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."
by Gerald Dworkin I recently watched the latest Claude Lanzmann documentary on the Holocaust called the Last of the Unjust. It is a four hour interview with Benjamin Murmelstein who was the last of the Judenrat in Theresienstadt. These were Jews who were selected to act as advisors to the Nazi administrators who ran the…
by Gerald Dworkin In this country 58% of male infants are operated upon shortly after birth. A part of the body is cut off and the operation usually does not use an anaesthetic. There are three relevant features which prompt ethical reflection. The infants cannot consent to the operation. There is no convincing evidence that…
by Gerald Dworkin There is a story about the philosopher Nuel Belnap who collapsed in his classroom. After a period of time, having recovered, he returned to the classroom and began “As I was saying…” It has been several years since my last blog. My absence is partly due to my having had heart surgery…
Moral philosophers spend a good bit of their time reflecting on what they call moral dilemmas. It is not entirely clear—nothing in philosophy is ever entirely clear—how to characterize them. But the usual course is to consider a case in which an agent is faced with two courses of action, only one of which can…
As some of my previous blogs attest I have a big interest in food. This extends beyond the buying, cooking and eating of food to social and political issues concerning food. So it was with some interest that I noticed the latest Atlantic contained a piece by Caitlin Flanagan entitled “Cultivating Failure.” The little headline…
Due to popular demand some further tasting from the part of the collection on Ethics. I know there is a mistake in the column. IT’S A JOKE. Part one, Short Takes, can be seen here. —————————————————— You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others. —Katherine…
by Gerald Dworkin Hemingway was thought to have written the finest, very short, story. It was a classified advertisement whose text was “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” I have always been attracted to very miniature versions of linguistic expression. It is interesting to seek the minimum number of words for various categories. So, for…
As usual, I am spending the summer in Evanston. My children and grand-children live in Chicago and no amount of whinging about winter weather (which comes in three kinds—cold, freezing, and how the fuck does anybody live here) could convince them to leave for California. And now that California seems to be going down the…
by Gerald Dworkin What we do is never understood, but only praised and blamed. –Nietzsche It is easy enough to look back to the beginning of the century and see many ethical views that we now believe to be profoundly mistaken. Views about the rights of women, about who should vote, about separate but equal,…
Anything to Declare? My baby came to me this morningShe said “I'm kinda confusedIf me and B. B. King were both drowning –Which one would you choose?” –Steve Goodman In a prior blogging incarnation on a blog called Left2Right I wrote about whether moral philosophers, i.e. those who study morality not those philosophers who are…
By Gerald Dworkin It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than anything else: the literature of the subject is not large enough for that. –Clive Bell Except for the purchase of a house my greatest expenditure has been on eating. I include in this total the amounts spent traveling to various…
Everybody wants to go to heavenBut nobody wants to dieEveryone wants to hear the truthBut they all want to tell lies. Having tried the readers patience in the first part of this essay with the task of defining what it is to lie, I propose to examine some of the moral issues raised by lying.…
by Gerald Dworkin I have been thinking recently about lying. I don't mean I have been thinking of telling a lie. Many of the lies I tell do not need to be thought about very much. “I am fine.” “Not at all. I think that color is quite flattering.” “Let me pay. My university will…