The Human Question

Suppose you already have a graduate degree but need to take a continuing education course or two.  So you decide to go out of town to do this so that you can both tourist and student at the same time.  You need to rent an apartment for the summer, so you contact the university to see if any year-round students are going to sublet their flats.  This inquiry results in your getting the phone number of Brenda, who is offering her place for rent.  Before you sign, however, you need to know if, in the event of a plumbing emergency, the pipes/sink/toilet/whathaveyou will be fixed gratis under the contract.  You call Brenda, who tells you that, as she is a student, she too is renting it, but she can give you the number of Carlos, from whom she is renting the place.  So you call Carlos and ask him about his plumbing policy.  He says that there have been no problems so far with the pipes, but he can't guarantee that they would be fixed at all, as he is subletti...

 In any account of nature offered by physics, there is always something that is basic or primitive, something that explains but is not itself explained.  And that "primitive" is better described as an attraction than a force.

"...[O]n his deathbed Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous atheist French philosopher, confessed that 'I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.'" http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2017/03/03/jean-paul-sartres-confession-of-belief-and-other-surprises-in-a-fine-new-book/

If our identity with other members as members of the same group is a function of our sharing desires together, then there is always the danger that we will find it impossible to identify at all with those whose goals seem to differ from ours entirely.  If they seem to differ from in their desires, then why not treat them as either threatening or useful to our attainment of goals that we share in common with each other but not with them, but not as possible friends, compatriots or cosmopolitans. Without common desire, there is no common life, and without a common life, there is no justice. There is only one basis that guarantees that we can truly identify with others, regardless of how very different their world may be from ours (think of science fantasy scenarios): that is a regard for the other as not only desiring specific goods that differ from yours, but as having a more basic desire for what cannot be specified to being of "this kind" rather than "that kind" ...