Tag: ethics

  • The Macbeth Effect and Moral Colours

    The Macbeth effect is the tendency for people who have acted or thought in an immoral or unethical manner to want to clean themselves physically as a kind of surrogate for actual moral cleansing. Researchers looking at this effect wondered about other interesting characteristics of moral psychology which led them to devising a test for…

  • Non-Voting Political Philosophers and Stealing Ethicists

    When I read that political philosophers vote less often than other philosophers (and political scientists) I was reminded of the book Can a Robot be Human?. This book touches on the logic behind voting, and comes to the conclusion that – for an individual – it is pointless because no election has ever been decided…

  • Aristotle’s Moral Virtues and Vices

    In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, moral virtues and their extremes are discussed. That is to say, personal characteristics and the extremes thereof. These extremes – or vices – are two of the three pillars of virtue, the third of which is The Golden Mean, or the Virtuous Mean. This mean is the position on the ‘scale’…

  • Interview With a Blind Homeless Man

    Interview With a Blind Homeless Man, by Bobby “Revellian” Revell: I don’t get upset when someone calls me old, stupid or whatever because I don’t know what it really means when describing a person. This great post reads almost like what I call the doctrine of the atheists; morals and ethics come from within. This…

  • Ethical Impulses & The Moral Instinct

    Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses. Do we know what to do with them? In Steven Pinker’s New York Times article, The Moral Instinct, this question is raised and discussed as he takes us on a guided tour of ‘moral psychology‘ – a recently invigorated field. The starting point for appreciating that there is…