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Books
Empathy & Morality
Stephen Anderson asks if empathy helps us feel the Good or just feel good.
Morality, it is often said, is a private affair. But in some ways, it’s also an extremely public one. That is, that without a moral consensus of some kind among the general population, our social policies become very difficult to rationalize, or to sell, to them. Back in the heyday of liberal progressives such as John Dewey, people talked about there being a ‘Judeo-Christian consensus’ – a minimal set of moral precepts acceptable to all good people around which our public policies could be shaped to the satisfaction of every good citizen.
Nice idea.
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