Winter’s Haven

Via Ophelia Benson, I found a news article titled South Sudan: Women Perpetuate Culture of Submission, which is mostly self-explanatory but still very much worth reading. I am reminded of what Alex Tabarrok said about Ayn Rand:

it’s no accident that Hillary Clinton was once an avid Randian (recall her political career started with Barry Goldwater) [...]

Ars Techina reports:

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented a paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain [...]

Stuff worth reading: Byran Caplan opposes “human weakness” as an excuse for adultery. Peter Suderman responds, looking at the issue from a broader social perspective.

Suppose that your next-door neighbor beats and rapes his wife. What is the ethically appropriate response on your part? The commonly accepted answer to this question, with which I agree completely, is to forcibly subdue the husband and lock him in a cage, both to prevent him from committing further violence and as a punishment [...]

That is the title of a Wired article about peaceniks and the remotely controlled attack aircraft used by the US Air Force. For a moment I thought that a bunch of hard-core pacifists had gone out and bought Stinger missiles. Just because it’s ethically consistent for pacifists to blow up unmanned drones doesn’t make the [...]

On the Wired science blog, Brandon Keim argues that Bush’s stem cell policy was neither anti-science nor crassly political, but rather followed from a legitimate ethical dispute.
Keim says that “there are plenty of examples of the Bush administration skewing scientific facts for political ends, the ban on stem cell funding wasn’t one of them.”, from [...]

So he describes himself in this brilliant short piece which elucidates the relationship between deontology and consequentialism.
If, owing to the complexities and uncertainties of life, the rule “don’t lie” produces the best consequences over the long run, and it just so happens that in a particular instance telling a lie led to a good [...]

A sociology grad student at Northern Illinois University opened fire on a crowed lecture hall there, killing 5 people and wounding 16 before killing himself. Details can be found at the New York Times and most everywhere else. I just want to toss out a bit of meta-commentary.
As in past mass shootings, this incident [...]

Thad Guy discusses objective morality, in his usual brilliantly succinct fashion.

I think that pretty much sums up the issue.

In response to this article in The Independent.

Dear Sir,
I read your recent recent article on Dawkins, ethics, and religion in The Independent. I have a question: of which religion are you a member? I wish to join. I am an atheist, but see no conflict in joining a sect so refreshingly free of mysticism and [...]