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: John Stuart Mill

  • Uganda and anti-gay law: This (again) is why you don’t put basic human rights to a vote.

    Mark D. White My stomach turns at the news that Uganda is set to pass a law that imposes life sentences and sometimes the death sentence for homosexual acts: KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — Uganda's anti-gay bill will be passed before the end of 2012 despite international criticism of the draft legislation, the speaker of the…

  • Utilitarians aren’t psychopaths–are they?

    Mark D. White The Economist published a short note recently summarizing the results of a forthcoming paper in Cognition that reports that experiment participants "who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness" (from the paper abstract). The experimenters presented subjects with variants of trolley dilemmas–either…

  • When economics and philosophy divorced…

    Mark D. White In a recent "The Shrink and the Sage" piece in the Financial Times Magazine, Julian Baggini (prolific popularizer of philosophy) and Antonia Macaro discuss the pursuit of happiness, which is very interesting in itself, but I was particularly amused by how Baggini started his half of the discussion: When psychology and philosophy…