Epicurus was in favour of friendly sex but not of grand passions or marriage and children, viewing them as sources of trouble and vexation..

Even if you just want to make a simple clothing item for yourself or go for a long hike in the forest - something we imagine requires absolutely no r….

Epicurus thought of justice as an agreement to prevent people harming and being harmed..

People's wants are not fixed; they generally want what others in their chosen comparison class appear to be enjoying and what advertising presents to….

In the old systems, hierarchies emanate power from above to below through forms of line management and are ideologically supported by cosmologies and….

Gentlemanly, principled, helpful behaviour by older men vis-a-vis young women goes unnoticed, but it deserves real moral credit, and we could use mor….

Highly unequal societies are morally defective because they get to be that way through the exploitation by the clever and well-positioned ones of the….

Moral claims aren't, as a class, truth-value apt or not..

We use and need to use both systems in complex political societies, and we oscillate in our commitments, because both oligarchy and rule by the will ….

Human courtship has some wild extremes. At one end of the spectrum, there is harassment, pestering, blackmail, and an abuse of institutional power, w….

We have to gamble, and sometimes lose as George Ainslie argues; this keeps the appetite for life sharp..

It used to be that nobody would really argue with a woman, because what she thought (unless it was by way of providing helpful comments about one's o….

There's Hobbes, who understood in the 1640s that the sovereign is not an appointee of God, or even a figure of superior virtue and wisdom, but just a….

Atomism had no absolute 'above' and 'below' and no such rulers, so favoured the undersranding of justice as an agreement amongst equals..

I don't see how being a faster runner, or a better mathematician makes you 'deserve' access to a better life, or more influence on policy, in the abs….

Claims like 'Slavery is wrong' are not fully common-sensical, so they must be at least partly theoretical..

We need grief as a precursor to emotional refreshment, and so consume it vicariously in somewhat titrated but powerful enough form through engagement….

'Contract' succeeded 'status' as the basic organising principle in modern political vs. ancient society..

You can reasonably make the intellectual journey from thinking it's permissible to eat shrimp to thinking it's not permissible, or vice versa, wherea….

We call 'Slavery is wrong' a moral truth because there is a specific history of theoretical investigation of a particular kind of slavery. We discuss….

The Epicureans denied that the gods had created the world and also denied that they played any role in it..