Author: Julian Baggini

Character Through Thick and Thin

etc.

​ABSTRACT: Concerns about making character formation a strand of public policy centre around both doubts about the empirical basis of such policies and the appropriate role of government in shaping and directing private life. To address both sets of concerns it is helpful to think of two key aspects of character in terms of their “thickness”. First, research in psychology has suggested that many aspects of character are highly variable according to situation. We can call these “thin” character traits are opposed to “thick” traits which are more robust. Second, some of the aspects of character being advocated as the appropriate object of public policy are based on capabilities and are normatively “thin”, in that they are not tied to any specific substantive conception of the good life. Some character traits, however, are normatively “thick”, and so their promotion would be tied to a substantive ideal. In both cases, thick and thin are matters of degree and there is not sharp distinction between the two. Nevertheless, the distinction is important and I will argue that a basic liberal position is that state policy should, in both respects, be as thin as possible, and I will attempt to sketch a means of determining what this is.

Read

Joy in the task

Articles & Essays, Food

We are not simply hedonic machines who thrive if supplied with things that tick certain boxes for sensory pleasure, aesthetic merit, and so on. We are knowing as well as sensing creatures, and knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them. Chocolate made from cocoa beans grown by people in near slave conditions should taste more bitter than a fairly traded bar, even if it does not in a blind tasting. Blindness, far from making tests fair, actually robs us of knowledge of what is most important, while perpetuating the illusion that all that really matters is how it feels or seems at the moment of consumption.

Read

Am I a nobody going nowhere?

The Shrink and The Sage

It’s not difficult to make people invisible. Just pan out so far that they become the smallest of blips in the immeasurable vastness of time and space, or zoom in so close that they become reduced to bundles of atoms, blindly obeying the rules of physics as purposelessly as space dust. One way reduces us to the particles of which we are made, the other to particles from which the universe is made.

Read

Confused? Maybe you’re not drinking enough

Articles & Essays, Food

We seem to have bought into a computational, ledger-based model of health which breaks everything down into its constituent parts and counts what goes in and out. Look at the reports I’ve highlighted and the key concepts are “BMI”, “calories” and “units of alcohol”, all things that can be measured and then used to create rulers with which to measure us. Our bodies, however, are more complicated than that. They are systems in which all the different elements work together. As soon as you try to isolate one, you lose the bigger picture and can easily be led astray.

Read