Philosophy

27
May

State of Nature

Graeber & Wengrow's Dawn of Everything opens with a discussion of the (admittedly one-sided, since Hobbes had been dead for a a century) debate between Hobbes and Rousseau on the state of nature: the way humans are in the absence of society. Hobbes holds that humans are, by nature, in a state of war against all others: in the absence of a social contract or bodies to enforce it, everyone's only incentive is to seek their own benefit. Rousseau contrasts this with an Edenic vision of true freedom, where the introduction of the law and private property serve as a

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3 min read
09
May

Who Is To Blame?

I think about responsibility a lot. Though the relevant muscles have atrophied quite a bit I did start out as a philosophy student after all. In a time when it feels to me like whatever threadbare moral fiber our nation used to have has eroded to nothing I wonder how much any one of us is to blame.

The thing about moral responsibility is that it necessarily requires agency. If it's not possible for us to have acted differently than we did, we can't really be blamed for our actions. If someone else threw me off a cliff and I

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3 min read