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NO CONTACT
The Prime Directive. As any self-respecting Trekkie knows, it is Star Trek‘s most important ethical rule. And possibly the most stupid. ‘Thou shalt not interfere with the natural evolution of another...
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RETHINKING THE IDEA OF ‘CHRISTIAN EUROPE’
UPDATE: this post won the 2011 3QD Politics and Social Sciences Prize. In the warped mind of Anders Behring Breivik, his murderous rampage in Oslo and Utoøya were the first shots in a war in defence of...
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IS IT ANTIQUATED TO BELIEVE IN SOCIAL PROGRESS?
In June I wrote a post questioning Brazil’s ‘no contact’ policy towards uncontacted Amazonian tribes. A version of that blog post was published as an essay in Göteborgs-Posten. The essay (like my post)...
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MORALITY AND THE LEFT
‘Why talk of morality?’ It’s a question I get asked a lot, especially as I am writing a book on the history of moral thought. Many on the left are uncomfortable with, indeed hostile to, moral...
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THE MYTHS OF CHRISTIAN EUROPE
I wrote some notes a few months back on Pandaemonium on Rethinking the idea of ‘Christian Europe‘. I reworked that post into an essay, which has now been published in the latest issue of New Humanist....
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ORIENTAL ENLIGHTENMENT
A book that I wish I had read many years ago. JJ Clarke’s Oriental Enlightenment is a superb study of ‘The encounter between Asian and Western thought’, as the subtitle puts it. It is primarily a...
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THE UNRAVELLING OF MORALITY
My book The Quest for a Moral Compass is published this week. There has already been an early review in the Tablet from the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who compared the book to Bertrand...
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WITHOUT A MORAL SAFETY NET
This is the text of a talk about my book The Quest for a Moral Compass that I gave at the Glasgow Aye Write festival last month. You can buy the book from my Pandaemonium bookshop. For other talks...
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WHERE DO VALUES COME FROM?
This is a (slightly edited) video of a talk I gave last month at London’s RSA entitled ‘Where do values come from?’. It explores some of the themes in my book The Quest for a Moral Compass. .
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ON MORALITY AND MORALISM
This is a transcript of my introductory comments to a discussion about moralism at the recent Battle of Ideas conference. The other discussants were Hannah Dawson and Alister McGrath. Every year I...
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RIGHT AND WRONG IN THE MODERN WORLD
Better than a sermon on Xmas day… a discussion of the history of morality, and of the state of contemporary moral thinking, with Philip Petit and Natasha Circa on Australia’s ABC Radio....
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HISTORY AND THE MAKING OF THE INDIVIDUAL
In May, I took part in a discussion on ‘Individualism’ organised by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation and the British Academy. The starting point of the discussion was Larry Siedentop’s book Inventing the...
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ON THE QUEST FOR A MORAL COMPASS
This is the text of my talk at the Galle Literary Festival Last week. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? These are the questions...
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THE MAKING OF THE MUSLIM WORLD
This is a review of Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason (Bodley Head), Cemil Aydin’s The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual...
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ON MORALITY AND ITS HISTORY
This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? These...
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