Virtual Molinari Society Panel on Rights: The Reboot

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This coming Monday, April 5th, the Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Pacific Symposium in conjunction with the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association via Zoom (5-10 April).

This panel has some overlap, both in personnel and in content, with the one we did in January for the Eastern APA, but it’s not identical.

Only those who cough up the hefty registration fee will be able to access the session, so no chance of free-riding this time around (the APA’s decision, definitely not ours; the APA is both pragmatically and morally confused about the costs and benefits of allowing free-riding at its conferences, but that’s another story). But there’s a substantial student discount, verb. sap. Anyway, here’s the schedule info:

Molinari Society symposium:
Radical Rights Theory

G2A. Monday, 5 April 2021, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Pacific time

chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

presenters:
Jesse Spafford (The Graduate Center, CUNY), “You Own Yourself and Nothing Else: A Radical Left-Libertarian Solution to the Self-Ownership Thesis’ Pollution Problem”
Jason Lee Byas (University of Michigan), “Stolen Bikes & Broken Bones: Restitution as Defense”
Zachary Woodman (Western Michigan University), “Extended Cognition as Property Acquisition”
Gary Chartier (La Sierra University), “Natural Law and Socioeconomic Rights”
Cory Massimino (Center for a Stateless Society), “Two Cheers for Rothbardianism”
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University), “How to Have Your No-Proviso Lockeanism and Eat It Too”

See the full schedule here.

I’ll be chairing the panel from the road, so let’s hope my motel’s wifi is up to the challenge. Still, can’t be worse than the Eastern session, when my power actually went out in the middle of it.

Thomas Reid and the Theory of Ideas

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Thomas Reid photo
(c) Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

All of Thomas Reid’s thought seems to grow out of his resistance to the skeptical conclusions of Berkeley and Hume. On the one hand, Reid is an effective critic, because he understands their arguments so well. By his own account, he started out as a convinced Berkeleyite and lost his enthusiasm only when he saw the skeptical scorched earth left by Hume. Instead of Berkeley’s real (albeit nonmaterial) and known world, with Hume there is not only no external world, there are no minds, no necessary relations of cause and effect, no rational inductive inferences, etc. Reid decided there must be something wrong, and identifies the problem as the theory of ideas (or “system of ideas” or “ideal system”), which he attributes to Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke (10; information on page references is given at the conclusion of this essay). He argues that Berkeley’s and Hume’s reasoning is mostly correct, derived by pursuing the theory of ideas more consistently than Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke had done. Thus, the extreme conclusions of Berkeley and Hume were due not to errors of reasoning but to errors of their starting points.

On the other hand, Reid’s effectiveness is undercut, in my view, by his failure to supply a convincing alternative to the theory of ideas. He should not be blamed for this. After all, it took philosophy more than 200 years after Reid to resolve the errors of the theory of ideas and put the philosophy of perception on a new footing. In my view, this has now been done with Intentionalism, and we shall see that Reid made promising steps in this direction. But he doesn’t go far enough, and as a result, he does not produce a fully convincing account of perception. He also fails to produce a plausible account of the contribution of the senses to conceptual thought, as the theory of ideas claims to do. Finally, I think Reid’s appeal to “common sense” is another reason he failed to convince. The notion of the authority of common sense—as a set of supposedly unchallengeable, quasi-axiomatic tenets, such as that there is an external world that we know by sense-perception—is fundamentally dogmatic and anti-intellectual, and it’s no surprise that philosophers generally denigrate it.

Thus, although Reid produced trenchant criticisms of the theory of ideas, these did not get the attention they should have. Every theory has problems and inadequacies. Accordingly, thinkers do not abandon a theory merely because it is in difficulties and arguably falsified or refuted. Rather, people abandon a theory when they have a better theory. Now that this is in our grasp, Reid suddenly looks a lot smarter than he used to.

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Revisiting Hursthouse on the Repentant Racist (2 of 2)

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In my last (recent) post on this topic, I argued that it seems absurd to blame people, or pass moral judgments of any kind on them, for what they experience in dreams. It follows that it’s absurd to blame, judge, or morally assess someone for having racist dreams, or generally, vicious dreams. But, I suggested, certain sorts of passing, stream-of-consciousness thoughts seem to bear a closer similarity to dream states than they do to conscious convictions. If so, thoughts of this variety are not a proper subject of moral assessment either, or at least less so, in proportion to their similarity to the relevant features of dreams.

One implication of this claim is that a person who encounters a lot of racist noise in his head, even racist noise voiced in the first person, is not necessarily a racist himself, and not to be judged a racist simply on that evidence–a claim that contradicts not just Hursthouse’s view, but one held by other moral philosophers. A second implication is that insofar as implicit bias/association tests function to detect a propensity to give voice to involuntary, osmotic mental noise, we have (yet another) plausible  explanation for their invalidity and unreliability, and should consider dramatically ratcheting back the use we make of them. Continue reading →

Ecce Cuomo

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It may seem strange to have so political a reaction to the death of a spouse, but I find myself, in the wake of my wife Alison Bowles’s recent untimely death, seeing the world through her eyes. And she was, if anything, a politically opinionated person whose perspective on the world permanently changed the way I look at it. I’ve certainly done my share of entirely private grieving for her (and have a long way to go), but I can’t help feeling an imperative to preserve what I regard as her distinctive outlook on the world beyond our marriage.

This story in The New York Times about Andrew Cuomo strikes a particular chord.

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“If You Can Make It Here…” Thoughts on Life in “The City”

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I saw the Op-Ed below in The New York Times the other day, arguing that those who “deserted” New York City during the pandemic, and now wish to return, ought to be “punished” by having to pay a resettlement tax. The author writes as though he suffered some great, distinctive hardship, and/or enacted some great act of social justice or virtue by staying in New York when others left.

I’m not really sure what he’s talking about, or what he thinks he’s talking about. Judging from what he writes, he did nothing of significance but stay in Brooklyn, suffering nothing more significant than what most New Yorkers suffer for living where they do. How it is that departure from such a place should mark one out for punishment is nowhere explained in the article–mostly, I suspect, because there is no explanation to be given. If people followed the author’s “advice,” immigration from the developing world would end tomorrow. We would all stay in the shitholes in which we found ourselves. That the author is content to do so is his problem, no one else’s. Someone ought to tell him.

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Alison Bowles (1963-2021), RIP

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I’ve revised the biographical blurb for Alison Bowles at PoT’s “About the Blog and Bloggers” page. I apologize to anyone learning belatedly of her tragic death in this fashion. I myself learned of her passing on the morning of March 10, but believe it took place a few days earlier. [I’ve since learned that it likely took place between March 2 and March 4.]

Alison, in Alexandria, Virginia, February 2017

Alison Bowles (“ridiculous2017”) was, until her untimely death in March 2021, a licensed mental health counselor in private practice, with offices in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, and New York City. On moving to Toronto in the summer of 2020, she became a frequent guest on Business Talk Radio, discussing various issues in the theory and practice of mental health counseling. Her first broadcast was on July 6, 2020 and her last was (I believe) on February 19, 2021. She maintained a personal blog housing some of her writing, and in her last days had created a Facebook page where her very last public thoughts may be found. Here’s an interview she did in 2019 on telemental health, and here is a brief biographical statement. (–IK, March 12, 2021).

In the Teeth of Tragedy

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Having recently experienced a terrible tragedy–the untimely death of my estranged wife by suicide–I can’t suppress a passing literary thought: Is there any major work of tragic literature,  broadly conceived, that is more preposterous, more wildly inapposite to the subject matter, than the Book of Job?

The Book of Job is one of the literary masterpieces of all time, and provides a profound discussion on the suffering of a just man.

No, it fucking isn’t–and no it fucking doesn’t. Continue reading →

Racist Dreams: Revisiting Hursthouse on the Repentant Racist (1 of 2)

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In a post I wrote here back in 2016, I sketched an idea for a paper (as yet un-written) challenging Rosalind Hursthouse’s views on virtue, moral luck, and racism as expressed in chapter 5 of her book, On Virtue Ethics (2001). Hursthouse’s overall view is that ascriptions of virtue and vice are sensitive to moral luck. In other words, ascriptions to S of virtue or vice–claims of the form “S is virtuous or vicious”–can depend in part on circumstances beyond S’s control. This is as true of ascriptions of racism as of other ascriptions of vice. The implication is that S can truth-aptly be described as a racist even for behavior or traits whose existence is beyond S‘s control.

Consider what Hursthouse calls “the repentant racist,” someone brought up as a racist, and who (for a time) internalizes that racism, but who (over time) comes to see the error of his upbringing, rejects racism, and does his best to rid himself of it. Such a person might, despite his best efforts, continue to have racist thoughts and feelings after regarding himself (and in some sense being) fully repentant or fully reformed. Suppose (ex hypothesi) that his having such thoughts and feelings is entirely out of his control–a deterministic outcome of his upbringing, caused by psychological facts out of his control. Continue reading →

Paul Krugman on Masks and Public Urination

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I agree with Paul Krugman about masking, but he’s wrong about public urination, and wrong to use the laws against it as an analogue of the laws requiring masking in the COVID-19 pandemic:

Relieving yourself in public is illegal in every state. I assume that few readers are surprised to hear this; I also assume that many readers wonder why I feel the need to bring up this distasteful subject. But bear with me: There’s a moral here, and it’s one that has disturbing implications for our nation’s future.

Although we take these restrictions for granted, they can sometimes be inconvenient, as anyone out and about after having had too many cups of coffee can attest. But the inconvenience is trivial, and the case for such rules is compelling, both in terms of protecting public health and as a way to avoid causing public offense. And as far as I know there aren’t angry political activists, let alone armed protesters, demanding the right to do their business wherever they want.

Laws against public urination do not impose a merely trivial inconvenience. If someone has a medical condition that involves urinary frequency or urgency, and there are no public bathrooms available (as often there aren’t), discreet “public” urination becomes unavoidable. Likewise if someone is homeless. Continue reading →

Cancel Neera Tanden

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The problem with Neera Tanden is not, as is now widely being asserted by Republicans, that she’s “partisan,” “divisive,” or “mean.” Nor is her great virtue, as a lot of centrist Democrats seem to believe, that she’s some kind of persecuted truth teller. The problem with Neera Tanden is that she’s full of shit–a lying windbag and reckless big mouth who’s mastered the art of invective without being able to argue her way out of a paper bag on any substantive issue.

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