More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 21 - November 16, 2023
Peter S...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
movement called “effective altruism.”
utterly uninterested in the emotional health of other people.
I don’t think it’s that. I think the explanation is prejudice, plain and simple.
And given how easily he alone could change the name, it’s probably wrong to support the team.
Woody Allen movies
Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism
Is it always enough simply to keep two conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time?
heuristic is a tool that allows us to input a problem and get a solution—a
Contradictions within our own system of integrity are simply opportunities to try, again, to make decisions true to our own beliefs, our understanding of ethics, and our sense of who we are.
conflict-averse,
doesn’t help anyone to remain silent when our friends or loved ones or casual acquaintances say something racist, sexist, or offensive. Action is called for here,
does anything we do even matter? So… does it?
Jean-Paul Sartre,
reductive nutshell, believes the following: Human existence is absurd.
a humanism?!
Sartre was trying to dispel misunderstandings about existentialism—essentially,
Sartre was becoming the anti-humanist par excellence:
All we have, and all we ultimately are, is the choices we make while we’re alive.
subjectivity,”
“Man is responsible for what he is.”
He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.
this case it’s a French philosopher yelling at you, and his conclusions deny the existence of God.
this is kind of tricky—when
when we make our choices, we’re actually making them for all people.
everyone can make whatever choices he wants… but also those choices should be a model for everyone else?
He knows how hard it is to be a human being on earth under the circumstances he describes, and refuses to let us off the hook. Life is anguish. Welcome to existentialism!
“Man is condemned to be free.”
deontology
utilitarianism
contract...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
virtue ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
He’s telling us that Kant and Bentham and Scanlon and Aristotle are about as helpful to our moral lives as a coin flip.
Should we listen to him, and junk all these other theories?
Albert Camus, the Non-Existentialist ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Sartre and Camus were contemporary French philosophers who both won the Nobel Prize in Literature,
Sartre did some (kind of contradictory) work to make his philosophy compatible with Communist political movements in postwar France;
Camus didn’t care about that.
Sartre thought we should perform actions that could serve as...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Camus didn’t care about that either. His existentialism is like a balsamic reduct...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
sharper, more intense, mo...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
It’s okay to admit that part of what they have is due to luck. It doesn’t diminish their achievements. It simply acknowledges that we all owe part of our success to chance, and celebrates those smart and capable and talented enough to capitalize on the breaks that go their way.
which is easily understood: the veil of ignorance. When kids want to split something—a piece of cake, or a pile of M&M’s, or whatever—parents will often tell one kid she can divide it into parts, but must give the other kid the first choice.
Apologize.
I thimk to mKe someone apologize makesfor an insincere apology
we have to climb in order to become better people.
It’s the punctuation mark on the end of an Aristotelian sentence that describes our search for virtue; it’s an easily formulated Kantian maxim, a utilitarian happiness increaser, and a contractualist debt we can pay off, all in one. Without an apology, the wound of a moral wrong can’t completely heal.
If caring and trying are the key to ethical improvement and failure is the inevitable result, apologies are like an exit interview for that failure.
The ickiness we feel when we apologize—the flushed-face shame that comes from admitting fault to a person we’ve wronged—is good.
It means we feel the pain we’ve caused, and we care t...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
But what if we arenot really sorry?
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”
Frankfurt aims to distinguish bullshit from lying.
