Readers, Due to traveling and a heavy work, I won’t be able to update the blog this week. Look for new posts on Monday, June 4. Until then, you can enjoy my previous entries by perusing the archive. Cheers, Michael De Dora
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A blog exploring issues at the intersection of ethics, politics, and religion.
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As you might already know, there is an ongoing battle between President Barack Obama’s administration and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) over the federal government’s new rule that requires organizations providing health care plans to arrange free coverage for preventive health services, such as birth control and contraception. Much of this debate has centered on which organizations would be exempt from the rule. The current proposal exempts only churches, meaning religiously affiliated organizations such as hospitals, universities, and charities, would have to comply. However, the government has carved out an exemption for these groups: if they object to the coverage, they can pass the weight of the requirement to insurance companies. This has not pleased the USCCB, which has lobbied to…
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Keeping on the topic of surveys gauging American views on morality, a new Gallup poll shows that 43 percent of Americans believe moral values in the United States are in poor shape, and a whopping 73 percent believe they are getting worse. On what do respondents blame this decline? Here you go: You can read more on the survey here.
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Gallup yesterday released the findings of its recent survey that gauged the views of Americans on the moral acceptability of 18 hot-button issues relating to social behaviors and policies. Here are the final results: You can read more on the survey here.
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Tagged: abortion, birth control, death penalty, ethics, gay, law, lesbian, marriage, morality, politics
Atheist blogger Greta Christina says yes: If religious believers were right, and this mortal life really were just a trivial eyeblink in the eternity of our real spiritual afterlives, then making this life happy and meaningful wouldn’t be so important. If we really did live forever in Heaven after we died, it wouldn’t matter so much that children around the world are born into hopeless lives of misery and despair. Hey, a few years of hunger and disease and violence and helplessness, compared to a blissful eternity in the arms of the Lord.. what’s the big deal? But religious believers aren’t right. There is no God. There is no Heaven. This mortal life is all we have. And if this mortal life is all…
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Take a look at this interesting letter to the editor, written by Dan Denney and published in the Watertown Daily Times : All the pubic discourse on same-sex marriage of late is getting on my nerves. It seems so clear-cut to me that this is a social issue and not a political one. The government has no place here except to guarantee the rights of its citizens regardless of sexual orientation. Let the churches sort out the sinners and exact spiritual sanctions. Just because the government says health care insurance has to cover abortion does not mean those who disagree have to use those benefits. Churches should not expect the government to help them enforce their moral views on their congregants or others. And why…
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Anyone who pays attention to politics has heard conservatives and religious believers argue that marriage is — and always has been — a relationship between one man and one woman, and thus, that same-sex marriage should be illegal. Here’s the problem: marriage has not always been a relationship between one man and one woman. Time to break out your Bible … Abraham had two wives, Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar. King Solomon had 700 wives, plus 300 concubines and slaves. Jacob, the patriarch who gives Israel its name, had two wives and two concubines. In a humanist vein, Exodus 21:10 warns that when men take additional wives, they must still provide for their previous one. (Exodus 21:16 adds that if a man seduces a…
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For the third year in a row, polling shows that a narrow majority of Americans consider gay and lesbian relations morally acceptable. The data comes from Gallup, which calls the result the “new normal” in public opinion on the issue. As you can see on the following two charts, American attitudes on the morality of gay and lesbian relationships have essentially flipped between 2001 and 2012, and track well with American approval of same-sex marriage.
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Well, this is an interesting article: As militaries develop autonomous robotic warriors to replace humans on the battlefield, new ethical questions emerge. If a robot in combat has a hardware malfunction or programming glitch that causes it to kill civilians, do we blame the robot, or the humans who created and deployed it? Some argue that robots do not have free will and therefore cannot be held morally accountable for their actions. But psychologists are finding that people don’t have such a clear-cut view of humanoid robots. The author goes on to discuss a recent study that found many humans — regardless of whether they think machines have free will — do blame robots in certain circumstances. Of course, this doesn’t mean robots ought…
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Tagged: ethics, morality, philosophy, robots, technology, war
You might recall that a couple years back, Natalie Angier sparked a debate over the experiential capacity of plants when she argued in the New York Times that humans ought to think twice about eating brussels sprouts because … they like to live. Well, the Times has done it again. Last week they published an essay by philosopher Michael Marder in which the author insinuates that peas can “talk,” and thus, we shouldn’t eat them. This has Leonard Finkleman, my colleague at Rationally Speaking, up in arms: … the language used in Marder’s essay — to say nothing of the research paper that inspired it — is awfully suggestive, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to eat something capable of basic learning and memory, would…
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