Eating meat can be ethical, but only when it does not violate rights. This requires that the ways in which meat is produced and prepared for human consumption satisfies certain standards. While many current practices may fall short of this standard, this does not justify the position that eating meat cannot be ethical under any circumstances and there should be no principled objection to its possibility.

Assuming God exists, should we worship God? This article contends that even if God is omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent, and created and sustains the world, we should adopt the attitude towards God exhibited by Abraham in Chapter 18 of Genesis. There, having been informed of God's willingness to destroy Sodom, Abraham persuades God that if the city contains ten innocent inhabitants, justice requires the plan to be altered. The story undermines the divine command theory of morality, demonstrates that God is subject to change, and suggests that God is prepared to be challenged rather than worshipped.

What sorts of reasons should citizens have in mind when they cast votes? Arguments from both sides of the EU referendum debate are used here to raise questions about what our motivations should be when voting. The article introduces John Rawls's requirement to give public reasons that are acceptable to all reasonable people.

Texting while driving is morally equivalent to driving drunk. In this dialogue, I illustrate why moral arguments from analogy are a valuable part of moral reasoning by considering how texting while driving is, morally speaking, no different from drunk driving.1

In this article, I argue that Berkeley's master argument is not the worst argument in the world – more like third or fourth.

Politeness in conversation has epistemic costs, in that it saps conversational silence of its capacity to signal assent. Whether these costs are outweighed by the obvious social benefits of politeness is not a question we pursue here.

Moral dialogue for moral subjectivists is gravely limited. As soon as moral subjectivists hold another person to any moral standard independent of the person's belief, they must give up their moral subjectivism. Some moral subjectivists might turn out to be moral realists who accord primacy to autonomy. This, however, is a senseless position that renders all persons equally worthless, unless such moral realists concede that norms that limit autonomy exist. But if so, they are not different from any other moral realists after all.

The world is logical, according to some. Others call it absurd. Apart from who is correct, however, what seems clear is that no one senses the absurd without also sensing the logical. Yet in that case, where does our sense of logic come from, and what is it really a sense of?

This piece considers the role of memory in personal identity, but specifically how we can choose and manipulate individual memories in order to take control of self-identity. The ideas of Locke and Ricoeur are briefly included, along with some questions about the implications of memory on identity in the age of social media.

Peter Singer has pointed out that many people in the United States are affluent enough to be able to give much more to overseas aid than in fact we do give; and Singer maintains that we are morally blameworthy in that respect. In what follows, I will undertake to show that the latter claim is mistaken. I will call by the letter ‘A’ a person who donates money to an overseas aid-organization and by the letter ‘B’ a disillusioned overseas aid-worker who has been in direct contact with some starving children.

Just what is the relationship between you and your body?

Many philosophers maintain that a being's moral status depends on its capacities, for example, whether the being is rational or sentient. In the notorious ‘argument from marginal cases’, animal rights advocates make use of this received view by arguing that because infants and the severely cognitively disabled have no more capacities than many animals, animals have status equivalent to humans and are entitled to equal moral consideration. But although capacities may be relevant to moral status, they do not determine it. Ultimately, we need to consider the objectives of morality in determining what obligations we have towards any group of beings, whether they are aliens, humans, or animals.

Do bees have feelings? What would that mean? And if they do have feelings, how should we treat them? Do we have a moral obligation towards insects? A short commentary on M. Bateson, S. Desire, S. E. Gartside, and G. A. Wright, ‘Agitated Honeybees Exhibit Pessimistic Cognitive Biases’, Current Biology 21.12 (2011), 1070–3.

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga wants everyone to agree that while sceptics will always be with us, no one is irrational in accepting what only the stubborn sceptic denies. Plantinga claims no one should be considered irrational for accepting what the religious sceptic denies either. Rather, the claim goes, belief in God should be as uncontroversial as any other properly basic belief sensible people happily hold without absolute proof sufficient to silence the sceptic. The legitimacy of placing theistic belief alongside other properly basic beliefs is challenged by the Sesame Street Objection: ‘one of these things is not like the others’.

The first philosopher is usually said to have been Thales. Raymond Geuss has recently suggested that it was not Thales but Oedipus (and the Sphinx), on the grounds that ‘It takes two’ for philosophy to exist. Slavoj Žižek, on the other hand, has suggested that ‘It takes one’: in which case the first philosopher may well have been Thales. Here I argue that ‘It takes three’ and that the first philosopher was not the first to have a vision, and not the first to answer a riddle, but the first to hear two sides of a question and make sense of both.

Alvin Plantinga dealt a significant blow to the ‘sufficient evidence’ standard of rational accountability when he showed that many beliefs are, as he puts it, ‘properly basic’ – rationally permissible despite appearing to lack an evidential basis. Why, Plantinga asks, can't belief in God be considered properly basic? In this article, I provide a workable account of proper basicality, thereby repairing a long-standing problem with evidentialism. This deepens our understanding of what it means to be rationally responsible, and allows a definitive answer to the theological question: God-belief, it turns out, cannot be considered properly basic.

Suppose you hear that according to the so-called science of happiness, a particular activity or circumstance should lead to happiness. But, based on your own experience, your sense is that it doesn't lead to happiness for you. Which should you trust? Two friends, Alexis and Mitra, debate these and other questions.