Category: ethics

• January 15, 2011

  What if pain weren’t a bad thing?

  Meditate on the difference between these two statements: 1. Pain is not a bad thing. 2. Pain is something very bad. (Example taken from A.A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy) On the face of it, statement 1 seems puzzling. How can pain not be a bad thing? Isn’t that rather like saying that a cat isn’t a…
• January 15, 2011

  On being resentful

  In the Jan. 17, 2011 edition of The New Yorker, the journalist James Surowiecki writes that the “recession has… magnified the gap between unionized and non-unionized workers.” He goes on to say that “[t]his resentment is most evident in the backlash against public-sector workers (who now make up a majority of union members).” Here we…
• January 14, 2011

  Will training exercise: bearing hot and cold

  There are a few problems we urban dwellers deal with on a daily basis. One is the feeling that we know what the right thing to do is and yet we seem to be unable to bridge the divide between intention and action. I know it would be good to help push the car that’s…
• January 14, 2011

  NYT columnist David Brooks on civility

  Civility, Brooks shows,  is a public virtue that’s largely absent from political life today. He concludes that the source of civility is a sense of modesty.
• January 13, 2011

  Nietzsche on hardship

  In this three-part series that originally aired on the BBC, Alain de Botton discusses Nietzsche’s view that suffering is a necessary component of a well-lived life.