imagist

The author doesn't actually ever present an ethical system they believe: the article is a summary and critique of a variety of ethical systems.

I'm not sure what basis you have for the implicit claim that we don't exist in "loose animalistic structures".

Wow, neither of you actually finished the article. Both of you are claiming the author believes viewpoints that the author presented in order to show problems with them.

Ultimately, the TLS didn't even claim a viewpoint. They merely presented a variety of opinions and critiqued them.

As someone who just bought a bunch of life-or-death climbing gear from Amazon, the idea of counterfeit goods is terrifying.

Speaking as a alcoholic with some sobriety, those laws were little more than a speed bump when I was drinking. I drank as both a child and a homeless guy with little problem.

I'm not saying those laws shouldn't exist, but they serve as a source of revenue, not as something that protects the public.

"Parole" refers to any situation where someone is given some trust for a period of time before they are given complete trust. It usually refers to people who get out of prison but have to check in with a parole officer for a while, but in this case it refers to immigrants being allowed into the country but having to check in with DHS.

Ah, yeah. That's problematic.

Of course we would want that, but that's not what we get. The rich pay few taxes and the international rich pay even less, given they already have offshore tax havens by the nature of being from another country. Given a green card allows establishment of US companies which are exempt from some tariffs which are imposed on foreign companies, there's no reason to believe that giving the rich green cards will be a net gain for tax revenue. It is indeed sometimes a net loss.

> The government doubled the price of the plan or more, and is paying with our tax dollars the difference between my $270 and $780.

Do you have evidence that the government is the main cause of the increase of the price of the plan? It could have merely been the companies using the ACA as an excuse to raise prices.

Okay, it's fastest-growing, but is energy-conscious lending anywhere near the size of subprime mortgages?

Even if it is, it doesn't seem like as big a tragedy if the bank seizes your solar array as of they seize your home.

See my response to your sibling comment.

All this explanation amounts to stating positions in what seems like a fundamental disagreement, so I'm not sure how to dig deeper.

At some level I agree with you that justice unevenly served is not justice, but I guess what I'm arguing here is that justice is a spectrum rather than a binary. Justice served unevenly is less just than justice served evenly, but more just than justice not served.

> If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author.

Why is that?

There are a myriad of ways to analyze a piece, and many focus on reader response rather than authorial intent. You can dismiss reader response as merely incorrect initially, but this becomes complicated when you try to analyze works written by reader response critics. Indeed some authors like Burroughs take this to the extreme, introducing randomness (via cut-up technique) to their writing in an attempt to eschew even the possibility of authorial intent. Burroughs was somewhat limited in his approach by the technology of his day, but it's not hard to imagine approaches using modern technology which remove an author from the system completely.

I am not saying I agree that reader response criticism entirely: just because authorial intent isn't special doesn't mean that reader response is the answer. Frequently reader response is used as a way for critics to use a piece of literature as a soapbox for their own ideologies, and I find that distasteful. But I do think that there's some validity to the idea that authors don't have any special authority to interpret their own work.

For example, look at the song "I'll be watching you". Sting had said that he intended this song to be about government surveillance. But almost universally this song has been (mis?)interpreted as being about a stalker. Any analysis of the song which focused solely on Sting's intent would be incomplete, because the interpretation of the consumers of the song is far more related to its cultural relevance.

Maybe, but it's also justice being served.

When a poor black man in America is arrested for a rape, it's racism and classism because a rich white man is far more likely to get away with that crime. But it's also justice. I don't think you would argue that we should let poor black men get away with rape just to make things more fair.

My criticism of philosophy nowadays is not that it isn't valuable to read, but that it's not read from a historical perspective. Instead, people to often read i.e. Aristotle as if it contains modern truths. While some parts of Aristotle remain true, his ideas have been greatly refined over centuries, and integrated into our culture to the point that uneducated people in the modern world often have a stronger grasp of practical philosophy than Aristotle did.

But too often old philosophy is taught and read in a vacuum, not as history but as a source of practical modern philosophy. This results in repeated resurgences of bad ideas that were refined away by more modern advancements in philosophy, but are revived when people read old philosophy uncritically. Few people have an understanding of the refinements to even refute many older philosophers claims.

Moreover, there are many accepted ideas which we take for granted that should be more deeply questioned which come from philosophy. For example, the pervasive Socratic idea that mind and body are separate entities is all but disproven by modern understanding of the nervous system, but it's deeply ingrained in our culture, and needs less reinforcement, not more.