anotherpanacea

Tag: That There May Be Any Future At all

  • Arendtian Natality, Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and Antinatalism

    Because of my work on Hannah Arendt, I often struggle with the apparent incongruity between her account of natality and my own tendency towards antinatalism. Natality is at the heart of Arendt’s project, a rejection of the Heideggerian obsession with mortality and being-towards-death: “It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started…

  • Publicity Without Politics

    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 Following Nietzsche, Arendt speaks of the Christian publicity without politics as world-destruction and ultimately as ‘desertification’: “the…

  • Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility

    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 In The Human Condition Arendt staked out a position that action’s novel self-disclosure…

  • Using Basic Income to Sell a Carbon Tax

    Using Basic Income to Sell a Carbon Tax

    You know, I may have been looking at the Basic Income + VAT wrong. Instead of using a value-added tax to fund the basic income, perhaps we should use a basic income grant to sell a different policy… the carbon tax! Here’s what I have in mind: the US could adopt a revenue-neutral carbon tax.…

  • 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…

  • The Walking Dead

    Last year, I wrote: I’d like to see what a surviving-a-day-at-a-time hero looks like. Whatever collection of writers can come up with that story and characterization will make a lot of money breaking with the current anti-hero conventions. More to the point, it might be good for us. Though we may [not] have had too…

  • Cloning isn’t about Genetic Identity: More on Procreation

    Ever since I wrote negatively about the justice of procreation, I’ve been hoping that someone would come along and take the positive position. It’s the kind of argument about which one doesn’t quite want to be right. Sadly, there’ve been no takers. However, there’s recently been a spate of discussions on a more narrow topic…

  • Moral Malapropism: Particularism on Craig Ferguson

    Late night television takes on moral particularism: via Peter Levine I’m still trying to get my head around Dancy’s view, so perhaps this post will be more confusing than it ought to be. Here’s the gist from the Stanford Encyclopedia: Moral Particularism, at its most trenchant, is the claim that there are no defensible moral principles,…

  • Thinking about Procreative Rights and Duties

    We are commonly understood to have a right to procreate. For instance, it is a clear violation of that right to coercively sterilize those judged unfit. However, there is some question whether this right includes the right to assistive reproductive technologies, and whether it is defeasible in any circumstances, i.e. whether we have a corresponding…