The first part of the talk will be looking at what is moral beauty. We'll start with the ancient Stoics and we will fast forward about 1600 years to the Earl of Shaftesbury in England. Then we'll come up to contemporary times. How can we approach moral beauty? What does it mean for us today? And then the second segment of the talk will be some suggestions for how we can cultivate moral beauty today and make our lives more beautiful.
This guest post is a transcription of my friend Brittany Polat's talk at Stoicon 2023. It was previously published on Brittany's Substack, Stoicism for Humans, and includes the themes of virtue, moral progress, and Shaftesbury’s views on beauty and nature. I hope you find this very inspirational topic useful in your own life.
The first part of the talk will be looking at what is moral beauty. We'll start with the ancient Stoics and we will fast forward about 1600 years to the Earl of Shaftesbury in England. Then we'll come up to contemporary times. How can we approach moral beauty? What does it mean for us today? And then the second segment of the talk will be some suggestions for how we can cultivate moral beauty today and make our lives more beautiful.
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Recent studies have highlighted a disturbing trend: over 50 percent of American adults haven't read a book in the past year. Worse still, fewer younger people are reading, and they read less than half the amount of older generations.
This is a unfortunate, since reading has so many scientifically-backed benefits: it increases intelligence, improves memory (especially in later life), makes it easier to relate to others, reduces stress, helps us to sleep better, and more. So why aren't people reading as much as they once did? And what can be done to reverse this trend? In this post, I take a stab at answering both those questions. Here are 5 reasons why people aren't reading, and 5 good solutions to this problem: As we approach the Winter Solstice and Christmas Day, my thoughts often turn to the beauty and majesty of the natural world.
The last several years have seen a spate of books published about living a life closer to nature. They range in topic from how spending time in nature improves our health, enriches our lives and our children's lives, provides us with a sense of beauty and transcendence, deepens faith, improves creativity, and much more. I have created a list of my favorite books from this genre that I hope you enjoy this holiday season: I was recently interviewed about Stoicism and fast fashion by Hannah Korbman, a current student at Binghamton University studying Philosophy, Politics, and Law. The interview, which I have republished here, is part of Hannah's final project, a Stoic magazine, for her seminar on Stoicism and politics.
Hannah defines fast fashion as, "An approach to the design, creation, and marketing of clothing fashions that emphasizes making fashion trends quickly and cheaply available to consumers." The interview gave me an opportunity to focus on Stoic philosophy as it can be applied to our modern decisions on what to wear, trends, consumerism, and the virtue of moderation, all topics I hadn't directly considered before. The final product has made for some interesting reading, and I hope you'll check it out: Most of us just want to be decent people, lead good lives and be happy. But there is an irreconcilable fact that antisocial and predatory people - psychopaths and sociopaths - walk among us. Robert Hare, PhD, argues that 1 percent of people are psychopaths, while the clinical psychologist Martha Stout puts the figure closer to 4 percent of the population. These individuals often have Cluster-B traits such as anti-social personality disorder.
The presence of predatory and antisocial individuals in the general population is a major problem for several reasons. First, anti-social people inflict a lot of damage on other people and society at large. Second, psychopathy especially is studied far less than other clinical disorders. And finally, most people are not trained to identify individuals with psychopathy and other antisocial personality disorders, and some do not, or will not, even acknowledge its sinister presence in others at all. None of us are completely immune from the manipulative or aggressive behavior of antisocial personality types. It turns out that good, regular people tend to have a lot of blind spots when it comes to evaluating the character of others, identifying antisocial behavior, assessing risk, and determining who to trust. Even if you pride yourself on being a good judge of character, crime statistics show that the majority of people are often wrong. I've come across a lot of helpful expert information on how to protect yourself that I'll share with you in this post. Here's how to be a better judge of character: It's time for this year's iteration of the According to Cicero series. I've been writing these posts since 2016, and they are a lot of fun, as they allow me to explore ancient Roman history, culture, philosophy, and how Cicero's ideas can be applied today.
Cicero has garnered renewed attention in recent years. He was a Roman Senator whose writings, as Historian Edward Gibbon put it, “breathed the spirit of freedom.” Particularly influential was his idea of natural law, followed by John Locke and other enlightenment thinkers: Human nature included reason, which could discover justice, which was the basis of law. Voltaire said “He taught us how to think.” This month's post will focus on 3 of Cicero's opinions that may be unpopular, but are likely quite correct. Read on to find out what they are: Parenting really is the ultimate time management challenge. The reason is simple. Once you become a parent, you feel you now have that responsibility, plus everything you were trying to do or maintain from before you had children. Time to Parent shows us how to work smarter not harder when it comes to what we do with our time.
In last month's post, I described how I had to take a hiatus from blogging during 2014-2015 around the birth of my first child. I simply couldn't figure out how to get enough time to work on the blog. As I learned over the years, the good news is that you can still manage your time well once you have children, you just have to become much more strategic about it, and that is what Time to Parent is about. The book, by professional organizer and productivity consultant Julie Morgenstern, is a blessing for parents, and I highly recommend it. Time to Parent is unlike anything I have read before, as Morgenstern organizes life as a parent into two main categories, "Raising a Human Being," and "Being a Human Being," each with four essential quadrants which represent how we should be spending our time. Parents are often stressed about the busyness in their lives and how to meet their child’s needs along with all the other demands of life. I honestly think this book helps to take much of that stress away. Read on for my full review: Common Sense Ethics is turning 10! To celebrate the site's 10th birthday, a bit of reflection about why I started CSE, as well as a list of the best posts from the past decade, is in order. I've also included a throwback graphic above from the original site.
When I started the website back in 2013, I had no idea I'd spend 10 years on it, meet all kinds of friends from all over the world, and publish two books. But my motivation for writing has not changed much as the time has passed. Back in 2015 I wrote: "I started the blog because I'm genuinely concerned about a lot of the distressing behaviors and issues that we see in our society. I'm interested in discussing ethical and psychological issues that may be at the root of moral problems. I also enjoy presenting solutions that have helped me to build my own character and made me a happier person my own life. I hope that this blog will help others." To celebrate, I've made a list of my favorite posts, one for each year. In some cases it was hard to choose my favorite, so I picked a runner up. These selections are not necessarily the most popular posts, but they are my personal favorites, and range in subject from the ethics of self-defense, philosophical maxims for growth, movies, Stoicism and Cynicism, books, TV shows, cognitive biases, Cicero's fortitude, propaganda, the divisiveness of partisan politics, taking risks for philosophy and freedom, the healing balm of the natural world, family, culture, and much more. Great cinema, and great art in general, can enhance our lives with a sense of joy and meaning. Such excellent films make us laugh, cry, and get us thinking about the deeper significance of life. I've been wanting to write a post for a while about some highly philosophical films that I really enjoyed watching. Below, I'll share three of the best with you.
For those who haven't seen these films, while I summarize and discuss the philosophical themes, I think I have been careful not to reveal anything that would spoil the movie or reveal the entire plot. Finally, before we dive in, one other excellent movie that tops my list of philosophical films is the sword and sorcery film Solomon Kane, but I already did a detailed write-up of it back in 2016 that you can read here. Now, let's discuss three other great philosophical films to watch tonight: In this provocative discussion, I interview philosopher Dan Demetriou about his work on sexual ethics and self-defense.
We discuss societal trends which are leading to Dan's (Gen Y) students having less sex than prior generations and being more sexually unhappy on the whole. Dan discusses statistics indicating a that high percent of young men today are sexless, why people are dating or getting married less frequently, and the negative implications that this may have for Western civilization. Dan also discusses his work on "sexual creepiness," why people get called creepy, and when it might be fair or unfair to classify someone as "creepy." We also discuss self-defense, pacifism, and how Dan's argument for dignity informs the gun rights debate from a position that both left and right might agree on. Support Common Sense Ethics to see more videos like this: Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?busine... Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/commonsenseet... Kofi: https://ko-fi.com/commonsenseethics%E... |
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