I’m holding myself to updating regularly again.

I have been thinking about the Severance piece that I posted last week, because I’m unhappy with it. You might have noticed that it misses a point. This is because the essay was originally twice as long, it had a second half (or missing middle) that examined the real existence of the conceptual link between identity and freedom that I develop through looking at Severance. I had wanted to give real content to the notion I gesture towards near the end of the essay, that freedom isn’t always a very clear normative guide. My argument was that there are some real cases where we look at certain identities, social positions is a better phrase here, as being incapable of exercising freedom and thus justify paternalist attitudes towards them. Because identity is a function of social structures this is one of those cases where a society generates ideological structures justifying its behaviour. My key example was that of dementia patients, but I cut this part out because I felt as though I couldn’t really do it justice without significantly more research.

I regret this, partly because it makes for a weaker essay. The problem, though, is that there are real ethical standards we ought to hold ourselves to in writing, etc. Those standards don’t necessarily mesh well with the notion of a regularly updated blog. For me to write properly about these subjects I would need to do a lot more research and work, for very short pieces that are effectively meant to be practice. I’m not sure what the right balance to strike is. Philosophy is no good when it is disconnected from our lives, but it does make me question whether philosophy blogging can be done well.

I have been working this week on a piece trying to defend the sophistication of mid-twentieth century emotivism. This is an issue near to my heart, because I do feel like Charles L. Stevenson has been treated poorly by posterity. An angle that I’m trying to stress is his interpretation of the pragmatist ethics of Dewey, as I think that this gives a much more engaged picture of the emotivists than the one that is often given. I think that there’s something there, though it mightn’t be of interest to anybody but me!