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.