There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in […]
Effective altruism
Parfit inaugurated several new areas of moral philosophy. The one that has most shaped my worldview, and which is covered in this chapter, is population ethics—the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be. Secular discussion of this topic is strikingly […]
To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout….The second is of history as molten glass. At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes. But at some point, the glass might cool, set, and become much harder to change. The resulting shape could be beautiful […]