Terms
Genealogy
Asking how something came to look natural, necessary or timeless. Nietzsche first, Foucault after him. It can be pointed at almost anything — a desire, a price, an identity, a political enemy.
Determinism
Events, including decisions, come from prior causes. I don’t think people are the uncaused authors of themselves. Background, upbringing and circumstance are therefore morally important, which is not the same as saying individuals aren’t real.
Fallibilism
Any belief might be wrong, including the ones that suit me.
Anti-essentialism
Social categories mostly don’t reveal fixed inner essences; they pick out patterns for particular purposes. The question I keep asking is when a category helps you see something, and when it starts deciding what a person is allowed to become.
Moral luck
Nagel and Williams, on how much of our moral judgement rests on things nobody controlled.
Social construction
Some facts depend on shared practices and institutions rather than existing independently of us. Money, borders and credentials are all made by people and all exert real force — being constructed doesn’t make something weak.
Habitus
Bourdieu’s word for the dispositions you pick up from social life: taste, expectation, bodily ease, a sense of which rooms are for people like you. It’s how structure turns into action without anyone consciously following a rule.
Structural injustice
Harm produced by many ordinary actions running through institutions, with no single author. Which makes “who is to blame” the wrong opening question, and “what process connects me to this” the better one.
Writers
Spinoza
People are part of nature rather than exceptions to it. Understanding what acts through you can make you less passive, even if it never makes you uncaused.
Foucault
Power doesn’t only prohibit. It produces identities, norms, and the vocabulary in which a problem can be stated at all.
Bourdieu
How class becomes confidence, preference and a feel for the game.
Nietzsche
The original move: asking what struggles and needs produced the moral concepts that now present themselves as timeless.
Hume
Scepticism about a simple permanent self, and the argument that reason alone doesn’t move anybody.
Bernard Williams
Moral luck, integrity, and a real resistance to clean systems that erase circumstance. Ethical modesty without ethical emptiness.
Ian Hacking
“Making up people”: classifications change the people classified, who then change the category back. Directly behind the essay on personality types.
Miranda Fricker
Epistemic injustice — how power decides who gets believed, and which experiences there are even words for.
Elinor Ostrom
Fieldwork showing communities governing shared resources without the state-or-market choice everyone assumes. Behind most of what I think about climate coordination.
Iris Murdoch
Attention, and the discipline of looking at a reality that doesn’t revolve around you. A useful check against turning a person into a type or a convenient villain.
Veblen
Consumption as communication.
Henry George
Land value is largely produced by location, public investment and everyone else nearby, rather than by whoever holds the deeds.
What I actually think
The working claims the essays should be answerable to. If a piece of mine contradicts one of these, one of the two is wrong and I’d like to know which.
- People do not create themselves. Characters, desires and convictions develop through histories, institutions and situations nobody chose. I try to apply that symmetrically, including to me.
- Understanding is not excusing. Explaining why someone acted doesn’t settle what should happen next.
- Categories are tools. A label can clarify a pattern and still do damage when a rough description gets treated as the whole truth.
- A first thought is evidence, not authority. It records a real encounter. It still has to face rival explanations and awkward facts.
- Efficiency needs a purpose. A fast route to the wrong place isn’t an improvement.
- An explanation should give something back. Widen a real option, improve a process, loosen a false certainty. An account of a perfect world isn’t much use if it can’t help anyone move from this one.
- No procedure removes the need for judgement. Evidence, rules and metrics discipline judgement. They don’t replace it.