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  "id": "CH03.P013",
  "oid": 51,
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  "label": null,
  "work": "orthodoxy",
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  "work_metadata": {
    "title": "Orthodoxy",
    "authors": [
      "G. K. Chesterton"
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    "description": "G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (1908), his account of how he came to Christian belief: the full text with annotations, cited sources and commentary.",
    "original_publication_year": 1908,
    "alternate_titles": [],
    "subjects": [
      "Christian apologetics",
      "Christianity",
      "Philosophy of religion",
      "Paradox",
      "G. K. Chesterton",
      "English literature, 20th century"
    ],
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    "metadata_updated_at": "2026-11-07T20:29:57Z"
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  "url": "/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH03.P013",
  "text": "Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it said, for instance, \"What is right in one age is wrong in another.\" This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.",
  "length_cp": 1108,
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      "title": "Nietzsche's reversal of values does not dispense with evaluation",
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          "exact": "Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them.",
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            "approach": "Philosophical contextualization: then and since",
            "question": "What does Nietzsche actually claim about the reversal of moral valuations, and does Chesterton's argument against changing standards answer it?"
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      "title": "What thought and choice need: from scattered virtues to a seamless character",
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