Megan, in discussing how stupid it is to tie abortion law to feelings, ends with a very libertarianish bit of dictum about how we don’t like the government to regulate things we “hold sacred.” I don’t really want to go too far into it, because there’s something great about just pondering this elegant throwaway line [...]

What if the desire for flourishing is narcissistic? How do we parse our way out of that paper bag?
Time to change the terms of argument, foax.

George Packer considers:
last year he wrote a much-praised column in Vanity Fair about a soldier who joined the military in part because Hitchens’s writings inspired him to, and who was subsequently killed in Iraq. When the awful news reached Hitchens, he experienced an understandable and even terrifying shock that led him to contact the soldier’s [...]

At Slate, Bill Saletan takes a crack at ape rights in Spain. I must admit, I have zero problem with extending legal protections to animal species on the basis of a rights recognition framework. Score one for the Great Ape Project. But I do have an 800-pound problem with the following:
Peter Singer, the philosopher who [...]

I´m a little late to Julian´s also-belated take on the German paper that ran a headline about the White House as “Uncle Barack´s Cabin,” but one element of the story is worth belaboring. Consider:
the editor’s attempt at a defense—while bolstering the “obliviousness” theory—is incredibly lame:

Editors at Taz defended their decision to run the headline on [...]

Star intellectual Steven Pinker, who should be careful whom he calls stupid, has penned (for The New Republic) an attack on the President’s Council on Bioethics that makes my ridicule of Martha Nussbaum sound like a call-in to Delilah. It is so easy to think up a list of insults for this piece that I [...]

Ramesh Ponnuru makes a point about this Vito business that I ought to be sure to respond to. Specifically, he takes issue with my hope that we can all agree to deem adulterous public officeholders bad persons:
Ross Douthat seems to agree. I don’t—especially with this “bad person” business. I certainly believe that someone who cheats [...]

I should respond to some of these Vito-related comments, I think, because they sound reasonable enough at first blush and provide thereby a good means of sharpening my argument. First consider commenter Tel:
He wasn’t married at the time, but Thomas Jefferson did father several children with one of his slaves, starting in 1795. Should his [...]

Another doomed Republican, another sexual surplus and moral deficit:
Rep. Vito Fossella of New York acknowledged on Thursday that he fathered a child from an extramarital affair, answering questions that arose from his arrest on drunken driving charges last week.
“My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly [...]

Megan McArdle responds to critics who have chided her “rage” against “the illegality of something that a majority of my fellow citizens think should be illegal” — namely, prostitution. (I used the word “wrath,” not entirely unsympathetically.) There are two key parts of her argument that rage is appropriate because  illegal prostitution is outrageous:
(1) prostitution [...]

With Will Wilkinson safely on the other side of the Earth, I am free to agree with him about something:
It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion. Liberals who worry about religious home schooling are not wrong to [...]

In comments [scroll down], Jesse Mazer has pressed me on how my conception of ethics and suffering applies to “intelligent aliens.”
if we met a species of intelligent aliens, you would say that torturing them is not bad because of the harm it causes to them, but only because of the harm it causes to the [...]

Stands for, y’know, We Await Radical-life Extension’s Zarathustra. I see Sonny’s on board, praying for the Great Noontide. Then there’s this guy:
As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor [...]

Ronald Bailey has an amusing enough post on Those Crazy Scots — specifically, Scots toying with the idea of crossbreeding people and monkeys. Problem area:

Professor Hugh McLachlan, professor of applied philosophy at Glasgow Caledonian University’s School of Law and Applied Sciences, said although the idea was “troublesome”, he could see no ethical objections to the [...]

It’s Grand Theft Auto IV (that’s “Four”, not a heroin reference). Nick Gillespie reports:
As sales mount for the game, now set in New York-like “Liberty City” and (hopefully featuring a whore-banging, money-laundering, hypocritical pol a la Eliott Spitzer), expect the protests to mount against the game, which has somehow helped add to generally lower crime [...]

Ten days ago I expressed displeasure over the latest court rulings on capital punishment. Lethal injection struck me as a far crueler option than what is still known, in an accidental irony, as ‘execution-style’ shooting. I also worried that permitting the execution of child rapists only after finding that society is becoming ‘more cruel’ is [...]

I almost forgot about this. There’s now a book that teaches kids how not to fear their new Plastic Post-Op moms. Rod Dreher no likey:
What kind of message is this sending to little girls? That if they don’t like their bodies, that if their physical appearance doesn’t conform to current physical ideals, that they should [...]

At Reason’s Hit & Run, Ronald Bailey praises the latest prophet of beating this thing called death:
In his column, “It’s not immoral to want to be immortal,” brilliant University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan refutes those who say that we should all just “go gentle into that good night.” From his column:
What is particularly interesting [...]