The unselfish gene

On Kindness, by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor

Whenever I say to someone that I do not believe that there is a universal human right to healthcare, that person always asks whether, then, I want to see people dying in the street from treatable disease. I in turn ask that person whether he can think of any reason for not allowing people to die in the street other than that they have a right to treatment. The fact that, as often as not, the person has great difficulty with this question suggests not only that our state, but our minds and moral imaginations have become highly bureaucratised.

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Jonathan Sacerdoti

Who is responsible for the BBC’s Gaza documentary debacle?

There is no doubt, I think, that we have difficulty with the notion of kindness nowadays. Kindness is apt to be capricious; the deserving may be excluded from it while the undeserving may be smothered in or by it.