Danny Shine, also known as the ‘Social Experimentalist’, runs a YouTube channel where he posts videos of himself out in London with a megaphone, voicing his polemical views. (His more recent content on his channel is recorded monologues on various social, cultural, and philosophical topics.) In public, he’ll interact with passersby or those standing to…
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In philosophy, the ‘non-identity problem’ refers to what our moral obligations to future individuals should be, that is, to those who do not yet exist. It is a problem in moral philosophy because, typically, the ethical rightness or wrongness of an action is evaluated in terms of how it affects someone (who exists). To summarise…
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In his latest book Why? The Purpose of the Universe, and in his defence of a heretical form of Christianity, the philosopher Philip Goff makes a case for the ‘limited God hypothesis’. This is the idea that a god with limited abilities best explains what we observe in the universe. The hypothesis, therefore, challenges the…
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Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (1973) poses an interesting and thorny moral conundrum. In this story, the narrator describes the utopian city of Omelas, whose very utopianism, prosperity, and unspoiled happiness depend on the perpetual misery of a single child, hidden and locked away in a dark,…
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Many antinatalists embrace veganism, as they find these lifestyle decisions to be ethically consonant with each other. Yet most ethical vegans are not against having children. Whether one position entails the other depends on the particular ethic at play: If the goal is to prevent and minimise suffering, then does this not entail antinatalism? This…
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