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You do something great, I clap. The child is naughty, he gets no ice cream. The athlete wins the race, she gets a medal. All of these actions and reactions seem built into the universe. It's just the way it is. According to Clifton Mark, this is false - this is not the way the world works. Oh, and to believe it is leads to evil. Mark defines meritocracy as the idea that "the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be distributed according to skill and effort." Most people, he says, think of meritocracy as a fact about the world. It is just the way the world works. However, Mark argues that "the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false." Mark offers one argument for his claim that meritocracy is not the way the world works and three more to support the claim that it leads to all sorts of evil. Of course, it could be the case that it is the way the world works and that ...

Amber Petrovich argues that too many old people are in charge and that they should stand aside to make way for the young . The point is simple: Older people know less about what life is like now than younger people. Since government is about the present, younger people are better equipped to be in charge: "too many of our politicians are too out of touch to be making crucial policy decisions that affect millions of lives every day...I will never claim to know what adult life was like in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, but I do know what adult life is like now. So why are you still making decisions for people like me who are becoming adults in this century?...The world now is drastically different … so why aren’t our politicians?" Oddly, I have recently been saying exactly the opposite: Older people have had more opportunity to experience life and ought to have gained much wisdom from those experiences. Thus, it is better to be governed by older people than younger. I even th...

“we had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community” (Martin Luther King) Is it okay for a Christian to break the law? On the one hand, the Bible tells us to to obey governing authorities (1 Peter 2; Romans 13). On the other hand, there are examples of apparent justified law-breaking (Esther 4; Daniel 1, 3, 6; Acts 5:29). Occasionally, Christians are obliged to break the law. When the law asks us to perform acts contrary to the explicit command of God, we are obliged to obey God. For example, Christians are obliged to disobey any prescription to refrain from worship of God. We are also obligated to explain the gospel to people (sometimes this gets us arrested ). According to Martin Luther King, Christians ought to disobey unjust laws such as segregation laws: “There are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obey...

Consider the present state of political discourse. Isn't it, at least in part, a discussion about evil and what to do about it? Of course, it also involves thinking about some things as evil and other things as good. But once a political group has decided what they think is evil, the debate is all about what to do about it. Debate over the environment is about what to do to confront the bad effects of successful economies. The debate over wealth and poverty becomes a debate about how to shrink the income gap. The same is true of debates over firearms, border control, the moral status of the unborn, and a plethora of other issues. What price utopia? What a politician has to do is attempt to restrain evil without removing other features of overweighing value. Good governance restrains evil without diminishing other valuable features of human life. Thus, to govern well, one must have a grasp of the nature of human beings. Indeed, any political philosophy begins with answering th...

"School has to be bigger. It has to mean more than 'I teach my subject.' School has to be about teaching people to change the world for the better. If we believe that, then teaching will always be a political act. We can't be afraid of our students' power. Their power will help them make tomorrow better. But before they can do that, we have to give them chances to practice today. And that practice should start in our schools" (Sydney Chaffee, 2017 CCSSO teacher of the year, TED talk, Nov 2017). According to the Sydney Chaffee, education is a matter of social activism. Teachers are to be facilitators, "thought partners" who let students "grapple with complex, hard issues" without "necessarily giving them the right answers." Students are not formed, informed, or reformed by teachers; instead "students make choices" and the aim of the school is to "encourage students to articulate their own opinions, not to coer...

If you were to find yourself in court accused of performing an action that you think is morally permissible--good, even--but against which there is a law, how would you react? Most likely, even if everyone in the room thought otherwise, you would think an injustice was being carried out. Imagine being led from the courtroom to undergo lashing, imprisonment, or even death when in your mind you had done nothing wrong. I'm sure most people's stomachs would be in a knot. You'd be angry and incensed for good reason. The reason, I suggest, is that legal codes of particular governing authorities are beholden to a higher law. Now, perhaps you are wrong. Either there is no higher law or you are wrong about what it would say. If there is no higher law, then that feeling of injustice is merely a feeling and nothing more. In which case, justice just is whatever the court decides. If, on the other hand, there is a higher law, but you are wrong about what it would say, then you ha...

Though it is generally true that those who work hard will earn a living, the sweat of your brow has no necessary connection with the contents of your wallet. The value of your labor does not determine its price . What determines the price of something is the amount someone is willing to pay for it. Nor is there are moral connection - without a voluntary  agreement to pay for someone's labor, work itself does not obligate anyone to pay for it.

Dissatisfaction is a mental state induced by not getting what one wants. Desire is also a root of evil. As James puts it, "each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own  desire . Then  desire  when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death" (James 1:14-15). There are at least two proposals on the cultural table for dealing with desires. Neither way works. The first way is to attempt to remove desires from the inside. This is the way of 'enlightenment' - coming to believe a new truth - there are no such things as desires. They appear real, but they are not. Desires are native to persons. We have them and there's no way to rid ourselves of them. Thus, some teach that there are really no persons. If there are no persons, then there is nothing to have a desire. To realize such a truth is to be enlightened. According to the second way, though we cannot remove desire from the inside, we can severely ...

Louis Pojman makes a convincing case for the conclusion that if there is any case for the equal dignity of human beings, then God exists: “The doctrine that all people are of equal worth, and this endowed with inalienable rights, is rooted in our religious heritage…The originators of rights language presupposed a theistic world view, and secular advocates of equal rights are, to cite Tolstoy, like children who see beautiful flowers, grab them, break them at their stems, and try to transplant them without their roots. The egalitarian assertions of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights are similar to those of our Declaration of Independence, with one important difference—God is left out of the former; but that makes all the difference. That posit…is not just an ugly appendage or a pious afterthought but a root necessary for the bloom of rights.” (295). His argument begins with two contrasting assumptions, the empirical counter-evidence to egalitarianism (C...

Relationships only work when we generally impute good motives to the speakers of sentences. Due to the nature of natural human languages, vagueness and ambiguity are inevitable in speech. Every-day talk is not supposed to be precise. But it works well because we assume the best of other people . At least in public discourse in America, this assumption is no longer true. It seems we assume the worst motives in other people (at least of those whose political opinions are not the same as our own). Even when we agree with them, we appear unable to impute good motives to our opponents (let alone when we disagree). One's policy in hermeneutics--the interpretation of text--is always to assume the best in the writer - that he or she intends to tell the truth, that there are clear distinctions in the mind even if not necessarily in speech . The job of a listener is rather like a court of law - to assume the innocence of the speaker until proven otherwise. Sometimes this takes hard...

Possible Democrat presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, recently tweeted the following: "Children are our nation’s future. We must listen to them about what they care about and give them a voice in our government." I am sure Harris didn't mean that children's opinions should the the basis for actual policy, but her words betray an increasingly common view of the opinions of youth: that their importance ought to be elevated. Children are our nation’s future. We must listen to them about what they care about and give them a voice in our government. pic.twitter.com/buBBTj1MNc — Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 24, 2017 Harris' sentiment is not new. I heard this kind of thing all the time when I worked in youth ministry in the UK. I even expressed something like it myself. "You are the generation that will change the world!" we told them.  Children can indeed be amazing. But sometimes this leads to the idea that they would do a better jo...