What sorts of reasons should citizens have in mind when they cast votes? Arguments from both sides of the EU referendum debate are used here to raise questions about what our motivations should be when voting. The article introduces John Rawls's requirement to give public reasons that are acceptable to all reasonable people.

Texting while driving is morally equivalent to driving drunk. In this dialogue, I illustrate why moral arguments from analogy are a valuable part of moral reasoning by considering how texting while driving is, morally speaking, no different from drunk driving.1

The world is logical, according to some. Others call it absurd. Apart from who is correct, however, what seems clear is that no one senses the absurd without also sensing the logical. Yet in that case, where does our sense of logic come from, and what is it really a sense of?

Peter Singer has pointed out that many people in the United States are affluent enough to be able to give much more to overseas aid than in fact we do give; and Singer maintains that we are morally blameworthy in that respect. In what follows, I will undertake to show that the latter claim is mistaken. I will call by the letter ‘A’ a person who donates money to an overseas aid-organization and by the letter ‘B’ a disillusioned overseas aid-worker who has been in direct contact with some starving children.

Do bees have feelings? What would that mean? And if they do have feelings, how should we treat them? Do we have a moral obligation towards insects? A short commentary on M. Bateson, S. Desire, S. E. Gartside, and G. A. Wright, ‘Agitated Honeybees Exhibit Pessimistic Cognitive Biases’, Current Biology 21.12 (2011), 1070–3.

Max Loxterkamp correctly attributes to us the view that people are living well if they act morally and find long-term satisfaction, regardless of the pursuits they choose. He disagrees with us, however, and suggests that lives are better if they benefit society, and he offers as examples a charity worker, a courageous soldier, and a philosopher of genius.

The topics of education and the role of educational institutions in society are seldom far from the headlines, the lips of politicians, schoolteachers and parents. Discussion of education (and its associated institutions) within these forums tends to assume uncritically that its ultimate point is to benefit the economy and, by extension, empower the individual through increased prestige and material wealth. This article argues that such a conception of education is misguided and, indeed dangerous, as it estranges us from forms of thought that are frequently united with our conception of what it means to be human, alongside damaging prospects of long-term economic welfare. It is, therefore, the responsibility of our educational institutions to maintain a critical resistance to the culture of the times by ensuring that they do not merely become factories that train their students in ways purely designed to maximize economic impact and increased personal wealth.

In number 35 of Think, James Spiegel presents reasons for why flatulence is funny. In this article I will address five issues that I find problematic in his account:

1. (1) His claim that laughter always results from a pleasant psychological shift is false.

2. (2) His argumentative move from what makes paradigm cases funny to what makes flatulence funny is unwarranted.

3. (3) His notion of a psychological shift is not specific enough and lacks explanatory power.

4. (4) The claim that funniness of flatulence involves superiority is doubtful.

5. (5) His talk about ‘nervous energy’ is questionable and has implausible implications.

Peter Lyth claimed that my argument against an infinite temporal regress of events conflates number as an abstract entity with number as a number of events or things. I show that my argument does not depend on such a conflation.