Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course still rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for the reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problem of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use." -- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue , p. 64

"For the subsequent history of moral philosophy has been a history of ramifying disagreement in which all of [Henry] Sidgwick 's attempted reconciliations of hitherto warring post-Enlightenment points of view into a synthesis -- which was itself intended to foreshadow a coming convergence of an even more complete kind -- I have been dissolved into new and multifarious conflicts. Universalizability theorists, utilitarians, existentialists, contractarians, those who assert the possibility of deriving morality from rational self-interest and those who deny it, those who uphold the overriding character of an interpersonal standpoint and those who insist upon the prerogatives of the self, disagree not only with each other but among themselves, and the certitude of those who maintain each point of view is matched only by their inability to produce rational arguments capable of securing agreement from their adversaries. Thus post-Sidgwickian moral philosophy, judged by the standards...

Imagine a post-apocalyptic world in which knowledge of the purpose of cooking had been lost. Many, many fragments of cookbooks remain in existence, but no one knows exactly what they are for -- people in this world eat all of their food raw -- only that their ancestors deemed them very, very important, and that somehow, these rituals are supposed to do something very positive for one and for one's community. (Seriously, it is interesting that someone who doesn't know what cooking is for might be able to read an entire cookbook and still not find out.) Cookbooks become the sacred scriptures of the time, and people perform the recipes in them in very solemn ceremonies, but no one realizes that what is produced was once intended to be eaten and to taste good. We would find all sorts of conflicting opinions on cooking. Some people would claim that cooking was all just subjective: one merely had to look at the huge variety of recipes put out by different writers of sacred cookbooks...