Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

I wanted to share this GoFundMe request, a fundraiser for the equivalent of a scholarship for a young woman named Tanya O’Malley. I met Tanya on a flight home from Rome back in 2016, after I’d spent the summer in Palestine, and she’d spent hers in Italy. We were total strangers to one another, mere…

Choice is a wondrous and dangerous concept. If the wrong choices are made consistently, one may find themselves in great peril. But, contained within choice is also the potential for the greatest success and satisfaction. Those who advocate a completely free and flourishing society like to underscore this latter, positive potential when discussing the importance…

In reply to mlyoung57. Well, I agree with that. I think the inference to draw is that justified voting is multiply realizable. In other words, there’s a multiplicity of very different sorts of considerations at work when you vote for a political…

I agree with all of that. It is largely for these sorts of reasons that I am unwilling to go out on a limb with some kind of suitably nuanced policy>character principle. One thing I would add is that, often — and I suspect rationally — p…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. One last complication I’ll mention in passing: when we vote for legislators, we’re voting for candidates who are going to pass laws that lead to policy. Legislation is not by itself policy. So the causality involv…

In reply to mlyoung57. Yes and no. It’s complicated. Yes, at some level, political offices exist primarily to promote the best policies, not to reward the best people. In that sense, the policies a candidate is expected to promote should be more …

Explore the research on coral reefs. This is part of our latest collection of work on Biodiversity and Wildlife.