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ORIGINALLY WRITTEN JUNE 3 2010 Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical writings include a great deal of contentious claims and propositions. Is it possible to imagine someone disagreeing with at least a few of them? Of course. It is similarly possible for people to agree with a great many of his assertions. What is more difficult is identifying a decision procedure that will let us know whether or not we agree with Nietzsche. At one extreme, all of his propositions could aspire to be absolute objective truths, with universal validity, that anyone with sufficiently clear rationality and access to facts would agree with. At the opposite extreme, e

Environmental ethics and ethics in general are currently subject to three fundamental problems. The obligation of omniscience, the denial of akrasia, and the insistence on discrete valuation are all concepts fundamental to the workings of ethical philosophy, and all three of these are deeply untenable. By rejecting discrete valuation, we hope to present a meta-ethical system which handles the other two problems as well. That is, we would like to present a framework for understanding ethics which incorporates continuous valuation and which therefore allows for the meaningful inclusion of ignorant and morally weak agents who are nevertheless wo

A New Evolutionary Model for Political History: Marx et al. apply the evolutionary model to socio-political history. Classically, whenever Darwinism has been applied to human affairs, it has either been in the form of social Darwinism or dialectic materialism. It is the latter that concerns me. One way of viewing Marx is that he believes that evolutionary processes will lead to the overall improvement of the proletariat, who become gradually more successful at overthrowing the bourgeoisie regimes. Thus as the dialectic progresses, proles become better at violently casting off the shackles of their oppressors until they cast them off so thorou