Let me start by making a book suggestion. The book is actually a long essay that Knopf has decided to put into hardcover, under the title Talking About Detective Fiction. It’s written by P.D. James, who says in the foreward that she wrote it for the publishing arm of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, “in…

Here is the basic problem with the murder mystery. Unless you have a police procedural, where the crime is fairly obvious and the perpetrator is hidden only because you’ve going to have to pick him out of a sea of anonymous faces, then the perpetator must be doing something to deliberately complicated the detection of…

Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best way to put it. Some of you have been around here long enough to remember that at the beginning of 2009, I published a post about the worst week-end of my life–or maybe the worst two weeks.  I don’t remember what the duration was, but I was probably wrong,…

So, here’s the thing. Part of me wants to go on with what I was talking about–especially because I think that there’s nothing surprising about people who try to formulate moral principles without know what their foundations are. In fact, I think that’s what most of us do most of the time.  Most people do…

For those of you who don’t know, the “veil of ignorance” Cathy is talking about is the principle by which a man named John Rawls thought it would be possible to construct the morally and politically ideal state. Okay, that sounds enormously heavy Rawls is sort of a bast from the past.  He was the…

Well, what can I say? I’m in favor of reproductive rights–and I’m probably the most radically pro-choice person you’ll ever meet–and I’m screamingly in favor of the equality of women. I think the first is a legal imperative of any decent society, and the second is a moral imperative, period. I just don’t think you…

Robert wants to know about “secular humanist” organizations for charity–what he really means, I think, is atheist organizations for charity, and that brings me to part one of my problem. First, unlike a religion, atheism isn’t really anything in particular–it’s the expression for a lack of something. Simply not believing that God exists provides an…

The title of this post is an attempt to do an end run around my older son’s command that I not sing Happy Birthday to him today, because, because–well, he’s not so good on the because, but I’m not supposed to do it.  So I did this instead. Yesterday would have been my twenty-sixth anniverary,…

Well, my first thought is this–why, and in what way, are “professional principles” “objective” in a sense that other moral and ethical systems are not? Most compilations of professional principles I know of are very subjective indeed, and all of them rely on a set of unstated axionatic assumptions–about the nature of the human person,…

Okay. So. Jem says “morality has nothing to do with it,” and Lee says that if somebody didn’t put professionalism ahead of religion, she couldn’t take him seriously as a professional. Let’s start with “morality has nothing to do with it.” Morality has everything to do with it–you’re just looking for the morality in the…