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Category: Ethics/Morality

Wildfire converted me from a tree-hugger to a tree-worshipper

Wildfire converted me from a tree-hugger to a tree-worshipper

Robert Moor writes: Thirteen years ago, I traded a shoe-box apartment on the east side of Manhattan for a cabin in the woods on the west coast of Canada. Like so many would-be Thoreauvians before me, I moved here in part because I craved an escape from the city’s pollution and noise. In that time, however, I have begun to feel the city — which is to say, the whole tangled system of advanced technology, industrial agriculture and hypercapitalism —…

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Wendell Berry, writer and the conscience of American family farming, dies at 92

Wendell Berry, writer and the conscience of American family farming, dies at 92

Robert D. McFadden writes: Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America, died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky. He was 92. His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed the death. Lanky and rawboned in middle age, with melancholy eyes, a jutting chin and a…

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How to create a society of cheats

How to create a society of cheats

John Paul Rollert writes: Recently, I have taken to telling friends that whenever I’m on campus, I feel like I’m trapped in the middle of a crime spree. I’m not talking about an epidemic of overdue library books or out-of-control parties. I’m talking about AI and the ways in which students are constantly using it to cheat on any work that is assigned to them. For those of us in higher ed—and I’ve taught at universities for more than 20…

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Pluralism is a moral commitment: a virtue that we each have a responsibility to cultivate

Pluralism is a moral commitment: a virtue that we each have a responsibility to cultivate

Traditional dancers perform in front of the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth, celebrating the Buddhist festival of Esala Perahera, in Kandy, Sri Lanka, on Aug. 8, 2025. Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images By Eranda Jayawickreme, Wake Forest University I grew up in Sri Lanka. Much of my adolescence was spent in Kandy, a city built around a lake, set amid the lush tea plantations of the hill country. Its northern shore houses the Temple of the Tooth, one of…

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Pope Leo all but rules out war’s legitimacy

Pope Leo all but rules out war’s legitimacy

James V. Grimaldi writes: It isn’t every day that a pope calls for an overhaul of a more than 1,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church, but that’s exactly what Pope Leo XIV did last month. In his inaugural encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which was mainly an exploration of how to protect human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence, Leo devoted a brief but critical passage to just war theory. In a break with a foundational principle of Catholic thought on…

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What I learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat

What I learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat

Noah Hawley writes: Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of…

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Trump is trying to distract us from Pope Leo’s calls for peace. Don’t take the bait

Trump is trying to distract us from Pope Leo’s calls for peace. Don’t take the bait

Sam Sawyer, S.J., writes: During a weekend full of bad news for Mr. Trump, his post [attacking Pope Leo] followed a lack of progress in negotiations with Iran and the resounding electoral loss of his favorite European leader, Viktor Orban, in Hungary. Relative to the Catholic world, his post came the day after Pope Leo XIV led a prayer vigil for peace in St. Peter’s and was joined in prayer all around the world. It came within hours of a…

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Vance questions the pope on just war theory hours after Leo honored its founder, St. Augustine

Vance questions the pope on just war theory hours after Leo honored its founder, St. Augustine

National Catholic Reporter reports: Hours after Pope Leo XIV paid public homage to St. Augustine, one of the key architects of just war theory, Vice President JD Vance questioned the pontiff’s understanding of the Catholic doctrine for determining whether a war is morally justifiable. “When the pope says that God is never on the side of people who wield the sword, there is more than a 1,000-year tradition of just war theory,” Vance said at a Turning Point USA event…

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Pope opens Holy Week condemning war waged in Jesus’s name

Pope opens Holy Week condemning war waged in Jesus’s name

Crux reports: Pope Leo XIV opened his first Holy Week as pontiff with a rebuke of those who pray for war, offering his condemnation mere days after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Hegseth – who prefers to be called the “Secretary of War” – made his prayer during a recent Christian worship service at the Pentagon, attended by military and civilian workers. Speaking during his March 29 Mass…

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Who cares about going to the moon when the world is in chaos?

Who cares about going to the moon when the world is in chaos?

Lisa Grossman writes: Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been gearing up to cover the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission. This launch aims to bring humans back to the vicinity of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, with an eventual eye toward landing humans on the moon and learning how to live there long-term. I expected to feel unalloyed excitement for this moment. I’ve been enraptured with space since I was 8 years…

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The Epstein scandal suggests that everything awful we’ve ever believed is true

The Epstein scandal suggests that everything awful we’ve ever believed is true

Joshua Rothman writes: It was odd, for many reasons, to be a journalist in 2016 and 2017, just after the election of Donald Trump. Part of the oddness was that seemingly every story had to include him. If a reporter travelled somewhere to gather material on something apparently unrelated—a natural disaster, a sporting event, a scientific discovery—it felt important to explore whether the people who lived there had voted for Trump, and why. Writing about individuals, one found it crucial…

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In unprecedented move, giant monkey research center may become a primate sanctuary

In unprecedented move, giant monkey research center may become a primate sanctuary

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine applauds the Oregon Health & Science University Board of Directors’ approval of a resolution authorizing negotiations with the National Institutes of Health to transition the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) toward closure and potential conversion into a primate sanctuary. With passage of the resolution, OHSU is now positioned to work with the NIH to explore a pathway away from invasive primate experimentation and toward humane, human-relevant science. During a 180-day negotiation period authorized…

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The Chomsky/Epstein puzzle

The Chomsky/Epstein puzzle

Chris Knight writes: Noam Chomsky’s life and work cannot be understood without taking into account his militarily-funded linguistics research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There were, I believe, always two ‘Noam Chomskys’ – one working for the US military and the other working tirelessly against that same military. This contradiction cannot explain every aspect of Chomsky’s puzzling friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. But it is the underlying contradiction that helps us understand why someone as radical as Chomsky ended…

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Is being virtuous good for you – or just people around you? A study suggests traits like compassion may support your own well-being

Is being virtuous good for you – or just people around you? A study suggests traits like compassion may support your own well-being

Opportunities to show compassion often feel difficult, but exercising virtue seems to help people cope. FG Trade/E+ via Getty Images By Michael Prinzing, Wake Forest University Virtues such as compassion, patience and self-control may be beneficial not only for others but also for oneself, according to new research my team and I published in the Journal of Personality in December 2025. Philosophers from Aristotle to al-Fārābī, a 10th-century scholar in what is now Iraq, have argued that virtue is vital…

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University of Southern California sold dead human bodies to the U.S. military to train IDF medical personnel

University of Southern California sold dead human bodies to the U.S. military to train IDF medical personnel

USC Annenberg Media reports: Near the end of 2017, the United States Navy filed a notice of intent to begin purchasing human cadavers from the University of Southern California. The purpose: Use dead bodies in trauma surgery training for the Israeli Defense Forces. Since that notice, the Navy has paid USC more than $860,000 for at least 89 “fresh cadaver bodies,” 32 of which were used specifically for IDF training at Los Angeles General Medical Center. One contract is still…

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The deaths of effective altruism

The deaths of effective altruism

Leif Wenar writes: I’m fond of effective altruists. When you meet one, ask them how many people they’ve killed. Effective altruism is the philosophy of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind now sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud and money laundering. Elon Musk has said that EA is close to what he believes. Facebook mogul Dustin Moskovitz and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn have spent mega-millions on its causes, and EAs have made major moves to influence American politics. In 2021, EA boasted of $46 billion in funding—comparable to what it’s estimated the Saudis spent over…

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