Sublime

Jim is what I call a rugged individualist. His brand of individualism comes straight out of the philosophy of the Enlightenment era, the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the same philosophical roots as the American Revolution and soon after that the French Revolution. Gone forever was the doctrine of the divine right of kings. It got

Cho’s model works best in a society that lacks mobility and therefore produces plenty of long-term relationships and an abundance of extended-family relationships.

The attempt to found what Kant takes to be the maxims of morality on what Kant takes to be reason therefore fails just as surely as Kierkegaard’s attempt to discover a foundation for them in an act of choice failed; and the two failures are closely related. Kierkegaard and Kant agree in their conception of morality, but Kierkegaard inherits that

In order to figure out the most fair and equitable way to structure society, he proposed that the designers of said society operate behind a veil of ignorance. This means that they could not know who they would be in the society they were creating. If they designed the society without knowing their economic status, their ethnic background, talents

is in this case unable to compel him to a more satisfactory obedience. The fear of removal is the only check to these quasi-offences;

I can summarize a thousand years of moral philosophy in a few sentences: pre–Hobbes and Bentham, human nature was viewed as a battle between our desire to be good and our temptations to behave badly, and the gist of moral philosophy and religious faith was that we should treat each other as we want to be treated ourselves—the golden rule—and we