The Great Chain of Being—the notion that the biosphere is partitioned into ranks, with humans at the top, and every other organism at some inferior position—is a way of thinking that’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge. Most of us have a strong conviction that it’s true, but we don’t have a clue why we think that.
At first glance, Westworld is just another show about robots run amok. If you look a little closer, though, you find all kinds of other philosophical questions in play, and you find them being explored with impressive seriousness and subtlety. At the level of philosophical reflection, this is golden-age television at its very best.
A question has plagued me since the latest cluster of scandals emerged from the Catholic church. The scandals are both about clergy who sexually abused young people and about the church hierarchy’s cover-ups. The question is this: do the priests who commit such abuses believe in God?
Are people cruel because they lack empathy? Is cruelty always a matter of seeing others as less than human? Or are there some who simply enjoy seeing people suffer? These are some of the questions we’ll be tackling in this week’s show.
Conspiracy theorists think quasi-rationally, but their thinking only goes in one direction. Because conspiracy theorists are less analytic, their thinking tends not to override their starting intuitions. So how can we alleviate people’s tendencies to adopt irrational conspiracy theories?
At a gut level, most of us consider humans’ lives far more significant than lobsters’ lives. But does this intuition just reveal a cognitive bias most of us have? Are there any good arguments to support the idea that lobster lives matter less?
The idea that athletics and philosophy are connected may sound strange at first. But if we see philosophy as a way of life rather than a set of beliefs, it’s not a stretch to imagine that athletic training can cultivate skills we need for the whole of our lives, both on and off the playing field.
We are delegating more and more morally fraught decisions to computers and their algorithms. Many find the prospect of such a thing truly alarming. It’s hard to blame them for that. After all, how many of us would be willing to trust our own lives to a computer algorithm?
You might think that conspiracy theorists like the flat earthers don’t really think about things. But if you’ve ever argued with one, you’ll find that they do. They have an answer for everything. So how do we reconcile their irrationality with their rational thinking?
To say that a person can fail successfully sounds really weird. To succeed at something is to achieve some goal that you’re aiming at, and to fail at something is to not achieve a goal that you were trying to achieve. But this isn’t the end of the story.
Mission Impossible: Fallout is an intensely escapist movie, but it’s also a deeply philosophical one. It explores the question: should you be the kind of person who saves his friends and risks millions of lives, or the kind of person for whom saving the millions matters to the exclusion of all else?
Science is typically not construed as a form of intellectual arrogance. After all, the scientific method is about making sure your beliefs are regulated by observations and experiments rather than by personal biases, subjective preferences, or mere stubborn pride. But science has the tendency to believe that it is the measure of all things.
With the World Cup having just ended, I am led to reflect on my own lack of interest in soccer. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the athleticism involved in soccer. And it’s not that I can’t see the strategies unfolding. But somehow it still leaves me pretty cold.
Even as we wait in anticipation for Sunday’s World Cup final between France and Croatia, there is at least one other major soccer event that we can watch right now: the “Philosophers’ World Cup” by Monty Python.
Is the market the key to freedom and prosperity? Don’t markets necessarily lead to economic inequality? Is it possible to make markets work better for everyone? This week we’re exploring Radical-market Solutions for Our New Gilded Age.
Because the IDW thrives on consumer popularity rather than peer scrutiny, it doesn’t have mechanisms for sorting out the worthwhile stuff from the trash. The burden is on the consumer to decide to what extent the dark web pundits have something valuable to offer or to what extent they’re “enlightenment peddlers.”