I am redoing one of the classes I teach at Loyola, on “Health Care in America.” I have decided to start the class with a more rousing call to "moral imagination," suggesting to the students that, if they want to change things for the better, health care is a great place to do that, since we are going to be going through lots of changes in health care, no matter what.
I want to present the class with an argument about why they should care about changing health care for the better. It boils down to responding to our “urge to care for the other.” To provide them some background, I am going to have them read a number of blogs that I posted in February, March and April of 2015. These postings offer an explanation of why we might care for “the other” and where that urge might come from.
As it turns out, because these were some of the first blogs I posted here, they have not had much viewership. So, I decided to send you all a message, encouraging you to dig back a bit, and see if those of you who have come lately to the blog might be interested in these earlier postings. Here is the list. (They are best if read in this order.) I look forward to hearing what you think.
Caring for “the other,” Part 1 – Why do we care?
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/02/caring-for-other-part-1.html
Caring for “the other,” Part 2 – Real, abstract, related, unrelated
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/02/caring-for-other-part-two_16.html
Does the “urge to care” come from biology?
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/02/does-urge-to-care-come-from-biology.html
Does the “urge to care” come from culture?
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/02/does-urge-to-care-come-from-culture.html
Beyond nature and nurture
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/02/beyond-nature-and-nurture.html
Life is not perfectible
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/02/life-is-not-perfectible.html
“Giving in” to perfectibility and the path to fundamentalism
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/03/giving-in-to-perfectibility-and-path-to.html
The inevitability of uncertainty
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-inevitability-of-uncertainty.html
“Only in our limits do we find our freedom”
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/03/only-in-our-limits-do-we-find-our.html
Thinking INSIDE the box
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/03/thinking-inside-box.html
Giving up
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/03/giving-up.html
Why secular idealism is insufficient
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/04/why-secular-idealism-is-insufficient.html
Faith
http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/04/faith.html
