When Alexander marched southwards from Tyre, he met with resistance at one place only, the old Philistine city of Gaza, the last great coast-town before the Egyptian frontier, a strong fortress on an eminence, which was bravely and skilfully defended by the eunuch Batis with the help of Nabatean mercenaries. Not until the heavy siege-engines had been fetched from Tyre and placed upon an artificial rampart and the walls had been undermined, did he succeed in taking the city after a two months’ siege. In the course of it he was wounded by a shot in the shoulder.  As a clean sweep had been made of the population partly by death and partly by enslavement, Alexander fetched in new settlers from the neighborhood, and converted the town into a Macedonian fortress.

–Ulrich Wilcken, Alexander the Great, p. 112

Here’s another interpretation of how (what Estlund characterizes as) the central thesis of political liberalism might go.

The reasons that favor permission to coerce A but that are not acceptable to A (due to their violating A’s conscience), unlike the other good reasons that favor it being permitted to coerce A, are not part of (they are irrelevant to) one being in a position to make a good case to A that would also be acceptable to A. The screening-off here would not be part of what determines the shape of the relevant good reasoning about the relevant permission to coerce itself, but it would determine the reasons or bits of reasoning (that are part of one’s good reasoning) that factor into meeting the condition that is crucial for the permission to exist (the condition of one at least being in a position to make an acceptable case to A, if not actually making it). Continue reading →

From a New York Times article on a nasty “shouting match” between two New York state legislators (some of which took place on Twitter, making the “shouting” part a bit of an exaggeration):

Mr. Parker has a record of outbursts and sometimes outright violence. In 2005, he was arrested and charged with punching a traffic agent; the charges were eventually dismissed.

In 2009, he was indicted on a charge of assaulting and menacing a New York Post photographer outside the senator’s mother’s home. He was found guilty of two misdemeanor counts but acquitted of felony charges. A judge gave him three years’ probation and ordered him to attend an anger management class.

How do dismissed criminal charges furnish evidence, even in part, of a “record of…outright violence”? There may well be hard evidence of Parker’s punching the traffic agent despite the dismissal, but if so, this evidence is not mentioned, and whether or not it exists, the fact remains that it didn’t lead to criminal charges. Continue reading →

Suppose we are considering whether it is okay for the government, in pursuit of legitimate public aims, to require one to bake a cake for a gay wedding when this goes against one’s religious convictions.  If a pretty strong version of religious tolerance is true, then the answer is no. And the same circumstance affects the shape of good reasoning toward the relevant conclusion in the following way: reasons like ‘this guy would be forced to act against his religious convictions if this proposal were implemented’ and ‘this guy has a religious conviction according to which it is a sin to be involved, in any way, in any marriage that is not between a man and a woman’ are to be given controlling weight, decisively weighing against the conclusion that it is okay for the government to thus coerce.  (This would be a fact about good reasoning, which we might well do privately, not a fact about how we should treat each other in deliberating together about what to do collectively.) Continue reading →

Consider:  

Religious Tolerance:  Governments are morally forbidden from (i) enforcing religious tenets on their citizens that are not the religious tenets of those citizens (or requiring of them sworn allegiance to such tenets) and (ii) forcing its citizens to say or do things that contradict their religious tenets (if they have such).

On this view, the truth or falsity of some of our conclusions about permissible government coercion depend on whether or not people have religious beliefs according to which what they would be coerced into doing would be a sin.  And the landscape of relevant or good reasons is similarly relativized to such religious belief, at least in this way: that one would be forced to commit something that one views as a sin comes to be a controlling reason against a proposed law, at least generally outweighing what would otherwise — from a neutral or objective or apart-from-what-religious-beliefs-people-have perspective — be sufficient or decisive reasons in favor of the law.   Continue reading →