Own Our Ignorance

I'll leave you with an excerpt from a podcast I listen to called Jordan, Jesse GO! Two guys in their twenties are jovially discussing a favorite topic of mine: owning your ignorance.

Other sincerely awesome stuff from them is available at Maximum Fun.

Goodbye to Yesterday...

Your grades are now posted. Enjoy your summer, Wednesday night class!
Sorry, Thursday night-ers, I forgot to bring my camera!

Links Worthy of a Swine

Here are some links that are loosely related to the stuff on Utilitarianism that we are studying. Most of these deal with psychology. There's a lot of psychological research on happiness popping up lately. The first link is an overview of the psychology of happiness:

Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness

The second is a slightly optimistic take on our ability to change our baseline level of happiness. This is important to know for an ethical theory that values maximizing happiness:

The Hedonic Set Point Can Go Up

The next link deals with a famous moral thought experiment, the trolley problem. This gets brought up a lot when evaluating Utilitarianism:

Psychology of the Trolley Problem

The last link is an advanced overview of consequentialist ethical theories. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory, since it only looks at the consequences of an action to figure out whether an action is morally good or bad:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry: Consequentialism

So what makes you happy? WaWa? Ping pong? Cookies?