In a morally healthy family the good of each member of a family includes and overlaps with the good of other members. When one family member flourishes, so typically do the others.

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.

People come to have different moral beliefs because they have different non-moral beliefs about relevant facts. People are disposed to believe whatever justifies the practices and institutions that benefit them. But I argue that not all moral differences can be explained away in such a fashion. Some of the most profound disagreements come from differences in priority assigned to values such as relationship and community on the one hand, and individual rights and personal autonomy for the individual, on the other hand.

Zhuangzi is especially insightful about the human pretension to know. The Zhuangzi tells a story about a frog who lives in caved-in well. Because he is the lord of this little world of his, king of the pollywogs, he is very proud of himself. But he doesn't know how small his world is until a turtle comes and tells him about the vastness of the sea. We human beings are like the frog, not realizing how little our worlds are.

Welcome to freakdom, Dave. It’ll be time to start a Web site soon, where you’ll type out everything in one huge paragraph.

Globalization in part means that a lot of people are walking into the room and in some cases becoming influential or even dominant voices in the conversation. Sometimes they are like party-crashers coming in and pushing people around, scooping up the valuables and eating up the food in the frig - bribing political leaders, undermining traditional economies and the ways of life that are interwoven with them, replacing them with new economic models that effectively exploit developing countries for their labor and resources.

Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.