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: Kant

  • Why We Relate to Batman

    Batman is celebrating his 80th anniversary this year, and while he has served admirably as the protector of Gotham City, there is one mystery that the world’s greatest detective has never been able to solve: his own moral inconsistency. Many focus on his all-too-human motivation and lack of superpowers to explain why he’s more relatable…

  • David Brooks on same-sex marriage, freedom, and individualism in The New York Times

    Mark D. White In his New York Times column today, David Brooks hails the movement for same-sex marriage as an admirable step away from personal freedom and autonomy: …last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the…

  • Chick-fil-A, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Ethical Consumption

    Mark D. White I've read an enormous amount of what's been written on the Chick-fil-A controversy the last couple weeks, although I'm sure I haven't scratched the surface. But I was fascinated by Will Wilkinson's recent post at The Economist's Democracy in America blog, titled "Feathers Flying," in which he casts the fast food company's stance…

  • Another perspective on why Batman doesn’t kill–and the problems with it

    This week's Batman and Robin #8 (written by Peter Tomasi and illustrated by Patrick Gleason and Mick Gray) was a welcome denouement to the Morgan Ducard/Nobody storyline that culminated at the end of #7 when, as Bruce explains to Alfred, "Nobody's dead. Damian killed him." (Imagine parsing that statement if you hadn't been keeping up with the…

  • On Character (in The New York Times’ The Stone)

    Mark D. White In this morning's The Stone column in The New York Times, UNC visiting professor Iskra Fileva offers "Character and Its Discontents," in which she writes eloquently on the nature of character in response to the situationist critiques of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. Her article doesn't lend itself well to quotes–it really…

  • Kant and copyright: Public sphere vs public domain

    Mark D. White Anne Barron (LSE, Department of Law) has an interesting paper in the latest issue of Law and Philosophy (31/1, January 2012) exploring a Kantian approach to copyright law: Kant, Copyright and Communicative Freedom Abstract: The rapid recent expansion of copyright law worldwide has sparked efforts to defend the ‘public domain’ of non-propertized information,…

  • David Brooks has it right on “The Limits of Empathy”

    Mark D. White In his column in today's New York Times, David Brooks explores "The Limits of Empathy," arguing that empathy may help us feel for other people, but it is not enough to actually spur us to action and help us make tough ethical decisions, and in the end may amount to little more…

  • 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…

  • Duties toward fictional characters, or: Does Barbara Gordon “deserve” to walk again?

    The issue of Barbara Gordon regaining mobility and once again adopting the mantle of Batgirl has been the cause of much discussion on the interwebs since it was announced by DC recently. Earlier I highlighted longtime Gordon scribe Gail Simone's conversation with Oracle-advocate Jill Pantozzi, during which Simone said (in the context of explaining why…