User legendre007

In his book "Defending the Undefendable," libertarian anarchist Walter Block argues that blackmail should be legal because the blackmailer does not initiate force against person or property. If I learn that Mr. X is cheating on his wife, for...

I often hear leftists claim that Ayn Rand's acceptance of Social Security payments makes her a hypocrite and invalidates her criticism of the welfare state. Was Ayn Rand wrong to accept such payments? Why or why not? More generally, if...

Must a person possess a strong sense of empathy to be moral? Is empathy an important quality of character or moral emotion -- or the most important? What's the role of empathy in a rational person's life?

At several points in my life, I had a valued friend who seemed otherwise rational and grounded, but who also exhibited dangerous body dysmorphia on social media. In these cases, the friend would first go through a several-month phase of confessing...

Many psychologists and psychiatrists want their disciplines to be "value-free," and they claim not to make moral judgments. However, they call behavior destructive to self and others psychologically unhealthy and pathological, with the cruelest...

In hard sciences, scientists in the discipline seem compare to control groups and experimental groups, making quantitative measurements of each. That does not seem possible with ethics. Moreover, ethical values are measured by ordinal ranking...