Virtue and Operant Conditioning
When my son started optometry school, he heard about a program that helped to pay the costs of books. He went to his counselor to apply for it and was told he did not meet the demographics for the grant.…
Virtue: Honor and Integrity
I had an interesting movement of revelation on two levels as I contemplated the terms “honor” and “integrity”. How are they similar and how are they different? Can you have one without the other? My mind wandered by to a…
Ethics, Morality, and Virtue: Relative vs. Absolute Meaning
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” Genesis 11:4 “Then…
Virtue, Wherefore Art Thou?
The rise of Christianity buried pagan philosophy for centuries as Christianity took control of all aspects of western life. But in 1649, the Treaty of Westphalia broke Christianity’s stranglehold on western life. The treaty ended the brutally destructive Thirty Years’…
Virtue: The Missing Enabler of the Republic
“A republic, if you can keep it.” Benjamin Franklin. The blog builds on several others on virtue: Virtue, Wherefore Art Thou? Virtue: honor and Integrity Virtue Leadership and Power Virtue and Courtesy are Requirements for Effective Solution Development and…
Do Oaths Have any Meaning Anymore?
I and all Military officers took the oath above. I assume most of us took the oath seriously. Other federal offices take the oaths in Table 1. Over the last several years, as I watched federal judges say the Constitution…
Communism’s Dirty Secret (and Capitalism’s and Democracy’s as Well)
Communism is a utopian philosophy, summed up by the quote from Karl Marx in the figure above. Communism’s secret is that it requires virtue to implement. Its dirty secret is that communism does not teach, induce, or want virtue.…
Virtue and Courtesy
A Solutions-Based Approach To Social Justice ended with a brief discussion of the need for virtue and courtesy to promote an effective dialog and discourse for solutions. This blog will discuss these two concepts and develop them as integral…
DOGE—Killer Clowns and Virtue
Abstract: The Hippocratic oath tells the doctor to do first no harm. Yet that is what a surgeon has to do. Sometimes we need to do harm to do good. The trick is to balance the harm and good,…
USDS Resignation Letter
usds-resignation-letter
