I'm a Canadian living in England and traveling Europe. Likes: theoretical bakery, documentary film making, magicians. Dislikes: Internet celebrities, the roof of my mouth after eating Captain Crunch, ersatz. E-mail me.
I’ve come up with an ingenius way to solve the current web-design fiasco. First tumblize will design a theme for me. Second, Bill Israel, and Numblr, will design me themes. Finally, I will choose which theme I want, AND decide whether I would have paid $999 for it.
What can I say? I’m a problem solver.
(via jessicagoldharalson)
Is there any other kind?
Actually it is funny, at least for Canadians. What are they going to invade with…foreign direct investment?
(via floodwaters,inky: Married To The Sea)
Voltaire on his death bed after being asked by a priest to renounce Satan. (via livejamie)
I heard he said something like “either this wallpaper goes, or I do.”
Hillary Clinton (via peterwknox) Hillary, we’re through. (via jessicagoldharalson)
I didn’t need much convincing anyways. sigh…
Degree in hand, loans coming due, the working partner expecting a more fair financial contribution, perhaps the question of children growing relevant, the degree holder asks a question to which the system has no answer: If I have been a splendid teacher and scholar while nondegreed for the past ten years, why am I suddenly unsuitable?
Nearly all of the administrative responses to the degree holder can already be understood as responses to waste: flush it, ship it to the provinces, recycle it through another industry, keep it away from the fresh meat. Unorganized graduate employees and contingent faculty have a tendency to grasp their circumstance incompletely—that is, they feel “treated like shit”—without grasping the systemic reality that they are waste.
” How the University Works by Marc BousquetI can’t wait, although I often wonder and am rarely answered: on what is your non-religious morality based?
EMPATHY.
Empathy is a sensation, not a reason; I feel it, and am a happy atheist; you feel it, and we could be neighbors in a lovely secular country. But what about people who don’t feel it? Not sociopaths, mind you: the many people whose ‘circle of empathy’ (to borrow Carl Sagan’s wonderful phrase) is narrow?
I can’t stay someone’s hand before violence by advising, “Feel empathy, damn you!” I believe in neither damnation nor coercion of feeling. This is the reality of the world; we are not all empathetic.
Those are two different problems. The first is your question, why be (non-religiously) moral? RJS answered but did not elaborate a morality based on empathy, although many have done so throughout the ages (see Kant in particular). The idea that we feel someone else’s pain as our own has been central to liberal philosophy since before the Enlightenment.
The second problem is in your response which suggests that the test by which we measure morality must be that which convinces others not to act in a certain way (in this case violently). But all systems of morality apply only to the individuals who subscribe to them. The test, properly understood, is whether or not that morality convinces me to stop acting violently. In this case, empathy could surely convince me not to act violently towards others.
Modern philosophies of morality have become quite sophisticated, but still retain their roots in some notion of human dignity. A brilliant theory is Amartya Sen’s (in economics) and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach.
