Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments - A Stone Reader

384 Pages·2017·1.63 MB·English

by  Peter Catapano & Simon Critchley

CONTENTS
Preface by Peter Catapano
ON EXISTENCE
The Meaningfulness of Lives — Todd May
There Is No Theory of Everything — Simon Critchley
The Light at the End of Suffering — Peg O’Connor
Being There: Heidegger on Why Our Presence Matters — Lawrence
Berger
Against Invulnerability — Todd May
Why Life Is Absurd — Rivka Weinberg
A Life Beyond "Do What You Love” — Gordon Marino
ON HUMAN NATURE
Evolution and Our Inner Conflict — Edward O. Wilson
Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene — Roy Scranton
Is Pure Altruism Possible? — Judith Lichtenberg
Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys? — Peter Railton
How Should We Respond to “Evil”? — Steven Paulikas
The Moral Logic of Survivor Guilt — Nancy Sherman
How to Live Without Irony — Christy Wampole
Deluded Individualism — Firmin DeBrabander
ON MORALITY
The Dangers of Happiness — Carl Cederström
Are We Ready for a “Morality Pill”? — Peter Singer and Agata Sagan
Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts — Justin P.
McBrayer
Morals Without God? — Frans de Waal
The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz — Simon
Critchley
Confessions of an Ex-Moralist —Joel Marks
The Maze of Moral Relativism — Paul Boghossian
Can Moral Disputes Be Resolved? — Alex Rosenberg
Moral Dispute or Cultural Difference? — Carol Rovane
ON RELIGION
Navigating Past Nihilism — Sean D. Kelly
Does It Matter Whether God Exists? — Gary Gutting
Good Minus God — Louise M. Antony
Pascal’s Wager 2.0 — Gary Gutting
The Sacred and the Humane — Anat Biletzki
Why God Is a Moral Issue — Michael Ruse
The Rigor of Love — Simon Critchley
God Is a Question, Not an Answer — William Irwin
What’s Wrong with Blasphemy? — Andrew F. March
ON GOVERNMENT
Questions for Free-Market Moralists — Amia Srinivasan
Is Our Patriotism Moral? — Gary Gutting
The Irrationality of Natural Life Sentences — Jennifer Lackey
Spinoza’s Vision of Freedom, and Ours — Steven Nadler
If War Can Have Ethics, Wall Street Can, Too — Nathaniel B. Davis
The Moral Hazard of Drones — John Kaag and Sarah Kreps
Reasons for Reason — Michael P. Lynch
ON CITIZENSHIP
The Morality of Migration — Seyla Benhabib
What Do We Owe Each Other? — Aaron James Wendland
Can Refugees Have Human Rights? — Omri Boehm
Dependents of the State — Amia Srinivasan
Is Voting Out of Self-Interest Wrong? — Gary Gutting
ON VIOLENCE
Philosophizing with Guns — Simone Gubler
A Crack in the Stoic’s Armor — Nancy Sherman
Who Needs a Gun? — Gary Gutting
The Freedom of an Armed Society — Firmin DeBrabander
Is American Nonviolence Possible? — Todd May
ON RACE
Walking While Black in the “White Gaze” — George Yancy
Race, Truth and Our Two Realities — Chris Lebron
Getting Past the Outrage on Race — Gary Gutting
Philosophy’s Western Bias — Justin E. H. Smith
Dear White America — George Yancy
Of Cannibals, Kings and Culture:
The Problem of Ethnocentricity — Adam Etinson
What, to the Black American, Is Martin Luther King Jr. Day? — Chris
Lebron
Is Real Inclusiveness Possible? — Justin E. H. Smith
ON WOMEN
When Prostitution Is Nobody’s Business — Laurie Shrage
On Abortion and Defining a “Person” — Gary Gutting
Girlfriend, Mother, Professor? — Carol Hay
The Disappearing Women — Rae Langton
A Feminist Kant — Carol Hay
ON FAMILY
Think Before You Breed — Christine Overall
Is Forced Fatherhood Fair? — Laurie Shrage
“Mommy Wars” Redux: A False Conflict — Amy Allen
The End of “Marriage” — Laurie Shrage
My Parents’ Mixed Messages on the Holocaust — Jason Stanley
ON EATING
The Meat Eaters — Jeff McMahan
If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them? — Michael Marder
When Vegans Won’t Compromise — Bob Fischer and James McWilliams
The Enigma of Animal Suffering — Rhys Southan
ON THE FUTURE
Is Humanity Getting Better? — Leif Wenar
Should This Be the Last Generation? — Peter Singer
What Do We Owe the Future? — Patrícia I. Vieira and Michael Marder
The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously. — Samuel Scheffler
Accepting the Past, Facing the Future — Todd May
Acknowledgments
Contributors
PREFACE

The seventy-seven essays in this volume have been selected from The New York
Times’ philosophy series, The Stone, to represent the best and most accessible
writing on ethical questions by philosophers and thinkers working today. The
book builds on the popular success of both the Times’ series, founded in 2010,
and the book The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,
published in December 2015 by Liveright.
In putting together this volume we had a primary goal: to create a less
expensive, more portable volume than the original Stone Reader, distilled to
meet the growing interest in ethics, both in universities and the public sphere. To
do this, we didnot simply carve out a subset of the larger anthology, but instead
selected the most fitting entries from that book, and updated that grouping with
more than thirty newer Stone essays, compiled exclusively for this volume.
The essays here tackle questions of existence, morality, religion, race,
family, gender, economics, government and citizenship—nearly every topic of
human concern—and reflect a range of viewpoints, writing styles and rhetorical
strategies. Each one either directly or indirectly raises a question to be explored:
Is humanity getting better? Is real inclusiveness possible? How should we
respond to evil? Who needs a gun? They sit very comfortably in the tradition of
philosophy as a practical tool for the navigation of life, and hence, in this case,
under the heading of Modern Ethics.
The key components of the essays—clarity, brevity, integrity and jargon-free
language—have been at the editorial core goal of The Stone since its founding.
At their best, these works are useful not only for general readers looking to get
beneath the surface of an issue but also for the student or teacher aiming to bring
the practices of philosophy and writing together in the project of public
engagement. We hope they can and will be read in philosophy courses and
seminars, but also at kitchen tables and cafés, in libraries and airports, on road
trips and summer vacations.
The Stone, which exists primarily as an entity of the Times opinion section,
has become a well-traveled bridge from academia to the public square. It has
given professors, scholars and students a vehicle to share their work and views
with millions of readers in all walks of life. The conversations typically sparked
by these essays—which appear weekly on the Times website, and occasionally in
our national and international print editions—extend over a broad geographical
and ideological spectrum, and have given us at least some reason to believe that
philosophical thinking is not only not dead, it is a robust, living practice woven
into the entire human experience.
The idea of using The Stone in classrooms is not entirely new. Very early on
in the project, Simon and I began receiving appreciative notes from teachers
using the essays in both high school and university settings, with good results, as
well as from students inspired to write essays of their own after engaging with
the series. We have also used Stone essays in our own teaching, and have found
that the shift that occurs in the educational process is essentially a dynamic one:
teaching short, accessible works by living philosophers can foster the sense
among students that philosophy is not an esoteric practice to be observed from a
distance but a shared activity in a common space, one in which the author of a
text may actually be praised, challenged or argued with in person, only a lecture
hall or an e-mail away.
It should be noted that Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments is not an ethics reader
in the typical academic sense. It does not break down the work into the usual
academic divisions—meta-, normative and applied ethics—but rather more
broadly by topic. Anyone who has compiled a table of contents for an anthology
knows that categories, while certainly not useless, are often fluid, and the
boundaries they imply often porous. We hope at the very least that those we
have provided will help in the navigation of these essays.
As products of a news organization, each Stone piece is a response to the
environment. While particular pieces may use important or canonical work in the
history of philosophy as a springboard, or to position or fortify an argument,
they must by necessity look forward, because the energy that drives this project
is a journalistic one. Its reason for being is relevancy. It weds philosophy and
journalism in their shared pursuit of, and loyalty to, the truth.
What we hope to have produced is a new text that will be useful both inside
and outside the classroom—in the academy and on the road, as it were, whether
and outside the classroom—in the academy and on the road, as it were, whether
it is the road to enlightenment, or somewhere else entirely.
—Peter Catapano,
New York
2017