[So this started an email to Jessie, but it quickly grew past that into a larger piece of writing… so I thought I’d post it here, too.]
hey Jessie…
You would be loving my ethics class right now. We’re having a talk about where you fall on sort of a 2×2 grid of ethics. We’re using Edmund O. Wilson (who is someone who you would, I think, really dislike, but he’s a fascinating read nonetheless) And we’ve set up a structural diagram that looks like this:
Religious Believers | Secularists | |
Transcendentalism
(The idea that there are truths independent of human experience — Justice, Equality, etc…) |
A |
B |
Empiricism
(The idea that all ethics are derived from human experience OR genetics, but not from something external.) |
C |
D |