#Image attribution: Michael D Beckwith, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rijks_Museum_Library_(243776563).jpeg
Moral Progress: A Controversial Yet Important Idea
“A theory of progress can help guide the future of ethics by locating this “low-hanging ethical fruit” of intertheoretical moral consensus, which has a greater probability of being morally good, as well as defended by future generations of people and moral philosophers than views that only rely on a particular or fringe moral view.”
"The lesson here for contemporary politics is clear and significant. Rather than disavowing our circumstances and dismissing our cultural and intellectual traditions as morally compromised or tainted by history, we ought to be examining the long-term historical processes that have led us to this conjuncture and employing the existing resources at our disposal to surmount its challenges."
#Image attribution: Jakob Schlesinger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jakob_Schlesinger_-_Hegel_1831.jpg
Western and non-Western, classic and contemporary, longer and shorter, verbal and visual, accessible and challenging. With 72 readings by thinkers from around the world―Plato to Toni Morrison, Lao Tzu to Aung San Suu Kyi― Reading the World is the only great ideas reader for composition students that offers a truly global perspective.
Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.
Centuries ago, our society buried profound differences of conscience, ideas, and faith, and in their place erected facts, which did not seem to rise or fall on pesky political and philosophical questions. But the power of facts is now waning, not because we don’t have enough of them but because we have so many.