The Philosopher's Beard

Drug overdose deaths have more than doubled in America in the past 10 years, mainly due to the appearance of Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. These drugs combine incredible ease of manufact...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/10/hard-drugs-have-become-too-dangerous.html

Source: hotpot.ai Putin's invasion of Ukraine has reminded everyone of how dangerous a world we live in. As rich countries scramble to rebuild militaries dismantled by post-Cold war complacen...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/07/conscript-old.html

Source: Hotpot.ai  Human psychology seems to drive us to pick a side in conflicts and then go all in. Hence a disappointing number of those observing the Israel-Hamas war even from a safe ...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/05/israel-should-have-fought-this-war-very.html

Source Taiwan is an independent prosperous liberal democracy of 24 million free people that the Chinese Communist Party solemnly promises to annex to its empire by whatever means are necessa...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/05/could-threat-of-information-war-deter.html

The recent history of the term 'political correctness' and its association with the contemporary left and the tedious culture wars obscures its true character and ubiquity. Political correctne...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/04/political-correctness-how-few-try-to.html

Israel is a state founded on a principle of ethnic supremacy and a practise of ethnic cleansing at exactly the point in history where these became universally condemned as morally unacceptable...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/01/israels-crimes-do-not-deserve-this-much.html

One of the peculiar side-effects of America's hegemonic dominance of global news, social media, and entertainment media is that the rest of the world is over-exposed to what Americans think of t...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/01/americans-are-not-as-poor-as-they-think.html

Human minds run on stories, in which things happen for human meaningful reasons. But the actual world is not human centred. It runs on causal processes that are largely indifferent to humans’ ...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2023/06/the-problem-with-stories.html

Environmentalists are always complaining that governments are obsessed with GDP and economic growth, and that this is a bad thing because economic growth is bad for the environment. They are part...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2023/04/governments-dont-actually-prioritise.html

It is easy to become exasperated with liberal democracy. Various factions bicker and manoeuvre against each other in an endless grubby contest for power, hypocritically appealing to a shared publ...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2023/02/strongmen-leaders-and-infallibility-trap.html

When people take to the street to protest this is often supposed to be a sign of democracy in action. People who believe that their concerns about the climate change, Covid lockdowns, racism ...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/12/public-protest-is-not-democratic-thing.html

According to the meta-charity GiveWell , the most effective charities can save a child’s life for between 3 and 5,000 US dollars. One way of understanding this figure is that whenever you cons...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/10/how-many-childrens-lives-is-that-worth.html

The idea that 'taxation is theft' is one of those thrilling, paradigm shifting recognitions that are continually being rediscovered and shared. It is a classic case of pseudo-intellectuality, in...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/08/on-incoherence-of-claiming-that.html

In the context of the current decolonisation movement it is rather strange that whenever bad things happen in a non-Western country they are still routinely analysed as the moral responsibili...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/07/we-should-recognise-moral-agency-of-non.html

There appears to be a moral panic going around that Putin is engineering a global famine to extort a more favourable outcome to his failed Ukraine invasion.  This is a delusion with 2 pernici...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/07/if-people-starve-it-wont-be-putins-fault.html

Climate change is a huge and urgent problem. It is natural to suppose that it is therefore a terrible mistake, an unforced error that we should regret and try to prevent ever happening again. ...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/07/we-should-fix-climate-change-but-we.html

Recent developments in the US have brought renewed interest to the ethics of abortion. I will skip over most of that rather parochial and politically tribalised debate and instead consider the...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/06/abortion-bans-as-conscription.html

It is common to see claims that if only women were in charge things would be much better and nicer, for example that people would be much happier at work, inequality would fall, climate change...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/06/putting-women-in-charge-would-not-make.html

Source: UNDP One of the impressive features of humanity's response to Covid was the development of successful vaccines within only 10 months, and the production and distribution of 12 billio...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/06/no-poor-countries-shouldnt-try-to-make.html

Philosophy has traditionally been considered and considered itself a part of the humanities, with a continuity in skills and attitudes, such as an emphasis on scholarship. In many universities...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/06/philosophy-belongs-in-sciences-not.html

A standard reaction to the disastrous democratic discourse and political mismanagement of public interest issues from the economy to public health to gun control has been to demand more respec...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/05/four-reasons-not-to-trust-experts.html

According to the World Bank’s latest figures , around 700 million people live in utter destitution, on less than $1.90 per day, poorer than the average pet cat in the rich world. It is easy to...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/05/just-end-poverty-now-case-for-global.html

Capitalism has had a good Covid. While governments of every political hue seem to stumble from one crisis to the next, for profit corporations stepped up to deliver our food and consumer goods...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2021/09/why-capitalism-won-covid-and-government.html

Dementia is a terrible condition that afflicts up to 1 in 3 of the elderly (and some younger people too). People with dementia suffer a gradual loss of their cognitive functions, including mem...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/04/a-dead-mans-switch-method-of-insuring.html

As any map will show you, the world is divided by political borders into spaces called countries. People and things can live in, come from, or go to these places. But countries are not any ...

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/03/theres-no-such-thing-as-countries.html