Some product reviews I wrote over the past year

2007 was a good year, and I wrote a number of interesting product reviews. A recent article I wrote was a list of lens bargains for the Sony Alpha (formerly Minolta Maxxum) lens mount. The article was titled Sony Alpha (Minolta Maxxum mount) lens bargains. I also wrote a review of my main wide-angle lens, the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM. And predictably review was titled Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM Review. A couple...

How engaged should the government be in preserving...

Should the state preserver minority languages? This is a question that ethical philosophers have been discussing a lot over the last twenty years. Those who are for government involvement focus on the communal aspects of identity and the role language plays in maintaining it. They argue that each sub-group’s language should be preserved, and even promoted. The argument from the other side focuses on the inhibitions to...

Richard Rorty and the problem of hyptheticals in m...

In "Justice as a Larger Loyalty" Richard Rorty argues that Justice is simply a sub-category of loyalty. Skipping his main argument, I started thinking about his examples and how he went about discussing the issue. The problem with hypothetical examples for moral dilemmas is that they invariably oversimplify the situation. It trying to highlight the dilemma, they posit a few facts, and then ask the reader to...

Another thought on Justice and Care…

The marriage of Justice and Care seems to be a lot older than the 1980’s. In Chapter 11 of Book 8 of his “Nicomachean Ethics” Aristotle examined the relationship between Justice and Friendship and found that where one is absent, the other is usually also absent. “But in the deviation-forms [of government], as justice hardly exists, so too does friendship. It exists least in the worst form; in tyranny there is little or no...