David Killoren
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David Killoren
@davidkilloren.bsky.social
150 followers 380 following 44 posts
I work on moral and social philosophy and teach at Grand Valley State University. I try to blog every Sunday at https://eg.typepad.com/
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I seem to have made a Wordpress copy of my old Typepad blog. (I am not checking to make sure that the automated migration was comprehensive, because I would likely be disgusted by the sight of older posts.) I'll restart my Sunday blogging in November, and will make it a ritual thereafter.

egegeg.me
E.G.
"Me! Hear! My foreign ear--the sounds of welcome near!"
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September 30, 2025 at 7:16 PM
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Typepad's death.
Long ago, someone gave me a lifetime subscription to Typepad. I used it for a while, and then I stopped for a while, and then I started again. I like the ritual of producing a blog post every Sunday. ...
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August 28, 2025 at 8:23 PM
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Sinead O'Connor's appropriation of the Catholic Church and other things.
I'm listening to Ethel Cain's Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. I am thinking about Ethel Cain's interest, in much of her work, in the uses of Christianity by ordinary people who think of thems...
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August 24, 2025 at 1:25 AM
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Theistic moral science vs. realistic moral faith.
Basl and Coons memorably worry about inferential movements from ought to is. Such movements constitute attempts at what they call moral science. There seems to be something fishy about such inferences...
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August 18, 2025 at 2:32 AM
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Does wrongness have to be tropic in order to be normatively potent?
According to a view I find appealing, when somebody does something wrong, there are three particulars involved. There's the particular agent who's done the wrong thing; there's the particular action t...
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August 11, 2025 at 2:22 AM
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Scattered thoughts on absurdity and the future.
In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis writes: Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed...
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August 4, 2025 at 1:23 AM
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Bret Stephens's defense of Israel against the charge of genocide.
Bret Stephens says: [T]here is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is ...
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July 28, 2025 at 1:23 AM
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Occasionalist pictures and perception.
Let's say an Occasionalist picture is any picture where (a) there is some agent S, and (b) there is some object O, and (c) S and O cannot directly interact (S cannot influence O, and O cannot influenc...
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July 21, 2025 at 1:48 AM
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Veganism is collective bargaining.
My opinion is that we should be faithful vegans: We should consistently and constantly follow veganism's rules. On an alternative view, we should be economic half-vegans. An economic half-vegan is som...
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July 14, 2025 at 2:02 AM
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My Dad's views on money.
My Dad was pretty choosy when it came to ideas. If you wanted to persuade him of anything that he didn't already believe, you'd usually have your work cut out for you. But when he did find an idea he....
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July 7, 2025 at 12:39 AM
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Let's not hope that MAGA incoherence will save us.
Kevin Vallier says that the American right is now a "strange blend" of three things: (1) Techno-optimism, exemplified by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Trumpist, who thinks that "the forces...
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June 30, 2025 at 2:44 AM
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Graceful vs. confrontational activism.
Sarah McBride advocates a politics of grace. In a recent conversation with Ezra Klein, she defines grace like this: I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good ...
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June 23, 2025 at 2:41 AM
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Let's not hope that beauty will save us.
I think the general type of view that Errol Lord presents in this paper is somewhat widely held, and Lord develops a sophisticated version of the view. For these reasons, the paper is valuable. But I ...
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June 16, 2025 at 5:34 AM
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AI friends will make us weird to each other.
Conversation is like dancing. Some conversations are like square dances, some conversations are like mosh pits, and so on. If someone who's used to having mosh-pit conversations is paired up with some...
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June 9, 2025 at 1:28 AM
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Inward light and Hare's Paradox: mutually illuminating, maybe.
Inward light is what I take to be the central idea of Quakerism. In its main forms, it has the following four features: It's in you: To find inward light, you're supposed to look inside yourself. This...
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June 2, 2025 at 3:01 AM
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The MAGA aesthetic.
Tim Kenyon and Jennifer Saul have observed that Trump often "appear[s] uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods." They say he is a "bald-faced bullshitter." A bald-faced bullshitter is o...
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May 26, 2025 at 3:32 AM
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The inertness of desert.
Some people say that there is no such thing as desert. They say that bad people do not deserve to suffer, and that good people do not deserve to be rewarded. One way to reach such a view is via...
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May 19, 2025 at 1:23 AM
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Flagrant evil.
There are many different views about what the basic stuff of material reality is. Some have said, for instance, that everything either is an atom or is made out of atoms; others have said that, in add...
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May 12, 2025 at 2:02 AM
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Intuitional diversity in the philosophy profession.
A few days ago, a somewhat prominent philosopher created a hullabaloo on Facebook by suggesting that hiring people "on the basis of" race or gender is unjustifiable, and is illegal, yet is commonplace...
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May 5, 2025 at 1:07 AM
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Second-order stoicism.
Recently, for a little while, many philosophers were toying with stoicism. Happily, the stoicism trend seems to be dying out. Here's The worst form of stoicism: The world around you is completely outs...
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April 27, 2025 at 7:03 PM
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Veganism, specifically.
We should not just be in the neighborhood of vegan. For example, we should not be vegetarian. We should not be flexitarian. We should not be reducetarian. We should be vegan, specifically, rather than...
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April 20, 2025 at 12:04 PM
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Moral reasons as deontic grounds.
Consider: The Darwall-Dancy definition of moral reasons: A reason to φ is a moral reason to φ =def it is the sort of reason that can, in the right circumstances, give rise to a moral obligation to φ. ...
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April 13, 2025 at 7:09 PM
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Our distance from ourselves.
I saw Mickey 17 in the theater the other day, and it made me worry about whether I might be wrong in my belief that we have relationships (relationships of the folk sort) with ourselves. I won't bothe...
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April 6, 2025 at 5:55 PM
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Directed obligations in random beneficiary cases.
I'm a fan of the view that All moral obligations are directed: If S1 has a moral obligation to φ, then there is some individual, S2, to whom this obligation to φ is owed. The view runs into problems w...
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March 30, 2025 at 11:04 PM
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Anti-reductionism about relationship tokens.
To illustrate the distinction between relationship tokens and relationship types, consider: Huck's friendship with Jim is a different thing than Bert's friendship with Ernie. These two things are dist...
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March 23, 2025 at 12:00 PM