Ethics and Morality
Morality is a technology to build a better world
It’s not just material technologies that make our lives better. Civilization is also a collection of moral technologies.
Be an average citizen of the future, now
Why not get ahead of the curve?
We cannot let a secular fear of God-belief poison law and politics
Author and law professor Bruce Ledewitz warns that the rejection of objective morality and meaning imperils the future we claim to want.
The future is a prisoner's dilemma
Our future is increasingly made worse by a refusal to cooperate.
Could the rise of the nonreligious defuse the population bomb?
The UN estimate of Earth’s human population has flown past eight billion. Can less religion slow the explosion?
Longtermism: the good, the bad and the ridiculous
Some philosophers stray into religious fantasy when they argue that a far-off utopian scenario supersedes any obligations to the present.
Our secular struggle with medically assisted dying
Reading Time: 14 minutes Suffering from chronic pain, a friend’s grandmother took her own life when I was 18. I was over when my friend and her mother heard the news. I will never forget the character of her mother’s grief. She was devastated to lose her own mother, yes. But she was even more devast
How to spare billionaires from terrorist attack
A radical eco-activist group arises in India after a terrible heat wave kills tens of thousands. The Children of Kali are firm in their declaration to the world: Change with us now, or suffer the wrath of Kali.
‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’: How time travel creeps into Trek today
Reading Time: 11 minutes This week’s episode of Strange New Worlds takes us boldly to Canada, but I promise: just because most of the show is set in my birthplace of Toronto, we won’t go off-mission too much to reflect on how it uses the location. I will only say that if you’re buying street meat (v
Do Biden’s bank bailouts create a ‘moral hazard’?
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Biden administration is insisting its recently announced bailouts of two failed tech-focused banks—Silicon Valley (California) and Signature (New York)—is something else. But experts in previous government interventions to save failing financial institutions, notably thos
NXIVM: Why are we so endlessly in thrall to deadly cults?
Reading Time: 6 minutes They’re all of one twisted mind. Donald Trump. Scientology. People’s Temple. Branch Davidians. Heaven’s Gate. NXIVM. Every personality cult that ever existed. They all weaponize charisma, weaponize it ruthlessly against innocent people’s often fragile, vulnerable, gullible ps
When living kids become organ donors
Reading Time: 4 minutes The passage below, quoting “Anna,” the traumatized child protagonist in Jodi Picoult’s disquieting novel, My Sister’s Keeper, sets the messy table for this essay: My parents tried to make things normal, but that’s a relative term. The truth is, I was never really a kid. To be