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David Killoren

@davidkilloren

I work on moral and social philosophy and teach at Grand Valley State University. I try to blog every Sunday at https://eg.typepad.com/

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Posts 25.09.2023
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Latest posts by David Killoren @davidkilloren

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E.G. "Me! Hear! My foreign ear--the sounds of welcome near!"

I seem to have made a Wordpress copy of my old Typepad blog. (I am not checking to make sure that the automated migration was comprehensive, because I would likely be disgusted by the sight of older posts.) I'll restart my Sunday blogging in November, and will make it a ritual thereafter.

egegeg.me

30.09.2025 19:16 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Typepad's death. Long ago, someone gave me a lifetime subscription to Typepad. I used it for a while, and then I stopped for a while, and then I started again. I like the ritual of producing a blog post every Sunday. ...

eg.typepad.com/eg/2025/08/t...

28.08.2025 20:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Sinead O'Connor's appropriation of the Catholic Church and other things. I'm listening to Ethel Cain's Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. I am thinking about Ethel Cain's interest, in much of her work, in the uses of Christianity by ordinary people who think of thems...

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24.08.2025 01:25 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Theistic moral science vs. realistic moral faith. Basl and Coons memorably worry about inferential movements from ought to is. Such movements constitute attempts at what they call moral science. There seems to be something fishy about such inferences...

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18.08.2025 02:32 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Does wrongness have to be tropic in order to be normatively potent? According to a view I find appealing, when somebody does something wrong, there are three particulars involved. There's the particular agent who's done the wrong thing; there's the particular action t...

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11.08.2025 02:22 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Scattered thoughts on absurdity and the future. In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis writes: Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed...

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04.08.2025 01:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Bret Stephens's defense of Israel against the charge of genocide. Bret Stephens says: [T]here is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is ...

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28.07.2025 01:23 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Occasionalist pictures and perception. Let's say an Occasionalist picture is any picture where (a) there is some agent S, and (b) there is some object O, and (c) S and O cannot directly interact (S cannot influence O, and O cannot influenc...

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21.07.2025 01:48 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Veganism is collective bargaining. My opinion is that we should be faithful vegans: We should consistently and constantly follow veganism's rules. On an alternative view, we should be economic half-vegans. An economic half-vegan is som...

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14.07.2025 02:02 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

My Dad's views on money. My Dad was pretty choosy when it came to ideas. If you wanted to persuade him of anything that he didn't already believe, you'd usually have your work cut out for you. But when he did find an idea he....

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07.07.2025 00:39 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Let's not hope that MAGA incoherence will save us. Kevin Vallier says that the American right is now a "strange blend" of three things: (1) Techno-optimism, exemplified by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Trumpist, who thinks that "the forces...

eg.typepad.com/eg/2025/06/l...

30.06.2025 02:44 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Graceful vs. confrontational activism. Sarah McBride advocates a politics of grace. In a recent conversation with Ezra Klein, she defines grace like this: I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good ...

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23.06.2025 02:41 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Let's not hope that beauty will save us. I think the general type of view that Errol Lord presents in this paper is somewhat widely held, and Lord develops a sophisticated version of the view. For these reasons, the paper is valuable. But I ...

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16.06.2025 05:34 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

AI friends will make us weird to each other. Conversation is like dancing. Some conversations are like square dances, some conversations are like mosh pits, and so on. If someone who's used to having mosh-pit conversations is paired up with some...

eg.typepad.com/eg/2025/06/a...

09.06.2025 01:28 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Inward light and Hare's Paradox: mutually illuminating, maybe. Inward light is what I take to be the central idea of Quakerism. In its main forms, it has the following four features: It's in you: To find inward light, you're supposed to look inside yourself. This...

eg.typepad.com/eg/2025/05/i...

02.06.2025 03:01 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The MAGA aesthetic. Tim Kenyon and Jennifer Saul have observed that Trump often "appear[s] uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods." They say he is a "bald-faced bullshitter." A bald-faced bullshitter is o...

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26.05.2025 03:32 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The inertness of desert. Some people say that there is no such thing as desert. They say that bad people do not deserve to suffer, and that good people do not deserve to be rewarded. One way to reach such a view is via...

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19.05.2025 01:23 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Flagrant evil. There are many different views about what the basic stuff of material reality is. Some have said, for instance, that everything either is an atom or is made out of atoms; others have said that, in add...

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12.05.2025 02:02 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Intuitional diversity in the philosophy profession. A few days ago, a somewhat prominent philosopher created a hullabaloo on Facebook by suggesting that hiring people "on the basis of" race or gender is unjustifiable, and is illegal, yet is commonplace...

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05.05.2025 01:07 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Second-order stoicism. Recently, for a little while, many philosophers were toying with stoicism. Happily, the stoicism trend seems to be dying out. Here's The worst form of stoicism: The world around you is completely outs...

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27.04.2025 19:03 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Veganism, specifically. We should not just be in the neighborhood of vegan. For example, we should not be vegetarian. We should not be flexitarian. We should not be reducetarian. We should be vegan, specifically, rather than...

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20.04.2025 12:03 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Moral reasons as deontic grounds. Consider: The Darwall-Dancy definition of moral reasons: A reason to φ is a moral reason to φ =def it is the sort of reason that can, in the right circumstances, give rise to a moral obligation to φ. ...

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13.04.2025 19:09 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Our distance from ourselves. I saw Mickey 17 in the theater the other day, and it made me worry about whether I might be wrong in my belief that we have relationships (relationships of the folk sort) with ourselves. I won't bothe...

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06.04.2025 17:55 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Directed obligations in random beneficiary cases. I'm a fan of the view that All moral obligations are directed: If S1 has a moral obligation to φ, then there is some individual, S2, to whom this obligation to φ is owed. The view runs into problems w...

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30.03.2025 23:04 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Anti-reductionism about relationship tokens. To illustrate the distinction between relationship tokens and relationship types, consider: Huck's friendship with Jim is a different thing than Bert's friendship with Ernie. These two things are dist...

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23.03.2025 12:00 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The People's Bribe. I don't see why the following very simple idea isn't good. The People's Bribe (1) Key decision-makers (KDMs) in the federal government are guaranteed a large income for life. (2) Apart from whatever t...

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15.03.2025 22:40 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Let's not accept all moral-conceptual freebies. A standard (I think) story: Before the chemical composition of water was known, people didn't know, and couldn't know, that water=H2O. But they still had the (or a) concept of water. It's just that th...

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09.03.2025 23:37 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

A vignette approach to well-being might be enough. It is widely and, I think, correctly thought that if The desire-satisfaction account of well-being: For any individual S, S's well-being consists in S's desires being satisfied, such that S is made be...

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02.03.2025 16:09 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

A moment that precludes what it requires. Compare and contrast: Curtis Yarvin and Elizabeth Anderson. Yarvin's signature idea is that the United States should not be a democracy and should instead be a dictatorship. He thinks the country shou...

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23.02.2025 06:11 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The natural. Here is the idea of naturalness that I like the most: A fact F is natural if and only if either (i) F is brutely natural or (ii) F explains (= substantively contributes to the best explanation of) at ...

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16.02.2025 16:08 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0