Is that allowed?

My daily newspaper, Die Presse, recently ran a special Sunday edition about morality and ethics. Throughout the paper they asked a wide range of people – from politicians to philosophers, from captains of industry to curators of art – the same three questions: What should humans no longer be allowed to do?What should humans never …

Responsibility reloaded

Two posts ago I examined how stopping profligate bread waste could reduce C02 emissions. Earlier in a comment to my post on climate change responsibility, Jordan had astutely noted that while consumers bear some responsibility in reducing emissions major corporations should also be held accountable. Today I will explore how assigning responsibility to both consumers …

What we believe to know

Recently I wrote about intuitionism – things that we simply “know” to be right non-inferentially – and its limitations. How does one discern between a principle actually being right and it merely seeming right to a particular person? If intuitionism functioned correctly then all individuals would reach the same moral conclusions, yet people reach different …

Our daily bread and GHG emissions

As examined in recent posts, one reason that people lack motivation in addressing climate change is that they have difficulty in conceptualizing how their actions can affect amorphous global problems. Wearing your clothes longer or driving less doesn’t result in a discernible reduction in GHG emissions. We need help in quantifying how our individual actions …

Climate change and FMGCs

Following up on my last post, today I want to examine the importance of narratives in getting people – especially Europeans since I’m Austrian – involved in climate change activism. First, it is important to note that current inaction is not because people reject climate science. Europeans overwhelmingly agree that “the climate is probably or …

Climate Change Responsibility

In my last post I posed the question: Who specifically is responsible for addressing climate change and reducing GHG emissions? Today I provide one possible answer. I believe that considerable, if not the brunt of, responsibility ought to lie with consumers. However, it is unlikely that individuals accustomed to unlimited choice among a glut of …

Who is responsible?

When I started studying political, economic, and legal philosophy at the University of Graz just for fun, little did I know that climate change would play a prominent role in the curriculum. Now in my fourth semester, I have had the opportunity to examine the urgings and arguments of diverse researchers – philosophers, economists, climate …

Ethical intuitionism

An area of philosophical thought I find particularly interesting is ethical intuitionism. It is a hotly debated concept among philosophers that is difficult to grasp and ever more difficult to justify. When exploring contested philosophical topics, my favorite starting point is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I highly recommend it because it has serious academic …

Magic Cat Academy is back!

I’m taking a class this semester in Digital Ethics. Not surprisingly, much of the discussion revolves around ethical standards for online search engines and what moral obligations should/could/ought to be in meeting those standards. Back at the dawn of the Internet there were a number of competing search engines – Lycos, Yahoo, AltaVista – and …

And on the third day he woke up in a VR studio

In the last issue of the Die Zeit there was an interesting article about Vive Studios, a South Korean digital visualization and content creation company. Using VR technology and terabytes of data, they created an avatar of a seven year old girl who had died of organ failure and reunited her in a virtual world …