Don’t worry if one day soon you click on B&W and get a page saying ‘migration in progress’ – it won’t be a bit of hackery, and it won’t take long. B&W is moving – to a better world. Be grateful to Josh Larios.… Read the rest

What a brilliant idea. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens

have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998. The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the [Inquisition]… Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable

I mentioned a passage from the Odyssey in my latest comment on Fact 1.5, as illustrating my claim that “It’s not natural to treat strangers or foreigners well, it’s not natural to think that everyone should have equal treatment, it’s not natural to think that women matter just as much as men do.” Having mentioned it I wanted to read it again, and having read it again, I wanted to post it.

It’s in Book Nine, which is where we at last get to hear about Odysseus’s journey from the beginning, when he is staying with the Phaiakians and Alkinöos asks him (in the last lines of Book Eight) to tell his story. After some polite throat-clearing he gets … Read the rest

More on Sam Harris’s 9 facts and why they don’t (I think) get us from is to ought. Just a little more, because the power is about to be turned off. Work is difficult around here these days.

FACT #1: There are behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which potentially lead to the worst possible misery for everyone. There are also behaviors, intentions, cultural practices, etc. which do not, and which, in fact, lead to states of wellbeing for many sentient creatures…FACT #3: Our “values” are ways of thinking about this domain of possibilities. If we value liberty, privacy, benevolence, dignity, freedom of expression, honesty, good manners, the right to own property, etc.—we value these things only