Ethics
18 essays on the hardest ethics decisions -- conscience, complicity, self-determination, and more. Three thinkers disagree on each.
Orwell says name it plainly. Arendt says thoughtlessness is how ordinary people participate in terrible things. Havel says you are already living the lie or refusing it.
De Beauvoir says the role was never the whole of you. Confucius says duties have real limits. hooks says love does not require your erasure. Three thinkers on the hardest version.
Three thinkers on wanting things for yourself. Russell says self-absorption is where misery begins. Hurston says claiming what you want is not indulgence. Spinoza says first understand the wanting.
Three thinkers on the line between mercy and enabling. Weil says attention is the only real generosity. Douglass says power concedes nothing without demand. Carnegie asks what winning this costs you.
Three thinkers on paying for a child's wedding. Carnegie asks what the money builds. Aristotle splits equal treatment from equal outcome. Beck names the wound.
Three thinkers on inherited benefit and moral obligation. Weil says attention is the beginning. Le Guin says freedom arrives welded to responsibility. Nietzsche asks who benefits from your guilt.
Three thinkers on desire and enough. Schopenhauer says desire is suffering in disguise. Maslow says you cannot stop yourself. Wollstonecraft says wanting more is a political act.
Three thinkers on moral cost and conscience. Kierkegaard says anxiety is freedom's price. Schopenhauer says examine what you're protecting. Tolstoy says your conscience already knows.
Three thinkers on lying to someone you love. Chekhov asks what gap the lie fills. Dostoevsky says the motive is not what you think. Spinoza says understanding the feeling transforms it.
Three thinkers on mental health versus duty. Wollstonecraft says a hollowed self serves no one. Confucius says duty abandonment abandons who you are. Camus says you choose anyway.
Three thinkers on helping those who resist. Rogers says accept the person, not the behavior. Havel says enabling is dishonesty. Weil says attention sees what is actually needed.
Three thinkers on cutting off family. Winnicott says the wound is old. Hurston says walk away whole. Girard says the pattern will follow you if you do not see it.
Three thinkers disagree about obligation after being wronged. Confucius says relationships have duties. Dostoevsky says suffering creates its own claim. Lorde says your survival matters too.
Three thinkers disagree about principled compromise. Clausewitz says friction is real. Aristotle says rules exist to serve something deeper. Havel says complicity compounds.
Three thinkers on broken promises. Russell says logic decides. Du Bois says justice overrides. Austen says character is what you do when keeping your word costs.
Three thinkers disagree about blind loyalty. Machiavelli asks what the situation requires. Havel asks what you refuse to say. Wollstonecraft asks who benefits.
Three thinkers on when to speak out. Orwell says name what you see. Douglass says silence has always served the powerful. Weil says look first, then speak.
Three thinkers disagree about honesty and harm. Hannah Arendt defends the truth. Confucius defends the bond. Nietzsche asks what your honesty is really serving.
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