If someday we finally persuade ourselves that free will, souls and individual purposes were inventions, that they are sustained only by our linguistic and pedagogical habits, that they can easily be dis-instituted and explained into non-existence — I hope the insight doesn’t come before an even deeper insight: That the most important elements of humanity are our second-natural ones: what we have made of ourselves in the act of making things for ourselves.

Cultural activity is working to form the second-natural essence of future generations. I want us to have free-will, souls and individual purposes because I like having them, not because I think they have an existence apart from “mere” human ways of being.

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Do not argue with me about what is natural with the expectation that naturalness compels acceptance.

Show me that a thing is good and for whom it is good and which good things must be sacrificed to have it.