. And yet they cannot be admitted to the Eucharist

“There is an obligation of consistency with respect to different moral issues, like racism and antisemitism,” Summers said. “If not consistency, explanation.”

Harvard psychology professor Steven A. Pinker, a co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, wrote in the Boston Globe that when a university releases a political statement, “inevitably there will be constituencies who feel a statement is too strong, too weak, too late, or wrongheaded.”A university, Pinker wrote, should be “a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates.”

Harmless, surely? Who would deny that it’s vital that my values be ones I’ve properly signed up for rather than had simply foisted upon me — by my parents, my teachers, my culture? But this truism — that I will more likely be able to live out a set of values if I have consciously adopted them — doesn’t exhaust the sense of what’s being said. My psychologist is implying something more radical when he insists on the pivotal importance of choosing your own values. When he claims that “values are subjective,” he is painting a picture of the world according to which the only values that exist are ones we have created. To say values are subjective is to say there is nothing independent of our own minds that answers to our talk of right and wrong. It is to say that our ethical beliefs do not track a reality which is “there anyway.” According to his picture, values are determined, not discovered, and selfhood — what it means to be a person — is therefore fundamentally about choice, not vision. It is about picking a course of action arbitrarily, not about seeing a reality that transcends you — goodness — and integrating with it.

подобно классической и релятивистской механике, четкое разделение на фильтр и сортировку актуально на относительно небольших наборах данных. Например, сортировка по релевантности в поисковой выдаче Гугла для человека фактически работает как фильтр — просмотреть сотни тысяч ссылок физически невозможно.

The second difference I shall remark is, that moral evidence admits degrees, demonstration doth not

“But it is futile. In Japan, one thing blends into another seamlessly. And importantly, nobody (no Japanese, anyway) worries about where the line is drawn. I would agree with the shell-less egg analogy. I cannot successfully engage in a conversation with a westerner without defining things and showing borders. And yet, I am certainly Japanese, in the sense that I stand back and ‘marvel’ at westerners who keep trying to define this undefinable thing called Japan. Why bother? You cannot do it. I will not attempt it.’”One of the best descriptions I have read of someone trying to “understand” Japan compared the process to peeling an onion. The cultural explorer pulls back layer after layer looking for Japan’s inner meaning, without realising that the meaning is to be found in the discarded layers. At the centre of the onion is nothing.

If you think everybody answers the same way, you may be an advocate of critical theory.