Everyday Ethics

Beginning next week, everyday-ethics.org will feature new content only once per week, on Wednesdays.  Our current publishing schedule has been twice per week, Wednesdays and Saturdays.  Despite this change, we remain committed to providing high-quality content that is both relevant to our readers and that engages substantive philosophical issues.  We apologize for any inconvenience this [...]

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It has become rather cliché to reply to questions concerning one’s religious views by responding, “Well, I’m not religious, but I’m very spiritual.”  This claim has always baffled me, because I have no idea what it means to be religious, but not spiritual.
Religion is clearly a spiritual activity, so it seems odd to try to [...]

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Most college students will at some point have to pass a course in something called “critical thinking.”  Often this class is taught in the philosophy department, and is accompanied by an introduction to very basic, formal logic.  This typically includes the types of logical fallacies that we all tend to make in everyday conversation, as [...]

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As the Obama administration settles into its role in the White House, the issue of whether “advanced interrogation techniques” used by the Bush White House has resurfaced, with many calling for a formal investigation of the former President and his subordinates.  The debate largely centers around two key disagreements:  whether certain techniques, like water boarding, [...]

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Although it has fallen off the map recently, the ethics of stem cell research continues to be an exceedingly popular topic in bioethics.  There is much fervor on both sides of the debate.  Proponents of stem cell research view its prohibition as a kind of medical and social malpractice, while its detractors equate it with [...]

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I’m no fan of going to the dentist, mostly based on having a storehouse of painful memories involving my childhood dentist forcibly removing countless teeth from my tiny jaw without providing sufficient anesthesia.  As a result, I put off having my wisdom teeth removed for approximately ten years.  When I finally decided to have them [...]

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Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, made a statement during a law lecture at UC Berkeley that has been the subject of considerable scrutiny from both the media and members of Congress.  Of particular interest, and the topic of our discussion here, is the extent to which evaluating this statement has [...]

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In a prior article, we defended the position that when it comes to describing the phenomenology of human intentional actions, folk psychology offers a more accurate account than reductive neuroscience.  This is not to say that we ought to abandon biological accounts of mind, only that the limitations of these accounts suggest that we ought [...]

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As cognitive science has become increasingly sophisticated, we have been able to give much more intricate explanations of human cognition.  One important side effect of this achievement has been the debunking of folk psychology and a tendency among philosophers of mind to disregard folk accounts of human cognition as overly simplistic and not in accordance [...]

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