Category: ethics

• August 4, 2011

  On the ‘great speedup’ and its reception

  In case you missed it, Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffrey, both of Mother Jones, wrote an article on what they’re calling “the great speedup.” I’ve been following the response to the article, which has been significant. The concept–longer hours, greater responsibilities, more stress, no more pay…–seems to have got people’s attention and to be catching on.…
• August 3, 2011

  Mark Edmundson on Health Now!

  All this blather about health and exercise. All this fastidious concern with vitamins and prescriptions. All this worry over living longer and Social Security and… well, living longer. Health without ideals is sickening, Mark Edmundson argues. Edmundson’s is a refreshingly honest Platonic defense of living for the sake of higher ideals. Huzzah! Hurray! The reductio ad…
• August 2, 2011

  On Fish’s ‘Does Philosophy Matter?’ Answer: No…and yes

  Philip Carey, the protagonist of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, is deeply confused. On the one hand, he has rejected revealed religion and thus does not believe in God. On the one hand, his moral principles uncannily resemble those found in Christianity. On his list of virtues are charity, compassion, humility, and love. It occurs…
• August 1, 2011

  Moral education in Maugham’s Of Human Bondage

  I’m about halfway through Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage (1915). As the editors tell us in the introduction, the novel was originally written when Maugham was in his 20s but because Maugham couldn’t find a publisher he filed it away in his writing desk. After some commercial success years later, he returned to the…
• July 29, 2011

  On 3 moods toward the past: smashing, worshipping, and loving while transcending

  The 1st Mood: The Past Must be Smashed.  “We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.” –F.T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909) “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” –Faulkner Thanks to Faulkner, Ibsen, and Chekhov, we recognize that the past cannot be wiped out or destroyed. In…