Nudging is one of the most fundamental forms of undermining personal responsibility, because it robs individuals not only from free choice, but from the opportunity of learning to make choices.
A philosophical text might be dense and hardly readable, but that is no guarantee that its structure is methodologically sound.
The very fact that this false platitude is reiterated endlessly, however, produces the cognitive illusion that it has some credibility.
There are still people and herds somewhere, but not with us, my brothers: here there are states. The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears, for now I shall speak to you of the death of peoples.
The scene in which Neo surveys the endless rows of womb-like pods in which human bodies are trapped vividly illustrates the pure horror of inescapability.
The claim is that authors like Hume or Kant were the unwitting (and sometimes conscious) architects of a history of Western oppression and universalism.
The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm.
As such, postmodern culture was an easy target for capitalism: the endless proliferation of sexualities, cultural backgrounds, language games and narratives could be marketed without too much effort.
The result is a cacophony of voices, images, half-formed opinions, and textual fragments. It is evidently not a Rawlsian “marketplace of ideas” where we argue reasonably and rationally about political measures and/or preferences.
The great advantage of this approach is that one can follow the author’s reasoning and start to perceive conceptual connections one didn’t see any previously.
The important distinction I want to make is between (i) anyone’s being treated in such a way that this mode of treatment either fails to have sufficient respect for their dignity or outright violates their dignity, which is being oppressed,
One of the most basic insights of moral philosophy is that our world is thoroughly nonideal, while moral theory is as ideal as one could imagine. The real world is made up of situations that are unjust, immoral, unfortunate, unfair, and irreparable.
In a series of gestures that are nihilistic to the core, lecturing and forcing others into practicing puristic virtues they haven’t freely chosen has become the weapon of choice in a world that’s mercilessly reflexive.
If there is one thing that the past four years have taught us, it is that Western democracy is imploding at a rate that its defenders could not foresee, and that they will turn out to be powerless to stop.