[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