Keen On

One of the more annoying characteristics of our coastal elites is their incessant virtue signaling. Every life choice - from drinking from plastic water bottles to driving electric cars to deciding to have children - is presented in terms of what Travis Rieder, the Johns Hopkins bio-ethicist and author of CATASTROPHE ETHICS, calls the “purity ethic”. Everybody these days seems greedy for virtue. But this greed, Rieder argues, isn’t realistic in an age of increasingly moral complexity. So, in our KEEN ON conversation, Reider lays out a path for leading a (reasonably) decent life which navigates between ethical fundamentalism and nihilism. Travis Rieder, PhD, is an associate research professor at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, where he directs the Master of Bioethics degree program. He holds secondary appointments in the departments of Philosophy and Health Policy and Management. His first book, IN PAIN (HarperCollins), was named an NPR Best Book of 2019, and his TED Talk on the same topic has