Values are beliefs of the form "X is good," whereby X is an abstract concept, and you know that X is good through life experience that you have reflected upon or, in brief, through wisdom. Values are distilled wisdom. But the wisdom need not be your own. You may borrow it from your family, educators, mentors, or some broader social network embedded in your culture. Political ideologies, philosophical schools, and religious traditions are common sources of values, too. Whatever your source, in … [Read more...]

Nietzsche's philosophy 'beyond good and evil' is a refusal of religious thought and of what he calls 'slave morality'. Last week I defined 'good' and 'bad' in Spinozian terms, which already are beyond good and evil. Now we will contemplate: Can the mind venture beyond good and bad, too? Let us being with Ethica, pars IV prop. LXVIII: Si homines liberi, nascerentur, nullum boni, & mali formarent conceptum, quamdiu liberi essent. which translates into: If men were born free, they … [Read more...]

Good is what is useful to you, that is, what facilitates your capacity to preserve yourself; for your body, good is what facilitates your power of activity; for your mind, good is what facilitates your capacity to form accurate ideas. Bad is the opposite of good: it's what hinders or erodes your conatus, what diminishes your power to act, and what undermines your rationality. 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...]