Sublime

What is ‘the function of human beings’? Aristotle approaches an answer to this question by analogies. What makes a good flute-player? Skill at playing the flute. A good carpenter? One good at making things from wood. Each is ‘good’ because he performs his particular function, his work (ergon), well. To do his work well is the virtue or excellence (

Philosophen verzichten bis heute gern darauf, uns als das anzusehen, was wir sind: ein Tier, eine Primatenspezies mit ihren entsprechenden sozialen Bedürfnissen.

Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world who behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in

The following instances of the application of fables to particular occasions are recorded. The fable of The Belly and the Members, which is reputed to be the oldest in existence, is of sterling excellence, as well as of venerable antiquity.[43] Its lucid moral is truth in essence. The logic of its conclusion is as invulnerable as the demonstration

It’s wrong to rape a girl—whether she knows what’s happening or not— because she has intrinsic dignity and rights. For the same reason, it’s wrong to mock and insult the mentally challenged even if they don’t seem to be hurt by these verbal assaults. Where then do dignity and rights come from in a world of electrons and selfish genes?

It is obviously essential to justice that unsectarian education should cut both ways; and that if the orthodox must cut out the statement that he has a Divine origin, the materialist must cut out the statement that man has a wholly and exclusively bestial origin. The difficulty arises from the combination of the widening of education with the exclu