anotherpanacea

Tag: Doing What’s Right

  • Tea Party Follow-up

    So after my last Tea Party post, I’ve been trying to track down more information about the movement. One interview does not an investigation make. Here’s what I’ve dug up:

  • Creative Philanthrophy?

    What would you do with $100 and a case of altruism? How about giving away umbrellas during a rainstorm: David Ibnale had no idea how tough it would be to give away umbrellas on Market Street the other day. He figured that he and his free umbrellas were going to change the world. The world had…

  • How to Carry Out the Duty to Assist in Haiti

    I won’t spend much time justifying the duty to assist now, except to link to Ramsey Clark’s essay “Haiti’s Agonies and Exaltations,” but I do want to talk about the kinds of assistance we can offer: Personal: in the short term, we can all text “HAITI” to 90999 to give $10 to the Red Cross.…

  • Advice

    Ever since the markets became front page news, I’ve been caught in some sort of economics blog vortex. At this point, most of my reading is no longer directed towards macro-economic issues and institutional critique, but rather focuses on the economics department at George Mason. The problem is that it seems like these people really…

  • Beyond ‘Real’ and ‘Relative’: What are moral propositions about?

    Dr. J responds on moral realism. It appears that our dispute focuses on the role that ‘the world’ plays in verifying our moral propositions. Dr. J is  right to note that I’ve made an important and potentially dispositive claim in asserting that agent-neutrality requires that one’s account be “either verified by the world or not.”  However, I…

  • War, Bureaucracy, and Public Opinion

    David Brooks writes: The disadvantage [of Obama’s style of governance] is the tendency to bureaucratize the war. Armed conflict is about morale, motivation, honor, fear and breaking the enemy’s will. The danger is that Obama’s analytic mode will neglect the intangibles that are the essence of the fight. It will fail to inspire and comfort. Soldiers…

  • Bridging The Will-Be/Ought Gap

    So I’ve been writing the last few days on a number of only tenuously related themes: cruelty and torture, probability and prediction markets, testability, middle-range theories, and moral realism. Today I’m going to try to draw these themes together and point to a couple avenues for further discussion. Obviously, it’s important to me that our normative…

  • Prisons, Still

    I’m just reposting a couple of links from Metafilter’s Optimus Chyme: Everything You Never Wanted to Know about the American Prison-Industrial Complex Prison Nation Don’t click through if you were hoping to maintain your post-holiday glow. This is the sort of thing I hoped would be on the agenda by now. For all the attention…

  • Cost-benefit analysis of drug policy

    Here is why I love the economic analysis of policy. It’s an article by Mark A. R. Kleiman, detailing some simple rule changes and common sense redistributions of law enforcement budgets in order to maximize the efficiency and fairness of our drug enforcement policy. Imagine if we asked the DEA, the FBI, and the Army…