autonomy
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Life Is Strange: Video Games and Moral Imagination (Spoilers!)
I’ve spent a little too much time, in the past week or so, playing a game on my computer. The game in question, with the deceptively trite title Life Is Strange, is an example of what may be an emerging genre in video games: a graphic adventure game that amounts to an especially rich and… Continue reading
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Theoretical Commitments
I have long thought of myself as something of an agnostic on matters of moral theory. From the beginning I have concerned myself with practical decision-making, first with environmental ethics and policy and more recently with engineering ethics. I am now mainly concerned with how best to teach ethics to undergraduate students in engineering degree… Continue reading
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Darwinian Humanism
In honor of Darwin Day 2015, I would like to revisit an odd paper I had published in Environmental Values in 2007, titled “Darwinian Humanism: A Proposal for Environmental Ethics“. I would here like to offer a few – I hope tantalizing – excerpts from my final typescript. In hindsight, it was an odd and… Continue reading
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Hydraulic Fracturing: Risk v. Acceptable Risk
I have said that the first day of our workshop on hydraulic fracturing, in November, brought out a long list of risks related to hydraulic fracturing and, indeed, the engineers and scientists who participated were quite adept at identifying such risks and possibilities for mitigation. Something else came out during those first sessions, though, which… Continue reading
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Charlie Hebdo
I have only a brief comment on the murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. I worry that there may be something unseemly in the haste with which commentators and demonstrators have politicized the event, taking up the particular deaths of twelve particular human beings as symbols for this or that cause, or as the… Continue reading
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A Field Guide: A First Sketch
This blog grew out of an idea I had, sometime last year, to write a Field Guide to Basic Values for use in my ethics courses, building on the idea of attuned awareness to which I referred in my previous post. I once used this analogy with students: There are no doubt some people who… Continue reading
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An Ethicist Walks to Work
A few months ago, something that happened on my morning commute provided an example of moral perception I could use in class later that day: what it’s like to see the ethical texture of an entirely mundane situation. I was walking along North Avenue on my way from the transit station to my office on… Continue reading
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From the Archive: Freedom of Choice: Behavior and Action, Part 2
Carrying on from my last archival post, here is the very next entry in my other blog, The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, from April 21, 2010: * * * Freedom of Choice: Behavior and Action, Part 2 The distinction raised in my last post comes out of a research project I’ve been pursuing for some… Continue reading