First Post

For the first post on this site, I'm going to link to one of my favorite other commentor-cum-bloggers, Driftglass.

"But Character is what you are in the dark."

No, not really. It's far too simplistic. The whole idea of character/values/morality being what you are in the dark, is to limit morals to things of a personal nature. The alternate translation is that character is what you are in your bedroom, in a nutshell. Which makes things like sex, or the art you like to partake in moral issues.

They're not.

Moral issues are things that affect other people. Period. If something doesn't affect another person, to call it immoral, well..it's none of your business. Morality then becomes useless to our society. And that's the last thing we want.

There IS something that is quite true about that phrase however, people will often do good things just to grandstand, not doing it for doing good itself, but doing it as to gain favor or popularity. Although the actions might be good in and of itself, it doesn't really make these people any more trustworthy, because the second that everybody turns their back, BAM, stabbity stab stab stab.

So I would say that a better pithy quote is "Character is not stabbing society in the back".

That sounds about right.