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Too Good to be Happy: A Paradox for the Good
Justice is a part of our idea of goodness, unequivocally. But having a sense of justice makes you sensitive to injustice. With this sensitivity, any injustice is liable to make such a person miserable. And there doesn’t seem to be anything good about being miserable. That seems to me to be a paradox of goodness, whereby something unequivocally bad comes from something unequivocally good. Justice is good, and happiness is good, but having a sense of justice makes us less happy. Having one good seems to deprive us of another. I wonder what the solution to this puzzle might be.
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Attend to What Matters: Freedom
My life is currently very constrained. I am occupied with looking after our 18-month old daughter. When she is awake, I am fully occupied; when she is asleep, I am on call and cannot go further than the effective range of the baby monitor.
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On Election Day
The proper purpose of democracy is not to find the right answer (for that we should appoint experts) but to allow each individual to participate in their own government. It is a way of preserving freedom or self-rule (autonomy) as a community. The will of the people will often choose badly, just as people will often make bad choices in how they govern their own lives. But since this was a free choice, and our purpose was to preserve freedom, this is not a failure. Democracy does not fail when it chooses badly: it fails when people do not choose.
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Sketch of a Theodicy
This is a sketch of a theodicy: an attempt to solve the problem of evil by offering a justification of God’s permission of evil. It is only a sketch: you will have to go and consult the literature to find these theodicies fully and better expressed in all their glorious technical detail. We are asking why a good God allows bad things to happen. There are classically two answers to this question: a) It’s good for us, and/or b) it’s our fault. […]
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The Proper Time to Eat
‘What is the proper time to eat?’, someone asks Diogenes the Cynic. ‘When rich, whenever you want; when poor, whenever you can.’ A pithy phrase, apparently saying little. It is a seed. Perhaps you might remember it and reflect on it from time to time. At first glance it conveys a certain sense of living […]
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Philosophy is a Magic Spell
Philosophy is like a kind of magic spell: you only need to say the right words in the right order and with the right intent you can change your world. Philosophy can turn poverty into wealth and sickness into health; it can free you from constraints, from the power of tyrants, from the fear of […]
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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