Tim Sommers is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at The College of William & Mary. He teaches and writes on ethical, legal, and political philosophy. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and an M.A. from Brown. Tim has won storytelling slams in London and elsewhere and was once a bodyguard for The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (for one night). He can be reached at tsommers@wm.edu.
by Tim Sommers In “Calculating God,” Robert J. Sawyer’s first-contact novel, the aliens who arrive on Earth believe in the existence of God – without being particularly religious. Why? There are certain physical forces, they explain, that make life in our universe possible only if they are tuned to very specific values. Which they are.…
by Tim Sommers John Austin was cursed with famous friends, among them Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Carlyle, James Mill and Mill’s son John Stuart, whom Austin tutored in the law. Cursed because, while they were all impressed by his intellect and predicted he would go far, he did not. His nervous and depressive disposition combined with…
by Tim Sommers In Bowers v Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court Case that affirmed the government’s right to criminalize sodomy, Justice Antonin Scalia famously insisted there that there was no “right to homosexual sodomy.” This was disingenuous in more than one way. First, the statue in question criminalized sodomy in general and not homosexual sodomy…
by Tim Sommers Where you are, death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear? –Epicurus I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw them. They were driving one of those huge pickups with four back wheels instead of two – what I now know is called…
by Tim Sommers Why have a democracy? Because democracy is always right. There are two kinds of arguments in favor of democracy: intrinsic and instrumental. Intrinsic arguments try to show that democracy is good in-and-of-itself – and not as simply a means to some other end or ends. Instrumental arguments try to show that democracy…
by Tim Sommers The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. –Henry Ward Beecher There are several long-running attempts to give AIs common sense. Or, at least, to build a useable database of “common sense” for AIs. MIT’s Media Lab shut down its “Open Mind Common Sense” project in 2016 after…
by Tim Sommers By all accounts, Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, is odd. For one thing, as Stephen Holmes points out, Lefebvre oscillates between saying that liberalism is so pervasive and all-encompassing that “Love it or hate it, we all swim…in liberal waters” – and emphasizing the need to evangelize…
by Tim Sommers Imagine a slave in ancient Rome with a very generous master. A master so, generous, in fact, that this slave lives their entire life doing as they choose and their master never once interferes with them. The liberal view of liberty, enshrined, for example, in the U.S. Constitution, is that liberty, or…
by Tim Sommers Donald Trump is not running for President. He is running to be, as he openly says, “a dictator on day one.” He sometimes implies he will give up these dictatorial powers at some later point. But given that he fomented a coup to prevent the peaceful exchange of power the last time…
by Tim Sommers Suppose a small group of people are stranded together on a desert island. They have no fresh water or food – until they come across a stash of coconuts. They can drink the milk and eat the coconut meat to survive. But how do they divide up the coconuts fairly between them?…
by Tim Sommers I usually begin my “Ethics” course by asking, “What is the difference between ethics and morals?” I used to begin by literally asking the students that question, until I realized no one is happy about your very first question being a trick. So, here’s the difference. “Ethics” comes from Greek, “morals” come…
by Tim Sommers Here’s the gist of it. I think a recent declaration on animal consciousness, being signed by a growing number of philosophers and scientists, is largely correct about nonhuman animals possessing consciousness, but misleading. It insinuates that animal consciousness is a recent discovery – made in the last five to ten years –…
by Tim Sommers The fella says, we must never forget that we are human. And as humans we must dream. And when we dream, we dream of money. —David Mamet/The Spanish Prisoner (1998) Long after Jesus held up a coin with Caesar’s picture on it and wisely counseled giving back to Caesar what, very obviously,…
by Tim Sommers The Theory of Mind That Says Artificial Intelligence is Possible Does your dog feel pain? Or your cat? Surely, nonhuman great apes do. Dolphins feel pain, right? What about octopuses? (That’s right, “octopuses” not “octopi.”)They seem to be surprisingly intelligent and to exhibit pain-like behavior – even though the last common ancestor…
by Tim Sommers Global migration has been remarkably stable for decades. Despite that, media coverage of immigration tends to give the opposite impression. In the US, for example, there’s always a “crisis at the border.” But if there is a real crisis it’s not about the number of immigrants coming into the US relative to…
by Tim Sommers Does ignorance always excuse someone’s actions no matter how much harm they cause? If so, doesn’t that imply that the less I know about the problems of the world the less I can be blamed for them? Paradoxically, can I be a better person by remaining more ignorant? Or can I be…
by Tim Sommers (The butter robot realizing the sole purpose of its existence is to pass the butter.) In the halcyon days of “self-driving cars are six months away,” you probably encountered this argument. “If self-driving cars work, they will be safer than cars driven by humans.” Sure. If, by “they work,” you mean that,…
by Tim Sommers One time, this guy handed me a picture of him and said, ‘Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture is of you when you were younger. – Mitch Hedberg There’s synchronic identity, what makes you, you at a particular moment in time – say, now. And there’s diachronic…
by Tim Sommers Suppose you have loved yo-yos since you were a child. You’ve spent countless hours hanging out with other yo-yoers, learning tricks, and reading up on the history of yo-yos (which date back to at least 500 BCE (see above detail of Greek terracotta: “Boy with Yo-Yo circa 440 BCE”)). You have also…
by Tim Sommers In honor of “Reading Hume Today,” a conference honoring professor Elizabeth Radcliffe and her work on Hume, here at my new home, the College of William and Mary, I thought I would read Hume today and revisit the topic of my very first 3 Quarks Daily article over five years ago, “Two…