[Back to Improving Ourselves]

What is an Effective Belief?

These could be called 'useful beliefs', but describing something as 'useful' is often a way of implicitly criticizing it.  Something can be useful as a stop-gap measure, but will be discarded when the real thing comes along.  We are probably not going to put much effort into identifying and understanding beliefs which we…

[Back to Reason, Science and Faith]

Introduction

At its most basic, an emergent property is a property of any system which is not present in the components of that system.

Beyond this, things start to get complicated.  People define terms - such as 'strong emergence' and 'weak emergence' - in various ways, generally with the intention of using the definition to support whatever position…

[Back to Morality]

The Problem

Context

This article is about how we can distinguish between good and bad, between moral and immoral, or between ethical and unethical.  When people disagree about the moral status of an action, how can we explore - and maybe resolve - that conflict?

Many people will offer a clear answer to this challenge: they will say that the Bible (or some other…

[Back to Morality]

Introduction

One difficulty when we try to talk about morality is the language: there are various terms we can use, but they are all ambiguous and problematic in various ways.  One the one hand, we can describe an action as 'moral', 'ethical', 'good' or 'right'; on the other hand, we can condemn it as being 'immoral', 'unethical', 'bad' or 'wrong'.

Discussion of the…

[Back to Morality]

Introduction

(By Paul Hazelden; this was circulated as an introduction for a discussion.)

When we say the war in Ukraine (or anything else) is immoral, I would like to know what we mean by this. Are we only saying, as some people suggest, that we disapprove of it? Is morality just a statement of personal or group preference? And, if not, then what is it? Can we find out…

 [Back to Spiritual Challenges]

Clearly, there is a lot which could be said here.

• Morality: An Introduction
• The Language of Morality
• Morality is simply a…

[Back to Ukraine]

We had another discussion about Ukraine last night (17 April 2025, for the record), and we can't see any plausible way to end the war, either by military or political means.  Our suspicions about US surveillance seem to have been confirmed, as within hours of our discussion, the White House starts to admit that they can't see a way forward and are planning to pull out of the 'peace…

[Back to Healthcare]

Introduction

Almost everybody agrees that the UK National Health Service (NHS) is in need of radical reform, so let's start to spell out what that reform might look like.  Other countries manage to deliver prompt and effective healthcare: it's not impossible.  But we have to want to do it, and we have to believe it is possible.

Details

Aim

For a…

[Back to Social Challenges]

Introduction

Okay, the title is clumsy: demographics are the details of a group of people, so they always relate to one population or another.  When you consider the demographics of a population, you are often looking to see how they change with time.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, apart from the constant threat of nuclear war, most people…

[Back to Ukraine]

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office.  This was clearly never going to happen but, as I said (probably, far too often), ending the war was one promise I believed he was able to keep.

The war is an utter disaster for both Ukraine and Russia.  Ukraine has lost (to date) around 20% of her previous territory, and is being…