Philosophy
Working in Gettysburg and driving past the cemetery where Lincoln delivered his address every morning, you understand the ways in which we take things and places and grant them a special status. I have a student who argues that this status is dignity and is the same sort of dignity we grant to human beings. Kant argues that with dignity comes moral consideration and therefore, my student contends, we can understand why certain things that may not have been thought to be moral objects become objects of moral consideration.
It made think of a story told by The Old Man when he and mom got back from a trip to Las Vegas. They were in a nice restaurant and at the table next to them was a small group of college students who had clearly just hit for a bunch of money in the casino. They used it to buy an incredibly expensive bottle of wine which they were swilling. The quality of the wine, the specialness of the vintage, was clearly unappreciated. The Old Man spoke of this not in objective terms of reporting facts, but indignantly. The bottle of wine was being treated without the proper sense of dignity, something it deserved for being what it is. Similarly, a longtime baseball card collector I was talking with recently was saying how his wife cannot understand why his 1909 Honus Wagner card is not "just a piece of cardboard."
Do these sorts of things have dignity and does it carry with it a certain moral responsibility for us? Or is it just that we have an attachment that creates a sense like dignity, but is different?
- Cancer, Dignity, And Health Care
I've been featuring pieces by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Cohn over at the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance Blog as they come out and he's got a new piece up about cancer and the Affordable Care Act. The interesting notion in Cohn's...
- Can You Really Own A Position?
I've been thinking about the use of the verb to own with respect to an intellectual view. When a student is being wishy-washy about a proposition he or she is arguing for and clearly believes, I'll tell the student to "own the position." ...
- So What Are These Ethical Issues Around Gay Marriage?
With North Carolina's enshrinement of bigotry into their state constitution and Obama's evolution to accepting the need for gay men and lesbians to receive fair and equal treatment under the law, there has been lots of talk about the ethical dilemma...
- Is There Progress In Art? Society?
I'm working through Max Weber's methodological essays and one of the points he argues is that social progress is a myth. Across the ideological spectrum of founding fathers of sociology, from Marx's communist view to Spenser's free...
- Grammar Curmudeons
Had a student ask yesterday about grammatical pet peeves. His was "irregardless." My big three are: 1) "Quote" used for "quotation." Quote is a verb. You quote someone. What you write down is not a quote, but a quotation. ...
Philosophy
The Dignity of Inanimate Objects
Working in Gettysburg and driving past the cemetery where Lincoln delivered his address every morning, you understand the ways in which we take things and places and grant them a special status. I have a student who argues that this status is dignity and is the same sort of dignity we grant to human beings. Kant argues that with dignity comes moral consideration and therefore, my student contends, we can understand why certain things that may not have been thought to be moral objects become objects of moral consideration.
It made think of a story told by The Old Man when he and mom got back from a trip to Las Vegas. They were in a nice restaurant and at the table next to them was a small group of college students who had clearly just hit for a bunch of money in the casino. They used it to buy an incredibly expensive bottle of wine which they were swilling. The quality of the wine, the specialness of the vintage, was clearly unappreciated. The Old Man spoke of this not in objective terms of reporting facts, but indignantly. The bottle of wine was being treated without the proper sense of dignity, something it deserved for being what it is. Similarly, a longtime baseball card collector I was talking with recently was saying how his wife cannot understand why his 1909 Honus Wagner card is not "just a piece of cardboard."
Do these sorts of things have dignity and does it carry with it a certain moral responsibility for us? Or is it just that we have an attachment that creates a sense like dignity, but is different?
- Cancer, Dignity, And Health Care
I've been featuring pieces by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Cohn over at the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance Blog as they come out and he's got a new piece up about cancer and the Affordable Care Act. The interesting notion in Cohn's...
- Can You Really Own A Position?
I've been thinking about the use of the verb to own with respect to an intellectual view. When a student is being wishy-washy about a proposition he or she is arguing for and clearly believes, I'll tell the student to "own the position." ...
- So What Are These Ethical Issues Around Gay Marriage?
With North Carolina's enshrinement of bigotry into their state constitution and Obama's evolution to accepting the need for gay men and lesbians to receive fair and equal treatment under the law, there has been lots of talk about the ethical dilemma...
- Is There Progress In Art? Society?
I'm working through Max Weber's methodological essays and one of the points he argues is that social progress is a myth. Across the ideological spectrum of founding fathers of sociology, from Marx's communist view to Spenser's free...
- Grammar Curmudeons
Had a student ask yesterday about grammatical pet peeves. His was "irregardless." My big three are: 1) "Quote" used for "quotation." Quote is a verb. You quote someone. What you write down is not a quote, but a quotation. ...