You know if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty-one feet farther than your shoes?

Accommodation is a willingness to maintain constructive relationship with others with whom one is in serious and even intractable disagreement. Social cooperation would come under impossible pressure if it always depended on strict agreement.

The demonization of Islam and immigrants shows that perception of difference remains one of our biggest problems, and maybe always will be for a species that began in small groups competing with other groups for resources. These apparently competing forces for sameness and difference sometimes even seem to be mutually reinforcing. The homogenizing force of globalization tends to make many people feel they are on the losing side, economically and culturally, and it is they who are most easily turned against those "others" who are demonized by demagogues.

The Zhuangzi is very good on telling us how the nonhuman-made world can enter into who we are more deeply than at the level of answering to our current interests. If the environment can shape who we are, it can shape our very interests, leading us to recognize things, events, and processes that are of genuine value and that we have not previously recognized as such.

Different moralities must share some general features if they are to perform their functions of coordinating beings having particular kinds of motivations. Morality is a cultural construction in something like the way bridges are. There would be no bridges unless human beings used them to move across bodies of waters or depressions in the earth, but a good bridge cannot be designed according to whim, but rather according to what would adequately fulfill their function and the nature of the materials that are available for their construction.

Antidepressants. The thought of this girl actually being depressed made me want to grab the whole planet and throw it into the sun. Well, more than usual anyway.

To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.