Given the fact that Martin Scorsese stands a good chance of winning the Best Director Oscar in a few weeks, I thought it might be a good time to ask: To what degree is Scorsese responsible for the Iraq war?
Okay, that’s absurd. More specifically, and more seriously, I’m bringing up the issue of violence [...]
I don’t have much of a review of the film, at least on par with Mike’s reviews. I enjoyed it whole lot more than I thought I would. It’s an action film about illegal diamond mining in Africa with some unexpected plot twists, powered by Leonardo DiCaprio’s finest performance in recent years. [...]
Question: What is the ethical obligation of the West to the people of Darfur?
Here in California there are now ads on TV in which several actors pose as “persons on the street” and read excerpts of letters from the people of Darfur that speak of numerous horrors. At the end of the ad the [...]
Now it’s my turn to follow up on an earlier comments thread. After exposing myself to be a cold-hearted snake for not feeling substantial empathy for the Katrina victims, I went further and proposed that is impossible for us non-Katrina survivors to every really understand their plight, and thus some kind of detached compassion was the best response to the calamity. I’d like to offer both a defense of my lack of sentiment and a critique of empathy itself, basing my points on two novels by the 20th century British author Graham Greene. (I have tried my best to not give away the endings in the novels.)
The problem with empathy is that it relies on understanding, and understanding is so subjective a process that it defies our best efforts, inevitiably leaving us reliant on a jumble of personal instincts and impressions that we convert into a workable truth. If we admit that we can never truly understand each other, is it possible to experience empathy for another person? Or is it better to assume we can understand each other on some level, perhaps an intangible connection that binds us together and acts as a kind of social glue for society? Going even further, the degree to which we process the world through media like television, film, radio, and the internet offers up a new, even more ambiguous realm for relating to other people. I can’t address the all of the layers of my query, but I do think Greene’s novels provide an interesting lens through which to view the our relationships with other people.
[This is a weird hodge-podge I feel I need to explain before one goes on: I had written a post that was pretty good in explaining my views, but then ended up writing what I think is a more clear explanation of my views in a comment to Nate’s post, so I have decided to [...]
Ethical questions posed in the comment thread of the ‘When the Levees Broke’ post have inspired me to compile my thoughts into a more cohesive form. In the following post my references to ‘The Social Contract’ pertain to the exemplar of the subject, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s text, ‘The Social Contract’, as it anticipated the character [...]
I am going to share some highlights from the book, with the hopes of coming back to this at another time to expand into a commentary post.
“A necessary evil cannot really be an evil at all, since it is a characteristic of evil that it is not necessary but gratuitous” (p. 17)
“In a war on [...]
Further elucidation of my steadfast belief in the inherent value of tacit knowledge, from the nineteenth century scribe William Hazlitt:
“It is, I confess, strange to me that men who pretend to more than usual accuracy in distinguishing and analyzing, should insist that in treating of human nature, of moral good and evil, the nominal differences [...]
I intend to actually contribute something of my own thoughts on this in the near future, but for now i would like to quote in full the conclusion of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘the Ethics of Ambiguity’. this is a manifesto after my own heart:
“Is this kind of ethics individualistic or not? Yes, if one [...]
I want to untangle the lines of communication if only partially in order to address a higher level issue that so often goes unsaid (my sense of decorum is already flaring up and I haven’t even started to transgress anything). I want to talk about the ego as it pertains to communication. I [...]
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