Gavin Coleman's Philosophy Blog

 In the article "Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change" Simon Caney discusses climate change and the difficulties we face with how to prevent it and who has to pay for it. I believe that this is a very difficult problem that has to be solved sooner rather than later. But how do we do it and who is responsible for doing it? Caney talks about a couple ways to make people pay for polluting and the first is the "Polluter Pays Principle" and the second is "Beneficiary Pays Principle." These two principles are ways to make people pay for the pollution that happens. The "Polluter Pays Principle" is exactly how it sounds, if you pollute you pay for the damages caused by the pollution on the other hand the "Beneficiary Pays Principle" refers to pollution from past generations needs to be payed for by the current generation that benefited from the rewards that caused the damage. These principles are very simple and I agr...

     Some say it might be better off to not have future people than to have the future people living a low quality life. Our decisions today directly correlate to these outcomes. Should we feel bad or immoral for making a decision that leads to a lower quality life in the future if it's at the expense of not having a life at all? These hypothetical questions are ideas that need to be thought about now more than ever because of the rapid increase in global warming. Could the increase in global warming make the quality of life so poor that it would have been better off not even being born?     In Derek Parfit's essay " Energy Policy and the Further Future: The Identity Problem"  he walks through several scenarios that impact future generations. Parfit gives a relatively short term example where a 14 year old girl is deciding whether to have a baby or not, the outcome of having a baby would mean that her life would be more difficult and the babies life might n...

      When I think back to who I was when I was 10 years old I have a completely different image of myself than what I see of myself today. I was in my first year of middle school, I was not even 5 feet tall, and I had hair covering my ears. If you saw me back then and saw me today you would say something along the lines of "Wow, it's amazing how much you have changed you look like a totally different person" and I would agree with you. My physical appearance may have changed but, I am still the same person today as  I was when I was 10.      In John Perry's article "A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality" there is no denying that the three participants in the conversation gave amazing arguments backing what they believe about surviving and identity. Gretchen Weirob proposes an argument that there is no proof that our physical bodies have only had one soul, for all...

      In Simon Critchley's article "To Philosophize is to Learn how to Die" he talked about the difference between fear and anxiety. He spoke about how fear is the human reaction to an actual threat like a bear coming up to your door and how that fear goes away as soon as the bear goes away. Critchley differentiates fear and anxiety by saying that anxiety has no particular object, such as the bear. His description of anxiety is that everything feels strange and uncanny. Critchley relates this anxiety to the pandemic that is currently happening around the world and how most people are living with a strange anxiety every day. Critchley also explains how philosophy could be a sort of an illumination to help us out of our daily struggles. He believes philosophy has failed to solve any major problems in thousands of years and he is hoping that it can help us now. This is where the title of the article "T o Philosophize is to Learn how to Die" comes in to pl...