Moral Relativism and Moral Realism
Moral relativists, also known as moral “subjectivists,” believe that all moral perspectives are equal. Thus, we should be tolerant of other people’s moral views even when they…
Cultural Relativism
The argument for cultural relativism is this: 1. All moral principles and rules apply only to the culture, time and place from which they arise. There are…
Clare Graves, Spiral Dynamics, and the Purple/Blue Hybrid
The pathological version of Green thinking flattens Clare Grave’s hierarchy of moral development because it rejects the notion of superior and inferior. Strangely enough, the tendency has…
Taleb and Business Ethics
Many of this semester’s readings will be taken from Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He first rose to fame with his 2007 book Black Swan, the title…
Whom Do We Imitate?
We imitate absolutely everybody, at least potentially. We will imitate homeless drug addicts with psychiatric disorders, our boss, celebrities, and anyone we interact with socially. When anyone…
Plato and Love
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and all your soul. And your neighbor as yourself. This is the first and…
Monism vs the Trinity
There seems to be some universal tendency to want to find the single underlying thing or principle that unites and explains everything. The person regarded as the…
God Saw all that He had Made, and Behold, It was very Good
The line from Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” is quite a challenge to faith. How easy it…
Nostalgia
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the…
Clare Graves and Spiral Dynamics
Clare Graves is an American psychologist who started teaching in the 1940s and retired in 1978. His “emergent cyclical theory of human development” began by asking people…
Agency and the Criminal Justice System: Agency for Me, but Not for Thee
An agent is the locus of decision-making. If determinism is true, and there is no free will, then no person is “deciding” anything. Agency would be an…
Prisons and Punishment
Gnosticism imagines that the disorder and conflicts of earthly existence can be overcome with gnosis – special knowledge; insight and learning. Ruth Gilmore Wilson, a prison abolitionist…
The Burden of Proof
The phrase “burden of proof” has to do with who it is who needs to back up his claims with evidence; the one who needs to prove…
The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
The perfect is the enemy of the good means that aiming at perfection can mean not doing the good that can be done. When this occurs, it…
Why Don’t Nihilists Remain Silent? For mickvet
Shakespeare’s Macbeth speaks the following lines: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time;…
