Julian Baggini
Julian Baggini
Julian Bagginiis a British philosopher, and the author of several books about philosophy written for a general audience. He wrote The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 other thought experiments and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Philosophers' Magazine...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
art self needs
Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.
thinking self vocabulary
One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.
self pay feels
When you do the right thing, but not to any particular person, we instinctively feel that we have earned some sort of pay back. Since no-one will do that for us, we opt for self-service reciprocation.
jobs real self
Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine.
thinking self ideas
The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true inner selves and the outside world is pervasive but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily think.
quality firsts quantity
Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality.
plato world considering
Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.
religious believe thinking
I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have willfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that.
fun two cynical
If there's one thing that makes me cynical, it's optimists. They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with, they might learn a thing or two.
nice animal priorities
If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.
glasses broken ethics
I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.
islands borders wandering-around
From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island.
europe differences mind
Dover's cliffs call to mind the Roman invasion; the Battle of Britain; our proximity to, yet difference from, mainland Europe; and international trade and exploration, both fair and exploitative.
religious believe suffering
Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.