Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. I agree with most or maybe all of that. It is not hard to believe that even the more-responsible pro-Enlightenment cheerleaders might be implicitly misrepresenting history in stressing secularism and universalism and their ef…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. This piece by John McWhorter is a perfect illustration of point (2) from my comment just above: LikeLike

In reply to mlyoung57. I agree with that. We have two considerations in play, both true: Progress for some often comes at a price of suffering for others. Some progress for some is, all in, better than persisting indefinitely at the status quo, even i…

In reply to mlyoung57. Re the “connections between human-universal motivations and human-universal normative standards” and “when folks say that a proposed moral requirement S is unrealistic (or that people or enough people will not c…

“But now, if one’s perspective is that of the value of the logically essential ideas, why not use ‘Enlightenment ideas’ in this more logical sense, in arguing for ideas that one thinks are valuable for society today?” You can do that, but t…

In reply to mlyoung57. I guess we need a criterion for what counts as “fundamentality” when judging ideas in a historical context. If you met a person who was kind but also a racist, would you say that fundamentally, they were a kind person…

In reply to butimbeautiful. I haven’t. It’s next on my fiction list after Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows, which I’ll finish this weekend. I’m guessing you can see the theme to my fiction reading lately. LikeLike

In reply to butimbeautiful. “Felix, like Alison, was both a difficult and extraordinary person.” Have you ever written anything about him, or what happened? I have only a vague idea. Of course, you may have done so, and I may have read it. …

I haven’t gotten to p. 82 yet, but isn’t The Choice in-principle easily made correctly by applying decision theory (calculating expected justice-y utility for each option)? Shooting from the hip: if (i) we have pretty radical uncertainty ab…

I think there is a kind of sanguine attitude here, with respect to human suffering, that is a double-edged sword. You don’t want to be categorically indifferent (and, at the policy level, you probably want some kind of safety net to deal with the…