Individual deliberations under conditions of serious deception are generally agreed to be invalidated by that deception. So political deliberations under conditions of serious deception should also be agreed to be invalidated. The UK’s referendum on membership of the EU was a flawed process of public deliberation precisely for this reason – that the public debate about the referendum involved serious deception. I raise the question what should be done about such public deceptions, and suggest a restrained form of legal remedy.

The idea that God can communicate with human beings is at the heart of religion. Most people who believe in God also believe that God speaks to them through a holy text, or through an inspired preacher, or even directly. However, language works only because it is embedded in, and a product of, human activity. Therefore it is impossible for God to speak to human beings, or for people to speak to God.

A theodicy is shaky if it explains only some evils but not all. For if certain possible evils are inconsistent with the existence of God, then their occurrence would disprove theism. But if a theodicy offers a justification for all possible evils, then it leads into a trap. After all, if God's existence is compatible with every horrible occurrence imaginable, why should belief in God afford any comfort?

John Stuart Mill famously remarked that it is ‘better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’.1 But is it necessarily better to be Socrates satisfied than Socrates dissatisfied?

Should you give to beggars? One argument that you should not is that since there are people who are much worse off than beggars, to give to a beggar is to deny some assistance to those who need it most. You should give instead to the most poor, and in general, you ought in your action to do the most good you can. This argument was defended in a paper published recently in /Think/, and the principle that lies behind it is the basis of a popular movement called ‘effective altruism’. I attack that argument in this paper. Morality does not require of you merely that you do the most good; there is more to it than that.

Television, like other forms of art and media, functions as a moral educator. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle places great emphasis on the role of the moral tutor for guiding children in their moral development, and in his Politics and Poetics, he (as did his mentor Plato) argued that the arts importantly functioned as moral tutors. In this paper, I will present an Aristotelian analysis of the effects exposure to highly sexualized media (with an emphasis on television) can have on the character of children and adolescents, who are in vitally formative years when it comes to their sexuality. Particularly, I am concerned that our youth is being habituated into a kind of sexual ethic that is based on treating their sexual partners as mere means and objects to sexual pleasure, rather than as intrinsically valuable persons with whom one can uniquely share sexual experiences.

Missionaries that try to convert us can be rather annoying. Missionaries that keep trying to convert us even after we explicitly refuse to be converted are even more vexing. However, in a weird and paradoxical way, they actually deserve much more moral credit than the ‘nice’ religious people who do not try to shove their religion down our throats.