12 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted in Blog Admin
≈ Comments Off on Question marks
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Quick administrative point: I finally got around to fixing the annoying question marks that had replaced diacritical marks in the blog’s older posts (where “Śāntideva” became “??ntideva” and so on). It should all work properly now, but it’s possible that I missed a couple. If you are ever looking back at an old blog post and you find a reference to “vipassan?” or “?a?kara” or the like, could you please drop me a comment or an email and let me know?
06 Sunday Nov 2011
Posted in Anger, Emotion, Family, Friends, Gentleness, Mahāyāna, Mindfulness, Patient Endurance
Perhaps the most common term for a man who is not traditionally masculine is “sensitive.” The term is sometimes spelled out further so that such men are called SNAGs, “sensitive new age guys.” But what is it to be “sensitive”? And is it a good or a bad thing?
It seems to me that the term “sensitivity,” as popularly used, implies at least two different concepts. They are related; in both cases, if one is asked “what is one sensitive to?”, the answer would likely be: emotion. But they are not the same; for one is generally good, the other generally bad. Continue reading
30 Sunday Oct 2011
Posted in Economics, Epics, Flourishing, Food, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Place, Virtue
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Aristotle, Barry Schwartz, Bhagavad Gītā, consequentialism, Ethan C-F (commenter), Herbert Simon, Jack Layton, John Rawls, Julia Annas, New York City, utilitarianism
A month or so ago I started reading Julia Annas‘s excellent The Morality of Happiness – while visiting family in New York City. Because of the New York setting, I was particularly drawn to this passage:
It is also not surprising that ancient ethics, with one marginal exception, never develops anything like the related consequentialist idea of a maximizing model of rationality. If my ethical aim is to produce a good, or the best, state of affairs, then it is only rational to produce as much as possible of it. But ancient ethics does not aim at the production of good states of affairs, and so is not tempted to think that rationality should take the form of maximizing them. Rather, what I aim at is my living in a certain way, my making the best use of goods, and acting in some ways rather than others. None of these things can sensibly be maximized by the agent. Why would I want to maximize my acting courageously, for example? I aim at acting courageously when it is required. I have no need, normally, to produce as many dangerous situations as possible, in order to act bravely in them.
Why is this passage particularly striking in New York? Because as I discussed before, New York life is all about maximizing. Continue reading
23 Sunday Oct 2011
Posted in Biology, Christianity, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphysics
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The posts of the previous couple weeks begin to add up to an argument for the existence of something like God – a value or goodness that is an inextricable part of the basic structure of reality. It strikes me that a significant part of this line of reasoning also underlies most of the widely known philosophical proofs for the existence of God. These proofs (at least on their own) do not take us to any of the particular Abrahamic views of God, as revealed in Qur’an or Torah or the person of Jesus Christ, but they are often taken as a first step to getting there.
Continue reading
16 Sunday Oct 2011
Posted in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Karma, Mahāyāna, Self
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Alasdair MacIntyre, Andrew Skilton, atheism, autobiography, Damien Keown, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.E. Moore, John Stuart Mill, Kate Crosby, Paul Williams, Penelope Trunk, Sam Harris, Śāntideva
Today’s post follows up on those from two and three weeks ago, and there’ll be another one next week. I intend the four posts, taken together, to make a statement about the continuing importance of the idea of God: why, in the face of the very real problem of suffering and the scientific ability to easily do without God as an explanation of life’s apparent design, God is still hard to do away with. I mean this on an intellectual and philosophical level, not merely an emotional one; it is not just that we need to bother with God because so many people out have some neurological need for him, but that there yet remain ways in which God helps us to make sense of reality.
I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Continue reading
09 Sunday Oct 2011
Posted in Humility, Leadership, Virtue, Work
I was intending this week to continue the series of posts about value and reality, but that can wait. For this week, there’s been another of the memorable lives that ended in 2011.
I speak, of course, of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple Computer. Jobs’s figure loomed large over my life a decade ago. My first wife had convinced me to switch to a Mac in 2000, and I embraced everything Mac and Apple with all the zeal of the newly converted. She and I regularly went together to the Apple retail store in Cambridge for Jobs’s keynotes, just to watch him announce new products with his famous showmanship. I have been far less enthused about Apple recently, especially the arbitrary restrictions the company places on iPhone apps – the exact kind of controlling monopolistic behaviour that Apple was once best known for fighting against. I still happily use Macs and iPods, though. And more importantly for today, I learned important lessons from following Apple and Jobs so devotedly in the 2000s – above all about leadership. Continue reading
02 Sunday Oct 2011
Posted in Aesthetics, Biology, Buddhism, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphysics, Morality, Self-Discipline
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Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Denis Dutton, Ethan Mills, G.E. Moore, game theory, Jesse (commenter), Neil Sinhababu
I’ll be the first to admit that last week’s post was insufficiently argued. But I think it may have been helpful as a springboard for further (potentially more carefully argued) reflection; I expect that next week’s post, as well as this one, will follow up on it. I argued last week that attempts to explain value judgements seem to run into trouble when they don’t ground those judgements in a deeper metaphysical reality. I looked at this problem there largely in terms of the early twentieth-century analytic tradition. But I didn’t address one of the most common non-metaphysical attempts to explain value judgements: the evolutionary explanation.
Several comments from Jesse took this approach. “Morality,” he claims, “has existed in some form or other since the first self-replicating proteins formed in the primordial ocean.” Citing game theory, he notes that organisms which helped each other out would have been far more likely to survive and thrive. Ethan Mills, while somewhat skeptical of the game-theoretic explanation, still cites James Rachels for another kind of evolutionary explanation: at the social rather than individual level, societies wouldn’t have lasted long without morality.
Now I am not and was not speaking only of “morality” in the sense of aiding (or refusing to harm) others. (There was a reason the word “morality” didn’t appear in that post.) As I noted in my comment, I was also speaking of other kinds of value – including virtues like self-discipline and patient endurance that would be valuable whether or not anyone else is around, and for that matter of aesthetic value, the value in good art or the beauty of nature.
But that’s not the big issue here, for it’s not so hard to come up with evolutionary explanations for these other kinds of value either. Self-disciplined creatures would very likely have adapted better to their environments. There are plenty of people, perhaps most notably Denis Dutton, who have even tried to find evolutionary explanations for aesthetics.
I am not going to pass judgement here on whether evolution is a correct or adequate causal explanation for the origins of human value judgements. For the sake of argument, in this post, I am going to assume that such accounts get the causal origin of value judgements basically correct. Because far more important is a deeper criticism: they miss the point. Continue reading
25 Sunday Sep 2011
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphysics
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20th century, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes, Kamehameha II, Ken Wilber
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I previously called the problem of good. Those who believe there is an ultimate goodness central to the universe face the problem of the universe’s imperfection and badness. The most obvious form of this problem is the Abrahamic problem of suffering; it’s also a problem for Advaita Vedānta, in which it’s hard to explain how ignorance can be possible. But for those who don’t believe in that ultimate goodness – which includes Theravāda Buddhists as well as naturalistically minded scientists – there is an alternate problem, of how we explain the existence of value in the first place.
This problem is not quite the opposite of the problem of suffering. Those who don’t believe in an ultimate value of this sort – I am here going to call them “atheists” as a shorthand, though I think that runs the risk of oversimplifying the matter – have no problem explaining the existence of particular good things, the way that theists have a problem explaining the existence of hurricanes or ALS. The problem they face, rather, is in the basic question of how things can be good (or bad) at all, of how the very ideas of goodness or badness can mean anything. Continue reading
18 Sunday Sep 2011
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Aristotle, ascent/descent, G.W.F. Hegel, Ken Wilber, Martha C. Nussbaum, Plato, postmodernism, relativism, skholiast (blogger)
It’s often said that philosophy is about questions rather than answers. Yet it is in the nature of a question that one who asks it at least wishes to find an answer, even if that answer remains elusive. Even rhetorical questions are rhetorical because they imply an assumed answer.
And so with the perennial questions, to which I regularly return on this blog. Central to the idea of a perennial question, as I have expressed it, is that the answers have never come easily. People across cultures, in different places and times, have asked the question – but in each place, people have come up with opposing answers.
To observe this diversity of opinion is humbling. Here are some of the greatest minds in human history, people smarter than I will ever be, reading each other’s work and still coming to opposite conclusions. Can an answer then ever be found? Continue reading
11 Sunday Sep 2011
Posted in Anger, Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity
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21st century, autobiography, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, London, Osama bin Laden, pragmatism, race, United States
Ten years ago today, my first wife and I were in the process of moving into our new unfurnished student apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had rented a moving truck and driven over to the house of a friend, who had generously offered us an old piece of furniture. My wife rang the bell and we waited a minute or two. Then my friend came running down the stairs, slightly flustered and dishevelled. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said, panting a little. “I was watching the news.”
“The… news?” We looked at each other.
“Oh my God, you haven’t heard! Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. It’s collapsed.”
“Two planes!” I said. “Then it must have been deliberate.”
“Yeah, they think it’s Osama bin Laden.”
“Huh,” I said. “Wow.” I paused for a few seconds, saying “Wow” and “Huh” a few more times. Then I shrugged my shoulders and said “Well, let’s get back to moving.”
This was not, I would soon learn, the way most Americans reacted to the same news. Continue reading