The Philosopher Justice

   A philosophical thought experiment is supposed to clarify a philosophical problem. Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment about the difference, or lack of difference, between saving a nearby life versus saving a far away life, does appear to clarify, but in fact it conceals an illegitimate move. The assumption that morality applies universally leads to a problem: are we, as individuals, morally responsible for the whole world?  This would imply an impossible burden on each human being.  Singer’s logic is relentless and seems irrefutable.  But he makes an illegitimate move when he goes from a moral ought to an ethical ought.  Singer, like most modern and ancient philosophers, (with some prominent exceptions, i.e. PF Strawson, Bernard Williams and Stephen Darwall ) , believes that there is no real difference between morality and ethics.    As a preliminary I’d like to thank Professor Singer for doing philosophy a service in putting moral p...

  If I were to recommend only one work of philosophy to read it would be Plato’s dialogue:  “The Symposium”  The subject is love, which is odd, since very few philosophers have tackled that subject since Plato did 2400 years ago. Plato’s take on love is that love is a bridge from the desire for a lover to desire for “The Good” with a capital G - in other words,  love is a form of transcendence.  In Plato’s time a Symposium was when a group of people got together to drink wine and give speeches on a given topic.  Symposiums still happen, but the difference today is that the drinking happens in the evening after, and not during the speeches.   A similar approach, minus the drinking, occurs in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Deuteronomy.  The name of this book: “Deuteronomy”, is the real give away.  It means “second law” because it is the second time that the ten commandments are recorded.  The key is that this time there is a prayer that d...

  I used to think that “harm reduction” was a good thing.  Better that addicts don’t share their needles and thereby spread deadly diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C. So, it benefits society for the government to provide free disposable needles to addicts in order to prevent this. But the BC health authority's policy of giving addicts free doses of opiates in order to protect them from overdosing from street fentanyl goes too far. Yes, it may have led to decreased deaths,  but, unfortunately, it has introduced more youth to these opiates because, (suprise surprise!) that supposedly “safe supply” is now being sold on the street. These policies are actually encouraging opiate use in the name of reducing harm.  There is a whole industry out there producing and distributing street drugs, getting rich off destroying people’s lives.  And what’s even worse is the lives destroyed by addiction itself.  We know it is causing great harm to society.  That’s what ma...

A good night’s rest, slumberland, downtime, out cold, dead-to-the-world - it’s the opposite of everything that philosophy stands for! Philosophy is about human consciousness, autonomy, the will, and Reason - none of which are operative during sleep. Sleep is darkness, nothingness - a void.  And yet we spend a third of our lives in sleep.  We often yearn for it and regret its loss.  We can very definitely feel the effects  of sleep loss: brain fog,  flu-like fatigue, and extreme irritability.  Eventually, with enough consecutive sleep loss we start to hallucinate, and after that it gets unimaginably worse. Our sleep/wake cycle directly connects us to the Earth’s rotation and its relation to the Sun.  This we share with all other life forms, including the ocean’s vast population of microscopic plankton that, since the dawn of time, collectively rises to the surface every morning and sinks to the depths every night.  Sleep connects us to our deep pas...

  If we could  better understand  what is at the heart of human nature than agreement about how to collectively move forward as a species becomes a possibility.  I believe that the heart of what makes us human is very simple, in fact, so simple that it is mostly taken for granted and ignored. We can talk about the  superior intelligence of humans, compared to other animals,  but we don’t really know how or why that intelligence developed.  Was it because we had to cope with bigger group size, as British Anthropologist  Robin Dunbar argues?   Was the development of language the driver in brain size? It appears from evidence of ancient skulls that the evolutionary rate of growth in the size of the hominin brain started accelerating  around the time that stone tools and weapons were first developed, approximately two and a half million years ago, well before humans are said to have developed language. Skeletal evidence reveals that anato...

  I’m fascinated with the image of the wizard from JRR Tolkien's   Lord of the Rings.   In this exceptional work of fantasy the fictional characters Gandalf and Saruman are members of an ancient order of wizards having the magical power to create new realities by casting spells.   We like to imagine that this power would reside in individuals, but in fact, words do have the power to create reality, but only if they are uttered  within a background of collective human agreement. That’s what is missing from the wonderful image of the wizard - the background.  And that is as it should be in a mythical or poetic account, because what forms the background is not commonly noticed, and besides, magic is fun and mysterious. Everything humans do is done against  a cultural background.  This background was created by successive agreements among and between many many groups of people.  That does not mean that when I decide to do something new...