Is It Future Generations That Are Important?

 

Why Worry About Future Generations? is Samuel Scheffler’s small book from his Uehiro Lectures at Oxford in 2016. It is a philosophically sophisticated reflection on the temporal parochialism that has led to the world’s extraordinary under-response to such risks as climate change. Scheffler argues that our concern properly goes beyond obligations for doing good (avoiding harm) to future populations because they are, like us, people. There are additional normative vectors, which may or may not be matters of either obligation or morality.

Half formed intent, change of heart, assault, accident, and failure to rescue. Should Clyde Griffiths have been electrocuted?

QUESTION 

Should the protagonist have been found guilty, and if so of what, had justice prevailed in the fictional rural New York courtroom of Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy?

Moral Obligations to the Future

Suppose that something like the classical utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, were true. I don’t think it is true. However, consequentialist reasoning dominates most policy analysis and discussion, and consequences must play some role in any plausible moral theory. That being so, it is useful to take an unflinching look at what a generalized version of utilitarianism would have to say about the duty of those of us now alive have towards future populations including those of the deep future.

How “So help me God” Is Becoming Constitutional

It is by subscribing to the inaugural oath, as set out in the Constitution, that the US president elect becomes the US president. It reads: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Article II, Sec. 1.

The Ferocity of U.S. Criminal Justice

Towards the end of a criminal trial in which a law partner of mine was defense counsel, he was approached by a journalist from a German newspaper who had been observing the trial. She asked him why American criminal justice was so ferocious towards defendants. The question is a good one. Our system is, in fact, anti-defendant to a degree perhaps unique in the civilized world. The German journalist’s question highlights a great divide in perception, for if you raised the subject of criminal justice with a random citizen of the United States, the question you might hear would be: “When are the courts going to close the loopholes and stop being revolving doors for criminals?”

When a Catholic Archbishop Declared Birth Control to be Worse than Abortion

"Heinous is the sin committed against the creative act of God, who through the marriage contract invites man and woman to co-operate with him in the propagation of the human family.To take life after its inception is a horrible crime; but to prevent human life that the Creator is about to bring into being is satanic. In the first instance, the body is killed, while the soul lives on; in the latter, not only a body, but an immortal soul is denied existence in time and in eternity."  Archbishop Hayes of New York Christmas Pastoral, 1921. (Hayes was later made a cardinal.)

This is a departure from the usual "It's unnatural!" condemnation of birth control, and implies that on any occasion in which the contracting marriage partners elect not to have sex when they would have conceived, they have forever denied existence to a soul and have committed a satanic sin, worse than abortion. Inasmuch as those born out of wedlock also have souls, any random pair that could conceive but declines to have sex would be chargeable by the soul precluded from existence with the same satanic wrong.

The Anti-Christian Nazis of "The Man in the High Castle"

The Man in the High Castle series by Amazon shows the Nazis, in their control of eastern North America and in their influence in the mountains neutral zone, to be decidedly hostile to the Christian religion. The Bible is banned. So far as I recall, there was no evidence of (above ground) churches, and in a late episode, we see a snatch of ritual of the Reich sponsored religion, apparently a marriage of fascism with ancient German mythology. Think swastikas, dirndls and lots of blond pigtails.

The implicit claim of the series, that Nazism was “godless” is historically inaccurate and politically dangerous. This sort of revisionism is particularly attractive to the right wing, especially the far right wing. The not so hidden message is: “There is no reason to be afraid of political movements just because they are nationalist, racist, and bind the state to capital, subjugating the employed classes. That isn’t what made Nazism bad; all the really bad stuff came from the fact that they were atheists.” For example, Dinesh DeSousa includes Hitler among the “atheist tyrants,” Hitler becomes a card carrying atheist, as if he were Madalyn Murray O'Hair or Ayn Rand.