Monthly Archives: February 2016

A Letter to My Students

February 24, 2016 · by · in Open Letters, South Korea, Teaching · 2 Comments

Dear Students,   Welcome back to Mokwon University. I hope you had a wonderful vacation and I hope you’re rested for the new semester but what I really hope is that you take the opportunity to do something cool in 2016. It’s true that cool stuff is more fun but that’s not my biggest reason […]

The Doomed Moralists, Part Two

February 21, 2016 · by · in Culture, logic, Opinion, Philosophy, Power · 9 Comments

In Part One of the Doomed Moralists, I argued that a moral practice becomes good because it makes a society more powerful. I don’t want to restate too much, but I took the view that good and bad are constantly evolving concepts that are always tested in the crucible of competition. Fellow writer Malcolm Greenhill […]

The Doomed Moralists

February 16, 2016 · by · in Coercive Power, Culture, Forms of Power, Persuasion, Philosophy, Power · 24 Comments

I recently had the opportunity to sample The Partially Examined Life’s Robert Nozick episode and IQsquared’s Karl Marx discussion. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less and less amenable to both Nozick’s libertarianism and Marx’s, well, Marxism. It might just be early onset curmudgeon, perhaps blind prejudice but I’m going to at least try to […]