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 →

Rather, a husband exercises authority over his wife in a different way because he shares that authority with his wife and allows her to participate in his own deliberations, taking her judgment and advice into account. The husband’s rule is comparable to political rule because he not only rules, but is also ruled; he does not make all of the important decisions on the basis of his own deliberation alone, but engages in cooperative deliberation with his wife. The wife exercises a degree of rule over her husband because her own deliberative contributions can shape the decisions that are the source of the household’s collective actions.

David J. Riesbeck, Aristotle on Political Community, p. 152

Average conversation in the Khawaja-Bowles household:

Irfan: I don’t think we should let Hugo go out on the deck unattended.
Alison: Who cares what you think? Right, Hugo?
Hugo: Meow.

Hugo remains on the deck unattended.

Hugo

I wonder what anyone out there thinks of this issue, especially from a libertarian-type property rights perspective:

I live out in the country—granted, the countryside of New Jersey, but still, in a semi-rural area. The town I live in, Readington, is quite large (48 sq miles), and contains a fair bit of open space, along with a bunch of large-scale property holdings.

One of the owners of one of these larger plots owns a plot large enough to accommodate a small jetport—which is what he wants to build on it. The plot in question already has a small airport on it, intended for private propeller-driven planes, but the owner wants to upgrade the existing airport to the equivalent of a regional jetport for some of the smaller commercial airlines. Continue reading →

I spent a few hours in municipal court the other day fighting a traffic ticket. Of the several dozen defendants in court that day, I was the only one to demand a trial by pleading not guilty. In insisting so conspicuously and anomalously on my innocence–annoying even my attorney–I began to wonder about the guilt or innocence of the other defendants in court. No doubt some were guilty as charged, but I found it hard to believe that all of them were. What, I wondered, was the point of driving to court in a Mercedes or BMW, hiring a high priced attorney, and wasting hours to cop a plea in a case that had “reasonable doubt” written all over it? But lots did. Continue reading →

Here’s the text of a letter I sent to Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) on the Ilhan Omar controversy and (then) pending legislation intended to censure her. I sent a similarly-worded letter to my own congressional representative, Tom Malinowski. I’ve listed some useful readings on the controversy after the text of the letter. Here is a useful backgrounder to the controversy, from The New York Times. Here is the draft of the congressional resolution I had in front of me as I wrote the letter below. This is the IHRA “Working Definition of Antisemitism” referenced in the draft resolution, and criticized in the fourth paragraph of my letter.  Continue reading →