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 [email protected].
by Tim Sommers In an ordinary classroom at a typical American university, two teams of four students sit across from each other in front of small audience, waiting. A judge stands and says, “The first question will be based on Case 15 which is concerned with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” (better known as SNAP).…
by Tim Sommers The economy is not a force of nature. We have some control over it. Granted, it’s also not like a machine controlled directly by levers, switches, and buttons either. But when the state acts, intentionally or not, it often influences the distribution of income and wealth. More often than not, it influences…
by Tim Sommers The ends don’t justify the means. Right? But then what does? Utilitarians say that, of course, the ends justify the means. If the ends can’t justify the means, then nothing can. Utilitarianism is built on the twin pillars of welfarism and consequentialism. Consequentialism is the view that the morally right thing to…
by Tim Sommers Even as we want to do the right thing, we may wonder if there is really, in some objective sense, a right thing to do. Throughout most of the twentieth-century most Anglo-American philosophers thought not. They were mostly some sort of subjectivist or other. Since they focused on language, the way that…
by Tim Sommers In October of 1987, 18-month-old Jessica McClure Morales – forever after to be known as “Baby Jessica” – fell into a well in her aunt’s backyard in Midland Texas. She was lodged 22 feet down in the 8 inch well casing with one leg bent above her head. Over the next 58…
by Tim Sommers The first time I tried to take a shower in Italy, I stubbed my toe, tripped, and smacked my face into the shower wall. In fact, I did that pretty much every time I took a shower there. Turns out it is not that uncommon there to have a 4-inch barrier that…
by Tim Sommers Most of the evidence available to us suggests that there is something. There are probably electrons and other fundamental particles, as well as fields and fundamental forces, likely there are planets, stars, black holes, and galaxies, and there are probably even, what Quine called, “medium-sized” objects: tables, chairs, dogs, and us. As…
by Tim Sommers Welcome to the VR office and, hopefully, welcome to the coven! No, it’s not just witches, a group of vampires is called a “coven” too. VR? Human Resources for vampires, obviously. Just a few last details before we can move forward. Lunch after, so let’s get through this. I know that some…
by Tim Sommers Or, rather, the very real threat to Physicalism posed by Philosophical Zombies. On the one hand, there are the Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Walking Dead, zombies, which are rotting, but animated, corpses that devour human flesh and can only be stopped by destroying…
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…