perception
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Of Stone Tools and Sustainability
In some of my earlier blog posts I began to toy with the idea of exploring a parallel or an affinity between music and ethics. It’s not that music makes us ethical or – as Plato supposed – that certain kind of music might draw people toward virtue or toward vice. It is rather that… Continue reading
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Hydraulic Fracturing: Images from Under Ground
My tongue-in-cheek comment on the language of hydraulic fracturing was intended to get at the ways in which metaphors and images can affect – and sometimes skew – our understanding of risks and responsibilities. This effect can work in any direction, for or against any particular position, and it can be especially pronounced when the… Continue reading
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From the Archive: A Phenomenology of Driving, and Other Matters
Continuing along the thread of music and the experience of systems and of movement, here is a post that appeared on my other blog, The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, on November 11, 2011. In it, I draw from half-remembered conversations from grad school to inform an elucidation of the fluidity of movement and the transparency… Continue reading
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The Music of Systems
As I continue to mull over possible connection between ethical experience and music, I came across a passage suggesting that systems have a kind of music to them. I provided students in my environmental ethics class with a few excerpts from Donella M. Meadows’ very useful book, Thinking in Systems: A Primer. The last chapter,… Continue reading
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An Ethicist Walks to Work
A few months ago, something that happened on my morning commute provided an example of moral perception I could use in class later that day: what it’s like to see the ethical texture of an entirely mundane situation. I was walking along North Avenue on my way from the transit station to my office on… Continue reading