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Believed by the Wise: Socrates, Pragmatic Arguments, and Pascal’s Wager
I’ve been wrestling with an aphorism that I can’t pin down. I want to say this: ‘The wise believe what is good and true, the clever only what is proven.’ But I can’t. The tone may be right, but the content is wrong: or rather, not wrong but factually inaccurate.
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Parenting a Toddler: An Illustration of Wittgenstein’s Distinction Between Saying and Showing
Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing can be seen, very simply, in how we raise our children. It is important. I hold it in mind at all times.
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Romanticism and Livestock Farming
Those who speak positively about livestock farming are often accused of having fallen into an insidious ‘Romanticism’. They view these idyllic pastoral scenes with overly-sentimental eyes, and this clouds their judgement. Is this true? If it were, it might be a problem: it is important to see things clearly – undistorted – and sentimentalism is one of the many distortions of thought that can creep in, like prejudice and other forms of bias. […]
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Relative Moral Certainty
Many judgements about the morally impossible will remain epistemically ambiguous and subject to change over time. Many philosophers who do not share my metaethical perspective will think this is a problem for any claims about moral necessity. But I think the issue of epistemic ambiguity actually reinforces my point, rather than weakening it, because this epistemic ambiguity is always relative to something more certain. […]
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Properly Basic Moral Belief
According to Alvin Plantinga, religious belief is properly basic because it is involuntary and it arises from a properly functioning natural faculty that, if its origin story is true, grants the belief epistemological warrant. Is there any reason to suppose moral belief, especially at its limits, is any different from a properly basic religious belief? […]
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Recognising Moral Necessity
Do you recognise anything to be morally necessary? I can easily imagine that many of you don’t. Scepticism is easy, and in any case easier than holding yourself to account. It’s easy to overlook or dismiss the morally necessary because most of the time we live in a murky world of moral contingency and epistemic uncertainty. But every now and then we hit upon a clear moral limit. I have sometimes found these limits in my own life; life has shown me what I believe. I imagine some of you have experienced the same. […]
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The Educative Power of Extreme Examples
Philosophers are often found reflecting on extreme examples of moral good or evil. When political philosophers talk about justice, they refer to utopian ideals that have no realistic chance of being realised. When we discuss ‘The Problem of Evil’, we talk about the Holocaust, or Hiroshima, or the worst forms of child abuse. These are extreme examples that hardly any of us face in real life (thankfully). Often they are outright fictional, as is seen when we discuss classic examples from literature and film. To many non-philosophers, this might seem like a waste of time and talent. […]
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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