What the Left—and Everyone Else—Can Learn from the Public Pedagogy of Jordan Peterson A professor who instructs people to clean their rooms in lieu of protesting emerged in the fall of 2016 as an unlikely hero among many millennials—especially among young adult males who like YouTube. Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, became a Continue Reading …
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 14: Fairness
The Workers in the Vineyard is one of Jesus’s longest parables, and probably involves more moral concepts than any other: For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others Continue Reading …
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 13: Solidarity
Is Jesus's moral philosophy broad in scope, such that it includes a political morality, or narrower, consisting only of private virtues? This is the question we began debating in the previous installment. There, we considered two reasons why people may advocate the "narrow" view: clinging to an image of Jesus as presented in right-wing ideology, and the false dichotomy that Continue Reading …
Parables as a Guide to Jesus the Philosopher, Part 12: Personal or Political?
Jesus’s call to common living (the sharing of all money and possessions) is read by many as a political conviction about how society should be. And while this has not been the traditional interpretation of the Christian establishment, it is a popular means of arguing that Jesus intended his moral philosophy to be applied at a socioeconomic, as well as personal, level. In the Continue Reading …
Papal Environmentalism’s “Ecological Debt”
If you needed proof that Pope Francis's recent encyclical letter on care for the environment, Laudato si', was not only seminal but radical, it would be that it is now being published by Verso, a leading publisher of leftist continental philosophy. It is sad, then, that rather than focusing on the ideas themselves, all of the attention being given to this event is to Continue Reading …
Justice and the Dialectic of Anger and Guilt
Are those who can do as they wish powerful? For Socrates, acting on your own whim, killing whomever you please or obtaining great wealth does not make you powerful, if you act unjustly you are acting against your own good. It does not matter how extreme or sophisticated your ability to be unjust if this is all you can accomplish. Callicles offered Socrates a different view, Continue Reading …
Episode 97: Michael Sandel on Social Justice and the Self (Citizen Edition)
On his book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), mostly ch. 1 & 4. Classical liberalism from Locke to Rawls focuses on rights as primary: a good government is one that protects people from violations of their rights, and that's what social justice amounts to, though of course, there's some disagreement about what counts as a "right." Sandel thinks that there's Continue Reading …
Episode 97: Michael Sandel on Social Justice and the Self
On his book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), mostly ch. 1 & 4. Classical liberalism from Locke to Rawls focuses on rights as primary: a good government is one that protects people from violations of their rights, and that's what social justice amounts to, though of course, there's some disagreement about what counts as a "right." Sandel thinks that there's Continue Reading …