Ethics

Liberal versus gender feminism: McElroy’s *Sexual Correctness*

7 Comments / Ethics, Human Nature, Politics /

In my Ethics course, we cover the arguments for and against banning pornography. One of our readings is from Wendy McElroy’s Sexual Correctness: The Gender-Feminist Attack on Women. McElroy takes up the gender-feminist arguments against porn and contrasts them with liberal individualist forms of feminism. The following updated* chart of contrasts is a work in […]

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On the private affairs of public figures: Nietzsche’s uncle on Goethe

Leave a Comment / Ethics, History /

Wisdom from the grave: “Friedrich Nietzsche’s grandmother had some private letters in her possession from the circle surrounding Goethe. These letters came into the possession of Nietzsche’s aunt and uncle—who destroyed them. The uncle’s reason was this: ‘The brutal revelation of private relations upset him deeply. He did not grant the public any right to

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“What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship” — text and audio versions

3 Comments / Business Ethics, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Ethics /

My short essay on “What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship” [pdf] was published in the Journal of Private Enterprise in 2009, just when entrepreneurism was beginning to get attention in the business ethics literature. The abstract: “Entrepreneurship is increasingly studied as a fundamental and foundational economic phenomenon. It has, however, received less attention as

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Is everyone selfish? Hannah Arendt quotation

7 Comments / Ethics, Politics, Psychology /

How some political ideologies depend on the self-induced selflessness of their members. Here is Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism speaking of both Nazism and Communism: “How little the masses were driven by the famous instinct for self-preservation … . The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements, so clearly different in quality from the greatest

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Philosopher Eric Mack on John Rawls

5 Comments / Ethics, History of Philosophy, Human Nature, Politics /

I re-read Eric Mack’s “Blind Injustice” [updated link], an excellent overview and critique of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s book is the most influential work of academic political philosophy in the last half-century, and Mack’s essay is the best short analysis I know of. By contrast: The moral basis for Rand’s liberalism, in

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