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Wait–aren’t we already? After all, we can change our features quite radically through surgery, if we have the money and the will. However, these aren’t the changes involved in the sort of shape shifting I have in mind. I’m imagining changing our features using processes that are under the control of our own bodies. Well, […]
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What is the nature of human religiosity? For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, psychologists treated this area of human life as a disposition – something Gordon Allport termed a ‘sentiment’.[1] It was conceived as a kind of personality trait along which people varied: some are more religious than others. Personality traits can be […]
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Many people I know have been out walking more, since COVID-19 upended our routines and transformed our daily lives. For a while, during the first shutdown, the activity of walking was the only way in which people could meet up. Restrictions in Melbourne, Australia – where I live – indicated that socially distanced, outdoor exercise […]
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A crucial topic in moral philosophy involves the aggregation and comparison of harms and benefits. How many, for instance, minor headaches relieved is worth a single human life? How many people being able to travel 75 miles per hour rather than 70 miles per hour are worth some number of additional car accidents and deaths? […]
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Recently while teaching my Theory of Knowledge class on Zoom I asked the students whether they should believe what they read in the newspapers. Their confident answer was that they should not – newspapers are biased. I expressed surprise. (Not genuine – I’ve been teaching this class since 1988.) Did they think they shouldn’t believe […]
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During the strange week in March that began almost normally and ended with the shuttering of campuses and a series of rushed goodbyes, the students in my course on Kant’s moral philosophy half-jokingly wondered if he might have anything instructive to say about pandemics or social isolation. I pondered the question. There was, I supposed, […]
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Before turning to the pandemic, allow me to tell a story. One of my cousins—let’s call him “Walt”—grew up loving cars. As a 12-year-old, Walt could name the make and model of every car we passed in his rural New Hampshire town. When Walt got old enough to drive, he and his friends would modify […]
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Writers, cinematographers, and philosophers have often wondered what love could look like in a virtual age. Could we fall in love with a sophisticated AI? Will there be a time in which people think that having sex in person is odd or even gross? Will the children of our children ever leave their bedroom in […]
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