The Cactus Crossing Conundrum

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The Cactus Crossing Conundrum is an ethics and "fairness" thought experiment I wrote for you in which your moral intuitions are represented as a number between 0 and 100: Suppose there are two villages, "Smallville" and "Largeford," which are a 5-minute walk apart. There are 100 people in Smallville and 200 people in Largeford - so Largeford has twice as many people in it. According to their ancient traditions, ALL of the people in the two villages must meet once per month in one of t...
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What is the REAL effect of circumcising men?

Those who grow up in the U.S. are often surprised to find out that in many European countries almost no men are circumcised. In the U.S., where the majority of men have had the procedure performed on them, it is pretty common to hear people say that foreskin is unclean, ugly, or even unhealthy. On the other hand, Europeans tend to find the idea of circumcision bizarre. "Why would you cut off a healthy part of your body?", they wonder. And "How would you feel about a culture that cut off their ch...
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Distinguishing Evil and Insanity: The Role of Intentions in Ethics

(Note: this is an essay I wrote many years ago that I still mostly agree with. It probably was what led to me eventually coming up with the idea of Philosophical Disorders.) After a little reflection, it is clear that the morality of a person who carries out an action doesn't just depend on the action itself but rather depends on the state of mind of the person who performs it. This holds for pretty much every commonly used definition of morality. Suppose, for example, that I was tricke...
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