After all, there’s no such thing as North.
OK, let’s explain a little. Am reading Susan Neiman, “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists”. It’s slow going, dense with thickets of ideas and little interpretive gardens of classic philosophy. We’ve just finished a brief analysis of, well, I won’t even go there or I’ll lose this train of thought utterly. And then we get to:
“Sometimes you need only look out the window to see whether my claim that ‘snow is white’ is correct. In harder cases, the process may be so long and complex that some theorists prefer to give up talk of correspondence altogether. But however hard it may be to find out whether a statement corresponds to the world, the processes used in deciding claims like ‘snow is white’ are different from the ones used to decide that ‘slavery is wrong’. Strictly speaking, *right* cannot be a matter of knowledge, though it’s often the thing we want to know most of all. Yet it’s wrong to conclude … that ideas of right are therefore unreal. For ideals — ideas of what is right — can be practical: When we use them as orientation, we can use them to change reality itself.”
Boom. Suddenly I realized with extreme clarity why the term moral compass is so uniquely apt. Because there really is no such thing as North.
Ideals. Idea L.S. Idea LodeStone.
“That’s when the fight started.”
(OK, the tagline is merely fresh in my mind from a rare, very rare lately, side of 0xdeadbeef. Yet it looms strangely applicable.)
Relentless Inquiry 
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