Seven Billion

Today's the big day, says the UN--there are now seven billion people.  Is that too many? Tony Ord gives a really terrific lecture about the question here.  More cool graphics at NPR here.  Cool graphics at The Atlantic here.

Free Will and Divine Foreknowledge -- Mental Masturbation?

These days philosophers who accept Templeton money can expect to be mocked by the atheist community--by which I mean folks other than the 70% of philosophers who are atheists.  Now, I can see that the money itself is just a little dirty -- I can understand objections on that level.  But what's really odd is the way non-philosophers presume to be able to judge the research that gets funded. The

Are Whales People Too?

Some good stuff in here ... but you have to watch the whole thing. See: corporation point!

           

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Whales Aren't People
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Socratic Mama

What a great blog name!  In fact, if I had any sense (I don't) I'd have thought of that as the title of the book I'm working on.  Socratic Mama is Anne Crumpacker's blog for secular parents and kids, which originated as a result of an encounter her daughter had with Christopher Hitchens at the Freethought convention in Houston a few weeks ago.  The whole story was at Jerry Coyne's website.  I

Pinker on Violence (3)

Angels update. I'm making good progress on Better Angels of Our Nature and starting to be a fan.  One of the very likable things about Steven Pinker is that he cheerfully rebels against political correctness and academic fads.  He's not a true conservative, but doesn't mind sometimes sounding like one.  Why did crime rise in the 60s and fall in the 90s?  He doesn't mind putting some of the blame

Empathic vs. Systematic?

Inspired by this report on women in philosophy, I'm going to be speaking to our undergraduates in a few weeks about female flight--so to speak.  Why do women start out being about half of all students in lower level philosophy classes, but then gradually thin out, until they're only 20-25% of all philosophy faculty?

In that report, the favored explanations have to do with "barriers"-- features

Philosophy for Kids

A student of mine has bravely ventured out into the Real World, where he is working with third graders in a low-income area.  Here's what he writes--
I would love to find a way to introduce my students to philosophy in some sense to give them a taste of what it is that I like to do. This has been hard for me to figure out though for multiple reasons. First, since it is a public school, I am

Can Compassion be General?

I've been surprised to find that quite a few people in my class on procreation and parenthood see genetic counseling as "ableist".  We're talking about pre-conception counseling here--there is no baby yet, and not even an embryo or fetus.  Parents, we are to imagine, are undergoing a test to avoid having a child with a variety of conditions.  Perhaps they're using the handy kit you can order at

The Children We Should Avoid Having

from the New York Times, 10/16/11
In my procreative ethics class this week, the issue is whether there are children we should avoid creating, and what means of avoidance are ethically permissible.  We are talking about pre-conception counseling, pre-implantation diagnosis, and prenatal tests like amniocentesis (followed by abortion).  To make the issues vivid, we are also talking about

Pinker On Violence (2)

Progress report.  I'm not even on pg. 100 of Better Angels of Our Nature yet, and I'm feeling just a little weary.  Reason:  Pinker presents himself as a debunker of a Great Myth.  What's the myth?  That over the course of history, humanity has become more and more violent.  But the thing is, I have no great attachment to that myth - if it's a myth - so I don't need 700+ pages worth of disabusing

Pinker on Violence (1) & A Question about Contagion

I'm going to post occasional impressions, as I read Steven Pinker's new book Better Angels of Our Nature (acclaimed by Peter Singer here).  The first chapter is about violence through ages, with the evidence drawn partly from literature.  There's all the ghastly violence in Homer, the bible, and  Shakespeare, for example.

I had no problem with this sort of evidence-gathering until I went to a

What about the Cherubim?

Jerry Coyne tells a nice story [more here] about Christopher Hitchens' appearance at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston.  I thought pretty hard about going - Houston is just 4 hours down the road - but the timing wasn't good, since yesterday was Yom Kippur. We Jewish atheists have a lot on our plates.

**

While sitting in services yesterday I read the first couple of chapters of

The Green and the Grey

Green Anti-natalists think we should hold back from having a child for environmental reasons.  They think the world population has to shrink, or human life (and all of life) in the far future will be threatened. On the other side of the coin, Grey Pro-natalists see supporting the elderly as one of the reasons people ought to have children.  Saul Smilansky makes the Grey argument in the

Applause

It's very hard for women to talk about their abortions publicly, and lots of nonsense and misinformation festers when something is forced into the shadows. So I want to applaud Katie Stack for writing this brave, truthful, and necessary editorial in the New York Times.  Every day, women are told lies at Pregnancy Crisis Centers, and they're forced into much unnecessary turmoil.  Some of them will

Truth, Metaphor, or Something Else?

I've always wondered about the state of mind of the authors of the bible.  What were they thinking when they told the story of Adam and Eve, stories about 900 year old people and whatshername who got transformed into the pillar of salt and ... all that.  Jerry Coyne's been having a debate with Mark Shea, Ross Douthat, and Andrew Sullivan that's (partly) about that question.

So what have we got?

Goodbye Steve Jobs

Thank you for being such a genius.

Wish Me Luck!

You have to like an author an awful lot to open an 832-page book, but I do like Steven Pinker a lot.  The Language Instinct is a really great book.  Now he's written a history of violence, and why it's declined.  It seems like we've had the worst violence of all time in the last century, so how can that be?  My curiosity about how he answers that question is part of the reason I ordered the book,

Metamorphosis

John Finnis has a very simple argument for fetal personhood (in "Abortion and Health Care Ethics," which is reprinted in Bioethics, edited by Kuhse and Singer) -- 
"Any entity which, remaining the same individual, will develop into a paradigmatic instance of a substantial kind already is an instance of that kind. The one-cell human organism originating with the substantial change which occurs

The Animal Art of Rob Dunlavey

Visit his blog and website for more visual delights.
























 

The Essential Skeptic

This article in Moment magazine reveals there are a lot of Jewish atheists, and many even belong to synagogues--like I do.  I was thinking about this at Rosh Hashanah services on Thursday, for the billionth time. Why am I so comfortable in that setting, despite being a non-believer? Well, I like the music (that's critical), the history and ancient texts, the shared liberalism, the beauty of the