Reading Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 has made me aware of something outside his storyline: the normal, routine, and unremarked willingness of medieval peasant-soldiers, leaders, bands, and armies to slaughter one another, to kill the disarmed, to enslave prisoners, and to do all these things with apparently no compunction. Vikings, Franks, Bulgars, …
Does philosophy offer consolation?
image: Martin Buber Alain de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy poses a bit of a puzzle. Why "consolations"? And why philosophy? How does philosophy come into the picture? For many professional philosophers from the past seventy-five years, the answer would be: not at all. Philosophy, in the analytic tradition anyway, is not concerned with the individual person's subjective …
An existential philosophy of technology
Ours is a technological culture, at least in the quarter of the countries in the world that enjoy a high degree of economic affluence. Cell phones, computers, autonomous vehicles, CT scan machines, communications satellites, nuclear power reactors, artificial DNA, artificial intelligence bots, drone swarms, fiber optic data networks -- we live in an environment that …
Ethical principles for assessing new technologies
Technologies and technology systems have deep and pervasive effects on the human beings who live within their reach. How do normative principles and principles of social and political justice apply to technology? Is there such a thing as "the ethics of technology"? There is a reasonably active literature on questions that sound a lot like …
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Moral progress and critical realism
Critical realists share a rejection of the fact-value distinction as a fundamental criterion of scientific rationality -- and rightly so (link). They believe that social research and theorizing involve value commitments all the way down. Further, they commonly believe that good social science should lead to improvement in the world and in our system of …
Moral limits on war
World War II raised great issues of morality in the conduct of war. These were practical issues during the war, because that conflict approached "total war" -- the use of all means against all targets to defeat the enemy. So the moral questions could not be evaded: are there compelling reasons of moral principle that …
A fresh approach to life plans
There isn't a clear philosophy of life-planning in the literature. So let's start from scratch. What do we need in order to make a plan for any temporally extended project? An assessment of the outcomes we want to bring about An assessment of the likely workings of the natural and social environment in which action …
Rational life plans
Aristotle, Kant, and Rawls agree: people ought to have rational plans of life to guide their everyday efforts and activities. But what is involved in being rational about one's plan of life? And really, what is a plan of life? Is it a sketch of a lifetime goal, along with some indications of the efforts …
Rationality over the long term
image: Dietrich Bonhoeffer with his students Millions of words have been written on the topic of rationality in action. Life involves choices. How should we choose between available alternatives? Where should I go to college? Which job should I accept? Should I buy a house or rent an apartment? How much time should I give …
Public attitudes towards market fundamentalism
Several recent posts have raised the question, what would be needed to move US public policy towards a more equitable treatment of the bottom 75% of American society? Conditions for much of this super-majority of society have gradually declined in the past several decades, and public programs designed to ameliorate conditions of health, education, nutrition, …
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Understanding Society 