Greatness, in the presidential sense, means transformation—not moral perfection.

"[Utilitarians], in the fashion of [Jeremy] Bentham, pronounce the greatest happiness of the greatest number to be the social end, although they fail to make it intelligible why the happiness of the greater number should be cogent as an end upon those who happen to belong to the lesser number."

~ Felix Adler from his essay “The Relation of Ethics to Social Science,” in H.J. Rogers, ed., Congress of Arts and Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), vol. 7, p. 673 [cited in Murray Rothbard's article 'Utilitarian Free-Market Economics']

The post Rubio’s Mystical and Racist View of the West is Anti-Civilization appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.

 

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While I’m campaigning, I have to restrict my comments in this newsletter to philosophy and history and other topics, rather than to current political events.

But occasionally, a seemingly obscure philosophical issue pops right up in the newspapers in a way that invites immediate commentary.

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Occasionally you come across an intellectual eating a chicken sandwich and “ruminating darkly about the existential quandaries of semi-literate farm animals.” Or you encounter in the wild a direct connection between Plato’s theory of concepts and Modern Monetary Theory, the crackpot economics to which we partly owe the burst of post-pandemic inflation. And of course, one of the most abstruse areas in philosophy, the philosophy of mind, is directly relevant to our evaluation of the potential and limits of artificial intelligence.

In the past few weeks, I came across another example, a weird lamentation in the Washington Post, of all places, that “Your Salted Caramel Mocha Latte Is Destroying Society.”

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If the Jones Act must be suspended to address national security emergencies, why do we keep it in place during times of peace? Why keep it around at all?

...and American Policymakers Follow Along.