Best Voice Mail Ever

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Hi Mr. Khawaja, this is Lieutenant Spatola from the Detective Bureau at Bloomfield Police Department. We wanted to advise you that we did make an arrest on the package theft you recently reported. The individual in question has confessed to about eight other thefts in the neighborhood. If you need any documentation or reports, you can just stop in at our headquarters. Thank you.

I initially thought it was an exercise in futility to report the theft, on the grounds that I couldn’t imagine their ever catching the thief. But I did the citizenly thing and reported it anyway. I’m glad I did. After thinking about it a bit, I eventually figured out how they caught the guy, but since I don’t want to reveal sources and methods, my lips are sealed, except to say: Elementary, my dear Watson.

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Morals and the Free Society: 3. Morals That Create the Free Market

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Here is the third chunk of the argument. To return to the second chunk, click here. To advance to the fourth chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here.

Of course, this moral vision of pure egoistic utility maximization applies only within a perfectly free market. This means the free society’s members must abide by the rules whose observance brings the free market into being in the first place. The free market depends on the observance of clearly defined property rights, for example, as well as on the observance of rules against direct coercion. But observing these rules is not always utility maximizing. Notwithstanding the many cogent reasons that have been advanced to show why coercive and rights-violating behavior is often not in the agent’s utility-maximizing self-interest, it seems clear that there are still many situations in which such behavior is utility maximizing. Thus, if the free market is to exist, agents must abide by its rules at the expense of their own utility maximization. And these rules—against fraud, theft, and murder, for example—are clearly moral rules. So the free market requires obedience to a certain set of moral rules—namely, the moral rules that establish the free market—that are distinct and apparently not derivable from the morality of egoistic utility maximization.

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IPOD “INTRODUCTION” (PP. 1-16)

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Irfan and I have had a bit of a reading project going.  We have been reading through Nomy Arpaly and Tim Schroeder’s IN PRAISE OF DESIRE (affectionately, “IPOD”).  I’m going to post some chapter or section summary/commentary here that is meant to more or less stand on its own (this helps me condense the material into clear essentials).  It is also meant as an invitation to read the book, or sections of it, and “get into the weeds” with us.  So here is (selective) summary/commentary for the IPOD Introduction (which, unlike many introductions, is substantive).

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Morals and the Free Society: 2. Is the Perfectly Free Market a “Morally Free Zone”?

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Here is the second chunk of the argument. To return to the first chunk, click here. To advance to the third chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here.

A somewhat different and even stronger version of the claim that a free—or at least ideally free—society does not impose morals is given by David Gauthier in Morals by Agreement (1986, ch. 4). Gauthier goes further than the mere claim of toleration and argues that the free market, wherever it works with perfect efficiency, is a “morally free zone,” meaning that morality is neither needed nor even desirable! In such a social context, instrumental rationality is a sufficient guide to life, and it is the only proper guide: any other principle must only damage people’s lives. Thus, in an ideally free society, morals actually have no place!

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Tenth Annual Felician Institute Conference: Tentative Program

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Just a quick note to say that I’ve worked up a tentative version of the program for the Tenth Annual Felician Institute Conference. As usual, we got more papers than we had spots to fill, so we couldn’t include all of them. But the ones on the program are really good, and I’d like to think that the sessions might well end up being more than the sum of their parts.  There’s a nice blend of meta-ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy this time (though not very much in the way of history). I was particularly gratified to get two hard-hitting pieces for our dedicated session on the ethics, politics, and economics of adjuncting–one by Michelle Ciurria (Washington University at St. Louis), and one by Derek Bowman (Providence College).

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Morals and the Free Society: 1. Intro; Is a Free Society a Paradise of Moral Tolerance?

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“Morals and the Free Society” is an essay I’d like to get feedback on. It’s much too long for a single blog post, so I’ll post it in installments every few days. For reference—or if you just can’t wait to read the whole thing in all its glory—the complete essay is posted here. To advance to the second installment, click here.

Introduction

What is the appropriate place of morals in a free society? By “free society,” I mean a social order that places heavy emphasis on individual liberty; for example, freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion; freedom from coercive state power, as exemplified by unreasonable search and seizure, incarceration without trial, conscription (military or otherwise), etc.; and freedom of commerce, particularly including the protection of property rights. By “morals”—which I shall use interchangeably with “ethics”—I mean fundamental principles for the conduct of life, making no preconceptions about what those principles must be. For instance, even a simple egoistic hedonism is on the table as a possible moral system and conceivably even as the best.

In asking about the appropriate place of morals in a free society, part of what I’m asking is which morals, if any, are encouraged or even required by a free society. Do the political arguments in favor of a free society imply any particular system of morals? Does the operation or the structure or the maintenance of a free society require or imply any particular system of morals? If a free society does not require any particular moral system, does it at least encourage (or inhibit) any? Or are the politics of a free society and morals completely independent? What moral vision, if any, should we associate with a free society?

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Roderick Long (and others) on Hilary Putnam

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Here’s a nice brief memorial to Hilary Putnam by Roderick Long, with a bonus link to Roderick’s review of Putnam’s Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, from Reason Papers 28 (2006). Roderick has a real gift for writing these RIP notices, emphasizing the deceased’s achievements but not ignoring what might legitimately be criticized.

Here’s Martha Nussbaum in The Huffington Post.

Jane O’Grady in London’s Guardian.

The official notice from Harvard, with a link that goes to Putnam’s blog, Sardonic Comment.

Though it’s not online, I’ve always found the interview of Putnam in Giovanna Borradori’s The American Philosopher candid and interesting.

Feel free to add any particularly good ones in the combox.

For Those About to Walk, We Salute You

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Yes, even I’ve come to think that the time has come for AC/DC to end things.

Speak up sonny–what explosion? 

When one singer dies of alcohol poisoning, the drummer is convicted of threatening murder, the rhythm guitarist has dementia, and the second singer is about to go entirely deaf, your band has kind of run out of the “nine lives” you’ve been singing about for the last couple of decades. Yes, you’ve been “abusin every one of them and runnin’ wild,” but after a career like AC/DC’s, there’s no shame in getting off the rock and roll train…

ht: Carlos Manalansan (thanks for waking me up at 6:30 this morning with the breaking news, bro)