A healthy economy enables citizens to fulfill their basic obligations—moral as well as financial. These obligations include providing for themselves and their families and fulfilling responsibilities ...

We’ve all had our moments of stinginess: We pass a homeless person and spare no change, or decline an appeal from a charity. We might feel a pang of guilt, but you can’t be nice to everyone, right? A ...

1. Moral relativism is avoidable: While we often talk as though we have the last word on morality, no one ever really gets the last word for the simple reason that we can always challenge the morality ...

Two weeks ago I said, "I never met a moral principle I could trust." One reader responded: Generalizations and abstractions are treacherous indeed, but we need them for directionality and efficacy.

In the new year, what moral code will you live by? Whatever moral compass we choose, it will affect who we become in 2026 and ...

Law students reflect on the principles they intend to follow in their professional lives. In 1996, while teaching a course on ethics to Santa Clara University law students, I asked the members of my ...

Americans are passionately attached to no two things perhaps more closely than they are to their rights and to equality. Under the banner of furthering those two things have most of the broad social ...

Patricia S. Churchland, the philosopher and neuroscientist, is sitting at a cafe on the Upper West Side, explaining the vacuousness, as she sees it, of a vast swath of contemporary moral philosophy.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 14: A person passes frozen turkeys displayed for sale inside a grocery store on November 14, 2022 in New York City. The price of turkeys, a staple for many Americans at ...

I appreciate Ferlin Pedro’s engagement with my views on the moral status of the unborn and the role of the state in addressing abortion (SN July 27, 2025). His critique raises important questions ...