Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Ethics

  • More confusion about individualism in The New York Times

    Mark D. White In this morning's installment of The Stone in The New York Times, anthropologist John Edward Terrell invokes against the individualist strain in modern politics, especially on behalf of "Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe." But, as regular New York Times columnist David Brooks often does, Professor Terrell…

  • Jonathan Wight’s 2014 Presidential Address to the Association for Social Economics

    Mark D. White Because he's too bashful to tell you, I'll tell you that Jonathan Wight's 2014 Presidential Address for the Association for Social Economics, delivered at January's ASSA meetings, has just been published in the Review of Social Economy, and the link has been posted to the ASE blog. The title is "Economics within…

  • A problem with Marvel’s AXIS: The difficulty of inverting complex characters.

    Marvel's current crossover event, AXIS, involves various characters having their ethical orientation "inverted": heroes become villians and vice versa. A deceptively simple premise that has been used throughout the history of superhero comics—but rarely on this scale—it has potential for interesting stories (as well as culminating in "things will never be the same" changes to…

  • Captain America and the Neglected Role of Moral Judgment

    Imagine you’re a leader in your community, fighting on behalf of a principle for which you are personally willing to sacrifice anything. Your own well-being is of no concern to you as long as your actions are protecting and promoting the ideal in which you believe so strongly. One day, however, you notice that your…

  • The arbitrariness of well-being measures: family mealtimes and Facebook enrollment

    Mark D. White Last week I submitted the manuscript for a book that argues that all measures of well-being or happiness are arbitrary and reflect the judgments of those who designed them, rather than the interests of the people whose well-being is ostensibly measured. (A precis of sorts for the book appeared in this article,…

  • First chapter of The Virtues of Captain America now available free

    It's almost here! Just a few weeks until The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero is released, and the fine folks at Wiley Blackwell have posted PDF files of the table of contents, the index, and the first chapter, which provides some basic ethical background for the…

  • An Answer to “Questions for Free-Market Moralists”

    Mark D. White I read with great interest Amia Srinivasan's contribution to the New York Times' philosophy column "The Stone" titled "Questions for Free-Market Moralists." After introducing the political philosophies of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, she states that "on the whole, Western societies are still more Rawlsian than Nozickian: they tend to have social…

  • New book: The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero

    Well, it's time to let the Cap out of the bag… I'm very pleased to announce my next book, The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero, which will be published by Wiley-Blackwell next March ahead of the film sequel Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier. (If you're…

  • Another day, another article defending nudge (but missing the point)

    Mark D. White Recently it was David Brooks, today it's Peter Reiner writing at Slate, reporting that people are less opposed to nudges the more they align with their interests, and interpreting this as weakening the case for autonomy. Using the crowdsourcing website Mechanical Turk, we polled 2,775 people, asking them to what degree they…

  • David Brooks on libertarian paternalism and “nudge”

    Mark D. White In today's New York Times, David Brooks comments on libertarian paternalism in "The Nudge Debate." There is not a lot in his article that is surprising or unreasonable, but it does suffer from some vagueness and misunderstandings. For instance, Mr. Brooks conflates interventions of a paternalistic nature (such as nudging people into…