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I dislike nationalism full stop, to be honest, and much of the 'us-them' complex which it sets up. You only 'die for a flag' in a figurative sense - it's the ideals behind the flag which are important, I feel. I'm sure much of this is just my inner iconoclast being brought out. On links to...

You should check out a book by Owen Flanagan called The Really Hard Problem in which he provides "the naturalist's response to those who say that science has robbed the world of the meaning that fantastical, wishful stories once provided."

Haha, it just hit me that a whole lot of (psuedo-?) nationalists w/ flag tattoos are going to become stuck with a symbol of our imperialistic beginnings.

Caramel is better than strawberry, true or false?

Think of this as looking at moral claims like 'murder is bad' and 'generosity is good' in a manner similar to the way in which you would look at aesthetic claims like 'wild strawberries are the best fruit' or 'postmodern art is rubbish'.

If you're interested in the interactions between neuroscience and morality you should check out some of the work of Harvard philosopher/psychologist Joshua Greene (you can also find some interesting arguments for relativism in his PhD dissertation that he undertook at Princeton). While...

It's not about being able to conceive of a situation where 'bad' actions are no longer immoral - that just amounts to imagining a situation in which they are permissible, which roughly translates to "it is not the case that you ought not to perform action X". To imagine such a situation is to...

Here is the link again: Prisoner's Dilemma

The prisoner's dilemma, for example, is so abstract that you would be hard pressed to find a society which doesn't contain social interactions that can be modelled in this way. In fact, as long as you have social interactions, full stop, you will probably be able to find social events which fit...

There could be a few reasons, and we needn't look to 'mystical' Yeats-style cyclical processes to find them. Possibilities: (1) Stable elements in human nature may account for some of the similarities. (2) Some persistent social social problems may have mathematical, or other determinate...

Not necessarily ('relatavism' is too broad a label for that), though this is indeed my thinking. It is certainly one way you can theorise. Rather than saying that morality simply changes with the 'prevailing mood' I would suggest the term 'prevailing environment' so that we're thinking more in...

We get blown about by similar forces to the absolutists - we're just realistic about the fact that people are blown around. In other words, the relativist perhaps more readily embraces the degree of contingency involved in the way moral beliefs get formed. That said, it's not as simple a...

Haha, there are enough big egos floating around in medicine (speaking both from experience and from word of mouth) that I doubt the profession will fall into a slump of self-depreciation any time soon. On handsome rewards - some doctors make far too much money (in my opinion), e.g. the financial...

Another article to dispell the doubts of those who would claim that doctors don't earn much money (from the looks of the attached article, some earn far too much!):

So suppose that those who display the pagan virtues - like bravery, strength, beauty, skill, humour and grace - that you admire are in the minority. I'm guessing that you (either honestly or in that ironic, devil's advocate kind of way that entertains me so much) wish to cultivate the existence...

Haha, and I yours. I was actually just marvelling recently at how much our political views seem to have aligned over time. A result of similar interests (evolution/scientific method/mathematics/cognitive science etc...) or mere chance? Who knows.

I should also mention that it seems like lunacy to discard the plight of 'the many' or 'the masses' in favour of 'the individual', for what constitutes 'the many' if not a group of individuals? Such an approach doesn't seem to make much sense unless 'the individual' is taken to be a euphamism...

That's just a matter of the aesthetics of word choice, in my opinion. You're reading homogeneity into the term - you needn't do so. I've written posts before about how it is detrimental to use terms like 'the average individual' whilst ignoring variation of traits within the population. "What...

I'm going to end up pushing SLE to its limits.

^ This is one of the reasonable arguments in favour of certain forms of regulation in my opinion. The average consumer can't be expected to have advanced knowledge of pharmacology or of the statistical interpretation of clinical trials. It thus makes sense to put in place bodies, like the TGA...