Forthcoming Anthology on Dialectical Libertarianism

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Check out Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s announcement for his forthcoming anthology Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom (edited by Sciabarra, Roger Bissell, and Edward Younkins) here, and the abstracts of chapters here.

Contributors include Jason Lee Byas, Robert Campbell, Troy Camplin, Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, Billy Christmas, Douglas Den Uyl, Nathan Goodman, Robert Higgs, Steven Horwitz, Stephan Kinsella, Deirdre McCloskey, David Prychitko, Douglas Rasmussen, John Welsh, the editors themselves (Sciabarra, Bissell, and Younkins), and your humble correspondent. (You’ll notice several of my fellow Molinari/C4SS and BHL folks on that list.)

In Sciabarra’s words: “These essays explore ways that liberty can be better defended using a dialectical approach, a mode of analysis that grasps the full context of philosophical, cultural, and social factors requisite to the sustenance of human freedom.” Sciabarra notes that while “some of the authors associated with the volume may very well not associate themselves with the views of other authors herein represented,” a “context-sensitive dialectical approach” is “living research program” that “will necessarily generate a variety of perspectives, united only in their ideological commitment to freedom and their methodological commitment to a dialectical sensibility.”

Sciabarra has devoted his career to exploring such an approach, most notably in his “Dialectics and Liberty” trilogy Marx, Hayek, and Utopia; Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical; and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.

I Won’t Drive The Roundabout

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A couple of days ago, my Facebook friend Gary Chartier posted this article from USA Today on increasing speed limits on American highways. As it happens, I’m at work on a paper on a traffic-related blog post I wrote here a few months ago, to the effect that police tailgating ought to be regarded as a form of legal entrapment. To that end, I’ve been reading a lot about cars, roads, road safety, traffic, tailgating, police chases, and entrapment. Research aside, I happen to be an unapologetic traffic-ethics bigot inclined to the view that when it comes to driving, it’s my way or the highway. So naturally, I leapt at the chance to pontificate on Gary’s post.

I think higher speed limits have a paradoxical effect. The higher the speed limit, the greater the generalized fear of driving; the greater the generalized fear, the greater the vigilance with which people drive; the greater the vigilance, the fewer fatal (high speed) accidents. (The general pattern has been statistically demonstrated.) Unfortunately, when there are accidents at that speed, they’re more likely than usual to be fatal. In New Jersey, higher speed limits have led to fewer fatalities. That said, I don’t think higher speed limits are a legitimate way of reducing fatalities; I call it “regulation by terror-induced vigilance.” It’s like reducing crime rates through extremely aggressive methods of deterrence.

Incredibly, Nathan Byrd, another of Gary’s FB friends, had the audacity to question my claims right there on Facebook. Continue reading →

Racism in an Elevator

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I went stark raving mad after seeing this video posted in a module of my Ethics course at Felician University covering multicultural counseling. Irfan and I have long talks about how upside down things are not only in the media, but in the social sciences where the truth of what one has to say appears to relate more to the color of their skin than what the person actually says.

The effect of the type of “reasoning” engaged in not only in the two paragraphs below, but in the video as well as the article on “white privilege” (just click on the link to see that article) was going to send me to the psych ward on suspicion of homicidal ideation if I did not speak up. So, I felt it best to do so in the interests of everyone’s safety. I didn’t have a lot of time to write this response so it’s rough, but it makes the points I wanted to make in essence. I think Irfan will follow-up with more to say. Continue reading →

Public reason as solving a fundamental disagreement problem

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One strand in the “public reason” approach to political justification, stated in a very general form, might go something like this: in the context of disagreement about which shared, public norms to codify and enforce, when actual consensus is not present, the obvious or evident nature of important, relevant objective reasons, the recognition of which would rationally tend to lead to consensus (this situation constituting a certain kind of hypothetical consensus) suffices to make for permission to enforce.  One way to characterize this general approach is by saying that there is a “disagreement problem” specific to the relevant context that is “solved” by taking steps toward consensus (with enough truth in it) on the matter as against simply seeking the truth. Here is a specific proposal along these lines, a first shot in the right direction with this kind of approach, to play with and evaluate: Continue reading →

Justice as Fairness

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I’m wondering what readers think of this case:

A judge has sided with a New Jersey teenager accused of cheating on the ACT exams, saying a clause test-takers must sign giving up their rights to sue the testing company is “unconscionable” and “void as against public policy.”

The ruling from Somerset County Judge Michael Rogers means Readington Township teenager Brendan Clare can seek damages from ACT Inc., the company that runs the test and threatened to invalidate his scores. It also opens the door for teenagers across the country to attempt to sue the testing company citing Rogers’ ruling.

A somewhat more informative article from Inside Higher Ed.

The contract in question strikes me as substantively unfair, but I wonder about the use of unconscionability to void it. For purposes of this post, set aside the possibility of fraud, and focus just on the issue of unconscionability. It seems to me that the use of unconscionability here raises the following problem. Continue reading →

Drivin’ and Cryin’: Bumps on the Road to Pot Legalization

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I’m all in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana, indeed for the eventual legalization of recreational pot use, but the closer we come to achieving that goal, the greater the number of practical quasi-dilemmas we’ll have to face that we’d never had to consider before. These quasi-dilemmas may not be conclusive considerations against full legalization, but they can’t be minimized, either.

It’s common for advocates of legalization to compare pot with alcohol: if we accept recreational alcohol consumption, why not accept recreational consumption of pot? In many ways (it’s plausibly argued), alcohol is worse than pot. If we overlook the problems with alcohol and allow recreational alcohol consumption anyway, it seems inconsistent to fixate on the similar problems with pot in order to ban the recreational use of pot. Continue reading →

Psychotherapy and Chronic Pain: An Interview with Alison Bowles

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Here’s an online interview with my wife (and PoT blogger) Alison Bowles, conducted by Raymond Barrett of the Telehealth Certification Institute in Canandaigua, New York. Alison is a psychotherapist in private practice with an on-ground presence in Manhattan, and a developing online practice.

The interview focuses on an under-discussed issue in therapy–therapy with people suffering from chronic pain. We hear so much about the “opioid crisis” that we forget that it’s overshadowed—by a long shot–by a chronic pain crisis. There’s also a dangerous trend in mental health of pretending that chronic pain conditions can be managed and resolved by the magic of mindfulness and meditation. Though many studies suggest that such claims are nonsense, that hasn’t stopped the mindfulness gurus from making them: Continue reading →

Calls for Papers: ISME, NASSP

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Given the interests of PoT readers and bloggers, I thought I’d call attention to this CFP, for what promises to be a knock-out conference at Notre Dame this summer:

https://ethicscenter.nd.edu/research/conference-to-what-end/

MacIntyre is a former mentor and Lear is a personal hero of mine, so I’m hoping to pull something together for this conference, and would love to see some PoT people there as well. Continue reading →