This Christmas, give the gift of a blameless life to someone you love

Do you want to be a good person but find yourself always falling short?

It may not be your fault. These days it is difficult to feel like a good person. In fact the harder you try, the more you may feel like a failure.

The calls on our moral attention are multiplying at an extraordinary rate. We are living through a perfect storm of social justice movements, activist NGOs, an unusually plausible pope, and a flood of academic moral philosophers trying to write for the public. Globalisation means that we have to take account of the furthest implications of our actions. The internet and social media spread the news of our ever increasing obligations and strike down those who sin without mercy.

Is Home Schooling Morally Defensible?

Let me start with the obvious. Home schooling is an objectively deficient form of education. It inhibits the development of life skills, such as for negotiating social institutions and employability. It undermines political community, such as by preventing children from learning society's common sense and dividing them from citizens of different homes. It provides a lower general quality of education since its 'teachers' know nothing more of what or how to teach than their textbooks tell them.

Rich countries are not to blame for global warming but they should still pay more to stop it

An unfortunate side effect of the moralisation of global warming is the blame game. A large number of people seem to think it makes sense to address the enormous problem of global warming by putting various rich countries on trial for their crimes against the atmosphere over the past 200 years. This project is a foolish one, a backwards looking side-show that - perhaps conveniently - distracts political attention from the pragmatic policy debates we need for actually addressing the problem (previously). But even if we were to take it seriously it wouldn't give the answers one might expect.

What does it take to be a good economist?

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject at which few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature of his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician. (J. M. Keynes. 1924. "Alfred Marshall, 1842-1924" in The Economic Journal)