Midterm on Monday

This is just a reminder that the midterm is on Monday, November 3rd.

Also, CONGRATS TO THE WORLD CHAMPIONS OF BASEBALL!

Black + White = Gold

For those who don't know what a mashup is, you're in luck. You can start with one of the best ones out there:

(December 4th, from DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album)

The internet has more to say about the Grey Album here.

Kant, You Ignorant Slut

I thought it might help us all if I opened up a post dedicated solely to complaining about how tough the Immanuel Kant reading was. Leave your best Kant insults insults in the comments of this post.

[can't get enough Kant?]
[want tips on reading these articles?]

Links Worthy of a Swine

Here are some links that are loosely related to the stuff on happy ethics (utilitarianism) that we are studying. Most of these deal with psychology. There's a lot of psychological research on happiness popping up lately. The first two links are overviews of the psychology of happiness:

Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness
and
Hedonic Man

The second is a slightly optimistic take on our ability to change our baseline level of happiness. This is important to know for an ethical theory that values maximizing happiness:

The Hedonic Set Point Can Go Up

The next link deals with a famous moral thought experiment, the trolley problem. This gets brought up a lot when evaluating happy ethics:

Psychology of the Trolley Problem

The last link is an advanced overview of consequentialist ethical theories. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory, since it only looks at the consequences of an action to figure out whether an action is morally good or bad:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry: Consequentialism

So what makes you happy? WaWa? Ping pong? Cookies?

God Stuff

Here are some links on God ethics (divine command theory).

• A transcript and audio of the entire F.C. Copleston & Bertrand Russell debate on the existence of God excerpted in our John Arthur reading. (Or just click the 'play' button on the audio player below.)
  
• A quick explanation of the Euthyphro Dilemma.
• An advanced overview of God ethics from my favorite free online philosophy encyclopedia (yes, there are more than one free online philosophy encyclopedias).

Cole Hamels Is An Exception

Thanks to Josh, our anti-I'M-SPECIAL-ism pin made it to the Phillies game today. Not to go against the message of the pin or anything, but I'm taking credit for the win. Clearly the pin is lucky.