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Democracy and the Good Life: Part 1
The temptation of stuff is not the only hard challenge of modern Western culture. The intellectual and political culture of our society reflects many of the same challenges as materialism: overabundance and temptation, aggressive niche filling, and strong forces taking advantage of our cognitive limitations and foundational desires. Democracy creates its own form of market…
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The Scientific “Debate” Over Free Will
Debates about free will never seem to go out of style, and two recent books addressing free will from a scientific perspective suggest that we are far from achieving any kind of consensus. And while most metaphysical questions don’t carry much practical import, there is a general sense that, when it comes to free will,…
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Better Living Through…Philosophy
It sucks that none of the easy answers our culture provides are worth a damn. It sucks that being rich, being woke, being left or being right is all cheap, mass-produced, highly consumable intellectual crap worthless for thinking about a good life. Getting to something better is not easy. Philosophy is the art of pushing…
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The Discipline We Demand, The Price We Pay
The idea that people in Western society are extraordinarily disciplined may be surprising. Yet few societies have ever asked for as much discipline as ours. It’s a burden not everyone can bear. For these people, the freedom of liberal society is a literal hell, and the help of the welfare state just another ball-and-chain.
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Hello Boredom, My Old Friend
The one ill no one would expect in our society is boredom. Our lives might not be good, but surely they are too frenetic and occupied to make boredom a problem. Yet people are bored and the evidence is everywhere – not least in the immense value we place on entertainment and distraction. What boredom…
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Do We Have Stable Dispositions?
“Everything is much more complicated. At every moment it is much more complicated. ‘They got married because they fell in love and wanted to share their life’…’he lied because he didn’t want to hurt’. What ridiculous stories! We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose…
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Materialism and the Void: The Emptiness at the Heart of Modern Culture
Our culture provides such extraordinary opportunities for rich and interesting lives that it is hard to understand how we mostly end up doing so poorly. Our problem is not opportunity, it is execution. And when it comes to building a good life, not just giving us the tools for it, our culture often works against…
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Intelligent Virtue and the Beauty of Modern Virtue Theories
Virtue theory is the flip side of transformative experience. Though L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience concentrates on rationality theory and choice optimization, the implications of transformative experience lead directly to some form of virtue theory. If you are choosing between experiences that will change who you are (like going to college or enlisting), you need some…
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The Virtues of Modern Society for an Ethical Decision-Maker
It’s always fashionable to knock the party you’re at. Our particular party (modern Western culture) does have a lot of problems – and dealing with those problems is very much the subject in hand. Yet it’s neither wise nor truthful to forget about the good stuff, and it’s genuinely important (and encouraging) to realize how…
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The Open Society as the Enemy
The interaction of our embodied selves with the world creates cognitive structures that instantiate preferences, values, dispositions, and skills. Much of this requires neither thought nor justification. One can choose to attach reasons to liking steak more than pork, or blackjack more than poker, but the exercise is post-hoc and unnecessary. This isn’t to say…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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