Status Updates From Vexed: Ethics Beyond Politi...

probs the best book on political analysis that i've read in the last 5 years

wts this book is fantatic

What is the upshot, in relation to my overall argument, of the widespread failure of rehabilitation? It is this: we saw that taking responsibility hinges on receiving assistance and that rehabilitation is a form of assistance. Therefore, insofar as the state fails to deliver rehabilitation it fails to value personal responsibility.

Rehabilitation presupposes peace. Yet what we have seen in the
UK are increases in violent assaults, upon both prisoners and officers. This has meant that the considerable potential of officers to act as mentors, to assist prisoners in rebuilding their lives, has remained untapped.

Read this chapter again, especially on the part of 'personal responsibility'

Just as the notion of agency defies the determinism that would say you are but the product of your environment, so it defies the determinism that would say you are but the product of your failures.

The overcoming of one natural impediment only serves to bring others into view, to create new tasks to be tackled. Old impossibilities become new challenges, with the only thing holding us back being ‘the present state of the science’.

Implicit in the mastery-of-nature picture is the assumption that because something is possible it is necessary. Something you now know you can do you must do. There is a presumption in favour of acting.

‘deliberative rationality’ or even wisdom – the ability to weigh up options, to discriminate, to judge, to step back from our desires, to select our priorities, to discern our vocations, to think what we are doing. The improvement of concentration will not necessarily increase wisdom. On the contrary, we have reason to fear one form of intelligence would eclipse another.

The more one reads the transhumanists, the more striking appears the reduction of intelligence to computation or ‘calculative rationality’ – the ability to retrieve, sift and apply information. But what about all the other forms of intelligence? Does calculative rationality really exhaust the domain of mental activity?

When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular. To be present with those I share a life with is then one option among many

Does not the self-defence argument hinge on that self-deceit? Is there not a temptation in a macho culture to overestimate one’s ability to be a hero when the time comes