Are Colleges and Universities Serving the Public Good? We've all heard about it. Campus speakers get shouted down or prevented from speaking. Academic freedom is under attack. Students congregate in safe spaces to prevent violence against them for their politically incorrect views and colleges are becoming sanctuary campuses, all the... Read more →

Civility and Ethics Go Hand in Hand If you’re like me, you shake your head almost daily at the increasing number of instances of a lack of civil discourse on college campuses. Whether it’s preventing speakers from sharing their views, shouting them down to prevent others from hearing those views,... Read more →

The Psychological Effects of Using Social Media Research from Harvard University[1] suggests that sharing information about ourselves on social media fires up the pleasure centers of our brains and may shed light on the roots of social media addiction. Activities such as creating a personal blog, making a You Tube... Read more →

Why Do Students Cheat Cheating in our schools has become commonplace. About 70 percent of high-school students reported they have cheated. Ninety percent admit to having copied student’s homework. The rate of students who admit to cheating at least once in their college careers has held steady at somewhere around... Read more →

A Basic Duty to Yourself and Others What does it mean to be a person of “good will” and why is it important? These are the questions I look at in today’s blog. An important part of Immanuel Kant’s theory of ethics is the Categorical Imperative. The Categorical Imperative determines... Read more →

Medical Ethics and End-of-Life Decisions Morality depends on the cognitive dimension of our behavior or our thought processes – the way we conceptualize right or wrong and make decisions and reason about how we should behave. Moral issues concern both behavior and conduct. They arise when people are faced with... Read more →

Where and When Do We Use Ethics? The Golden Rule is a common-sense principle of how we should behave. It can apply to all areas of our lives: How should we interact and communicate with others in our personal lives? How should we behave in the workplace? How should we... Read more →

May 31, 2017. Published by Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage Do all Religions and Cultures Believe in the Same Set of Values? The existence of a common set of values across religions would go far to explain why different cultures and societies believe that The Golden Rule is the basic... Read more →

How Can We Live Our Lives in Accordance with Virtue? The Greek fable has been used to teach ethics for ages. They date back to the mid-6th century BCE. Aesop’s Fables are the world’s best known collection of morality tales. The fables, numbering 725, were originally told from person-to-person as... Read more →

Individual Rights versus a Communitarian Ethic There are many arguments that have been raised for and against legalizing marijuana as I addressed in my last blog. In this blog, I focus on the morality of marijuana use, rather than the law. Most of the arguments against marijuana are centered on... Read more →