August 2020

Does Meritocracy Have Merit?

Should people be rewarded for their talent and effort? Or should society treat us all the same? Is meritocracy just a smokescreen for a system that’s rigged? These are some of the questions we're asking on this week's show on "The Merits of Meritocracy."

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Discriminating Streets

Why is there so much bad urban design? How can we make our streets more welcoming to everyone? Is the perfect city merely a mirage? This week on the show we’re asking whether streets can discriminate, and how we can design our cities so they are more just.

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Abortion and Dehumanization

From time to time, pro-life advocates appropriate my work on dehumanization to argue that those who take a pro-choice position routinely dehumanize the unborn, paving the way for murder-by-abortion. I want to show why these arguments don’t hold any water.

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Kant on Lying to Robots, Part II

I recently posed a puzzle about Kant's moral philosophy. The puzzle was this: if lying is always wrong, would it be wrong (according to Kant’s theory) to lie to a robot with speech technology who came to your door trying to locate innocent people who were hiding from a tyrannical government?

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Another Reason Zoom Is So Draining

There is a particular dead-eyed, mind-numbing exhaustion I feel at the end of every video meeting I’ve ever attended. Zoom is exhausting for many reasons, but the most important one is that it is missing a fundamental piece of social interaction—joint attention.

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