Category: Revisiting Right and Wrong
The Foundation of Ethics and Morals in America
In America, a thoughtful parent must understand the foundation of ethics and morals to teach children. Similarly, in answering ethical and moral questions from medical students, residents, and patients over more than forty years as an academic physician and scientist, I have had to know ethical foundational principles. Before coming to the essence of the …
In Response to Reynold Spector
Reynold Spector has provided us with an ambitious and thought-provoking, if somewhat idiosyncratic, essay on ethics and the law. It makes for an interesting read, and he has several insightful observations. That said, I do have some areas of disagreement. More fundamentally, his argument as a whole is on my view inconsistent and self-defeating. To …
In Defense of Sam Harris’s “Science of Morality”
In this article, I am pursuing several objectives. First, I will address some of the problems with Sam Harris’s thesis concerning a science of morality that was introduced in his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010). Specifically, I intend to demonstrate that Harris applies a not-so-carefully-developed language that …