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The Brain Gain: Why Smart People Should be Encouraged to Leave Developing...
Guest post by Denise CoenegrachtSkilled workers emigrating from developing countries are good for us, but bad for the developing countries At least, according to the received wisdom. When considering...
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Saving The Planet: Why Cap-and-Trade Is Not Fit For Purpose
Guest post by Tadhg Ó Laoghaire "It's not easy being green" -Kermit the FrogA consensus is finally shaping up among international...
View ArticleThe Concept of White Privilege Does More Harm Than Good
'White privilege' and its cousins have achieved enormous prominence on the American left, from which it now seems to be spreading around the Western world. As a slogan it has an undeniable rhetorical...
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What Terrorists Want - and How to Stop Them Getting It
After every new atrocity or catchy ISIS video the armchair psychologists and amateur Islamic theologians take to the air. Their low grade psychobabble turns tragic events into compelling TV narrative...
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Liberalism Insists on the Freedom to Insult Religion
Should insulting religion be banned? The reason the idea is still debated in the 21st century is that it has been reframed as a debate within liberalism rather than against it. The arguments set...
View ArticleToo Much Competition is Ruining Sport
Competition is amazing! It is the disruptive engine at the heart of the three key institutional innovations of modernity: market economies, democracy, and science. But despite its glamorous power,...
View ArticleA Team Approach to Intergenerational Justice
We have difficulty living up to our obligations to future generations. To be precise, our problem is not not that we don’t care about what happens to the world after we're gone. It is that we can’t...
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The Case for Subsidising Art (and Taxing Junk Entertainment)
High art – i.e. real art - like Booker prize winning novels and Beethoven is objectively superior to junk entertainment like Piano Tiles and most reality TV. Some egalitarians of taste dispute the...
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Almost No Disasters Are Natural
A natural disaster is a disaster because it involves a lot of human suffering, not because the event itself is especially big or spectacular. The destruction of an uninhabited island by a volcano is...
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Welcome to Philosophy! Make the most of your time here
[Adapted from introductory remarks to my first year Ethics course at Tilburg University]If I have calculated correctly, mine is the very first class in your new academic careers in philosophy. This is...
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The Revolt Against Liberalism: Diagnosing and Defeating Populism
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will...
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Crime Hurts. Justice Should Heal
Judicial punishment is the curious idea that individuals deserve to be punished by the state for breaking its laws. Intellectually this is rather counter-intuitive. If crime is so bad because of the...
View ArticleProductivity is the Wrong Argument for Diversity
If you look around your workplace and everyone, or least all the managers, look the same - same sex, skin colour, social class, age - then your company has a diversity problem. But why is it a...
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Can Free Speech Survive the Internet?
The internet has made it easier than ever to speak to others. It has empowered individuals to publish our opinions without first convincing a media company of their commercial value; to find and share...
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Tyrants Aren’t Smarter Than Democrats. Just More Evil
Tyrants like Vladamir Putin and Kim Jong Un seem to win a lot of their geopolitical contests against democratic governments. How do they do it?A common explanation is that these tyrants are better at...
View ArticleInvisible Hand Ethics
"[B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote...
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No One Actually Believes Fake News. So What's The Problem?
The statistics are shocking. A Russian troll farm created false anti-Clinton stories and distributed them on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. As many as 126 million Facebook users may have...
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Can Corporations Be ‘Good Citizens’?
SourceThe idea of ‘good corporate citizenship’ has become popular recently among business ethicists and corporate leaders. You may have noticed its appearance on corporate websites and CEO speeches....
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Peer Reviewers Should Be Paid
Academia is an extended set of conversations all going on at once. We academics score status points for making a contribution that other people find interesting because it helps them with their often...
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Academics Should Not Be Activists
SourceIn a civilised society, academic scientists are granted a special epistemic authority. They deserve to be listened to, their claims believed, and their recommendations considered seriously. This...
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