Everyday Ethics

It now appears that Sonia Sotomayor is going to be confirmed as the next Supreme Court Justice.  Two significant criticisms of Sotomayor’s performance during the confirmation hearings have emerged, both of which reflect opposing ideologies.  One criticism, from the political right, is that Sotomayor is a judicial activist who played the political game properly, but [...]

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Another boisterous 4th of July has come and gone, filled with the booms and bangs of fireworks being shot off, as well as the inevitable horrific fireworks injury that always seems to accompany this holiday.  This time, it was an exploding fireworks truck in North Carolina killing three people.  These dangerous results, as well as [...]

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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 previous article, I discussed the recent proposal from the Obama administration, which suggested that billions of dollars might be saved and the needs of students better served if the U.S. government took over all educational lending.  The interesting side effect of this proposal is that it brings to the forefront a social conversation [...]

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A recent proposal by the Obama administration suggested a bold new direction for the way that student loans are administered in the United States.  Citing a potential savings of billions of dollars, Obama suggested that the U.S.  simply eliminate the middleman, the student loan industry itself, and make educational lending an agreement between students and [...]

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Justice is a funny thing.  Sometimes justice is about retribution, other times it’s better understood as a type of reconciliation.  Economically, justice also takes two distinct forms.  Some accounts of economic justice focus on an equal and fair distribution of goods, and many people point to the role of historical and social factors in shaping [...]

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Most people agree, for a variety of reasons, that there is something wrong with killing another person.  There are clear cases where killing is deemed acceptable, such as wartime, but this is not because killing is not bad in those cases.  To claim that killing is sometimes acceptable is just to claim that sometimes the [...]

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In the last several articles on liberalism and social problems, we have focused on a variety of different liberal arguments regarding illegal drugs, gun ownership, and pornography.  We saw that one can give a liberal argument on both sides of these issues, and that relevant considerations on one matter sometimes suggest an undesirable policy endorsement [...]

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The final social issue relevant to our discussion of liberal values in society is whether pornography out to be legally permitted.  Studies have shown that there is a statistically significant correlation between misogynistic pornography and violence against women.  Viewing pornography is not a part of most peoples’ idea of the good life, and there is [...]

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In our last article, we clarified the challenges that the question of gun control presents for a liberal society.  We now move to another contentious topic for proponents of liberalism:  illegal drugs.  As we evaluate how a liberal ought to address the problem of illegal drug use, we will see that not only is it [...]

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