Tag: Ethics

• January 30, 2013

  Doing what comes naturally

  If it isn’t easy to do, then it’s not the thing to do. Deliberations require lack of spontaneity and struggle a lack of understanding, but graceful action comes quite naturally. Cutting wood is only hard until the trunk and I are on friendly terms and then the neck yields to the axe’s touch. Being courageous is…
• December 10, 2012

  On sex, clumsiness, and adverbs

  Typically, we associate awkwardness, clumsiness, inelegance, and gracelessness with poor aesthetic performances alone, but could aesthetic considerations have any connection to ethical considerations? Could there be a point at which clumsiness cancelled out a good deed entirely? Sometimes we may think that what makes a good deed good is that the individual has the right…
• June 11, 2012

  Adderall and philosophical life

  The Sunday New York Times front page article on the pervasiveness of Adderall use among wealthy high school students, “Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill: Taking Stimulants Not for a High, but for a Higher SAT Score” (June 10, 2012), misses the philosophical point. The reporter Alan Schwarz covers the usual suspects–availability, pervasiveness, potentially adverse side…
• May 15, 2012

  Ethical life restored (VII)

  VII Silent of speech is nature’s course. Laozi, Daodejing, 23 Can we still follow nature’s course under nature’s gently guiding hand? I think so but only if we let nature return to its humble home and only after we learn again to listen to its silent speech. In early May, my love Alexandra and I spent a…
• May 8, 2012

  Acting contrary to nature or living according to nature? (I)

  I Somewhere near the passage to modernity, the philosophical tree sprouted some branches and grew dead. How many branches, pray, before it breathed its final breath? The contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt holds up his fingers, counts two, and then shades in a third. The first branch is epistemology which, he says, is concerned with “what…