Category Archives: Morality

Do you need anger for respect and accountability?

04 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Action, Analytic Tradition, Anger, Free Will, Mahāyāna, Morality, Psychology

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I am delighted to announce the publication of my first book, this coming fall, with Shambhala Publications. It is a book project I have been working on for many years, and the topic has veered considerably from the version I discussed five years ago, becoming much more specific than the ambitious project I had imagined then. The title will be After Anger: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Our Culture of Rage. As the title suggests, it will constructively address the Buddhist critique of anger – and then, afterwards, will turn to the deeper mental roots of our anger in craving and resistance. I’ll be saying more about the book in this space as we get closer to publication time.

In the meantime, I have a number of thoughts that had to be left out of the final version of the book, but that I think are nevertheless worthy of publication on this blog. As you can imagine, anger has many defenders, who have a variety of different reasons. I tried to deal with most of those sorts of reasons in the book, but there are a couple that didn’t quite make it in.

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Mindform Podcast interview

12 Wednesday Nov 2025

Posted by in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphysics, Mindfulness, Morality, Natural Science, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Self

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I was interviewed by Frank Lawton on a recent episode of the Mindform Podcast on self-development and wisdom, associated with Ryan A. Bush’s Designing the Mind. We begin with my formative story in Thailand and the anti-politics associated with it, proceeding to a critique of utilitarianism, a discussion of my gradual movement from Theravāda to Mahāyāna Buddhism, and finally to an exploration of expressive individualism. All told, I think it’s a very nicely rounded introduction to my philosophical thinking – even if my growing hair is in its awkward phase and I stammer a little too much!

In memoriam: Alasdair MacIntyre

25 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Roman Catholicism

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My photo of an elderly MacIntyre speaking in 2019 at “To What End?”

Alasdair MacIntyre is dead. He had a very good run, better than many could dream of: he was 95 years old, and produced an output significant enough to be in competition for the title of “greatest philosopher of his age”. Few indeed are the 20th- or 21st-century philosophers who have an entire learned society – in his case the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME) – devoted to pursuing the implications of their work. It seems that MacIntyre himself was a little uncomfortable with that society’s existence. The one time I ever saw MacIntyre in the flesh was at the society’s 2019 conference, held on the University of Notre Dame campus near his home, in honour of his 90th birthday – but, I was told, he only participated on condition that his name not appear anywhere in the conference title. (Thus, given his focus on teleology and the aims of human life, the conference was called “To What End?”)

Even now, MacIntyre still sits outside what is usually considered the philosophical mainstream. Though he was trained in the English-language mainstream of analytic philosophy and taught in analytic departments, he refused to confine himself to the analytic mode of philosophizing, always writing in a way broader and less precise than analytic departments were usually willing to count as good philosophy. That experience surely shaped one of MacIntyre’s more powerful philosophical insights: the recognition that philosophy itself always operates within the context of historical tradition – the conception of tradition at issue being close to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms. Kuhn and MacIntyre recognized that different paradigms differed not just on what claims they believed to be true and false, but on the standards by which one judged them true and false; MacIntyre knew that within philosophy, analytic philosophy’s standards were never the only ones available.

Thus MacIntyre is the sort of philosopher whom one often first encounters in unusual ways, outside being taught him in a classroom. Thus one colleague at “To What End?” helpfully started conversations with “What’s your MacIntyre story?” – imagining, rightly, that everyone had their own personal story of encountering his ideas, more interesting than being simply taught him in an Intro to Ethics class. (Now that I think of it, the one place I remember being asked a similar question was on a long tour around the Laphroaig whisky distillery in Scotland, which also began with the guide asking “What’s your Laphroaig story?” – a comparison that would likely have pleased MacIntyre, as he always took his philosophy to be deeply informed by his Scottishness.)

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Why we sometimes need to deadname

20 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Friends, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Self

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A little while ago I was at a party en femme and met an older man who didn’t know many transgender people but was interested in talking about it. He mentioned someone else he knew who’d transitioned, and asked about how to refer to that person when discussing things they’d done together before the transition. He said that in that context it felt more natural to refer to them by their old name and pronouns. While I understood that, I responded “It’s considered polite to refer to someone who’s transitioned by their new name and pronouns, even when you’re talking about them before the transition.”

I stand by that response, and I think that that custom is quite appropriate. For most trans people, their new identity is important to them, they have gone to some struggle to reach it, and that’s how they prefer to be thought of in general; they’d prefer to turn the page on the chapter of their life where they had been called something else. So where there are not other major considerations that override, it’s generally polite and preferred to respect their wishes to be referred to by their new name and pronouns, even retrospectively. That norm seems to me extremely reasonable. What I disagree with is an emergent norm that goes much further than this.

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Checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers

13 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by in Confucianism, Courage, Economics, Leadership, Morality, Politics, Virtue

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When the head of state or government goes rogue, what happens next?

Consider the recent experiences of three countries where the top leader pursued an agenda far more radical than they had campaigned on, in a way that caused widespread panic. In South Korea, Yoon-Suk Yeol attempted to impose martial law, marking an attempted return to something like the country’s past military dictatorship. In the UK, Liz Truss attempted tax cuts so radical that even the business community hated them. In the US, Donald Trump is now attempting something like both: after having been blatantly caught trying to sabotage the election and encouraging a riot that sought to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, now he is not only claiming to be move toward an unconstitutional third term in office, he has also engaged in tariffs so drastic that the market’s reaction to them was even worse than to Truss’s cuts. (Trump is taking as much from the rich as much as Bernie Sanders would – just without giving any of it to the poor.)

But there is an obvious difference between the three cases: Yoon and Truss were removed from power within a few months after their drastic measures, while there is not the slightest sign of any such thing happening to Trump. And that should lead us to ask: why this difference?

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“It is God’s will that I should have sinned”

24 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by in Action, Anger, German Tradition, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Serenity, Shame and Guilt

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It’s not hard to see why the Catholic Church condemned Meister Eckhart for heresy. One of his teachings, in particular, is shocking even today: the good or blessed man, properly “poor in spirit”, is

so much of one will with God that he wills everything that God wills, and in the fashion in which God wills it. And therefore, because in some way or another it is God’s will that I should have sinned, I should not want not to have done so, for in this way God’s will is done “on earth,” that is, in misdeeds, “as it is in heaven,” that is, in good deeds. (Book of Benedictus section 2, pp. 216-17 in Meister Eckhart)

Or, as Eckhart’s accusers put it in the papal bull accusing him of heresy, “A good man ought to so conform his will to the divine will that he should will whatever God wills. Since God in some way wills for me to have sinned, I should not will that I had not committed sins; and this is true penitence.” (p. 77)

That’s a pretty extraordinary thing to be saying: it sounds like Eckhart is saying it’s good to be doing evil. That idea is as alarming to us as it would have been to the medieval Church.

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The return of Justice

27 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Morality, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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I was delighted to hear that this fall Michael Sandel has returned to teaching his Justice course at Harvard. He’d gone many years without teaching it, which I think was a shame, because that course does a better job than just about anything else I can think of at introducing people to philosophy. So it’s great to hear that it’s back.

I was twice a TA – or “TF”, for Teaching Fellow, as Harvard calls them – for Justice, now twenty years ago during my PhD. When Sandel interviewed me for the position, it was my favourite job interview I’ve ever had: the only interview where I was grilled on the finer points of Kant and Rawls. It was a proud moment for me because Sandel was skeptical about whether, as a religionist, I’d have the competence to teach the course, but I showed him how much moral and political philosophy I knew.

In those days at least, Justice was the most popular course at Harvard. It was held in the beautiful Sanders Theatre, Harvard’s largest audience space, and was so popular that the students who wanted to take it wouldn’t even fit in that space. That occasionally put us TFs in the position, not exactly standard for graduate students, of being bouncers: I told one student “I’m sorry, you’re not allowed in at the moment”, and she tried to go in anyway so I had to physically block her. Its popularity often made it a target for funny student pranks (see the picture).

A still from a video of Sandel teaching Justice twenty years ago. That’s me in the blue shirt in the back. (But I’m not the prank).
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Of course “racist” is a pejorative

06 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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Consider what happens when you call someone an introvert. They may agree or disagree with you, but they will probably not feel particularly flattered or offended. That’s because, functionally, “introvert” is a merely descriptive term. We sometimes value extroversion more than introversion, but we get that introversion can be valuable in its own way and we don’t think it’s morally wrong.

Next, consider what happens when you call someone a liar. They are only likely to agree with you if you have caught them red-handed, and that agreement is going to be painful for them and have social consequences. More likely, they are going to deny it, and understandably so, because the act of lying is generally a bad thing, and to be a liar – being the kind of person who lies – is to have a moral character flaw.

Now consider in turn what happens when you call someone a racist. Are they going to react the way they do when you call them an introvert, or the way they do when you call them a liar?

They will react the way they do when you call them a liar, of course. As they should. Because we widely agree that being a racist, like being a liar but unlike being an introvert, is a moral failing. Racism is very bad. To call someone a racist is to seriously malign their moral character. Given all the disastrous harm that racism has caused over the centuries, you wouldn’t think that anyone would dispute that point. But it turns out that someone does, and that someone is Ibram X. Kendi.

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When marginalized people don’t say what we think they should

14 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Deity, Hermeneutics, Islam, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Morality, Politics, Social Science

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The late Saba Mahmood’s 2004 The Politics of Piety is a brilliant example of how to do philosophical ethnography. The book’s one flaw is its dense prose style, but even that may have been necessary in order to persuade its target audience: 2000s-era postmodern feminists, who tended to take six-syllable words as a sign of profundity. And while the typical vocabulary has changed significantly in the decades since she wrote it – from “resistance” and “agency” to “privilege” and “marginalization” – the kinds of views she is critiquing remain very widespread, and her critique has lost none of its power.

Mahmood is studying the da’wah piety movement among Egyptian Muslim women, including practices like wearing the veil. Other feminist scholars had studied such women before. But those scholars had insisted in defining their informants’ actions in the scholars’ terms rather than the informants’:

Some of these studies offer functionalist explanations, citing a variety of reasons why women take on the veil voluntarily (for example, the veil makes it easy for women to avoid sexual harassment on public transportation, lowers the cost of attire for working women, and so on). Other studies identify the veil as a symbol of resistance to the commodification of women’s bodies in the media, and more generally to the hegemony of Western values. While these studies have made important contributions, it is surprising that their authors have paid so little attention to Islamic virtues of female modesty or piety, especially given that many of the women who have taken up the veil frame their decision precisely in these terms. Instead, analysts often explain the motivations of veiled women in terms of standard models of sociological causality (such as social protest, economic necessity, anomie, or utilitarian strategy), while terms like morality, divinity, and virtue are accorded the status of the phantom imaginings of the hegemonized. (16)

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Moral regress is annoying too

07 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Morality, Politics, Psychology, Social Science, Work

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Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra recently wrote a widely circulated Aeon article entitled “Moral progress is annoying”. It would have been more convincing – but also go against their agenda – if they added: “and so is moral regress.”

The article notes that when faced with changes in social norms, like declaring a certain term offensive or being expected to share pronouns, it is common for us to react with annoyance and irritation, most visibly expressed in the physical gesture of rolling our eyes. Kelly and Westra argue that this reaction is inappropriate:

we think that the eyeroll heuristic is a serious obstacle to moral progress. Many genuinely good arguments for moral change will be initially experienced as annoying. Moreover, the emotional responses that people feel in these situations are not typically produced by psychological processes that are closely tracking argument structure or responding directly to moral reasons. Instead, they stem from psychological mechanisms that enable people to adapt to local norms – what’s called our norm psychology.

Specifically, they claim that the annoyed eyeroll represents what they call affective friction:

When a person’s norm psychology is misaligned with the rules and customs around her, norms make their presence acutely felt…. Instead of fluency, we have disfluency, which can be stressful, frustrating and exhausting – just ask any North American tourist who has been cursed at by a Berlin cyclist after wandering into a bike lane, or been panicked by their first encounter with a squat toilet. Call this affective friction.

Because it is affective friction, they argue, the eyeroll is not really a rational response: “As tempting as it can be to interpret the unpleasant feelings as your moral compass ringing alarm bells, your annoyance is just a feature of your norm psychology becoming misaligned and reacting to the unfamiliar.”

Now Kelly and Westra are right that the annoyed eyeroll is a gut reaction rather than a rationally considered one. But the eyeroll is not unusual in that regard. Most of our actions, in a moral domain or any other, aren’t based on considered rationality. Crucially, that is just as true of the eyeroll’s opposite: namely bandwagon-jumping, the enthusiastic adoption of a new norm because it is a new norm, irrespective of whether that new norm actually benefits those it is supposed to help.

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