for example--
Fair. A wonderful puzzle arises with the excellent entry on the word ‘fair’. Has the French philosopher writing here entirely understood the English word? Not quite, perhaps. ‘An action’, the entry says, ‘a method, or a kind of reasoning is fair if it rejects arbitrary preferences, undue favor, or partiality and if it does not aim to win out by dishonest means or by force.’ It probably is, but it could do all that and still be unfair, because fairness is about balance and not about procedures or even honesty. It’s true that the philosopher John Rawls thinks of justice as fairness; but this is a take on justice, not a simple equation of the terms.
Animal. English and the Romance languages have the same word here, although German has ‘Tier’, which feels closer to ‘beast’. Do we know the difference between an animal and a beast? Are animals, as many cultures assume, creatures ‘that lack reason but are mobile’? That keeps plants out, but they are living (‘animal’ is close to ‘animate’), and do we believe that dogs and cats lack reason entirely? The entry in the Dictionary explores a whole range of possibilities of life from beneath the beast to beyond the human. Such a simple word.
No comments:
Post a Comment