Here’s the text of the talk I gave on self-ownership at the PPE conference last March. It’s not a defense of self-ownership in the sense of a positive argument for the thesis; instead, it’s a reply to the most common objections to self-ownership that I’ve encountered:
Getting Self-Ownership in View
I seem to be revisiting a lot of things lately–first reparations, now this. Anyway, you may have noticed this down on the pingbacks, but there’s a long response here to my November 2 post (and exchange with Roderick) on the tensions between Aristotelianism and libertarianism. The post is called “The Shallowness of Secular Ethical Systems,” the blog is called Politics and Prosperity, and the author’s pen-name is Loquitur Veritatem, or truth teller. This last piece of information will come as a shock to anyone who (like me) thought Policy of Truth was the repository of all truths worth knowing. Continue reading
There are times when I read a passage of Ayn Rand’s and find myself rubbing my eyes to make sure that what I’m reading is real. I take a perverse pride in knowing my way around the Randian corpus, but I just read a passage of hers that I somehow seem to have missed before today, and am having trouble processing what I’ve read. It’s excerpted in a piece on the ARI website on the “moral foundations of the Berlin Wall.” The two prefatory sentences are by Tom Bowden, the author: Continue reading
So one side in the impeachment dispute thinks it’s obvious that we should have been sending Ukraine $391 million in military aid to prosecute a proxy war against Russia, and the other side thinks it’s obvious we should have been doing the same to launch a Ukraine-based investigation of the Bidens. Whatever you think about impeachment, the one question sure to be lost in the impeachment shuffle is whether we should have been sending Ukraine $391 million in military aid in the first place.
One side thinks we should have because Bill Taylor said so. The other side thinks we should have because Donald Trump and Rudolph Giuliani thought so. If this is a test of comparative credibility, I guess the partisans of Taylor win, but it’s typical of our politics that at a substantive level, no matter who wins or loses, the outcome is the same. Even at its most ostensibly partisan, our politics ends up bipartisan.
In short, even if we remove Trump, we get Pence. High stakes.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post arguing that Nozickian libertarianism entails reparations.* The reparations in question follow from Nozick’s “principle of compensation,” which offers compensation for what Nozick calls “preventive restraints,” that is, coercive restrictions on individuals imposed in order to lessen the risk that they will violate others’ rights. So-called Terry stops are a paradigmatic example of a preventive restraint in Nozick’s sense (I argued), so that those on the receiving end of them would on Nozick’s view be owed compensation. If we assume (ex hypothesi, but still plausibly) that young black men (or black people generally) are disproportionately on the receiving end of preventive restraints, then young black men (or blacks generally) would disproportionately receive Nozickian compensation. That compensation, I suggested, is a form of what’s commonly called “reparations.” Continue reading
I’m inclined to rant today. As readers have probably figured out, that doesn’t really differentiate today from any other day, but still.
Today’s rant is about Catholic education. Let me preface it by saying that I like Catholic education. I got my Ph.D. at Notre Dame. I’ve spent the last twelve years teaching at a Catholic-Franciscan university, “The Franciscan University of New Jersey,” no less. I just got a paper accepted at a conference at Sacred Heart University on the “Catholic intellectual tradition” wherein I defend the pedagogical legacy of Cardinal Newman. I teach the Catechism of the Catholic Church in my ethics classes. Some of my best friends are members of the Knights of Columbus. Continue reading
One thing which is suggested by the letters themselves is that Locke’s courtship was not rewarded as he hoped. “P.E.” welcomed love, but of a different sort from that which Locke offered her. She wanted a rarefied spiritual love. Locke was more ardent. He protested first with sadness and later with bitterness that her love was too cold. …
In another letter he assured “P.E.” that she was right in thinking he wished to come back to Oxford for the sake of people there; but he said she was wrong in putting her name after that of another person. However, he asked her to increase as much as she could that other person’s friendship for him. This other person was named in the letter as “Mr. T” and Locke was a little jealous of him. He told “P.E.” he could not believe that the new friendship between her and “Mr. T” would ruin their friendship, but it looks as if he was afraid that it might.
–Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography, p. 48.
… [T]here were double meanings in
the Necronomicon of the mad Arab
Abdul Alhazred which the initiated
might read as they chose ….
Sometimes two terms can be the same in reference but different in sense, like “the morning star” and “the evening star,” or “Mark Twain” and “Samuel Clemens,” or … “John Galt” and “Cthulhu.” Continue reading
About a year ago, I attended a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) as part of an assignment for a class on addictions counseling I’d been taking in the Master’s in Counseling Program at Felician University.[1] Struck by the philosophical richness of what I’d encountered at the meeting, I thought I’d reproduce a version of my report on it here in case readers found it of any interest. In the interests of preserving the confidentiality of the group’s members, I’ve omitted any identifying features of the meeting with respect to time, place, and the identity of those present, describing the event only in the most general way. My aim here is to reflect on matters of general principle, not to dwell on the particulars of anyone’s life. Continue reading
