Sublime

Thus inequality in our time. Is it a political stability problem? Perhaps in a controlocracy backed by big militaries, no. Is it a moral problem? But morality is a question of ideology, one’s imaginary relationship to the real situation, and many find it easy to imagine that you get what you deserve, and so on. So morality is a slippery business. S

It took only a couple of weeks of working for Sam before Caroline Ellison called her mother and sobbed into the phone that she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. She’d first met Sam at Jane Street, in the summer before her senior year at Stanford, after he’d been assigned to teach her class of interns how to trade. “I was kind of, like, t

This is how FAIRNESS impacts our perception of value. Most people above age five, and not actively engaged in politics, understand the concept of fairness. We recognize it instantly when we see it or talk about

I can summarize a thousand years of moral philosophy in a few sentences: pre–Hobbes and Bentham, human nature was viewed as a battle between our desire to be good and our temptations to behave badly, and the gist of moral philosophy and religious faith was that we should treat each other as we want to be treated ourselves—the golden rule—and we sho

We think that human beings, at least in ethical theory, all have equal rights, and that justice involves equality; Aristotle thinks that justice involves, not equality, but right proportion, which is only sometimes equality

Properly understood, the difference principle is concerned not just with the distribution of income and wealth, but with the concentration of economic power and control, and with the extent to which people have opportunities for self-respect, including through work.

From observing Elliott Smith I learned that being a decent person is terribly important, but being a “nice guy” is not important at all.