Tag: Ethics

Think there’s too much excess at Christmas?

Articles & Essays, Food

Christmas Day lunch is the ideal target for the newest but already most tedious Christmas tradition of them all: the ritual moan about the terrible excess and waste. You know, all that money spent on too much food, of which too much is eaten, too much is thrown away and too much is bad for you. I’ve been as guilty of this as the next party hat refusenik. Yet I wonder whether the Yuletide vices we loathe are just the shadows cast by the festive virtues, and we can totally escape the dark side only by destroying the splendours that block the light.

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Are men from Mars and women from Venus?

The Shrink and The Sage

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, that would explain why philosophy so often reads like Martian. Both in the UK and the US, women account for only around a fifth of philosophers in the academy, fewer than in most comparable disciplines. Does this suggest there is something essentially masculine about philosophy, that cold, hard logic comes much more naturally to the less touchy-feely sex?

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Have we become too assertive?

The Shrink and The Sage

In philosophy as in science, “mere assertion” is the lower than lowest form of argument, being not more than baseless pontification. Yet in much of everyday life, assertion is king. Much of what passes for discussion of serious issues, for example, is actually little more than people taking it in turns to state their opinions and dismiss those of others. Instead of trying to understand each other, they merely stay quiet and listen for as short a time as is decent before simply resuming their own monologue…

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What good luck to miss out on a £64m lottery win

Articles & Essays

If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don’t have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn’t take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me. I think about how I might spread the love, and worry that it would take away the incentive for someone to work at what might really give them satisfaction; or that they might spend the cash on things like cosmetic surgery or drugs that are no good for them in the long run. Meanwhile, of course, I trust myself to spend wisely, unaware of all the ways in which I too might screw up my life by making bad choices.

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