autonomy
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From the Archive: Behavior and Action, Part 1
Continuing my reflections on the role of the empirical sciences in understanding human moral experience, I’ve dug into the archives. As a down-payment on further exploration of the idea, I thought I would re-post an entry from my other blog, The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, from April 10, 2010. This is part one of two;… Continue reading
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The Other End of the Beam
This past semester I presented students in my engineering ethics course with an especially messy problem situation involving the development of a cyclotron for use in proton therapy, an unreliable fellow engineer, a boss playing favorites, the spectacular failure of a control system during a preliminary test, the relative merits of hardware versus software, and… Continue reading
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An Unlikely Contrast Between Torture and Social Media
Continuing the point about the good and the right in discussions of the CIA torture program, my attention has been drawn to a domain in which arguments from the right seem more easily to yield to arguments from the good, almost to the point of reducing the discussion entirely to terms of benefits and costs.… Continue reading
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The Torture Report: Further Clarification
Since it is such a sensitive issue, I want to be especially careful in the language I use to discuss torture. Reading over yesterday’s note, it seems I could have drawn the point more precisely. Here’s some of what I wrote: That said, a number of commentators have hastened to say that even if the… Continue reading
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The Torture Report: Efficacy v. Ethics?
There’s not a lot I can add to the conversation of this past week about the CIA torture report that came out of Sen. Feinstein’s committee. I did note, however, that many politicians and commentators fell into a narrative about the report according to which the question of whether torture worked has no bearing at… Continue reading