Individual deliberations under conditions of serious deception are generally agreed to be invalidated by that deception. So political deliberations under conditions of serious deception should also be agreed to be invalidated. The UK’s referendum on membership of the EU was a flawed process of public deliberation precisely for this reason – that the public debate about the referendum involved serious deception. I raise the question what should be done about such public deceptions, and suggest a restrained form of legal remedy.

If you kidnap or drug someone to prevent her from casting her vote, then you are responsible for her failure to cast her vote. There is nothing she can do about it. If you hypnotize a person to get her to assassinate your enemy, then you are responsible for the assassination. She cannot be blamed (except in the special case in which she is a willing accomplice, allowing herself to be hypnotized, in order to be a more effective assassin). Kidnapping, drugging and hypnosis are all methods of subjecting someone else to your will. But does persuading a person to do something count as a further method of controlling her, or subjecting her to your will? Intuitively, we want to say it does not. If you persuade me not to vote, then you get me to do what you want, but you do so in a way that leaves me in control. Having been persuaded does not exempt me from blame, as having been kidnapped, drugged or hypnotized would do. However, this intuitive view proves surprisingly difficult to justify. What makes being persuaded different? Why isn't persuading someone to do something simply a further way of controlling what she does?

A thought experiment invites us to examine our intuitive beliefs about the reality of the past, the reality of the future, and our capacity to affect either, and provides a test of our attitudes towards life. Given an inescapable choice and extraordinary power, would it be our duty to destroy the whole of reality, both past and future?

Sam Harris, in his book The Moral Landscape, argues that ‘science can determine human values.’ Against this view, I argue that while secular moral philosophy can certainly help us to determine our values, science – at least as that word is commonly understood – must play a subservient role. To the extent that science can ‘determine’ what we ought to do, it is only by providing us with empirical information, which can then be slotted into a chain of deductive (moral) reasoning. The premises of such reasoning, however, can in no way be derived from the scientific method: they come, instead, from philosophy – and common sense.

The idea that God can communicate with human beings is at the heart of religion. Most people who believe in God also believe that God speaks to them through a holy text, or through an inspired preacher, or even directly. However, language works only because it is embedded in, and a product of, human activity. Therefore it is impossible for God to speak to human beings, or for people to speak to God.

Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational and unscientific. If you ask a philosopher, however, you'll likely get two answers: most religious belief is rational in some respects and irrational in other respects. In my previous essay (THINK 40) I explained why they think so many religious beliefs are rational. In this essay I explain why they think those same beliefs are irrational.

Zombie art, or salvage art, are artworks that are damaged beyond repair, deemed ‘no-longer-art’ by insurance companies, and removed from the market and stored at claims inventories due to their purported loss of value. This paper aims to make sense of the notion of zombie art. It then aims to determine whether artefacts that fall under this concept retain any aesthetic value, and whether they can genuinely cease being artworks, i.e. be dead art.

A theodicy is shaky if it explains only some evils but not all. For if certain possible evils are inconsistent with the existence of God, then their occurrence would disprove theism. But if a theodicy offers a justification for all possible evils, then it leads into a trap. After all, if God's existence is compatible with every horrible occurrence imaginable, why should belief in God afford any comfort?

In the first section of this paper, I discuss a quantum mechanical account, which is endorsed by the MIT physicist, Alan Guth, of the origin of what Guth believes to have been an absolutely first universe. I argue that, though his explanation is unsound, there is no reason to think that it needs to be replaced by a supernaturalist one. In the second section, I argue that though Professor Steven Weinberg's tentative explanation of the apparent fine-tuning of the cosmological constant is unacceptable, we need not accept a supernaturalist account of the coming about of intelligent life.

The issue of how we ought to treat the nonhuman animals in our lives is one that has been growing in importance over the past forty years. A common charge is that discriminatory behavior based only on differences of species membership is just as wrong morally as are acts of racism or sexism. Is such a charge sustainable? It is argued that such reasoning confuses real differences with false ones, may have negative ethical consequences, and could tempt us to abandon our responsibilities to the natural world. Finally, some benefits to human animal treatment that more humane nonhuman animal treatment may bring are considered.

In ‘Do Souls Exist’, I suggested that, while the non-existence of the soul does threaten free will, the threat it possess is inconsequential. Free will faces so many other hurdles that, if those were overcome, the soul's non-existence would be a non-threat. In this paper, I establish this; and to do so, I define the common libertarian notion of free will, and show how neuroscience, determinism, indeterminism, theological belief, axioms in logic, and even Einstein's theory of relativity each entail that libertarian free will does not exist. I conclude by demonstrating why some philosophers reject alternate (compatibilist) understandings of free will, and so believe that the notion we are free is an illusion.

John Stuart Mill famously remarked that it is ‘better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’.1 But is it necessarily better to be Socrates satisfied than Socrates dissatisfied?

What makes a morally right action morally right and a morally wrong action morally wrong? For clarity's sake, let us divide the question. First, what makes a particular action the morally right action in some situation, that is, what makes it morally obligatory? Second, what makes a particular action a (but not the) morally right action in some situation, that is, what makes it morally permissible (and optional)? And third, what makes a morally wrong action morally wrong (that is, morally impermissible) in some situation?

Should you give to beggars? One argument that you should not is that since there are people who are much worse off than beggars, to give to a beggar is to deny some assistance to those who need it most. You should give instead to the most poor, and in general, you ought in your action to do the most good you can. This argument was defended in a paper published recently in /Think/, and the principle that lies behind it is the basis of a popular movement called ‘effective altruism’. I attack that argument in this paper. Morality does not require of you merely that you do the most good; there is more to it than that.

I argue that normative reasons (reasons to do and believe things) are powerful evidence that a god exists. Normative reasons are presupposed by all intellectual inquiry, yet it appears there is only one thing they could credibly be: the favourings a god is having of us doing and believing things. I anticipate some possible objections and show them to be confused or dogmatic.

With the assistance of historian Richard Carrier, I have just published Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists (2015), as a spiritual sequel to my earlier There Was No Jesus, There Is No God (2013). Unsurprisingly, I argue that – with the Christ of Faith already dismissed by mainstream secular scholars – it is very reasonable to doubt Jesus' historical existence. The basic premise of the book is to examine the arguments of four scholars who have recently published significant works about this controversial issue. What follows is a brief summary of these analyses.

Bertrand Russell was, along with G.E. Moore, deserving of accolade as a founder of analytic philosophy, and of its close companion, the linguistic turn. Here I explain how his ‘Theory of Descriptions’ relocates philosophy's concern with appearance and reality as a concern with grammatical surface and logical depth. I then on remark the irony of Russell's unhappiness with views to the effect that an ethical judgment is not, despite linguistic appearances, really something that can be true or false. A further irony lies in Russell's error of assigning metaphysical grandeur to logical truths, an error he could have avoided by more fully appreciating how logically misleading linguistic appearances can be.