Ethics

A note before starting: this piece is only tangentially related to the earlier parts of the series — it stands largely on its own. But the central thesis of Part 1, that humans differ in kind because of a deeper telos, turns out to be relevant here too — this time in defense of the carnivore. That application is not mentioned explicitly in the essay. The setup: why lions get a pass The standard vegetarian/animal-rights position doesn’t claim a lion is permitted to kill — it claims the lion is a moral patient but not a moral agent.1 The hinge is moral agency: only beings that can reason, recognize rights, and choose otherwise can bear duties or be held responsible.2 The lion can’t deliberate, so its killing carries no moral weight — it’s a physical event, not a moral one. The animal isn’t outside moral concern (as a patient it can still be wronged by us); it simply can’t do wrong, so its predation poses no moral problem to be solved.3 The asymmetry with humans isn’t “lions are excused” — it’s that the category of moral responsibility doesn’t apply to lions at all. Humans, who can hear and act on moral arguments, are the only beings the framework holds answerable. ...

A framework for animal moral status that doesn’t collapse into sentimentality or dismissiveness The previous essay argued that human dignity is grounded in kind-membership — that belonging to a kind whose nature is constitutively oriented toward self-transcendence is what makes a human being worth protecting, regardless of what any individual has personally achieved or can currently do. What do you do with the edges? Gorillas. Elephants. Dolphins. Animals that are clearly doing something cognitively that a cow isn’t. Do they just get lumped in with livestock? ...

The previous part lays out the idea from first principles: beauty is a kind of power — it acts on people before they consent — and the grown-up thing to do with power is to carry it with care, neither flaunting it nor burying it as shameful. That argument is deliberately narrow: it only speaks where power is in play, and it generates no dress codes. This part turns to a specific application: the place of modesty in Jewish life, and a failure mode the principle predicts. ...

On kind membership, potential, and the collapse of civilizational superiority There’s a question that sits beneath most arguments about how we treat animals, how we treat the vulnerable, and how societies have historically justified treating each other: what, exactly, grounds the special moral status of a human being? The intuitive answer — that humans are smarter, more capable, more morally complex — runs into problems almost immediately. What about the comatose patient? The infant? And more uncomfortably: what about the tribal community that has lived in the same way for thousands of years, with no written philosophy, no systematic theology, no recorded science? ...

The Innocence of Children Picture an isolated village in the hills. The children there have found little nuggets of gold in the streambed, and they play with them — flick them, trade them, leave them in the dirt. You watch and you smile. They are holding something that could build a house or buy a field, and to them it is a pebble that catches the light. That is innocence. It is not knowing the value of what you hold. The child who throws a heavy object at his brother’s head and misses, breaking a window instead, is guilty of the broken window and the thrown object both. And he is still innocent, because he cannot yet feel the weight of what he nearly did. He doesn’t see how close he came. The depth of harm, the full meaning of being responsible for another person — these are things a child develops into. Empathy at that depth is earned, not issued at birth. So a child can be guilty and innocent at once: he did the thing, but the thing has no real size to him yet. ...

The Sky Arena: Why Air Shows Are a Moral Anachronism We’ve Somehow Normalized We banned gladiatorial combat. We reformed NASCAR until the deaths stopped. Air shows cannot be reformed — they can only be banned. There is a particular kind of moral blindness that only becomes visible in retrospect. Future generations look back and ask: how did they not see it? How did they sit in those stands, eat their funnel cake, and watch without flinching? ...

On March 16, 2024, Mary Fong Lau drove her Mercedes SUV at 70 miles per hour—the wrong way down a residential San Francisco street. She killed an entire family: Diego Cardoso de Oliveira (40), his wife Matilde Moncada Ramos Pinto (38), and their two infant sons, one-year-old Joaquim and three-month-old Cauê. They were waiting for a bus to the zoo. On February 13, Lau pleaded no contest. The judge indicated she’ll receive probation. No prison time. ...

A Simple Question That Reveals Everything Do any current Angry Birds games have the same simple elegance as the original? The answer is no. And the reason why reveals something far more disturbing than the decline of a mobile game franchise. The Death of Premium Mobile Gaming In 2009, Angry Birds was a revelation. You paid $0.99 once, and you owned a complete, polished game. Pure physics puzzles that scaled through clever level design. No ads. No energy systems. No daily login bonuses. No loot boxes. ...