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A Reckoning In recent years, plastic waste has got some of my attention. BBC’s hit documentary Blue Planet II (2017) shows me the horrific plastic pollution in our oceans. From another documentary The Story of Stuff, I learned how how the oil and plastic industry intentionally made us addicted to plastics. I also learned from a podcast by NPR (National Public Radio) that plastic recycling is more or less scam to keep us feeling OK about keep using plastics because they cannot really be recycled on a large scale. ...

When I read the book Strangers Drowning, I was very much impressed by the work of Ittetsu Nemoto, a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk, who dedicated his life to helping suicidal people. The book also briefly described his four-year extremely harsh ascetic training in an especially strict monastery. My interest was aroused. “Why does someone willingly go through such unimaginable hardship willingly?” This is why I picked up Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple by Kaoru Nonomura. At the age of 30, Nonomura left everything behind and enrolled in Eiheiji, one of the most rigorous Zen monasteries in Japan to train as a monk. The book is his memory of his time at Eiheiji. ...

I’d like to thank Dr. Gregory Sadler for helpful comments on this post. Who is Peter Singer? Peter Singer at The College of New Jersey, Oct 2009. Bbsrock, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I consider myself a follower of Stoicism philosophy. In recent years, I have read attentively ancient Roman Stoics as well as modern Stoic writers. Their inspiring words have helped me tremendously in dealing with everyday challenges. However, many of my questions about how to live a good do not have answers in either classic or modern Stoic literature. Take, for example, what would be an ideal political system? As modern Stoic writer Massimo Pigliucci pointed out, the ancient Stoics do not have a consensus. Moreover, the world we are living in today is vastly more complicated than in ancient Rome. To live a virtuous life in our time, we must go beyond Stoicism and educate ourselves about how this world works. ...

A summary of Chapter 11 Objectivity Virtue ethics rejects the sort moral objectivity which Kant aspires to. The naturalism describe in the last three chapters also rejects the type of objectivity based on empirical facts accessible from a neutral point of view. However, it also does not assume our standard list of virtues is correct without need of validation. This is the type of objectivity naturalism can offer. But the study of objectivity should also give an account of ethical disagreement. ...

A summary of Chapter 10 Naturalism for Rational Animals. What Difference Does Our Rationality Make? Unlike animals, it is primarily our actions from reason that we are ethically good or bad human beings. In ethical naturalism, rationality makes a big difference. And adding rationality does not need to add the fifth end to the four other describe in the previous chapter. What characteristics do human have? Comparing to animals, it is hard to summarize. We enjoy and suffer from so many different things. So it seems that naturalism cannot work for humans. ...

A summary of Chapter 08 The Virtues Benefit Their Possessor. Can we objectively justify which character traits are the virtues? We can only do this from some already acquired ethical framework, instead from some external neutral point of view. Doing so risk just rationalize what we already believe. But if we think critically, little by little we many radically change our entire ethical outlook. The philosopher’s task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea. We can improve our conceptual scheme, our philosophy, bit by bit, while continuing to depend on it for support; but we cannot detach ourselves from it and compare it objectively with an unconceptualized reality. ...

A summary of Chapter 09 Naturalism. This chapter is about the 2nd Plato’s requirements of virtue in the last chapter – The virtues make their possessor a good human being. Virtue ethics is a type of ethical naturalism, i.e., basing ethics on considerations of human nature, or on what is involved in being a good human. The objective of such an approach is that an account of human nature may be too broad for making moral judgement, or too strong to the extend that it is just a restatement of our ethics. Gary Watson asks ...

Strangers Drowning : Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help by Larissa MacFarquhar is a deeply inspiring and thought-provoking book. It is mostly a collection of profiles for do-gooders who go to extreme length to help strangers. To various extent, they all have chosen to save “drowning strangers” instead of their own family, which may be unsettling for many people. Thus the book also discusses attacks mounted against do-gooders throughout history. ...

This is a very informative and inspiring book on addressing climate change. It is written by Canadian economist Mark Jaccard, who has advised many regional and national governments on energy policies. The book is freely available online. When people who care enough about humanity look into climate change, it is easy to feel despair. Popular books sounding alarms on climate emergency such as The Uninhabitable Earth and Our Final Warning tell us an apocalyptic future will come soon if there is no dramatic green house gases (GHG) emissions in the next ten years. However, decades after climate scientists have reached consensus on the causality between human activity and global temperature rising, we are still on a path of emitting more and more GHG. It is difficult to see how things can change in the very limited time left. ...