E.G.

"Me! Hear! My foreign ear--the sounds of welcome near!"

egegeg.me

Typepad's death.

Long ago, someone gave me a lifetime subscription to Typepad. I used it for a while, and then I stopped for a while, and then I started again. I like the ritual of producing a blog post every Sunday. ...

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Sinead O'Connor's appropriation of the Catholic Church and other things.

I'm listening to Ethel Cain's Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. I am thinking about Ethel Cain's interest, in much of her work, in the uses of Christianity by ordinary people who think of thems...

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Theistic moral science vs. realistic moral faith.

Basl and Coons memorably worry about inferential movements from ought to is. Such movements constitute attempts at what they call moral science. There seems to be something fishy about such inferences...

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Does wrongness have to be tropic in order to be normatively potent?

According to a view I find appealing, when somebody does something wrong, there are three particulars involved. There's the particular agent who's done the wrong thing; there's the particular action t...

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Scattered thoughts on absurdity and the future.

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis writes: Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed...

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Bret Stephens's defense of Israel against the charge of genocide.

Bret Stephens says: [T]here is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is ...

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Occasionalist pictures and perception.

Let's say an Occasionalist picture is any picture where (a) there is some agent S, and (b) there is some object O, and (c) S and O cannot directly interact (S cannot influence O, and O cannot influenc...

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Veganism is collective bargaining.

My opinion is that we should be faithful vegans: We should consistently and constantly follow veganism's rules. On an alternative view, we should be economic half-vegans. An economic half-vegan is som...

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My Dad's views on money.

My Dad was pretty choosy when it came to ideas. If you wanted to persuade him of anything that he didn't already believe, you'd usually have your work cut out for you. But when he did find an idea he....

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Let's not hope that MAGA incoherence will save us.

Kevin Vallier says that the American right is now a "strange blend" of three things: (1) Techno-optimism, exemplified by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Trumpist, who thinks that "the forces...

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Graceful vs. confrontational activism.

Sarah McBride advocates a politics of grace. In a recent conversation with Ezra Klein, she defines grace like this: I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good ...

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Let's not hope that beauty will save us.

I think the general type of view that Errol Lord presents in this paper is somewhat widely held, and Lord develops a sophisticated version of the view. For these reasons, the paper is valuable. But I ...

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AI friends will make us weird to each other.

Conversation is like dancing. Some conversations are like square dances, some conversations are like mosh pits, and so on. If someone who's used to having mosh-pit conversations is paired up with some...

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Inward light and Hare's Paradox: mutually illuminating, maybe.

Inward light is what I take to be the central idea of Quakerism. In its main forms, it has the following four features: It's in you: To find inward light, you're supposed to look inside yourself. This...

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The MAGA aesthetic.

Tim Kenyon and Jennifer Saul have observed that Trump often "appear[s] uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods." They say he is a "bald-faced bullshitter." A bald-faced bullshitter is o...

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The inertness of desert.

Some people say that there is no such thing as desert. They say that bad people do not deserve to suffer, and that good people do not deserve to be rewarded. One way to reach such a view is via...

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Flagrant evil.

There are many different views about what the basic stuff of material reality is. Some have said, for instance, that everything either is an atom or is made out of atoms; others have said that, in add...

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Intuitional diversity in the philosophy profession.

A few days ago, a somewhat prominent philosopher created a hullabaloo on Facebook by suggesting that hiring people "on the basis of" race or gender is unjustifiable, and is illegal, yet is commonplace...

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Second-order stoicism.

Recently, for a little while, many philosophers were toying with stoicism. Happily, the stoicism trend seems to be dying out. Here's The worst form of stoicism: The world around you is completely outs...

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Veganism, specifically.

We should not just be in the neighborhood of vegan. For example, we should not be vegetarian. We should not be flexitarian. We should not be reducetarian. We should be vegan, specifically, rather than...

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Moral reasons as deontic grounds.

Consider: The Darwall-Dancy definition of moral reasons: A reason to φ is a moral reason to φ =def it is the sort of reason that can, in the right circumstances, give rise to a moral obligation to φ. ...

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Our distance from ourselves.

I saw Mickey 17 in the theater the other day, and it made me worry about whether I might be wrong in my belief that we have relationships (relationships of the folk sort) with ourselves. I won't bothe...

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Directed obligations in random beneficiary cases.

I'm a fan of the view that All moral obligations are directed: If S1 has a moral obligation to φ, then there is some individual, S2, to whom this obligation to φ is owed. The view runs into problems w...

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Anti-reductionism about relationship tokens.

To illustrate the distinction between relationship tokens and relationship types, consider: Huck's friendship with Jim is a different thing than Bert's friendship with Ernie. These two things are dist...

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The People's Bribe.

I don't see why the following very simple idea isn't good. The People's Bribe (1) Key decision-makers (KDMs) in the federal government are guaranteed a large income for life. (2) Apart from whatever t...

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Let's not accept all moral-conceptual freebies.

A standard (I think) story: Before the chemical composition of water was known, people didn't know, and couldn't know, that water=H2O. But they still had the (or a) concept of water. It's just that th...

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A vignette approach to well-being might be enough.

It is widely and, I think, correctly thought that if The desire-satisfaction account of well-being: For any individual S, S's well-being consists in S's desires being satisfied, such that S is made be...

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A moment that precludes what it requires.

Compare and contrast: Curtis Yarvin and Elizabeth Anderson. Yarvin's signature idea is that the United States should not be a democracy and should instead be a dictatorship. He thinks the country shou...

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The natural.

Here is the idea of naturalness that I like the most: A fact F is natural if and only if either (i) F is brutely natural or (ii) F explains (= substantively contributes to the best explanation of) at ...

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