Many societies are now characterized by much more informality than they were before. One manifestation of this is that whereas children would previously address adults more deferentially (as Mr or Mrs Bloggs, for example), they are now much more likely to call (some) adults by their first names. The same is true of younger adults addressing considerably older adults. Is this greater familiarity acceptable or should it be avoided?

Psychologists and common sense recognize blaming the victim as a cognitive error (fallacy) that many of us use to support the just-world hypothesis — the view that life is basically fair. In this article Richard Double compares a related phenomenon, blaming the culprit. When we commit the fallacy of blaming the culprit we mistakenly conclude that judging a culprit to deserve blame for an action exonerates everyone else from blame for that action. Double provides several examples of the fallacy.

Do bees have feelings? What would that mean? And if they do have feelings, how should we treat them? Do we have a moral obligation towards insects? A short commentary on M. Bateson, S. Desire, S. E. Gartside, and G. A. Wright, ‘Agitated Honeybees Exhibit Pessimistic Cognitive Biases’, Current Biology 21.12 (2011), 1070–3.

In a democracy people are free to express their opinions and question those of others. This is an important personal freedom, and also essential to the very idea of government by discussion. But it has also been held to be instrumentally important because in open public debate true ideas will conquer false ones by their merit, and the people will see the truth for themselves. In other words, democracy has an epistemic function as a kind of truth machine. From this it follows that in a democracy there should be no dogma: no knowledge protected from public challenge and debate. Yet this whole argument is founded on embarrassing misconceptions of the nature of truth and of the working of democracy.

Bullshit is a prevalent phenomenon in this info-crazy world of ours. With the help of Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, I want to provide a brief philosophical account of this phenomenon, and offer some practical tips to how we could deal with it.

Sometimes people wonder why we should look at the morality of property at all. Property rights are taken to be legal constructs. Their validity rests, as Hume suggested, on their utility. In this context it makes little sense to focus on the specific provisions of property law and ask about their moral foundation. What has a foundation in morality is the whole system of property itself: laws, distributions, expectations, conventions. And the general usefulness of this arrangement is so large a question, so fraught with uncertainty, that it is almost beyond serious discussion.

Assuming God exists, should we worship God? This article contends that even if God is omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent, and created and sustains the world, we should adopt the attitude towards God exhibited by Abraham in Chapter 18 of Genesis. There, having been informed of God's willingness to destroy Sodom, Abraham persuades God that if the city contains ten innocent inhabitants, justice requires the plan to be altered. The story undermines the divine command theory of morality, demonstrates that God is subject to change, and suggests that God is prepared to be challenged rather than worshipped.

Peter Lyth claimed that my argument against an infinite temporal regress of events conflates number as an abstract entity with number as a number of events or things. I show that my argument does not depend on such a conflation.

In his fairly recent article in this journal, ‘The Evil-god Challenge – A Response’ (Think 40), Keith Ward attempts to nullify Stephen Law's evil-god challenge by presenting several arguments intended to demonstrate that an omniscient, omnipotent being cannot conceivably be evil. In this article, I critically respond to each of Ward's arguments to reach the conclusion that an omnipotent, omniscient being could indeed be evil. To achieve this, I claim that neither perfect empathy nor rationality entails benevolence, that the desire for suffering is not necessarily pathological, and that human desire for a good god does not entail that god is actually benevolent.

The first six articles in this issue of THINK have the theme “Good without God”. Here, Richard Swinburne argues that the existence of God is not a precondition of there being moral truths, but his existence does impact on what moral truths there are.

At a time of acute danger, people commonly petition God for help for themselves or their loved ones. Such prayer seems natural and, indeed, for believers, reasonable and acceptable. But once we closely examine what is actually happening in such situations, we see that frequently such prayer is not morally innocuous. I present a number of examples which illustrate the difficulty, and argue that even assuming the benevolence of the deity does not suffice to make such prayer legitimate.

Many are growing increasingly skeptical of the claims by government officials about winning the war against drugs. Should this war be supported because a smaller percentage of teenagers use marijuana, or should it be opposed because a larger percentage of teenagers and young adults use cocaine and crack in the USA? Should people be optimistic when multi-billion dollar shipments of cocaine are confiscated, or pessimistic that seizures continue to increase yet have such little impact on price and consumption? Drug prohibition was doomed to failure from the start, no less so than alcohol prohibition, and the best alternative is an immediate return to complete legalization of such drugs.

There exists today an infinite variety (literally) of formal logics, different systems with incompatible properties. One way to explain the existence of many logics is to posit logical pluralism: to suppose that there is in fact more than one correct logic. In this selective guide – designed for non-logicians – we look at some examples of how different logics come into apparent conflict with each other. Then we look at different ways of understanding the idea of logical pluralism. Our question throughout will be a basic one: does logical pluralism have any limits?

According to Socrates, an unexamined life is not worth living. This view is controversial. Is the unexamined life worth living or not? Most philosophers disagree about the answer. While some argue for the worthlessness of an unexamined life, others support the superfluity of self critical examination. In his recent article, Jamison pooh-poohed the claim that an unexamined life is not worth living. According to Jamison, not only is an unexamined life worth living; the rigorous examination of life should not be encouraged due to its possible negative effects on the participants and the entire society. In Jamison's view, a consistent and unregulated examination of human life produces a feeling of ecstasy (a specie of spiritual feeling) in those who engage in it. The feeling, if allowed, could endanger both the thinker and the entire society. For Jamison, “once you get a taste of this kind of thing, you do not want to give it up”. Someone who engages in self-critical examination eventually becomes entangled with it. Socrates became entangled in dialectics, became unpopular, was accused of corrupting the youth and eventually sentenced to death.

Some people have engaged in acts of civil disobedience to protest against the climate policies of their governments and corporations. This article argues that these disobedient actions are justified at present since governments fail to do all they reasonably can to respond to this pressing issue.

‘Bah! Humbug!’ It's the most famous line in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but is it the most important? Surely not, for this Christmas classic is not centrally about Christmas, but about a man, the holiday being the convenient setting for his transformation. What kind of transformation? Why a moral transformation of course, because the man, Ebenezer Scrooge, through multiple encounters with the spirit world, becomes a good man by the end of the story. But where does this story begin, what are we to think of Scrooge at the outset and how is his transformation accomplished? These are the questions I take up here, for while Scrooge is tightfisted, covetous and hard-hearted, he is still a man of principle. Judged by the standards of some views on ethics, Scrooge isn't actually all that bad. How can that be? Let's start with a quick overview of two centuries of ethical theory.

To what extent are philosophical questions and problems like other kinds of questions and problems, such as the those tackled by the physical sciences? Peter Hacker suggests that the problems of philosophy are conceptual, not factual, and that their solution or resolution is more a contribution to a particular form of understanding than to our knowledge of the world.