“If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?” This, in essence, is the issue of privacy. If a specific action (or information) is unobservable (even after the fact) by no one else but the actor, then that act (or information) is, by …
Prof. Michael Sandel from Harvard University offered a 12-lecture course on “Justice: A Journey in Moral Reasoning” last year. Prof. Sandel makes a wonderful argument for studying philosophy as a means for understanding the answers that we already know, and he goes on to warn the audience that understanding political and social philosophy is, ironically, going to make you worse citizens, not better! You couldn’t ask for a more provocative set up to the lectures!
Here is the first video of the 12 [link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY]
On October 23rd, 2009, the American Law Institute(ALI) resolved to withdraw Section 210.6 of the Model Penal Code (MPC). The official copy of the resolution (proposed on April 15, 2009) is available here (in PDF). Why is this important? Simply because peeling back the obfuscating legalese reveals that this resolution has effectively demolished the intellectual …
Given that marriage is an institution of great importance across many (if not all) cultures, it is not unreasonable to expect some sort of a definition of marriage. Ironically, anthropologists are yet to agree on such a definition! Of course, it does not help that the institution itself has been constantly changing over time. So my query is the following: What exactly is the institution of marriage? The institution of marriage, in my opinion, has conflated three different, but related, institutions: (1) a personal institution, denoted pMarriage, (2) a social institution, denoted sMarriage, and (3) a legal institution, denoted lMarriage. …
