This is a selection of 100 tweets from the book Bird on an Ethics Wire. Battles about Values in the Culture Wars (Margaret Somerville, McGill-Queen's University Press, Québec, 2015, 358 pp.)
- Experiencing amazement, wonder, and awe enriches our lives and can help us to find meaning, which is of the essence of being human, in a way that traditional philosophy alone cannot.
- We need to prepare the metaphorical soil in which the values we want to flourish can take root and grow.
- [We should] use reason as a “secondary verification process” to ensure that our decisions about values are wise and ethical. (I use “secondary” here in a chronological sense, not as indicating that reason is of secondary importance.)
- Effective informing requires abandoning “mystery and mastery” – the use of concepts and language that average people cannot understand – which is an exercise of control and exclusion of those not among the “chosen few” initiated to “mystery”.
- My response has been to ask them to judge me on the basis of the arguments I present and the ethical values I advance, rather than on the basis of what they think I may believe.
