Ethical Philosophy Selector

These questions reflect the dilemmas that have captured the attention of history’s most significant ethical philosophers. Answer the questions as best you can. When you’re finished answering the questions, press “Select Philosophy” to generate your customized match of ethical philosophers/philosophies. The list orders the philosophers/philosophies according to their compatibility with your expressed opinions on ethics. Click on a philosopher/philosophy to see a summary and links.[via randomWalks]

The site is part of selectsmart.com, which claims to be “the Internet’s biggest collection of selectors. Decision-making based on your preferences.” The general methodology is that you answer qauestions about your preferences in an area; in some surveys, you also indicate what weight should be given to any particular preference you express. At the site, you can operate selectors for anything ranging from “gifts and collectibles” or “lawns and gardens” to “jobs and careers”, “personalities” or “belief systems”. They vary in incisiveness tremendously and, of course, in many cases if you already recognize your preferences you don’t need to be told what to select. But, I agree, the ethical philosophy selector is informative and possibly useful if you want a starting point to explore moral thought and clarify your own.

Rafe Colburn at rc3.org commented on March 2 on the Israeli incursions into the Palestinian refugee camps:

I try to restrain myself from commenting on Israel and Palestine. I really do. Really. But sometimes I cannot. The current Israeli incursions on Palestinian refugee camps are surreal, and I don’t think the media is describing them vividly enough…

And the most grotesque point here is that the even as the Israeli government rightfully condemns terrorism, the IDF is engaged in actions that inevitably result in the deaths of civilians and inevitably fail to accomplish any positive outcome as well. If they captured every militant who they believe is hiding in the refugee camps, would it put an end to the suicide bombings? Would it even reduce their frequency? I think we can all predict the long term effects of living in miserable conditions and being the subject of repeated military assaults by an occupying force…

One thing I find interesting in reading the conservative Israeli press is that they talk about what wretched hives of scum and villainy the refugee camps are, but fail to examine the conditions that lead to their current state. I have no doubt that many terrorists operate out of the camps, but perhaps an alternate solution would be to change things so that the camps are no longer needed.

A secular history if Islam: adapted from Tariq Ali’s forthcoming book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, a fascinating attempt to grapple with the intersecting trends, some dating from the time of Mohammed himself, that explain why Islam has never undergone a Reformation, why it was not touched by the Enlightenment, and why its clashes with the West, from the Crusades to Sept. 11th, have been of a fundamentalist variety.

“It was the discovery of black gold underneath the Arabian desert that provided the old religion with the means and wherewithal to revive its culture while Britain created new sultans and emirs to safeguard their newest and most precious commodity. Throughout the 20th century, the West, to safeguard its own economic interests, supported the most backward, despotic and reactionary survivals from the past, helping to defeat all forms of secularism. As we know, the story is unfinished.” London Review of Books

About the major new exhibit surveying Surrealism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The link points to NPR’s feature on the exhibit (“the art movement defied rigid definitions, but curators keep trying…”). The Met’s own servers have been too busy for me to succeed in getting to their page on the exhibit. Maybe you’ll have better luck…

The stormtrooper tactics of the cult of scientology — both on and off the ‘net — have long been of broad concern. Readers of FmH know I’ve frequently linked to accounts of their antics. I’ve usually written the name of the cult as “s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y” so they wouldn’t find my comments as easily in trolling the net for critical comments; they’ve been known to hack their opponents’ sites in the name of enlightenment and freedom… Thanks to wood s lot, I was pointed to this site which details their meticulous efforts to manipulate the ranking of their own sites in Google and other search engines to prevent readers from finding sites critical of scientology. It might be useful, as Mark Woods and I have done, to use the scientology link to point to such critical sites instead. If this were done enough, it might interfere significantly with their attempt to have only their own hits shown in searches on the term scientology.. Consider doing this too if you agree, please. [thanks, Mark]

Effects of Ethnicity on Psychiatric Diagnosis: do different rates at which various psychiatric illnesses are diagnosed in different ethnic groups represent real ethnic differences in the rates of various mental illnesses? ethnic differences in how the same mental illnesses present? or biases by diagnosticians? Psychiatric Times

Ant base is the first, online continuously-updated database of all 11,000 known ant species in the world. Social Insects Web (SIWeb) And a Wired article about Antbase.