Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.
The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable.
If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil.
Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be.
Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are but just accept the fact. Complaint occurs when we refuse to accept that things are wrong and we do something about it, even if that something is simply articulating our unease.
Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things.
Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.
If we now find ourselves looking down on the cheap and convenient, it is only because we now have better things which are affordable.
Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It's simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings.
Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.
Society needs both justice and compassion, a head and a heart, if it is to be civilised.
The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.
Dover's cliffs call to mind the Roman invasion; the Battle of Britain; our proximity to, yet difference from, mainland Europe; and international trade and exploration, both fair and exploitative.
The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success.
Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.
Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.
If there's one thing that makes me cynical, it's optimists. They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with, they might learn a thing or two.
Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.
Nature deals the cards without thought or care, and there is no point in blaming the dealer. All we can do is make the best of the hands we have been dealt.
People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment.
