I have some questions about Estlund’s account of acceptability conditions on reasons (in public reasoning).  Here is the first one.

(1) Acceptability conditions make sense as conditions on the reasons that it is appropriate or permitted to give to each other (aside from whether they are good or true).  However, I think Estlund means for these conditions to apply to what reasons are appropriate even in private reasoning (when one is reasoning about when the state is permitted to coerce its citizens).  But why would the former imply the latter? Why should standards governing giving reasons to others speak to the appropriateness of a reason (distinct from its goodness or truth) in any kind of good reasoning? This seems almost like a category mistake of some kind.   Continue reading →

From this article in The New York Times. Michael, David, and I were making fun of Rawlsian public reason last night in our weekly philosophy discussion group, but then stuff like this comes down the pike, and you think, “Hey, we’re not denying that Rawls was addressing a real problem…”

The zeal to embody the whole truth in politics is incompatible with an idea of public reason that belongs with democratic citizenship.

–John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” Collected Papers, p. 574.

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Rand held her axiom Existence exists to include that the universe as a whole “cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence” (1973, 25).[1] One would naturally suppose Rand was thinking that immunity from creation or annihilation means the universe has existed an endless time in the past and will exist an endless time in the future. Plausible as that picture appears, might the axiom Existence exists not strictly entail the endless duration of Existence? Continue reading →

Here is a quick argument for non-voluntary (and hence non-consent-based) normative authority.  No doubt this needs some tightening-up or is otherwise flawed. And I have to do a lot more reading about the various “fair play” approaches to political authority (and authority generally).  But right now, something like this seems pretty compelling to me.

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I just called the cops on a guy who drove a van up to my garage, jumped out, took a picture of it, hurriedly jumped back into his van, and drove away with the tires screeching. With full certainty that the motherfucker was casing our house to burglarize it (as Rashida Tlaib might put it), I grabbed my phone and got a picture of the van driving away, doing my best to memorize what I could about it. I told the police dispatcher that the guy was taking a picture of the keypad to my garage.  The cops put out an APB on the guy, and sent an officer to our house. Continue reading →

We now lock fear and hatred behind bars, because we do not want them to have a place in our future lives. We shall lock them behind bars, but shall not forget them.

(Click the “Continue Reading” tab for the answer, but don’t give it away!)

 

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One problem with Estlund’s argument (Ch. 1, p. 9) is that only the denial of consent, not mere non-consent, is an event that typically changes the landscape of relevant permission/obligation.  Let’s look at two cases. Suppose that the initial conditions are that we are allowed to touch each other on the shoulder in order to get the attention of person who would be touched. We now have two cases:

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In Ch. 8 of DEMOCRATIC AUTHORITY, David Estlund argues for a certain kind of political authority on a purely intuitive basis (as a run-up to a more-principled or intuition-vindicating defense of political authority).  His argument starts with the intuitive (and Lockean) anti-vigilante principle (AVP):

when there is a system that serves the purposes of judgment and punishment without private punishment, then private punishment is morally wrong  

The idea here is that the obligation not to engage in relevant sorts of private punishment (even when the public verdict is known to be wrong) is generated by the system of public justice forbidding private punishment or vigilante behavior.  Since forbidding-generated as well as command-generated obligation (to obey) suffices for authority, what we have here is a kind of political authority. (Notice that, despite my language here, the system need not be public in anything like the governmental sense. The system could be privately-run but dominant in a geographic area.) Continue reading →

The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Eastern Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York City, 7-10 January 2019. Here’s the schedule info:

Molinari Society symposium: New Work in Libertarian and Anarchist Thought

G5C. Tuesday, 8 January 2019, 9:00 a.m.-12:00 noon, Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, 811 7th Ave. (at W. 53rd St.), New York NY, room TBA

chair:
     Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

presenters:
     Jason Lee Byas (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), “The Political Is Interpersonal”
     Dylan Andrew Delikta (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Anarchy: Finding Home in the (W)hole”
     Alex Braud (Arizona State University), “Putting Limits on Punishments of Last Resort”
     Roderick T. Long (Auburn University), “The Anarchist Landscape: Social Anarchism, Individualist Anarchism, and Anarcho-Capitalism from a Left-Wing Market Anarchist Perspective”

Regrettably, our session is scheduled opposite a session on Elizabeth Anderson’s book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives, with comments by Jacob Levy and Jessica Flanigan. This is unfortunate both because many members of our potential audience will probably be lured away by this session, and because we’d like to go to it ourselves. But as good anarchists, we must bear our sufferings like Rakhmetov.