Posted in Evolution, Minds and Brains, Philosophy on April 6, 2008 | No Comments »
From an evolutionary point of view, consciousness is a bit of a conundrum. I’m a pretty hardcore adaptationist so I’m of the opinion that complex traits are either adaptations or related to adaptations in some way (by being byproducts or vestiges of them, or, if they are not shared by a significant proportion of the population, [...]
Posted in On the Interwebs, Philosophy on March 17, 2008 | No Comments »
The latest philosophy carnival is on at philosophy, et cetera and I’m in it. Huzzah! Have a look around and if you like what you see then check out the carnival website for previous carnivals and more philosophical goodness.
Posted in Ethics, Idle Speculation, Philosophy on February 20, 2008 | No Comments »
I thought I’d take some time to write down my views on ethics before they completely change as a result of writing an ethics thesis.
Posted in On the Interwebs, Philosophy on February 15, 2008 | No Comments »
Preparing to write my thesis involves a lot of writing. Mainly this involves borrowing books from libraries and downloading journal articles that are only available to people at uni but there’s also a lot of good stuff on the internet as well.
Posted in Ethics, Minds and Brains, Philosophy on February 10, 2008 | 11 Comments »
That’s my what honours thesis is on. This post is an attempt to rid myself of thesis-writing block. First off, let me just explain what I take ‘ethics’ to mean. To simplify, ethics is about how our actions affect other individuals. This is not universally accepted but it is a useful working definition for certain [...]
Posted in Philosophy on December 5, 2007 | No Comments »
Over the last week or so two major internetty things have happened: we’ve finally got broadband and I signed up to something called face-book. It’s all the rage apparently. Anyway, I was exploring the whole thing, seeing how my friends and family had customised their facebook pages when I came across this video that’s been [...]
Posted in Animals, Ethics, Philosophy on November 11, 2007 | No Comments »
The Principle of the Equal Consideration of Interests is the foundation of Singer’s moral theory and he makes it clear that to have interests requires consciousness. This poses the rather tricky question ‘How do we detect consciousness in animals?’. His arguments in favour of the irreplaceability of persons also poses a question: ‘What makes self-conscious [...]
Posted in Animals, Ethics, Philosophy on October 27, 2007 | No Comments »
From this foundation, much of Singer’s moral reasoning follows standard utilitarianism. However, he departs from this with his notion of replaceability. Utilitarianism holds that it is right to maximise pleasure, or the satisfaction of desires, regardless of the content of these pleasures. Thus it does not matter to the utilitarian whether I derive my pleasure [...]
Posted in Animals, Ethics, Philosophy on October 24, 2007 | No Comments »
Like many ethicists, Singer takes it as axiomatic that ethics requires one to justify one’s actions, not merely in terms of self-interest, but from a universal standpoint. He points to examples such as the Golden Rule and the Categorical Imperative to substantiate this claim. From here, he goes on to claim that:
Posted in Animals, Ethics, Philosophy on October 21, 2007 | No Comments »
If you were to take a sample of the books written on ethics in the last century and sort them into two piles, one containing books published prior to 1970, the other containing those published after, almost all of the books dealing with animals would be in the second pile. One ethicist who helped bring [...]
