Skip to main content

Suggested readings, 22 November 2020

Here are some interesting articles I've read over the past week that I think are worth checking out.

John McWhorter, “The Black People Who Voted for Trump Know He’s Racist. 16 Nov, The Atlantic
Why did so many racial minorities vote for Donald Trump in the US presidential election? John McWhorter offers some reasons.

"Black or Latino Trump voters may know quite well that racism exists, or that Trump is racist, yet not prioritize it to the degree that the woke consensus assumes any sensible person would."  

Results of a universal basic income experiment in Kenya: (1) most people who received some money experienced less hunger, sickness and depression; (2) cash supplements encouraged people to make business investments.

Corinne Purtill, “How Close Is Humanity to the Edge?” 21 Nov, New Yorker
Profile of Toby Ord, a philosopher at the Future of Humanity Institute and author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

"Ord places the risk of our extinction during the twenty-first century at one in six -- the odds of an unlucky shot in Russian roulette. Should we manage to avoid a tumble off the precipice, he thinks, it will be our era’s defining achievement. The book catalogues many possible catastrophes. There are the natural risks we’ve always lived with, such as asteroids, super-volcanic eruptions, and stellar explosions. 'None of them keep me awake at night,' Ord writes. Then there are the large-scale threats we have created for ourselves: nuclear war, climate change, pandemics (which are made more likely by our way of life), and other novel methods of man-made destruction still to come. Ord is most concerned about two possibilities: empowered artificial intelligence unaligned with human values (he gives it a one-in-ten chance of ending humanity within the next hundred years) and engineered pandemics (he thinks they have a one-in-thirty chance of bringing down the curtain). The pandemic we are currently experiencing is the sort of event that Ord describes as a 'warning shot' -- a smaller-scale catastrophe that, though frightening, tragic, and disruptive, might also spur attempts to prevent disasters of greater magnitude in the future."

Tom Chivers, Should Big Pharma profit from Covid? 17 Nov, UnHerd
"You want pharma companies to distribute their products in as equitable a way as possible, but you also want them to continue to make those products. And taking away their profits when they make a good one will not encourage them to do the same next time."

John Lewis-Stempel, Factory farming will kill us all. 16 Nov, UnHerd
"[T]he Danish mink episode is just one more proof that factory farms are ticking time-bombs of zoonotic disease -- those which leap from animals to humans -- and petri-dishes of bacterial infections"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should We Use Neuroenhancement Drugs to Improve Relationships?

A version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , July-August, Vol. 147 (2014)   L ove, it is fair to say, is probably the strongest emotion we can experience. It can come in many different forms:  love of one’s parent, sibling, or child. Though most people consider romantic relationships—which include companionship, sexual passion, intimacy, warmth, procreation and child-rearing—as the most significant component of one’s life; and it is probably the thing we find discussed more than anything else in novels, films and music. Committed romantic relationships tend to occur within the institution of marriage—something that is ubiquitous to most, if not all, cultures.   Indeed, relationships today, which are primarily love-driven, are not just confined to marriages, as many couples sustain relationships outside of wedlock. Being in a love-driven relationship is considered important for most people, as it contributes to happiness—something we a...

Is Adult Incest Wrong?

An version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , March-April, Vol. 151 (2015)   Incest is something most people find morally objectionable and it's one of the most common of all cultural taboos. The British Medical Association’s Complete Family Health Encyclopaedia (1990) defines incest as “ intercourse between close relatives,” that usually includes “intercourse with a parent, a son or daughter, a brother or sister, an uncle or aunt, a nephew or niece, a grandparent or grandchild.” The Oxford English Dictionary ’s definition is a little broader: it doesn’t confine incest to just intercourse, but to “sexual relations between people classified as being too closely related to marry each other.”    Most countries have some kind of law against incest—though consensual adult incest is not a crime in France, Spain, Russia the Netherlands, and a host of countries in South America. In England and Wales, however, t he Sexual Offences Act 2003 ...

Intuitions and Ethics

A version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , May-June, Vol. 146 (2014) The notion that our moral intuitions possess epistemic authority has been associated with a number of philosophers within the canon of Western thought.  Roughly speaking, these thinkers have argued that our intuitions have recourse to a unique authority of perception that yields special access to a sphere of moral legitimacy. Others, however, have claimed that our intuitions are incredibly diverse and often conflict with each other—for example, your intuition says assisted suicide is morally permissible and my intuition says it’s wrong. But it seems the two contrasting intuitions cannot both be right. At the same time, most of us think our own moral intuitions are right : they do not seem inconsistent to us, and we have a strong sense to believe them. Accordingly, they strike us as correct. Undoubtedly, moral intuitions can be shaped by our particular culture, environment or co...