Tony Blair seems very confused.

In an interview published in the Church of England Newspaper , Mr Blair said: “Sometimes I think we as Christians are more sensitive than we should be although I say that as someone who when I was in office, although I was perfectly open about my Christianity, nonetheless kept it within certain boundaries that were restricted in terms of what I said publicly. The position of prime minister puts you in a unique category. But in general terms in British society there is a risk that people see faith as a personal eccentricity.”

But if faith is not in some sense ‘a personal eccentricity’ then why did Blair keep his Christianity ‘within certain boundaries’? … Read the rest

It’s interesting to notice how hard it is to think without thinking morally. I suppose it can be done, but one would have to be ruthlessly, dedicatedly, vigilantly selfish and solipsistic. Psychopaths can do that, by definition, but it must be very difficult for everyone else. (Autistic people are another exception but autism is a disability, so that’s a separate issue.) We think with our emotions, as Antonio Damasio has helped to make even clearer than it was before; most of our emotions are related to attraction or aversion; once we become aware, at about age 4, that other people have minds just as we do, we understand that other people have likes and dislikes just as we do. This … Read the rest

We’ve been visited lately by someone who has (by his own admission) only just realized that different cultures have different moralities, and who has drawn sweeping conclusions from that fact, which he offers to us as if we had never heard that different cultures have different moralities. This is unenlightening and uninteresting – but the larger subject is interesting.

An irony in this is that part of his claim (entangled though it is in overgeneralization, oversimplification, rhetoric, and confusion) is one that I’ve talked about here more than once. It is true that there is a popular claim that ‘we all agree’ or ‘we can all agree’ on certain basics about morality. I think that claim is dead wrong, and … Read the rest