William Payne

Cancel culture has taken lots of criticism recently, and in so far as cancel culture means hastily judging people without trying to understand them, I’m on board. But for the same reason I worry about the […]

Cultural norms often go far beyond morality. Morality has nothing to say, for instance, about whether men should grow beards or women should wear veils or makeup. So what is accepted or disapproved of in a […]

I’ll have to research this one, but I’m pretty sure Nietzsche would count righteousness, the sense that bad must absolutely be punished. as a sublimated impulse to cruelty, a diseased manifestation of the will to […]

Thoughtful and lovely essay here:

Self-Censorship in the Academy. Two cheers for inclusivity | by Aaron Kunin | Dec, 2020 | Arc Digital

Through 3rd and most of 4th grade, I lived in Ganado, in the Navajo nation. I don’t recall a paved road in town. Horses and dogs roamed free. So did children. My friends and playmates were all Navajo save for one […]

Critical Thinking Note 27: Trust and IdentityWe are living through a period of deep mistrust. This is most obvious at the level of national politics where tens of millions of […]

In everyday language we often treat “subjective” and “biased” as synonyms and likewise “objective” and “unbiased”. But we don’t really need two different words to say the same thing, and this way of speaking […]

The futility of offending the offenders: We must speak out on behalf of the oppressed. Silence amounts to consent to their oppression. But, then there is the question of how to speak out when you see people […]

Knowledge and understanding both require some critical thinking skill. But they aren’t the same thing and cultivating some understanding of how they differ is a worthy critical thinking exercise in itself. […]

Important Essay here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/the-end-of-denial/614194/. Kendi’s policy recommendations are made clear at the end.

“The abolition of slavery seemed as impossible […]

Barr Says He Sees no Systemic Racism in Policinghttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/us/politics/justice-department-barr-racism-police.html?searchResultPosition=1

Speaking as an avid fruit preserver, I wish […]

Discussion post in PHIL&101 in response to student asking, “If there are moral truths, should everyone believe them?”

There is a sense in which everyone should believe and abide by truths. The goal of rational […]

Personal preferences would be a good examples of things that are purely subjective. There is no fact of the matter to discover about whether chocolate tastes better than vanilla. And matters of personal […]

Twenty four notes into this series, it has been a while since we’ve laid out the basics. So, time for another pass. Critical Thinking is basically about getting at truths and avoiding falsehoods as best we can. […]

This is bullshit. In his seminal analysis of the concept, philosopher Harry Frankfurt identifies lack of regard for the truth as the essential core of bullshit. Our country today is what it looks like when […]

Imagine your love is forbidden. Imagine that the kinds of relationships that animate your affection, bring meaning to your life and inspire your devotion are deemed taboo, intolerable, unacceptable to polite […]

Of course, you have a right to your opinion. It’s not clear what it might mean to assert this as a right, since no one could possibly force a person to give up an opinion they are attached to. But when people […]

Some things are up to us, other aren’t. Some things we get to decide. Some things we have to figure out. Where does morality fit in these categories? We do get to decide what standards we will uphold and hold […]

Click below for the more-or-less self-explanatory slides for my 2019 Earth week talk at BC.

Climate-vs-NihilismDownload

We live in unreasonable times. This much seems clear. It’s not just that people are easily wounded, indignant on a dime, or chronically resentful, though we see plenty of that. But people also seem to be […]