Philosophical Dictionary

“Without objective morality, everything is permissible” sounds like a knockout argument, and a sandwich meme made it a joke. The sentence is usually pinned on Dostoevsky, Sartre built existentialism on it, and Nietzsche thought atheists who kept their morals were cheating. Does objective morality need God at all?

A viral line says crushing a cockroach makes you a hero and crushing a butterfly a villain. Nobody can trace it to Rumi, but the question is ancient: the Greeks fused beautiful and good into kalokagathia, Kant made beauty a symbol of morality, and psychologists tested the bias. Do our morals follow our eyes?

When a self-driving car or a chatbot gets it wrong, someone ends up holding the blame, and it is rarely the system. AI ethics has names for this: the responsibility gap, the problem of many hands, the moral crumple zone. Forty million votes on whom a car should hit did not settle it. So who should pay?

In 1990 Gilles Deleuze wrote five pages arguing that Foucault’s disciplinary society was already ending. Prisons and factories were giving way to codes, access cards, endless training and debt. What did he mean by dividuals, why does the panopticon meme get Foucault backwards, and was Deleuze right?

Schopenhauer called the Upanishads the solace of his life and put them next to Kant and Plato. He read them in Latin, via Persian, and built an ethics of renunciation that sounds a lot like moksha. Did he borrow his philosophy from India, and why does the meme about sex and the will to live get him right?

Philosophy means love of wisdom, and Plato’s Socrates called himself barren of it. Aristotle traced it to wonder, Russell put its value in uncertainty, and David Chalmers asked in 2015 why it makes so little progress. Thales used it to corner the olive market. So what is philosophy for, if it never settles anything?