Speaking of Nietzsche in this context, there is an interesting discussion of choosing good in the absence of absolute morality in Camus’s The Myth of Sissyphus.

And Dutton pays scant attention to qualities like emotional shallowness and deep loyalty. The psychopath is a disturbingly shallow, disloyal individual. This surely doesn’t equate with spiritual advancement, yet Dutton absurdly seeks to find commonalities between Tibetan monks and psychopaths. He aims to recast psychopaths as misunderstood rebels, perhaps overly adapted to the exigencies of modern society.

….and this also has nothing to do w Nietzsche who was talking about how divorcing the spiritual aspects of life from culture, science and governance and privileging what was touted as “rationality” (which philosophy now would regard as highly subjective and relational opinions) to bring about specific forms of liberalism in governance servicing imperialistic capitalist hegemony (aka the enlightenment) would completely change morality and spirituality in “western culture” aka “god is dead”

It is embarrassing, I agree. But it isn’t Evans who thinks this, it’s Chomsky. Evans is just quoting.

Seems obvious enough, yet Frankfurt spends all of his short book making and remaking this simple point. Weren’t the original journal articles sufficient? Why go to this trouble now, unless to attempt to remedy the lack of attention paid to the point then by cashing in on the current interest piqued by Piketty?

I think Frankfurt, or more likely his publisher, is trying to recreate the surprising success of On Bullshit, which was a similar republishing of an old journal article as a stand-alone book that skyrocketed to the NYT Best Sellers list. Also, people seem to find short books that say obvious things very satisfying; definitely less painful than committing to Piketty’s tome.

Good questions, but not ones that Frankfurt addresses.

He is entirely satisfied with sufficiency, which he constantly contrasts with what he considers unobtainable, even undesirable equality. (“Inequality of incomes might be decisively eliminated, after all, just by arranging that all incomes be equally below the poverty line. Needless to say, that way of achieving equality of incomes—by making everyone equally poor— has very little to be said for it. Accordingly, to eliminate income inequality cannot be, as such, our most fundamental goal.”) Eliminate insufficiency, and let the “excess” fall where it may.

The only time that he addresses the repressive powers of excess is in a brief aside about buying political influence.