A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
c. The imagined order is inter-subjective. Even if by some superhuman effort I succeed in freeing my personal desires from the grip of the imagined order, I am just one person. In order to change the imagined order I must convince millions of strangers to cooperate with me. For the imagined order is not a subjective order existing in my own imagination – it is rather an inter-subjective order, existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
Harrow (2007), writing about the ‘third sector’ in the UK, argues that it is simultaneously underpaid (relying on volunteer or low-waged labour, because of the value-or ethos-driven character); overworked (both in terms of stretched organisations and individual workers); and overvalued (with unrealistic expectations about the scale and quality of third sector contributions).
Publics, Politics and Power
Janet Newman and John Clarke
Another central claim of this book, which will seem equally indecent to those who find the purity of morality attractive, is that our responsibilities to others constitute only the public side of our lives, a side which competes with our private affections and our private attempts at self-creation, and which has no automatic priority over such private
motives. Whether it has priority in any given case is a matter for deliberation, a process which will usually not be aided by appeal to "classical first principles." Moral obligation is, in this view, to be thrown in with a lot of other considerations, rather than automatically trump them.