Philosophers Take on the World: Exploring Moral Issues Beyond the News edited by David Edmonds (Oxford: OUP, 2016).
Philosophers Take on the World, edited by David Edmonds (one of the great minds behind the Philosophy Bytes website and podcast), is an easy to read, relevant collection of short essays (actually, a collection of blog-posts from the University of Oxford’s Practical Ethics blog) wherein philosophers discuss recent (2016) news items from a philosophical perspective. It’s fun to read. The authors take tough topics and make them easy to understand. And it’s a book that even someone with the shortest attention span can enjoy because each chapter is only a few pages long.
The philosophers discuss a wide-array of subjects related to ethics including gun rights, stolen artwork, the point of death, sports-hate, adoption, artificial wombs, whether men should be able to discuss abortion, how people use the Internet to shame others, the worth of pets, and whether we should be allowed to erase painful memories. There’s much, much more for the philosophically minded person who likes to read but doesn’t have a whole lot of time to dedicate to long chapters.
LePort 