The Based Life

Fragments from Ecce Homo "One has deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invested an ideal world." Mankind worships the values that are opposite to the ones that would guarantee health and its future (p. 218).  "The aggressive pathos belongs just as necessarily to strength as vengefulness and rancor belong to weakness" (p. 232).  "My whole Zarathustra is a dithyramb on solitude or, if I have been understood, on cleanliness" (p. 234). What does Nietzsche mean be cleanliness? - the values of the herd are contrary to the needs of the individual, through solitude are we able to be free from the ideas that infect our minds. Social media is a good example on how by isolating yourself from it your mind becomes more transparent, more clear, or as Nietzsche would put it, more clean.  "Scholars who at bottom do little but thumb books ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for...

  Smith, Jones and Euthanasia The Smith and Jones ethical question is one which illustrates the moral difference, or the lack thereof, between killing and letting die. It is a scenario where both Smith and Jones would receive a large inheritance if their cousin hypothetically passed away, this is a sufficient enough reason for Smith to actively go out an murder his cousin by drowning him in the bathtub. On the other hand, Jones also has the same intention and actively goes out to drown his cousin but has the fortunate situation where his cousin, right in front of him, drowns by himself, although Jones had the intention of drowning his cousin if he so happened to get out of the water, but having not killed his cousin, Jones does not feel morally responsible for what has just happened.  This ethical question presented in the article “Active and Passive Euthanasia” by James Rachels (1) thus presents the scenario that if we consider killing and letting die as morally different the...

 Hippias Minor Platonic dialogue on lying The dialogue of Hippias Minor can be roughly divided into two main sections, in the first one Socrates is questioning Hippias on whether or not liars and truth tellers are mutually exclusive to each other, the second part is concerned about if voluntarily lying is better or worse than involuntarily doing it. I will be going over the main arguments put forward in the dialogue to clearly delineate the arguments presented.  Son of Laertes, sprung from Zeus, resourceful Odysseus,  I must speak the word bluntly,  How I will act and how I think it shall be accomplished,  For as hateful to me as the gates of Hades  Is he who hides one thing in his mind, and says another.  As for me, I will speak as it shall also be accomplished.  (Achilles to Odysseus) Are liars and truth tellers mutually exclusive? Hippias, at the start of the dialogue, claims that Homer made Achilles the superior individual compared to Odysseus...