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David Killoren

@davidkilloren.bsky.social

I work on moral and social philosophy and teach at Grand Valley State University. I try to blog every Sunday at https://eg.typepad.com/

146 Followers  |  381 Following  |  39 Posts  |  Joined: 25.09.2023  |  1.9313

Latest posts by davidkilloren.bsky.social on Bluesky

Scattered thoughts on absurdity and the future. In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis writes: Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed...

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04.08.2025 01:23 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Bret Stephens's defense of Israel against the charge of genocide. Bret Stephens says: [T]here is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal β€” if it is ...

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28.07.2025 01:23 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Occasionalist pictures and perception. Let's say an Occasionalist picture is any picture where (a) there is some agent S, and (b) there is some object O, and (c) S and O cannot directly interact (S cannot influence O, and O cannot influenc...

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21.07.2025 01:48 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Veganism is collective bargaining. My opinion is that we should be faithful vegans: We should consistently and constantly follow veganism's rules. On an alternative view, we should be economic half-vegans. An economic half-vegan is som...

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14.07.2025 02:02 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
My Dad's views on money. My Dad was pretty choosy when it came to ideas. If you wanted to persuade him of anything that he didn't already believe, you'd usually have your work cut out for you. But when he did find an idea he....

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07.07.2025 00:39 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Let's not hope that MAGA incoherence will save us. Kevin Vallier says that the American right is now a "strange blend" of three things: (1) Techno-optimism, exemplified by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Trumpist, who thinks that "the forces...

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30.06.2025 02:44 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Graceful vs. confrontational activism. Sarah McBride advocates a politics of grace. In a recent conversation with Ezra Klein, she defines grace like this: I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good ...

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23.06.2025 02:41 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Let's not hope that beauty will save us. I think the general type of view that Errol Lord presents in this paper is somewhat widely held, and Lord develops a sophisticated version of the view. For these reasons, the paper is valuable. But I ...

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16.06.2025 05:34 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
AI friends will make us weird to each other. Conversation is like dancing. Some conversations are like square dances, some conversations are like mosh pits, and so on. If someone who's used to having mosh-pit conversations is paired up with some...

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09.06.2025 01:28 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Inward light and Hare's Paradox: mutually illuminating, maybe. Inward light is what I take to be the central idea of Quakerism. In its main forms, it has the following four features: It's in you: To find inward light, you're supposed to look inside yourself. This...

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02.06.2025 03:01 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
The MAGA aesthetic. Tim Kenyon and Jennifer Saul have observed that Trump often "appear[s] uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods." They say he is a "bald-faced bullshitter." A bald-faced bullshitter is o...

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26.05.2025 03:32 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
The inertness of desert. Some people say that there is no such thing as desert. They say that bad people do not deserve to suffer, and that good people do not deserve to be rewarded. One way to reach such a view is via...

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19.05.2025 01:23 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Flagrant evil. There are many different views about what the basic stuff of material reality is. Some have said, for instance, that everything either is an atom or is made out of atoms; others have said that, in add...

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12.05.2025 02:02 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Intuitional diversity in the philosophy profession. A few days ago, a somewhat prominent philosopher created a hullabaloo on Facebook by suggesting that hiring people "on the basis of" race or gender is unjustifiable, and is illegal, yet is commonplace...

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05.05.2025 01:07 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Second-order stoicism. Recently, for a little while, many philosophers were toying with stoicism. Happily, the stoicism trend seems to be dying out. Here's The worst form of stoicism: The world around you is completely outs...

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27.04.2025 19:03 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Veganism, specifically. We should not just be in the neighborhood of vegan. For example, we should not be vegetarian. We should not be flexitarian. We should not be reducetarian. We should be vegan, specifically, rather than...

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20.04.2025 12:03 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Moral reasons as deontic grounds. Consider: The Darwall-Dancy definition of moral reasons: A reason to Ο† is a moral reason to Ο† =def it is the sort of reason that can, in the right circumstances, give rise to a moral obligation to Ο†. ...

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13.04.2025 19:09 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Our distance from ourselves. I saw Mickey 17 in the theater the other day, and it made me worry about whether I might be wrong in my belief that we have relationships (relationships of the folk sort) with ourselves. I won't bothe...

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06.04.2025 17:55 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Directed obligations in random beneficiary cases. I'm a fan of the view that All moral obligations are directed: If S1 has a moral obligation to Ο†, then there is some individual, S2, to whom this obligation to Ο† is owed. The view runs into problems w...

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30.03.2025 23:04 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Anti-reductionism about relationship tokens. To illustrate the distinction between relationship tokens and relationship types, consider: Huck's friendship with Jim is a different thing than Bert's friendship with Ernie. These two things are dist...

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23.03.2025 12:00 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
The People's Bribe. I don't see why the following very simple idea isn't good. The People's Bribe (1) Key decision-makers (KDMs) in the federal government are guaranteed a large income for life. (2) Apart from whatever t...

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15.03.2025 22:40 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Let's not accept all moral-conceptual freebies. A standard (I think) story: Before the chemical composition of water was known, people didn't know, and couldn't know, that water=H2O. But they still had the (or a) concept of water. It's just that th...

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09.03.2025 23:37 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
A vignette approach to well-being might be enough. It is widely and, I think, correctly thought that if The desire-satisfaction account of well-being: For any individual S, S's well-being consists in S's desires being satisfied, such that S is made be...

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02.03.2025 16:09 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
A moment that precludes what it requires. Compare and contrast: Curtis Yarvin and Elizabeth Anderson. Yarvin's signature idea is that the United States should not be a democracy and should instead be a dictatorship. He thinks the country shou...

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23.02.2025 06:11 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
The natural. Here is the idea of naturalness that I like the most: A fact F is natural if and only if either (i) F is brutely natural or (ii) F explains (= substantively contributes to the best explanation of) at ...

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16.02.2025 16:08 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
The procreation muddle and carnism's persistence. In America, (a) there are 10 billion livestock animals and about 330 million humans, which is to say that (b) almost all Americans who are alive at this moment (>97% of the population) will soon be br...

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09.02.2025 13:07 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Is there a good worry about Marxian alienation? I've never been particularly thoughtful or knowledgeable about what's called "alienation" in Marxian circles but I've been teaching Philosophy of Work this term and in the course of that I've been rea...

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02.02.2025 23:11 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Most undocumented people in the USA are already American citizens, I think. You can correctly say of an undocumented person that she is not a legal citizen, i.e., isn't considered a citizen by the US government, doesn't have a US passport, isn't allowed to vote, can't run for...

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26.01.2025 12:52 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
A serviceable but modest substitute for an afterlife. Consider: The forever view: Each moment of your life is, was, and always will be happening locally, at its particular time and place. This view has long been a comfort to me. It strikes me as a somewh...

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20.01.2025 03:34 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Notes on the idea that USA will, could, or should eventually encompass the whole world. Certain weird statements recently made by Donald Trump have created renewed interest in the scenario where America metastasizes: Each of the world's countries become states of the USA, one by one, unt...

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12.01.2025 15:57 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

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