I don't really hate dogs or dog owners really, but I'd like to. I live in townhouse. In front of our townhouse there's a narrow patch of earth and behind it a low concrete wall. On the wall there used to be signs asking kindly "Please" not to allow your…

On the Virtues of Respectful Disagreement — One of the problems with modern discourse, particularly online discourse, is the idea that somehow we’re supposed to agree with each other. For many people disagreement is uncomfortable; it feels like a prelude to conflict and we all know that fighting with others can be stressful. …

Shifting Contexts for a Relationship Ethics — Original Philosophy A space on Medium for serious philosophers to post their research and thinking for a broader audience.medium.com Hierarchy & Fairness Economists are accustomed to telling us that there’s a trade off between equality and efficiency. As the famous economist Greg Mankiw put it: “Efficiency means society is getting the maximum benefits from its scarce resources. Equality means those benefits are distributed uniformly among society’s members…these two goals often conflict.” …

There seems, in the twenty-first century, no good reason for this. After all, the vast majority of people on the planet are not white men. If you’d be inclined to say “white supremacy” you’d be speaking of a symptom of white male domination, but not about its cause. …

Even if they Shouldn’t — I often find discussions about racism and sexism to be very frustrating because it seems to me that otherwise well-intentioned people expend much time and effort attempting to solve problems that in many cases cannot be solved. Since these problems have no practical solution, but remain problems, really the only…

I have long argued that the greatest art is apolitical — that is, that it resists the currently ubiquitous desire to promote the interests of a particular agenda or particular group. “Political art” then, is something of an oxymoron — to the degree that it is art, it is not…

Erotics as Morality in Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” — “The aesthetic has the purely ideological function of concealing the fact that the canonization of a work is nothing but the affirmation of the social values expressed in the work.” John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993). “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics…

I just had sex again. I was feeling vulnerable and needy and I really wanted someone inside me. When he was fucking me I just wanted to surrender to the feeling. There’s something I can’t explain about having a man’s dick up my ass. …

Social Media, Anti Racism, and Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned” — It’s been about nine months since Robert and I broke up. Maybe we weren’t really dating, since as I remember we only met three times. But he kissed me passionately, like no one ever has, and I miss him. Robert was Black. That’s highly unusual where I live. My city…