Let's say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don't worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you're the one who shot him.

I think that all moralities adequately serving the function of fostering social cooperation must contain a norm of reciprocity - a norm of returning good for good received. Such a norm is a necessity, I argue, because it helps relieve the strains on motivation of contributing to social cooperation when it comes into conflict with self-interest.

I argue for a relational conception of the person as a basis for an environmental ethic that can encourage us to preserve the environment not solely on the basis of satisfying human interests and not solely because we might attribute intrinsic value to the environment, but because the environment is something with which we can potentially enter into constructive relationship, as part of what makes us who we are or transform who we are and open us up to new interests.

For Confucians, we are such thoroughly social beings that individual and social interests are not in the end regarded as fundamentally incompatible. Though there will be conflicts, the central mission of moral and political philosophy is to foster approaches that will render them compatible or if that is not possible in some cases, to keep a reasonable balance so that neither side is consistently sacrificed for the sake of the other.

Here’s exclusive Channel 5 video of a local man having his brain eaten by a winged gremlin. Local gremlin experts warn that—

The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one you can call because you're not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It is a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society? Enturdment?

And, well, that's my story," I said. "I'm sorry that it's so, you know. Retarded.