Gerald Dworkin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus at the University of California, Davis. He has taught at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and been a Visiting Fellow of All Souls, Oxford as well as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University. From 1990-97 he was the editor of ETHICS. When not thinking about How to Live, What to Do he is thinking about Where to Eat, How to Cook. He divides his time between Sacramento and Chicago (where his two daughters and four grand-children live) and thinks the best four word sentence in English is Ring Lardner's: "Shut up he explained."
Editor’s Note: This essay once mentions a well-known racial slur. Indeed, much of the essay is about the usefulness of maintaining a distinction between using a word and merely mentioning it, and argues that mentions of even taboo words should be allowed, so it would be self-defeating to resort to euphemism in this case. by…
by David Copp and Gerald Dworkin We have argued in a recent article in 3 Quarks Daily that there is a moral obligation for those who are able to safely be vaccinated against serious diseases such as measles and COVID-19 to do so. The gist of the argument is that, when certain factual conditions are met,…
by David Copp and Gerald Dworkin In a survey released at the end of May by the AP and the NORC Center for public affairs research, 49% of Americans said they intended to be vaccinated against the new coronavirus, 31% said they were unsure, and 20% said they would not get the vaccine. The Supreme Court…
by Gerald Dworkin At least since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 the issue of Conscientious Objection (henceforth CO) has been an important one in the context of Catholic hospitals and women patients. Such hospitals object to the provision of abortions, contraceptives, sterilization, fertility care, and “gender-affirming care” such as hormone treatments and surgeries.…
by Gerald Dworkin In 1998 I was a co-author of a book called Euthanasia and Physician-assisted Suicide: For and Against. I was for; Sissela Bok was against. The point to note here is that the title used the concepts of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Euthanasia is no longer invoked by proponents of medically-assisted dying (hereafter abbreviated…
by Gerald Dworkin Three years ago I posted on this site “California Dying” about my experience in working for an assisted-dying bill in that state. That bill passed and while it has been involved in litigation by its opponents on a tactical issue of whether it was the right type of issue for a special…
by Gerald Dworkin We (the readers of 3QD; I know there are many people who disagree) can take it as given that Alex Jones is a thoroughly evil person. Someone who spreads false statements that the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting staged the whole thing deserves lots of bad things…
by Gerald Dworkin Having taught Philosophy for 46 years in three Universities—two State and one private—and never taught a Critical Thinking course one might have some questions about my choice of topic. My response is two-fold. First, there is a sense in which no matter what the topic of a particular course philosophy is always…
by Gerald Dworkin In October, 1961, I was sitting in The Jazz Workshop, a San Francisco nightclub, listening to Lenny Bruce doing his infamous routine Are there any Niggers here tonight? It begins with asking that question and proceeds to make comments using racial slurs for every racial group he could–kikes, guineas, wops, spics, polacks,…
by Gerald Dworkin In three previous columns I have discussed the ethics of lying. I am still working on this topic and, in the course of doing so, have accumulated some interesting remarks. Here is a sample: Some topics–is it decaf?–require absolute honesty. With others–military secrets, some non-contagious diseases–some legitimate exceptions may be allowed. —Michael…
by Gerald Dworkin From time to time my friends, knowing that I watch many television series, ask me what current show I recommend. I always start by asking if they have watched The Wire. If they say they have not, I suggest they watch all five seasons and then I will make suggestions about what…
by Gerald Dworkin I am finishing the six months a year that I live in California. While here I have been working on the campaign, led by an organization called Compassion and Choices, to get a bill passed by the California legislature–SB128. This is a bill to allow medically-assisted dying in the state of California.…
by Gerald Dworkin I have been thinking and writing about lying and deception for a number of years. Readers with a long memory may recall these two blog posts written for 3QD when I first started my thinking on the topic: Lying Around — Part I Lying Around — Part II Along the way I…
by Gerald Dworkin Tom Paulin In the light of the recent fire-storm over the hirefire of Steven Salaita, I thought it might be interesting to revisit a case which raised similar issues about whether there are limits to what a University may do with respect to controversial speech. This was a case which did not…
by Gerald Dworkin By some strange coincidence, the Chancellors of the two Universities at which I spent the longest periods of my career– University of California and University of Illinois–have turned into poster children for current administrative cant about free speech and its limits. Chancellor Wise and the Salaita decision were the subject of my…
by Gerald Dworkin In a talk given some years ago at the University of Illinois Urbana (UIUC), which is the object of a boycott protesting the Salaita decision, I described myself as a “first amendment fanatic.” Having grown up in the era of McCarthyism as the child of a member of the Communist Party, having…
by Gerald Dworkin Many of the quotations that appear in my e-reader Philosophy: A Commonplace Book are one-liners: There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. —Beckett Better latent than never. —Morgenbesser Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation…
by Gerald Dworkin Recently a ghastly case of capital punishment by means of lethal injection was featured in the news. A convicted murderer and rapist, Clayton Lockett, died 43 minutes after his execution began. He was described by many witnesses as writhing in pain and struggling to speak. After administering the first drug, “We began…
Image from here. by Gerald Dworkin Some of my readers may recall from an earlier blog post or Justin Smith's review of my Philosophy: A Commonplace Book that for many years I have been collecting humorous quotes, epigrams, aphorisms, parodies, etc. that have some connection to Philosophy. The connection is sometimes that it is from…
by Gerald Dworkin It has been a well-recognized phenomenon for some time that how we frame our questions to others affects the answers they give. The best known work on the topic is by Kahneman and Tversky. They give examples such as the following. Subjects were asked to choose between two treatments for 600 people…