Posts from — September 2008

Does the morality of society, on the whole, improve? It would be extremely naïve to answer with a straightforward “yes”: the 20^th and 21^st centuries have seen atrocities that more than match the most reprehensible of history’s offerings. But if we adjust the timescale to one far larger than that of centuries, and imagine instead the whole of human history, present, and future, then does the situation change? Or is humanity doomed, by its very nature, to stay at roughly the same moral level? [Read more →]

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how can we even speak of beauty? It must be, at least in part, an objective phenomenon: that is to say, we need an objective understanding of subjectivity. [Read more →]

The expression “truth is stranger than fiction”, or at least the overuse of it, is a prime example of lazy thinking. The truth is, truth is only stranger than fiction by virtue of its being true. Reality has an unfair advantage over fiction in this regard. If an outlandish piece of fiction, whose strangeness does not otherwise particularly strike any reader, were to occur in real life, people would still say that truth is stranger than fiction. But if it followed the fiction to the letter, how can it be stranger? [Read more →]