Infractions of personal liberty can be justified when they improve the welfare of individuals on the whole, even when they on occasion diminish the welfare and freedoms of particular people. The argument against assisted suicide on these grounds is not that your doing it directly harms others, but that your having the right to do it requires changing the social ecology in such a way as to diminish the ability of all individuals to thrive in it.
Read“Brian McLaughlin wrote the entry on consciousness for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Consciousness. He said the Churchlands don’t believe in consciousness. And it was so interesting because we had studiously avoided saying any such thing about consciousness. So I phoned Brian after I read this and I said, ‘Well, what the fuck?’”
ReadIt has finally been accepted that we can’t function without values. (Indeed, the very project of avoiding moral judgments itself rests on the firm belief that they are wrong.) But the suppression of morality-talk has served another very good purpose: the language itself is being used differently, as if it needed time in retreat in order to purge itself of its puritanical associations. It left the stage muttering about people shagging each other and strode back on later lamenting how the privileged are screwing the masses. Look at how the uses of moral language have been pressed into service in recent weeks and you’ll find that they do not concern mere private behaviour but the point at which individual actions have consequences for wider society. Morality has recovered its political dimension.
ReadI am sitting at a table that doesn’t exist. I wanted to eat out at a table 13, defying superstition ahead of tomorrow, the third Friday the 13th in this unusually inauspicious year. But it’s hard to find one. Only two of the UK’s 14 best restaurants have a table 13, most simply skipping from 12 to 14. Here at Le Gavroche, the closest I can come is to dine at table 12a, a kind of phantom table 13, the cursed spot that dare not speak its name…
ReadThe suggestion is that we don’t need hope at all. All we need is a purpose for our action, a purpose that need not be conceived of as a hope. When people plan to, try to, aim to, work to, they are taking steps to achieve a desired goal. But when someone says they merely hope to, nine times out of ten what that tells you is that they have not yet set about doing what needs to be done to realise that hope.
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