anotherpanacea

Tag: Doing What’s Right

  • A Duty to Forgive?

    Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Arendt’s response raises interesting questions: “Of course I am prejudiced, namely against charity,” she wrote. In her letter…

  • Meliorism versus Perfectionism

    Consider two courses of action: One has a low probability of success but promises to mildly increase welfare (however defined). Call this “meliorism.” Rawlsian liberals, Burkean and Oakshottean conservatives, and Hayekian libertarians frequently identify with this view. Another has an unknown probability of success, but promises to massively increase welfare (however defined). Call this “perfectionism.”…

  • Jonathan Haidt’s Conflation of the Personal and the Partisan

    There’s been a conflict running through Jonathan Haidt’s work that it’s time for him to address. On the one hand, he asserts that there are characteristic moral intuitions that distinguish partisan liberals from partisan conservatives. He recently argued that these moral intuitions are demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of social psychologists identify…

  • Why I am still hopeful for Egypt’s revolution

    It is said that revolution is what happens when a police officer is transformed from a legitimate authority into a man with a gun. If that’s true, then what we witnessed in Egypt yesterday is a classic counter-revolution: irregular hoodlums attacking peaceful protesters, whose only defense is the military standing by. To ask for the…

  • Can I Buy a Vowel? Joe Pettit and Godless Morality

    My colleague Joe Pettit has posted a defense of theism that takes up the traditional Christian onto-theological response to the Euthyphro problem. God is the Measure Rather than speak of God as in some sense separate from the moral law, Pettit posits that God is the moral law. That way, there’s no dilemma when we…

  • The Growing Field of Julian Assange Secondary Scholarship

    If you haven’t read Assange’s own self-justifications, then you can read this summary of them to get a sense of what worried me. Now, Peter Ludlow does a proper study of Assange’s political theory: this is conspiracy in the sense of the original etymology of ‘conspire’ – as in “breathe with” or “breathe together”.  The individuals are acting in…

  • Borderline Personality Disorder, Utility, and Maximin Strategies

    Most liberals adopt some version of the Rawlsian principle that changes in the distribution of goods ought to benefit the least advantaged. This is a principle easily adopted on utilitarian grounds: the marginal utility to be derived from redistribution is quite high. For instance, the difference between the pleasure I currently experience and the pleasure…

  • The Politics of Crazies

    Dr. Trott has a nice post over at Mahogany Feed on Terry Jones’ threat to burn Korans over the weekend to commemorate the attacks of September 11th and to remind Muslims “not to push their agenda on us.” Dr. Trott suggests that this threat to burn the holy book of a cultural group, with an…

  • Democracy, Bureaucracy and the Fear of Statisticians

    Often when I am trying to explain problems in the modern political landscape or my own approach to political philosophy, I will return to Max Weber’s account of bureaucracy as more efficient than private office. Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about “efficiency” in bureaucracy, but Weber’s argument rested on the contrast between private and…

  • Could the Iraq War have been prevented?

    In the comments to a post on Republican obstructionism, my old colleague Will Roberts proposes the following historical counterfactual: if the American left had been willing to fight harder and dirtier, they could have prevented or arrested the war in Iraq. He goes on to propose a variety of actions that might have achieved this…