Benjamin Studebaker

Yet Another Attempt to Make the World a Better Place by Writing Things

Tag: Ethics

July 30, 2021

Two Kinds of Pride in American Politics

I’ve been thinking about pride’s role in politics. When I say pride, I am not talking about mere self-respect. I am thinking about vanity, about the insidious mistake of thinking we are superior to others when in fact we are their equals. This is pride in the grim, nasty, old-fashioned sense. I think there are two kinds of pride running amok today. One is associated with entrepreneurs, with those who consider themselves “self-made”. The other is associated with professionals, with those who consider themselves “educated”. Let me share them with you.

Read the rest of this entry »
May 5, 2021

How to Be Excellent

I have a new piece out for Psyche on excellence in Plato and Aristotle. You can read it here:

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-become-excellent-with-tips-from-plato-and-aristotle

I was really happy to be able to give proper emphasis to the background social conditions that play such a large role in Plato and Aristotle’s work. Many popularizations of ancient philosophy take too many of their cues from the Stoics, presenting virtue as attainable in a vacuum.

How to be excellent | Psyche
July 11, 2020

Against the Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Buddhists

This is going to be an odd post about Greek philosophy and the contemporary analogues of Greek traditions. Its purpose is threefold. First, I’ll argue that the Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans had similar conceptions of the good life, that this conception closely resembles the conception preferred by Buddhists, and that this conception of the good life is mistaken. Second, I’ll argue that the Stoics and Skeptics both make similar–if opposite–errors with respect to meta-ethics, with the Stoics asserting an unrealistically ambitious epistemology and the Skeptics denying that epistemology without acknowledging less ambitious alternatives. Third, I’ll argue that many contemporary political and moral antagonisms are essentially new versions of the Stoic/Skeptic antagonism, and that there is a popular Epicurean response to this antagonism.

Read the rest of this entry »

April 7, 2020

What I Think in 2020

Now that the Bernie Sanders movement is comprehensively failing, it is time for those of us who supported it to take a step back and reflect. We can only learn from defeat if we are willing to be honest with ourselves and recognise it as such. This post is more autobiographical than most of what I run here. The aim is to do some hard introspection about how I came to support the Sanders movement and where its downfall leaves me, politically.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 23, 2019

Why Richard Dawkins Fails to Appreciate Plato

The other day, Richard Dawkins had a go at Plato:

It’s not the first time. Dawkins has a thing for picking on Plato. He said this back in March:

Read the rest of this entry »