Category: ideas

“As a philosopher, I believe this ethical conundrum involves two issues: one, the question of moral responsibility for an action at the time it occurred. And two, moral responsibility in the present time, for actions of the past. Most philosophers seem to think that the two cannot be separated. In other words, moral responsibility for an action, once committed, is set in stone. I argue that there are reasons to think that moral responsibility can actually change over time – but only under certain conditions.”

It’s strange to consider that a company so fundamental to our world is still so relatively young. … Sergey Brin and Larry Page defeated their competition so soundly and so effectively that competitors like Excite, Lycos, and AltaVista are blips in the internet’s long history, despite once being hugely important platforms.”

“One paper, published in a journal called Sex Roles, said that the author had conducted a two-year study involving ‘thematic analysis of table dialogue’ to uncover the mystery of why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters. Another, … published in a journal of feminist social work and titled ‘Our Struggle Is My Struggle,’ simply scattered some up-to-date jargon into passages lifted from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The three came clean this week, writing that their aim was to expose the problem of what they call “academic grievance studies.”

“Something has gone wrong in the university — especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.”

Over the last several years, competing notions of “diversity” have emerged. In many corners, the traditional definition, focused on demographic diversity, has been eclipsed by a new concept centered on experiential or cognitive differences. Deloitte, a provider of advisory services to firms around the globe, including 85% of the Fortune 500, encapsulates the trend, noting, “Up to now, diversity initiatives have focused primarily on fairness for legally protected populations. But organizations now have an opportunity to harness a more powerful and nuanced kind of diversity: diversity of thought.”

What does it mean for an experience to be interesting? First, to say that something is interesting is to describe what the experience feels like to the person undergoing it. This is the phenomenological quality of the experience. When we study the phenomenology of something, we examine what it feels like, from the inside, to experience that thing.

Mutual aid, social cooperation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others: these are the kind of things that actually go to make civilisations. In which case, the true history of civilisation is only just starting to be written. It might begin with what archaeologists call ‘culture areas’ or ‘interaction spheres’, vast zones of cultural exchange and innovation that deserve a more prominent place in our account of civilisation.

It’s a testament to just how unequal and angry and, in many ways, decadent the United States is. We have this situation where the extreme inequities of our time, on one hand, inspire elites to step up, do more, solve social problems. But at the same time, those same inequities have an equal and opposite consequence.

When it comes to interior design, the color pink has been particularly controversial. After some psychologists were able to show that certain shades of pink reduced aggression, it was famously used in prison cells to limit aggression in inmates. Yet pink toes a shaky line. Is it a benign means of subtle manipulation? A tool to humiliate? An outgrowth of gender stereotyping? Or some combination of the three?

Today, few people talk earnestly about western civilisation. Mahatma Gandhi’s jibe – “it would be a good idea” – has stuck. But the veteran critic Desmond Fennell believes it is a useful concept to try to understand where the world is going. He argues that we are “between two civilisations”. Not just that but he believes a tectonic shift took place in the last century when the mask of western civilisation finally fell. In fact, he traces it to a particular date: August 6th, 1945