Category Archives: ethics

“Sick of the Bullshit”

Posted on by under cancel culture, ethics, Fatwas, moralism, Palestine

It’s ordinarily a violation of the ethics of discourse to use the question-and-answer period of a talk to make a speech rather than ask a bona fide question. A question is a request for information. A request can, as a condition of its intelligibility, require a brief clarification or bit of context-setting, but there’s a difference between that and a speech. 

However, most norms, no matter how stringent, have exceptions. What if, day after day–hundreds or thousands of times across a solid year–the spokesperson for a person in authority engages questioners in egregious, obvious bad faith? What if, day after day, he tells smirking lies about life and death matters, makes up random bullshit at will, and evades the meaning of obvious questions in order to serve up whole stinking, decaying schools of red herrings? What if his bosses are concealing complicity in mass murder, and are about to lead the country into an insane, ill-conceived war (the second one in the last few years), not just on behalf of their own country, but on behalf of a foreign country? Continue reading →

Markets with and without Limits

Posted on by under book review, ethics, General announcements, libertarianism, liberty and the left, moralism

Some more bragging to compensate for the free-riding modesty of PoT’s bloggers: Roderick Long has an article out on the dispute over markets with and without limits: “The Limits of Anti-Anti-Commodification Arguments: James Stacey Taylor in Markets with Limits versus Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski in Markets without Limits,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 37:2 (Fall 2023), pp. 1-10. The publication date is given as 2023, but the issue just came out. Continue reading →

First Thoughts on Pettit’s Republicanism

Posted on by under ethics, MTSP Discussion: Philip Pettit's Republicanism

I want to get some basic thoughts on Philip Pettit’s book, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, on the record. Pettit’s ideas have the virtue of being not so far out in left field (from my own perspective) as to be hopeless, yet strange enough to be difficult to grapple with. What follows really are just some first thoughts, not very elegantly expressed, and not very certain.

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From the Molinari Vaults

Posted on by under anarchism, ethics, General announcements, liberty and the left, Rand

To my surprise I discover that I never uploaded the PDFs to the articles in the 2nd issue (2019!) of the Molinari Review. I’d intended to have an interval between print publication and web publication in order to incentivise people to buy the print edition, but I hadn’t intended to have a five-year interval. I thought I remembered posting the PDFs a while ago, but apparently my memory befoozled me. (Well, the past few years have been … complicated.)

mr-f19-coverOkay, so I’ve uploaded them now. Thus if you’re one of those penurious souls who never purchased the hard copy, you can now read the articles for free! Check out Jason Lee Byas defending market anarchism vis-à-vis communist anarchism; Joseph R. Stromberg defending Gabriel Kolko’s account of the role of big business in setting up the regulatory state; Thomas Lafayette Bateman III and Walter E. Block on the political implications of the free will debate; an exchange between Jan Narveson and James P. Sterba over whether a commitment to welfare rights follows from libertarian premises; and an exchange among Gus diZerega, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, and your humble correspondent on the merits and demerits of libertarianism in general and Ayn Rand in particular.

All this Molinari goodness is available via this link.

By the way, the 3rd issue (which will feature, inter alia, a reply to Stromberg from Robert Bradley Jr. and Roger Donway, along with Stromberg’s counter-reply) has been nearly ready to go for a while now; I just haven’t found the time to put the damn thing together. Maybe this summer? (It’d be nice if the 3rd installment of the Molinari Review could appear before the still-longer-awaited 3rd volume of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology, due out this fall. People have been waiting for that sucker since 1973.)

“It’s OK to Be Gay”: Hamtramck and the Jihad for Gay Pride

Posted on by under cancel culture, ethics, Fatwas

This Washington Post article tells the story of a betrayal–a double betrayal, really. The first betrayal is the one mentioned in the article itself. The Muslims of Hamtramck, Michigan accepted the generosity and hospitality of pro-immigrant activists, including Pride activists, then stabbed them in the back.

In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.

“We welcomed you,” former council member Catrina Stackpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. “We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”

That betrayal is obvious. The other one is harder to see, but just as real. The Muslims of Hamtramck have not only betrayed their neighbors but their co-religionists: Muslims abroad fighting for gay rights and pride. Continue reading →

Titanic Malice

Posted on by under ethics, MTSP Discussion: George Sher's Desert

The response to the Titan submersible event has, in my view, been both remarkable and bizarre. Some people have found it an occasion for gallows humor; others have tried to suggest that the crew/passengers felt no suffering as they died. Still others tell us that we should celebrate the heroism of people who take risks to explore the unknown, and point out that civilization itself depends on its bold risk takers. I find all three of these reactions delusional, and diagnostic of the delusions of our society.

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Estlund’s Defense of Ideal Political Theory

Posted on by under ethics, MTSP Discussion: Gerald Gaus's The Tyranny of the Ideal

In “Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy,” (2011) David Estlund defends what are sometimes called “ideal” or utopian political theories against the charge of being incompatible with human nature. For example, a utopian socialist or egalitarian political theory might require a degree of selflessness from the citizenry that it is entirely unrealistic to expect flesh and blood humans to possess. Therefore, it is said, the political theory is defective and false. To this familiar objection, the familiar reply from defenders of utopian political theory is to claim that human nature is indeed up to the demands of their theory, or at least it will be once the dog-eat-dog pressures imposed by capitalism have been swept away and we enter the New Jerusalem.

But Estlund does not take this tack. What distinguishes his defense of utopian political theory is a willingness to agree for the sake of argument that we can know in advance that people will never bring themselves to act as the theory requires—which means he acknowledges that the theory should never be implemented, since to do so would bring catastrophic social dysfunction. Nevertheless, this does not invalidate the theory! Such a utopian political theory would remain the normative ideal: we ought to rebuild society on the model it prescribes and comply with its moral demands on our personal actions. Only, since we will never so comply, we ought not to rebuild society in the way it prescribes. But that does not mean there is anything wrong with the theory.

In what follows, I will elaborate and critique Estlund’s argument. TL;DR: The main thrust of his argument makes a valid and interesting point, but not one that saves ideal theory’s bacon.

Continue reading →

Markets Limited, Friendship Unlimited

Posted on by under anarchism, ethics, liberty and the left

The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Pacific Symposium in conjunction with the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco, 5-8 April 2023. Here’s the schedule info:

gary-jst-apa

Molinari Society symposium, part 1:
Author Meets Critics: Gary Chartier, Understanding Friendship: On the Moral, Political, and Spiritual Meaning of Love

G4D. Thursday, 6 April 2023, 6:00-8:00pm, Westin St. Francis Hotel, 335 Powell St., San Francisco CA 94102, Elizabethan C (2nd floor).

chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

author:
Gary Chartier (La Sierra University)

critics:
Neera Badhwar (University of Oklahoma and George Mason University)
Michael Pakaluk [in absentia] (The Catholic University of America)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

Molinari Society symposium, part 2:
Author Meets Critics: James Stacey Taylor, Markets with Limits: How the Commodification of Academia Derails Debate

G7E. Friday, 7 April 2023, 7:00-9:00pm, Westin St. Francis Hotel, 335 Powell St., San Francisco CA 94102, Olympic (2nd floor).

chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

author:
James Stacey Taylor (The College of New Jersey)

critics:
Amy White (Ohio University)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

[Glen Whitman (CSU Northridge), previously announced as an additional commentator, had to withdraw.]

Gerald Gaus on the Primacy of Individual Moral Perspectives

Posted on by under ethics, MTSP Discussion: Gerald Gaus's The Tyranny of the Ideal

In “Social Morality and the Primacy of Individual Perspectives” (2017), Gerald Gaus responds to critics of his The Order of Public Reason (2011) as part of symposium on that book. I presume The Tyranny of the Ideal (2016) is a continuation of the ideas earlier and more formally developed in the 2011 book. The 2017 essay is valuable because it aims to “sketch a modest of recasting of the analysis” presented in the 2011 book. That is, more or less the whole argument of 2011 is restated in new terms, and obviously much abbreviated. The following is a brief summary of the argument and one of its implications.

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The Beautiful People

Posted on by under Art/Literature, ethics

Is it legitimate to criticize someone’s physical appearance? I don’t mean: is it legitimate to have or even express personal preferences about someone’s physical appearance. I mean: is it legitimate to issue an objective verdict on someone for looking the way they do, e.g., criticizing the very structure of a person’s face for giving them the facial appearance they have? Continue reading →