Birth: 1946
To kill or not to kill, that was the question that haunted me..
It is obvious that humanity faces existential threats of a global nature. They are global in the sense that is not possible to deal with them unless ….
I wanted to know what it means to know something, whether we can know at all, and, if so, how..
The best explanation why people agree is that they have converged on true answers..
Even where people in different cultures agree they may all have gone wrong..
It is quite possible that we will soon come to live under some sort of global despotism, enlightened or not. This is not a nice prospect. And there i….
People in different cultures think very differently about abortion. Abortion is not seen as a moral problem for example in Sweden or Russia, but it i….
I have now come to the conclusion (roughly) that capital punishment is defensible, if it can be shown to have a deterrent effect on murder. In that c….
These theories, deontology, the moral rights theory, and utilitarianism, contradict one another. Moreover, they give conflicting (inconsistent) recom….
The perspective that many today are beginning to see as fully realistic is that democracy in our country, and in our part of the world, will suffer t….
What we need is legislation, not negotiation, for the entire globe..
I was conscripted to military service, and my gut feeling was to refuse to serve. I did not want to kill other people. This seemed to me wrong, if no….
It is true that it feels very differently to enjoy a good meal, taking part in an interesting conversation, or to think of how successful your childr….
We can be certain that, if there are conflicting views in different cultures, some of these views must be false. This may help us to transcend our ow….
Once we realise that utilitarianism comes with the idea of blameworthy rightdoing (such as when you push a big man onto the tracks in order to save f….
It is hard to tell if capital punishment has such an effect. And even if, in some contexts it has (such as in the American South with a very high inc….
Normative ethics, pursued as a free, systematic, and critical attempt to find moral truth, regardless of religious and other authorities, is a rather….
One way of submitting your moral intuitions in relation to some issue to cognitive therapy is to learn more about how people in other cultures think ….
I have been brought up in a culture where capital punishment is indeed anathema. I have always thought of myself as a principled opponent to capital ….
The Chinese are generally speaking much more reluctant than Westerners to killing as a means to the rescue of lives..
There are some particular moral truths that I believe we have access to (such as the one not to inflict pain on a sentient being for no reason)..