“Trolley Follies” by Kerah Gordon-Solmon is the winner of the July Normative Ethics Prize! Congratuations! Second prize is split between Travis Timmerman’s “A Dilemmas for Effective Altruism” and Grant Rozeboom’s “You’re so Smug, I’ll Bet you Don’t Care This Post is About You.” First prize […] Read More

For PEA Soup: “You’re So Smug, I’ll Bet You Don’t Care This Post is About You” There is something distinctively infuriating about a kind of conceit that we often call “smugness.” Consider the “tech bro” of Silicon Valley, a type made infamous by Justin Keller, […] Read More

Here’s a variation on the classic trolley problem that I haven’t seen before: Five innocent people are trapped in the path of an oncoming trolley.  You could turn the trolley onto a sidetrack, away from the five.   If you do so, the five will be […] Read More

Philosophical Examples: The Stark and the Dense by Vida Yao In “The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, and Ethics,” Bernard Williams draws a distinction between dense and stark fiction, and their use in moral-philosophical discussion and reflection. Sophocles is his exemplar of the latter; Dickens the […] Read More

Options Without Constraints Richard Yetter Chappell The paradox of deontology counsels against including constraints in our fundamental moral theory. Consequentialists are generally suspicious of the associated asymmetries, e.g. between doing and allowing, or killing and letting die.  We say you should just bring about the best outcome, […] Read More