Everyday Ethics

The Miss USA pageant is certainly not something that most people interested in philosophy pay attention to.  Frankly, I’m a little shocked that they can find enough women to participate in this thing, since it’s clearly a contest that evaluates women as objects.  That aside, the recent Miss USA pageant produced an interesting sound bite [...]

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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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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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In several previous articles, we discussed the theoretical principles that underlie our liberal system of government.  These principles include the values of autonomy, equality, and neutrality with regard to conceptions of the good life, as well as the role of the harm principle, paternalism, and legal moralism in limiting these values.  We now turn to [...]

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In the previous article, we discussed the core principles of political liberalism, with the goal of using this framework to consider a variety of issues in applied moral problems.  But before we complete this task, there is another essential component of political liberalism that we ought to discuss.  The basis from which any act can [...]

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One of the core principles of everyday ethics and a principle purpose of this site is to help people to recognize ethical questions and revelations of ethical knowledge in their own everyday experiences. Sometimes this is harder than others. Recently, a great example of everyday ethics appeared in the news, when a story was published [...]

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I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I have developed an appreciation of morning talk radio.  My drug of choice is the Adam Corolla Show, featuring an intelligent, humorous, and slightly irritated man making comments and observations about the state of our world.  It harbors no pretenses of being a legitimate news outlet and this [...]

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The compassionate, bleeding heart liberal in me is desperately clinging to a desire to help my fellow man as much as humanly possible, without regard to financial burden or legislative backlog.  This point of view seemed very simple during my undergraduate upbringing, especially considering the number of sociology classes that  I took.  Sociology is a [...]

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The next enormous economic stimulus package has just passed the House and is being debated in the Senate, with much hullabaloo being created over the fact that no House Republicans voted for it, and that it appears to be loaded with funding for programs that won’t obviously stimulate the economy.  I think the National Endowment [...]

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