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4 Reasons Why Free Speech is So Misunderstood Today

4/26/2024

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Freedom of speech, despite being a fundamental principle of liberal democracy going back to the Enlightenment, has recently become a dirty word. Why? Because in today's regressive environment, freedom of speech misunderstood. One misunderstanding essentially boils down to the fact that defending someone's right to free speech is not the same as endorsing their views. These two things get conflated all the time, probably because people are not well educated in history and civics, and NGOs, government officials, and even journalists are increasingly exploiting people's ignorance about freedom of speech.

Also, and I'm not going to mince words here, many people today who should know better are cowards and ideologues. Even most "liberals," no longer have the stomach to defend freedom of speech when it is used by someone they disagree with. People often argue that, "Hate speech isn't free speech," or, "We should crack down on misinformation." The problem is, it doesn't work like that. Free speech is all or nothing. The American Civil liberties Union historically held that:

"History teaches that the first target of government repression is never the last. If we do not come to the defense of the free speech rights of the most unpopular among us...then no one's liberty will be secure. In that sense, all First Amendment rights are 'indivisible.'"

Setting aside the thorny issue of what actually constitutes offensive speech, it's important to understand that we don't tolerate offensive speech because we agree with it. We tolerate offensive speech because that is the price we pay for being able to criticize the state. This is a key point to understand. In what follows, I'll break this point down, as well as the 3 other important reasons why freedom of speech is misunderstood today:


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Why Asking Questions is so Important for Debate

3/19/2024

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Just a quick post this month, since I'm strapped for time. This YouTube Channel, Secret Scholar Society, has been on my radar recently. And for good reason - it's run by a professor who went viral with his use of the Socratic Method for evaluating controversial student claims. 

​Here, professor Warren Smith, talks about why the Socratic Method is so powerful for debating, especially the method's employment of asking questions, rather than directly attacking a person's claims. I suggest checking out the video, but in a nutshell, here is why asking questions works so well to get to the truth:


  • ​It removes the person's ego from the equation. If you ask a question, rather than directly attack their claim, the other person is engaging with the question rather than with you and your perceived attack on their ego. 
  • When questioned, people give the answer in their own words, which helps us better define what exactly they mean and what we are talking about.
  • ​It allows you to debate someone without them realizing they are debating, while still offering the possibility that they might be right.
  • The purpose of asking questions is establishing that the issue at hand is either 1) more complicated than they assumed, or 2) arriving at the more objective truth. 

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The Inspirational Power of Moral Beauty

2/10/2024

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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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5 Reasons People Don't Read Anymore, And 5 Good Solutions

1/15/2024

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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: 



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4 Great Books About the Beauty and Transcendence of Nature

12/14/2023

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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:
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The Gaze of Foolish People: An Interview on Stoicism and Fashion

11/30/2023

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​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: 



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Psychopathy, Antisocial People & How to Protect Yourself

10/12/2023

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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:


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3 Unpopular (But Likely Correct) Opinions According to Cicero

9/7/2023

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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:
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Time to Parent by Julie Morgenstern: Book Review & Summary

8/12/2023

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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.

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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:


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Celebrating 10 Years With 10 Great Common Sense Ethics Posts

7/28/2023

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​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. 


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    Thank you for your interest in Common Sense Ethics! I'm Leah, a librarian and freelance editor with a background in history and philosophy.
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    3 Unpopular (But Likely Correct) Opinions According to Cicero

    Beauty in Philosophy, Ethics and Art: A Conversation with David Fideler

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