Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Let us begin by distinguishing between political liberalism and metaphysical liberalism. Political liberalism is focused on the activities and institutions of governance. Its rough outlines include insistence on certain basic rights, such as free speech, some level of respect for private property, the right to free assembly, etc.; and a preference for a certain type of governmental institutions: democratic, republican, non-hereditary, accountable, and so on. Many, many people are political liberals who are not what I would call "metaphysical liberals": these political liberals' own metaphysical beliefs may be traditionally Christian or Jewish or Muslim, for instance, but they believe that the best form of state is neutral between such commitments, and is broadly liberal in character. While they might strongly believe that, for instance, pre-marital sex is wrong (and not just "wrong for me"), they don't feel it is the place of the state to correct such mis...

Noah Millman, who typically seems to be an intelligent fellow, forwards two surprisingly fatuous contentions in this post . 1) "we can’t rely naively on an Aristotelean teleology which we now know has no empirical basis" Ah, someone must've had their final-cause-detection meter set on high, and still have failed to find any teleology! Because what else can Millman mean here? Four hundred years ago, the founders of modern science made a methodological choice: they would only look for efficient causes, and they would only consider efficient causation in their explanations. Final causation was excluded not because of any evidence that it does not exist, but because explanations in terms of final causes were thought to be unenlightening. That an enterprise which has deliberately excluded teleology from its explanations does not reveal to us any final causes is hardly surprising. 2) Millman next suggests that the hole created in Aristotelian ethics by removing teleology (which...

Consequentialism, I find,is typically espoused by people who like to see themselves as "hard-headed," practical, empirical sorts of folks. So, faced with something like the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan at the end of WWII, they say, "Unlike starry-eyed idealists, I am a realist: I consider the consequences. The US won the war; therefore, dropping the bombs was worth it." (Note: I am not saying all consequentialists would approve of dropping those atomic bombs. I am just presenting a typical sort of consequentialist argument.) They actually convince themselves that people subscribing to other ethical systems don't think of the consequences of actions! I guess it shows how easy it is too willfully blind oneself, because it ought to be rather obvious that the US winning the war was not quite the only consequences of dropping the bombs: there is also the minor consequence of a quarter of a million dead Japanese, and many more maimed and injured. The peop...

The situation (which I just saw on a TV show): two elderly women have their nephew move in with them. He terrifies them, bullies them, and turns them into his servants... or slaves, I guess, since he doesn't pay them. Then, one day, he is hit by a car. He doesn't want official attention drawn to what happened (for reasons irrelevant to our discussion), so when he arrives home, he asks his aunts not to call a doctor. He goes up to bed. One of his aunts tends to him, and sees he is very seriously injured. She suspects, in fact, that without medical attention he will die in his sleep. But she does nothing; in the morning he is, indeed, dead. Are the sisters morally culpable for not calling a doctor? Does the fact he has abused their hospitality weigh for or against the sisters? Does the fact the he explicitly declined help aid their case? Should they have taken into account the fact that he might be delirious, and not in the right mind to make a sound decision on needing a ...