Three
Third annoying person in my anthropology tutorial: People just act out of self-interest.
Professor Blackburn’s response: Often people don’t act with enough self interest and ruin their lives by doing things like murdering people over a love affair and wind up going to prison. More importantly, saying this kind of thing is lazy and proves nothing. It gives the illusion of explaining everything, and therefore it explains nothing.
I would have read more but Eleanor had gotten out of the paddle pool and was busy not being good over by the rosemary and I had to go and stop her. Still, I rather like Mr. Blackburn, and I look forward to hearing what else he has to say.
In the afternoon Eleanor played in her paddle pool and I carried on reading. I went and lay down on the grass under the trees. When the light of the sun comes to you through the cool green of leaves it is a fine tranquil thing. I started a book called Being Good by Simon Blackburn. It’s interesting although sometimes I have to reread bits to really get it. The author is trying to explain to me what ethics are and why they are unpopular.
“Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world’s resources, or the ways our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world.” He’s right of course. Sometimes when I reveal a particular absurdity to my History students (things people said about women getting the vote, or the intellectual capacity of the Negro, that kind of thing) I also say: “don’t worry, in 200 years people will be appalled by us.” I hope this is true. I hope that in 200 years people will find our global injustices and arrogance appalling, because that will mean things have changed.
Blackburn’s book begins by going through all the reasons people use for dismissing ethics. This bit of the book would have been really handy if I’d had it in tutorials at university.
First annoying person in my anthropology tutorial: God is dead. There are no morals.
Professor Blackburn’s response: Good things exist separately from God. We know this because God also must decide what is good, (gay=bad, straight=good) and then punish accordingly.
Second annoying person in my anthropology tutorial: It’s all relative.
Professor Blackburn’s response: Quite probably, but given that we have to make a decision what are we actually going to do that we think is best?
“Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world’s resources, or the ways our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world.” He’s right of course. Sometimes when I reveal a particular absurdity to my History students (things people said about women getting the vote, or the intellectual capacity of the Negro, that kind of thing) I also say: “don’t worry, in 200 years people will be appalled by us.” I hope this is true. I hope that in 200 years people will find our global injustices and arrogance appalling, because that will mean things have changed.
Blackburn’s book begins by going through all the reasons people use for dismissing ethics. This bit of the book would have been really handy if I’d had it in tutorials at university.First annoying person in my anthropology tutorial: God is dead. There are no morals.
Professor Blackburn’s response: Good things exist separately from God. We know this because God also must decide what is good, (gay=bad, straight=good) and then punish accordingly.
Second annoying person in my anthropology tutorial: It’s all relative.
Professor Blackburn’s response: Quite probably, but given that we have to make a decision what are we actually going to do that we think is best?
Third annoying person in my anthropology tutorial: People just act out of self-interest.Professor Blackburn’s response: Often people don’t act with enough self interest and ruin their lives by doing things like murdering people over a love affair and wind up going to prison. More importantly, saying this kind of thing is lazy and proves nothing. It gives the illusion of explaining everything, and therefore it explains nothing.
I would have read more but Eleanor had gotten out of the paddle pool and was busy not being good over by the rosemary and I had to go and stop her. Still, I rather like Mr. Blackburn, and I look forward to hearing what else he has to say.
1 comment:
I left this comment because no one else had = I was at school and bored at the time.
Post a Comment