Jonathan Glover's website

This site is worth a look with plenty of good stuff on ethics and much more from a leading figuring in applied ethics. On a personal note, I interviewed Jonathan Glover in 1998 for the magazine, Philosophy Now. He was very engaging and sympathetic. Unfortunately, perhaps, the interview is only accessible to subscribers.

Note the state of his desk. The philosophy department is clearly in good company.

Moral philosophy on the Late, Late Show (sort of)

Jonathan Dancy is spoken about by his daughter-in-law, Claire Danes, here.

Prison and marriage in the USA

This piece from the Economist proposes a link between the levels of incarceration among black men and the decline in marriage levels among black women in the USA. To the extent that marriage is generally a social and personal good (and that is, of course, a matter of considerable debate), this points to a pernicious side effect of the approach to sentencing in the USA.

A point to note is that a decline in marriage does not entail a decline in co-habitation and long-term partnerships. The article also reports that 96% of married black women in the USA are married to black men. Again, this may overstate the ethnic exclusivity of the long term relationships of black women as it measures just marriage rather than partnerships.

Earlier there was some discussion of the problem of evil, particularly in relation to Haiti. Here's a bit more on the problem of evil from the Wall Street Journal. I saw the article thanks to the Leiter blog.

'If Leibniz is right, then natural disasters aren't the result of divine punishment for sin. They are the foreseen but unintended consequences of a well-regulated and overall good system of natural laws. So religious believers can explain the causes of earthquakes in purely natural terms (Leibniz was an avid scientist himself), while still maintaining belief in a divine, nonpunitive purpose for allowing such events. The harmonization of natural and theological explanations, reason and faith, is Leibniz's true legacy.'