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So, if I got something wrong, that’s the reason: pure ignorance!
That’s the golden mean of this quality: that perfect middle spot, representing the exact amount of the quality in question that keeps the seesaw level. Shifting toward either end, however, will throw it out of whack; one side of the seesaw will plummet to the ground, and we’ll hurt our butts. (In this metaphor, our butts = our personalities.) The two extreme ends represent (1) a deficiency of the quality, and, on the other side, (2) an excess of the quality—way too little, or way too much. Extreme deficiency or excess of any one quality then becomes a vice, which is obviously what we’re trying
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“constant learning, constant trying, constant searching” is what results from it: a mature yet still pliable person, brimming with experiences both old and new, who doesn’t rely solely on familiar routines or dated information about how the world works.
putting cruelty first in our list of things to avoid seems like a really good idea.
Intensity (how strong it is) Duration (how long it lasts) Certainty (how definite it is that it’ll work) Propinquity (how soon it can happen) Fecundity (how “lasting” it is—how much other pleasure it can lead to) Purity (how little pain it causes in relation to the pleasure it creates) Extent (how many people it benefits)
First, it is impossible to look at that list and not make jokes about utilitarianism being like sex.
“Utilitarian Killer.”
When we do something good, we want credit, dammit. We want a little gold star. We want to be seen as good people—and I mean literally seen—which I think is both completely understandable and deeply embarrassing. (Side note: So much of philosophy involves investigating embarrassing human activities and inclinations. We really are weird little creatures.)
What difference would it practically make to any one [sic] if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.
Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable.
When kids are literally dying, he says, it’s hard to justify ignoring their pain and sending your annual charitable gift to a local art museum or symphony orchestra.
If you remove God from the equation—and thus any kind of grand design for humanity—then we’re all just a bunch of dodos wandering around the planet, accountable to nothing but ourselves.
“Man is condemned to be free.”
Rawls says that we ought to decide the rules for our society from what he calls the “original position”—meaning ideally, we’d all decide how we would divvy up things like salaries and resources for our society before we knew which role we were going to play in that society. We’d conceive of these rules from behind a “veil of ignorance” regarding who we’re all going to become—it’s like deciding what the rules will be for grown-up humans, back when we’re all embryos.
instead he just explains how it happened, acknowledges that he blew it, names the people he hurt, and expresses regret. This is the correct way to apologize.
The bullshitter has only one goal: to make the listener think of him as a certain kind of person, whether it be a patriot, a moral avatar, a sensitive and caring soul, or whatever else advances his personal interests.2 “The essence of bullshit,” said Frankfurt, “is not that it is false but that it is phony
have said, over and over, that caring about what we do requires us to accept and endure a lifetime of screwing up.
You are people on earth. You are not alone here, and that means you owe the other people on earth certain things. What you owe them, more or less, is to live by rules they wouldn’t reject as unfair
