While visiting my parents over Christmas I attended worship services as the local ward – the ward I “grew up” in. It was a great experience for many reasons. I had a chance to see some close friends from High School and catch up with other Church members who I had not seen for many [...]
Is demonstrable experience more “valid” or genuine than non-demonstrable experience? In short, no. However, in order to fully explore this question we must examine how and when such experiences begin to motivate action and application – both internal and external to the mind. For example, when designing a jet engine, I must be able to [...]
NOTE: Lately I have been contemplating what it means to “know” something as true or false. What follows is the beginning of my attempt to explore this, and similar questions. My thoughts on the subject are highly influenced by David Hume. All human knowledge is a direct function of human experience. Human experience comes in [...]
In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume makes an explicit distinction between the experiential moment, with its accompanying sensations, and the later recollection of that experience. Indeed “everyone will readily allow that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind, when a man feels the pain of excessive heat, or the [...]
As mentioned in a previous post, Pragmatism is, in large part, a method to identify truths. However, pragmatism does not seek after abstract truths but rather, instrumental truths. That is to say truths, which in practice, allow human beings to negotiate their varied, and often contradictory, experiences. Pragmatism holds that our “ideas (which are but [...]
Further “the whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, and definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.” Pragmatism is “both more radical” and “less objectionable” than empiricism as “a pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers” and “turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems and pretended absolutes and origins.”
We must examine issues of equality of opportunity and also examine how social inequalities impact the whole of society. While nearly 50% of all health care expenditure in the United States originates with the federal government, the delivery of services is largely private and thus costs and prices are very much a function of market dynamics. … In scenarios such as this, just policy should create the incentives necessary for firms to develop treatments for these diseases and provide them at affordable prices. In an ideal world we would not be concerned with issues of resource distribution but as it is, we must adopt a system which creates an aggregate benefit for all within society through the distribution of those resources which are available.
The social contract which binds and informs society in the United States is based on the normative ideas of individual freedom, general suspicion of government power, and an idealized notion of equal opportunity and the virtues of free markets.[1] Less prevalent – as opposed to many parts of Europe for example – is the [...]
In Free Markets and Social Justice, Cass Sunstein highlights further problems with a general assumption of rational and free choice.[1] He argues that “modern government has no concern with souls” and that “people are taken as they are, not as they might be.”[2] Further, “self-interest, not virtue, is understood to be the usual motivating force [...]
A key concept in Rawls’ theory of justice is that rational human beings make judgments and determinations in the original position which ultimately define what distribution of resources or particular political institutions are just and fair. In a purely theoretical sense, this model is extremely useful and allows us to at very least argue [...]
