When should we say no?
If we don’t have the backbone to resist taking the opportunity to tell a little lie on an insurance claim or to keep a mistaken overpayment, how can we expect to be ready to refuse greater temptations?
ReadAuthor: Julian Baggini
Gray & Grayling reviewed
AC Grayling and John Gray are two of Britain’s best-known public philosophers, consistent and relentless in arguing for their respective world views. There, however, the similarities end. Grayling is the approachable, upbeat carrier of the Enlightenment torch, while Gray is the gloomy critic of uplifting myths of human progress and rationality.
ReadIs confusion good?
Those who cannot accept an absence of order often end up trying to create it, with disastrous results.
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Do your genes determine your entire life?
The idea that unconscious biological forces drive our beliefs and actions would seem to pose a real threat to our free will. We like to think that we make choices on the basis of our own conscious deliberations. But isn’t all that thinking things over irrelevant if our final decision was already written in our genetic code? And doesn’t the whole edifice of personal responsibility collapse if we accept that “my genes made me do it”?
ReadBusinesses on the mindfulness bandwagon
When people claim that “mindfulness works”, they can mean different things. There are claims that it promotes psychological flexibility, awareness, resilience, better decision-making, job performance, reduced absence rates and the ability to learn new tasks. No wonder businesses are interested.
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