One of my favorite bits of dialogue in any film is in Annie Hall when young Alvy Singer is taken to the doctor because he's depressed. He tells the doctor that he's depressed because the universe is expanding, and the universe is everything, and eventually it
A philosophical thesis about human psychology is that we are motivated by what we take to be good, that our actions and desires are under the "guise of the good." On this view, it would be incoherent to want something that we think is bad or to do
The other end of changing norms from Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son because God said so is me when I'm in a nice restaurant and the waiter takes my plate before everyone at the table is done eating. Here are the relevant norms of nice restaurants,
The way that Kierkegaard tells the story in Fear and Trembling, the biblical Abraham, when faced with doing what God says and sacrificing his son, or doing what morality says and, you know, not sacrificing his son, chooses to do what God says because he is a “knight of faith.
The Raleigh News & Observer wrote about UNC’s School of Civic Life in a way that isn't directly about the controversies surrounding the school. Most of what I'd seen before had been, first, about the way that the school was set up in response to
Ethics are the answers to the question of what ought I (or we) to do? But sometimes the answer doesn't seem to have anything to do with ethics. "What ought I to wear?" is a sartorial question that has to do with style and comfort, and
I keep coming back to this odd case: the “just asshole” or the “neutral asshole.” This is the person who doesn’t treat himself as worthy of special attention because he’s special. That’s the standard asshole, who, on Aaron James’s account, thinks he’s special and therefore
I stopped assigning papers longer than a page or two about four semesters ago because I wasn't sure how to engage in the arms race with generative AI. I think writing longer papers is valuable, but I had to figure out what I thought was valuable about it.
I'm rereading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, who is the model of the kind of asshole that I'm interested in because he undeniably did some world-changing great things and was undeniably an asshole, and almost certainly did some of the world-changing
Having distinguished meaning and purpose, I want to know how are they related, and why do people tend to conflate them? They must be close, given how the terms are used mostly synonymously. Here are a few ways they seem to be related. First, one's overall purpose could
I'm sketching out a paper for a conference on meaning in life, which isn't something I've been working on for long because I didn't think serious philosophers worked on such things. Now, I know that some serious philosophers do, and, more importantly,
I've read Robert Caro's The Power Broker twice now, and each time I've been struck by how odd is the chapter, "Two Brothers," on Robert Moses and his brother, Paul. Robert was immensely powerful in New York, and Paul struggled financially, despite
In the very long break since I last wrote here, I've been reading a lot of books on assholes. I've even structured my introductory ethics class around not being an asshole, which answers the question that some (assholes) usually ask early on in an ethics class:
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and why I continue to go
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another shot at understanding meaning without purpose
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I was asked “Where do you feel most at home,” and what came into my mind (and then out of my mouth) was a cafe that I think I’ve only been to once, on a grey day in Paris twenty years ago, where I sat at a bench facing
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you can't work hard enough to become the coach's son
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learning how to read and why time isn’t spent
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ethics for assholes, part 4
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why ethics can't be too hard
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high standards and reasoning
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part 1, on rational reconstruction
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thinking about Robert Moses
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my meaningful, purposeless life