What I Commented ...

I hate those "What I Twittered" posts, but I feel myself sliding into the same slough of blog-despond. So here are some things I wrote to some people I know.

To ironed_orchid:
I'm thinking of starting a Society for the Abolition of Egregious Punctuation. This would target, not ignorant errors of the "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" variety, but the offensive insertion of slashes, hyphens and parentheses by philosophers and literary theorists.

To philosophy:
Actually, I think Randroids practice a weird kind of virtue ethics: in any situation, the question to ask is "What would John Galt do?"

To stoics@yahoogroups.com:
I agree, but also by "teleology gone bad" I was referring back to my example of Aquinas "putting the animal cart before the rational horse." If teleology is to make any sense at all (and I'm not sure that it can) it must argue from the Aristotelian premiss that as rational animals, our flourishing is dependent on the proper use of our reason. It cannot make sense when it employs a kind of proto-sociobiology; this is bad philosophy, and bad biology to boot. It is a classical/medieval equivalent of the popular modern misconception of evolution. As Steven Pinker points out, we are not "programmed" to spread our genes; we are constituted such that we feel good in situations where our genes are likely to be spread (for the obvious reason that organisms that feel this way are more likely to pass on their genes than organisms that feel bad or neutral in a potential gene-propagating situation). There is no imperative to reproduce, so it is hard to see how there can be an imperative not to engage in non-reproductive sex.