Bad Utilitarianism There are those who believe we have a moral obligation to donate a substantial part of our wealth to foreign aid if the net utility of doing so is maximized. Thus we should give away (say) 10% of our wealth to charity, even if we are not well off by local standards. […]
Music and Language The analogies and connections between music and language are striking. This is most apparent in the case of song, but it applies quite generally. Music is made up of notes, phrases, bars, tunes, riffs, verses, movements, symphonies, operas, albums, etc. It has compositional structure. It proceeds from a finite […]
[1] A consequence of this is that it is in the nature of every mental state that it belongs to a single self: every mental state needs a subject, but there can only be one subject, so it is part of the essence of being a mental state that it can be instantiated by only […]
Identity of Selves It is plausibly urged that there can be no identity without identity conditions (“criteria”): for example, material objects are identical in virtue of being spatiotemporally coincident, or sets are identical if and only if they share their members. Likewise, we could say that distinctness requires conditions (“criteria”) of distinctness: no two […]
So the Australians have shown themselves even stupider than the Americans. I blame the British.
One’s Own Mind Several times in The Basis of Morality Schopenhauer remarks on the mysterious nature of compassion (or altruism). He says: “When once compassion is stirred within me, by another’s pain, then his weal and woe go straight to my heart, exactly in the same way, if not always to the […]
Right and Ought: Schopenhauer on Kant In The Basis of Morality Schopenhauer undertakes a wholesale critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. He begins by attacking the very idea of a categorical imperative: morality should not be conceived as consisting of imperatives at all; the concept of the “moral law” is defective; moral rightness […]
Language and the Cave In Plato’s cave the inhabitants see nothing but shadows. Shadows are etiolated compared to the objects that cast them. You can glean very little from a shadow about the object that casts it. The shadow is two-dimensional, colorless, massless, and without texture: it is merely an absence of light, […]
Death, Disgust, and a Possum The other day my attention was caught by a bad smell emanating from near the front gate of my yard. Upon closer inspection I discovered a dead animal, evidently a possum. It had clearly been there a few days in hot weather. Flies were buzzing all around it. […]
A Modal Argument from Evil Some worlds are more evil than ours: we don’t live in the worst of all possible worlds. Some are a lot worse than ours: only the wicked prosper, disease is rampant and deadly, virtue leads to imprisonment, people are executed for singing in public, deep depression is the […]