Category: Ethics
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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August 14, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
After Job loses everything (including his health), but before his friends come to “comfort” him, Job’s wife offers a rare sentence of advice. No other female speaks in the Book of Job so it caught my eye. She suggests that Job should end his misery. By the end of chapter 2, Job is in a truly pitiful state.
August 7, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Before I selected the Book of Job as the focus of the July Quarterly Discussion, I knew a little bit about Job. I’d heard snippets at church, an occasional reference to the plight of the unfortunate, and the question “why do bad things happen to good people?” Honestly, that’s all that I knew of Job. So, imagine my surprise to read forty-two chapters of gorgeous poetry!
May 22, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan concludes with Jesus’s advice to be merciful and charitable. “Go and do likewise” Jesus reminds the reader. Be like the Samaritan who saw a fellow human in need and helped them.
In last week’s blog, I made a case for discussing charity in Voltaire’s Candide, basically arguing that chapter three retells the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
May 15, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
In April, HMU hosted four discussions dedicated to Voltaire’s Candide. Although Candide is not solely about charity, we used this as the focus topic in each discussion. While charity is not listed as a great idea in the Syntopicon, it seems like a pretty vital idea for society. To begin our conversations,
April 17, 2026
Thanks to Natalie Sum Yue Chung, HMU 2026 Fellow in Ideas; PhD Candidate in Climate Policy, Princeton University
Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) by Henry David Thoreau: review by Natalie Sum Yue Chung
There are books we read, and then there are books that read us—that somehow knew us before we knew ourselves. Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” (1854) has been such a companion throughout my life.
» Read more about: Finding Walden: A Personal Reflection on Thoreau’s Masterwork »
March 20, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Last week, I introduced some of Martha Nussbaum’s thoughts from Justice for Animals. The idea of granting capabilities to animals is unique to Nussbaum. However, even she admits that it will be problematic to assign capabilities to species that are so completely other from us as to be unintelligible. Here, I insert the example of sharks,
» Read more about: What Lurks Below Melville’s Whale: The Shark Chapters Part III »
March 13, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
If you read the post from last week, you’ll remember that Stubb orders a sermon from the ship’s cook. Poor Fleece unwillingly obliges. But the whole scene smacks of injustice and indecency. Fleece seems to be the most blameless of all the characters — he’s just an aged and broken body being ordered around. And yet,
» Read more about: What Lurks Below Melville’s Whale: the Shark Chapters Part II »
March 6, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Sharks flow in and around the Pequod for most of its journey. Ishmael often notes their presence rather casually. They are, of course, one of the many challenges involved in whaling. They hover at the periphery of the tale until Stubb, Ahab’s second mate, decides to feast on a recently harpooned whale. At this point in the story, the reader has met everyone except Moby Dick.
» Read more about: What Lurks Below Melville’s Whale: the Shark Chapters Part I »
December 12, 2025
Thanks to Ibrahim Nureni, a 2025 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
In Margo Natalie Crawford’s Black Post-Blackness, tidalectics is characterized by “nonlinear” or “back-and-forth” black radical tradition of continuity in that the experiences of black people from the era of slavery to the contemporary days do not follow a parallel path but adopt a circular schema (3). English, in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness,
» Read more about: Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day”: A Serial and Tide of Black Voices »
October 31, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
For the October Quarterly Discussion, we read a selection from Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life” in combination with Nelson Mandela’s statement at the opening of the defense case in the Rivonia Trial (Pretoria Supreme Court, April 20, 1964). Mandela’s speech ends with the words:
“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people.