Published in Psychology Today, 25th November 2016. We should avoid the unnecessary suffering of animals—no one but the most disturbed among us would disagree. Unfortunately, pointing out that this moral square peg doesn’t usually fit in the round hole of meat-eating is distasteful to many. The ideological zeal with which many preach their love for…
Category: morality
Is Vegetarianism a Religion?
Over the past year, author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has made his abandonment of eating animals public – and it’s been inspiring. As I previously noted in an unfortunately titled Salon article, Sam’s secateurs of reasoning attend to the weeds in his own garden as much as those that lie over the fence. Last year…
Baby Asha: How You Can Support Her
Published in the Independent Australia, 26th February 2016: Baby Asha: How you can support her Excerpt: “Empathy can kindle the flames of compassion, but we require someone to thoughtfully and dispassionately fan those flames in the right direction. Left to our own devices in a third-world country, we would disproportionately give to an individual. Charities use…
Baby Asha Decision Sets Risky Precedent
Published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 22nd February 2016: Baby Asha Decision Sets Risky Precedent. Excerpt: “The problem here is the irrationality of empathy: the imaginative capacity to place ourselves in another’s situation. As psychologist Paul Bloom has said: “If you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide”. Empathy favours an individual…
Steve Stankevicius 