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. His current work focusses on equality and inequality, including distributive and relational, gender and racial inequalities. His “Can there be Relational Equality Across Generations? Or at All?” appeared in Res Publica this year, and “Range Egalitarianism: A Novel Principle of Distributive Justice” is under review. 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 When people say they want equal opportunity, what do they really want? If what they want is whatever it is that the opportunity is an opportunity for, are they really interested in the opportunity at all? Or are they motivated by what de Tocqueville called “the charm of anticipated success”? Well, there…
by Tim Sommers When I ask students what they were most interested in, or at least what they remember most, from their “Introduction to Ethics” or “Intro to Philosophy” class, it’s remarkable how many offer the same answer. It seems they all remember Robert Nozick’s “Experience Machine.” Here it is. The Experience Machine Suppose you…
by Tim Sommers Moral Grandstanding is using moral talk as way of drawing attention to oneself, seeking status, and/or trying to impress others with our moral qualities. Moral grandstanding is supposed, by some, to be a pervasive and dangerous phenomenon. According to psychologist Joshua Grubbs, for example, moral grandstanding exacerbated the COVID-19 crisis and is…
by Tim Sommers Computers are not alive. Hopefully, we can agree on that. It’s a place to start. But if anyone succeeds at creating a program that exhibits true artificial general intelligence, wouldn’t such a program, despite not being alive in the biological sense, deserve some kind of moral consideration? Or, at least, if we…
by Tim Sommers “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” I can’t find the origin of this unfortunate slogan, but it’s been around – and oft repeated – at least since the 1970s. “To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.” That’s Wayne Lapierre, CEO…
by Tim Sommers In “Shower of Gold” by Donald Barthelme, Peterson, a sculptor who welds radiators together, applies to be on a TV show called Who Am I? – strictly for the money. In the ensuing interview, he asks the interviewer, Miss Arbor, what the show is about. “‘Let me answer your question with another…
by Tim Sommers The New York Times’ columnist who thought that a good way to capture the interconnectedness of the modern world was to say that “The World is Flat” – an idea, arguably, better captured by saying that the world is round (which it is) – recently joined the chorus of pundits saying, yeah,…
by Tim Sommers The “Crito” by Plato opens with Socrates in prison (circa 399 B.C.E.) awaiting execution, having been unjustly convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and teaching false gods. When his friend Crito assures him that he can get him out, no problem, that “some people only need to be given a little…
by Tim Sommers How do we know that the external world exists in anything like the form we think it has? Assuming that we think, therefore we are, and that it’s hard to doubt the existence of our own immediate sensations and sense perceptions, can we prove that our senses give us reasonably reliable access…
by Tim Sommers When I was 15 years old I volunteered at a paleontological dig in Barnhart, Missouri. A car dealership expanding its parking lot had discovered a treasure trove of mastodon bones in the empty lot right next door. Mastodons are woolly mammoths’ smaller, less glamorous, cousins. Furry elephants, basically. They roamed the Americas…
by Tim Sommers Facing immanent death, his friends and followers inconsolable, Socrates, according to Plato, attempted to console them. He called fear of death “the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown,” adding that “no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the…
by Tim Sommers This past Friday, 3 Quarks Daily linked to a review by George Scialabba of the recent posthumous publication of a Richard Rorty lecture series called Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. The review was called, “Should Philosophy Retire?” I promised myself I wouldn’t respond to it. That I wouldn’t respond, for example, to the claim…
by Tim Sommers Suppose on your way to work every day you pass a small, shallow pond. One day as you approach it, you hear a commotion and cries of “Help!” When you get close enough, you can see a small child is drowning in the pond. You could save them. The only problem is…
by Tim Sommers If we take action now to mitigate global climate change, it might make life a little worse for people now and in the near future, but it will make life much better for people further in the future. Suppose, for whatever reason, we do nothing. Since future people will have much worse…
by Tim Sommers I had a weird reaction to Charlie Huenemann’s recent 3 Quarks Daily essay on knowledge. I mean I disagreed with him that knowledge is a “policy to live by” (as I’ll explain later), but that wasn’t weird (and, of course, I could just be wrong). No, the weird reaction that I had…
by Tim Sommers “Unidentified Objects” Here we go again. A secret government investigation. Blurry pictures. Debunkers. He saw…/She saw…. UFO fever comes around at least every decade or so and, if you are old enough to remember earlier iterations, it’s deja vous all over again. But “UFO” is a misnomer. How do we know these…
by Tim Sommers You may know everything that you need to know about the on-going “Critical Race Theory” debate. Indeed, you might have concluded that actually there is no such debate. If so, you’re not wrong. But I think it’s still worth asking, ‘Why is so much anger, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly directed against…
by Tim Sommers In an interesting recent article on Aeon, “You are a Network” (based on her 2019 book, “The Network Self”), Kathleen Wallace argues that anthropological, narrative, feminist, and communitarian views of the self have all converged on the idea that you are a network. But you’re not. At least part of what she…
by Tim Sommers The first part of the original trolley problem goes like this. A runaway trolley is careening towards five people tied to the tracks. There’s a lever in front of you that could divert it onto a second set of tracks. Unfortunately, there is also a person tied to those tracks. You can…
by Tim Sommers Children are natural philosophers. Some combination of imagination, maybe, and lack of knowledge. Philosophy is all theory and no data, after all. In any case, in my experience, one of the most popular philosophical puzzles among young people is this. When I look at something red, it looks red to me. But…