Good is what is useful to you, that is, what facilitates your capacity to preserve yourself; for your mind, good is what facilitates your capacity to form accurate ideas; for your body, good is what facilitates your power of activity. Bad is the opposite of good: it's what hinders or erodes your conatus, what undermines your rationality, and what diminishes your power to act. These Spinozian definitions are what I have in mind whenever I use the words 'good' and 'bad' on this blog. Even … [Read more...]

Justice cannot be objective because it is rooted in subjective intuition and opinion. But neither can justice be subjective because then it would lose its usefulness as a concept (if everyone means something different when speaking of justice, it's useless to talk about it in the first place). Therefore, lying somewhere between objective and subjective, justice is intersubjective. The true meaning of justice is: what a people deems to be fair. What justice means in practice can thus be … [Read more...]

Peter Singer's child-in-the-pond argument goes like this: Imagine you are walking past a shallow pond and you notice a small child drowning in it. Would you ruin your favorite, quite expensive, pair of shoes in order to rush into the pond and save the child, or would you rather save your shoes and let the child drown? It is pretty obvious that only a sociopath would prioritize his shoes over a child's life. So far so good. But then comes the analogy: There are so many children all over the … [Read more...]

We can clearly define concepts like egoism, selfishness, and selfless altruism when we look at our everyday decisions from a game-theoretic perspective. Think of every possible interaction between people as a game where each party can either win or lose. This gives us the following grid with four possible outcomes: 1. Win-Win (Effectiveness) In a win-win situation, both you and the other group or person benefit from the interaction, and with your plus added to the other's plus, you get a … [Read more...]

When I criticize someone for doing something that I would do myself, I am a hypocrite because my criticism typically implies the pretense that I wouldn't. The same glass house logic applies to hypocrisy itself. Unless I have absolute certainty that I would never be hypocritical, which I practically cannot have, I cannot judge anyone of being hypocritical because this would make me meta-hypocritical, that is, hypocritical about my own hypocrisy. … [Read more...]