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Damn It! Politeness is a Virtue
Nobody seems to give a damn about politeness. Until, that is, they are treated rudely, ignored, made to feel ignorant or displaced, or pushed aside in a queue. Then, suddenly, we see all too clearly how much we appreciate polite society. Those moments do not translate into the world of ideas, where “polite society” is a…
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Utopia: Its the People You’re With
People are the essence of what makes a community and it’s hard to imagine anything could be more important. If we don’t like the people, we won’t like the community. If we do, we will. It really is that simple. But deciding what kind of people you’d want in your utopia turns out to be…
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Thinking About Utopia
We are all trapped in time and place to certain kinds of life. We spend most of our big-picture energy thinking about the kind of life that’s best for us, given the world we live in. And so we should. But every now and then, a group of people decide to wipe the slate clean…
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In Defense of Bourgeois Values
“The term “bourgeois” has almost always been — been one of contempt. Yet it is precisely the — the bourgeoisie which is responsible for — well, for nearly everything good which has happened in our civilization over the past four centuries.” Charlie Black — Metropolitan Nothing is more important to living a good life than…
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Democracy and the Good Life: The Politicization of the Self
Modern political ideologies are nothing more (nor less) than lifestyle brands built to capture votes in the democratic marketplace. They are the shallow, intellectually incoherent two-buck chuck of the political world: sweet, deeply addictive, and very cheap to acquire. These ideologies have already exacted a terrible toll on our democracy and they may or may…
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Democracy and Good Life Part 3: Consumer Packaged Ideology
We think of an ideology as being a coherent set of principles encompassing a system of values and based on some fundamental set of assumptions and principles. But that’s not at all what modern political ideologies are. From a philosophical perspective, they are an incoherent mass of contradictory policy positions bundled in a giant, nicely…
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Democracy and the Good Life: Part 2
The Democratic Marketplace “To the somber warfare of creeds and sects there succeeded the squalid but far less irrational or uncontrollable strife of parties” Winston Churchill on the aftermath of the English Civil War If free markets are the arena and engine of capitalism, democracy also involves a free (though sometimes carefully designed) marketplace in which…
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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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Longtermism: A Lot Less Rational Than It Might Seem
In What We Owe The Future, William MacAskill presents the case for longtermism, the idea that we should place much more moral weight than we do on the very long-term future. It’s an intriguing book, well and clearly written, with interesting things to say about issues as diverse as AI, the value of having children,…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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