An Introductory Post

I’ve explained a bit about what to expect at Unbound Inquiry on my About Page, but I thought I’d add a bit more here. I plan to write summaries in this space and then transition to short and long essays later. My motivation for creating this Substack is that writing is a great way to learn and to clarify thinking. Here are some of the questions that I’ll be exploring:

Concerning Mill’s harm principle, should we define harm differently today?

• John Stuart Mill is considered one of the founding fathers of classical liberalism. True to classical liberal values, he valued individual freedom, or liberty, as he called it. He proposed a principle to guide us in the gap between one individual’s liberty and another. We call this principle the harm principle. The idea is that a person’s liberty should only be curtailed if his or her actions harm another. I want to examine how Mill defined harm and contrast it with modern thinking about liberty and harm today.

Does free will exist, and if so, how free are we?

• These questions have been in people’s heads for a few thousand years, and we still haven’t reached conclusions. I have a cursory understanding of the prominent positions. My intuition is that we have a type of free will, but it’s highly constrained. Much of this topic's confusion is caused by individuals defining free will differently and then talking past one another.

What are some strategies for thinking more clearly?

• Thinking well is essential, but few of us take steps to improve our thinking. There’s loads of information describing how fallible our thinking is. I want to examine this fallibility, learn how it can be mitigated, and develop a simple framework to aid thinking.

How can we increase human flourishing?

• However put, we all want to be happy, live the good life, or flourish. It’s a subject that’s been talked about for a long, long time. I want to look at some of the historical answers to this question and how effective our contemporary world is in helping us flourish. Another component of flourishing that I want to explore is how we should behave. I want to delve into values, ethics, principles, and morals.

Is morality a social construct, or does it have objective roots?

• Some believe that for morality to carry any weight, it must be grounded in something that is outside of ourselves. For example, that ground may be God or human evolution. For others, morality is found within humanity through social processes and contexts. I suspect the origins of morality are a blend of evolving to survive and our intellect building on these evolutionary instincts.

Those are some of the questions I’m interested in exploring. While the motive for this Substack is selfish, in the sense that I’ll be writing for myself, I do hope what I produce is helpful to you. Contact me if you have any questions; dialogue about these topics is welcome.