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…
Tag: 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…
Why It’s Impossible To Not Actually Be A Cannibal
Published in The Daily Banter, 29th April 2016: Why It’s Impossible To Not Actually Be A Cannibal. A dizzying number of publications recently ran a piece titled “Why It’s Impossible To Actually Be A Vegetarian”. Within it, philosopher Andrew Smith argued that because ecosystems tend to involve the transfer of matter from both plant to animal…
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…
Don’t Let Veganism Make The Same Mistakes As Feminism
Published in The Daily Banter, 24th February 2016. Are you a feminist? Unfortunately, the number of people who respond ‘yes’ to this question is currently falling off a cliff. The belief that men and women should have equal opportunities represents one of the most direct routes towards a more humane society, yet the name for…
New Atheists Must Become New Vegans: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the extra burden on moral leaders
Published on Salon, 10th January 2016: “New atheists must become new vegans: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the extra burden on moral leaders”. As some of you might know, Salon altered the title of the article without my consent to include the words “must”, “moral leaders”, and include the names of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. This was misleading,…
Video: “Free Will versus Psychiatry”, RANZCP Congress 2015
Recorded at the Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatry Congress 2015, 05/05/2015, Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre.
Execution: The Death of Compassion
The recent execution of two Australians in Indonesia for charges related to drug-trafficking has sparked an intense amount of attention and debate. Is the death penalty moral? Is it effective at preventing future crime? Is it cost effective? The fact that we are all asking these questions is a great step forward, and I thought I’d weigh in…
Steve Stankevicius 