[The following is loosely inspired by a compare-and-contrast re-reading of Scanlon’s material on coercion in his Moral Dimensions (p. 74, 78, 108-111) and Michael Huemer’s initial discussion of coercion – in his stipulative sense that simply means exercising or threatening to exercise physical violence or control over another person – in his The Problem of Political Authority (pp. 9-10).]

 1.  One might coerce someone by doing things that impact or interfere with their exercise of their agency in a ways that are never permissible.  One might also coerce someone by doing things that impact or interfere with their exercise of their agency in ways that are permissible if the patient consents – but they have not consented (and in the right circumstances like having full information and with the conditions of consent or non-consent not themselves being coercive).  Both sorts of coercion presuppose antecedent moral requirements, moral requirements not to do specific things that negatively impact the ability of others to exercise their agency.  So the requirement not to coerce would seem to be a generalization over particular ways of interfering with the agency of others that are of these two types (absolutely forbidden, forbidden unless the patient consents).

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I spent the afternoon yesterday trawling JSTOR and EBSCO for articles. There is–and you’ll have to trust me on this–nothing more enjoyable than an afternoon spent in the library, skimming through scholarship that was being published when you were in grade school.

I couldn’t help chuckling over the sheer curmudgeonliness of this item, a critique of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class:

Dale Edward Williams, “Were ‘Hunger’ Rioters Really Hungry? Some Demographic Evidence,” Past and Present, vol. 71 (May 1976), 70-75.

Have scare quotes ever been so dismissive? The thesis, apparently, is “not really.” At any rate, they could have been hungrier.

Here are some snippets of actual conversations I had this week with colleagues. The first was with a colleague in the English Department.

English professor waiting for an elevator (ominously): Irfan, we have to talk.

Irfan: About what?

English professor: About [pause]…Ayn Rand.

He disappears wordlessly into the elevator. Continue reading →

I’ve been a little too busy to blog much lately, but here are a few announcements of potential interest. Continue reading →

It is fitting or appropriate to admire the admirable (and similarly, it is fitting to value the valuable).  According the the fitting attitudes account (FA) of an action or person being admirable, admirability is nothing more than fittingness to be admired.  And according to the reasons account of an attitude being fitting (RFA), an attitude being fitting is nothing more than the balance of reasons (of the right sort) favoring having the attitude toward the object.  This gives rise the the “wrong kind of reason” problem:  we need to say which reasons are the right reasons for admiring to make for admirability because a person or action is not rendered admirable by, say, my threatening her (or God threatening everyone) should she (or any given person) fail to admire, say, children torturing cats.  Nor are these sorts of reasons relevant to it being admirable to help someone in need at some significant expense to oneself (e.g.).  

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1.1(3) (part 1, para. 1, line 3 of Derek Bowman’s “The Circumstances of Justice” 

We owe (or are due) things from each other and there are general principles (of justice) that specify just what it is that we owe to each other.  That the verb here is ‘specify’ suggests a normative, explanatory role:  the general principles explain why each of us owes it to each other to refrain from PHI-ing, but not to refrain from PSI-ing (or perhaps why each of us owes it to each other to refrain from PHI-ing in certain circumstances but not others).  However, one of several to-me controversial things that Rawls’ characterization of justice suggests is that these general principles do not do this work, but rather some slightly different work – the work of justifying the adoption (perhaps the public adoption) of a prescriptive norm (or a nested set of prescriptive norms with a certain structure).  That might go something like this:  each of us is to refrain from PHI-ing with respect to each other person (and all of us is to stand ready to enforce the prescription to refrain from PHI-ing by demanding that potential rule-breakers don’t break the rule and by punishing actual rule-breakers).  On this second way in which the general principles might work, they do something like specify conclusive reasons to construct a particular social practice.   Continue reading →

It appears that my book is officially out. In the hope of further enticing some of you to read it, or at least find a copy and flip through it, I here include a brief snippet from chapter 4 that may be of some interest. We pick up in the midst of my consideration of an alternative view (that of Mary Nichols in her Citizens and Statesmen) of what Aristotle means when he talks about ruling and being ruled “by turns” or “in part.” According to this alternative, I count as ruling “in part” with you provided that you rule me in a way that recognizes my existence as a distinct, independent, free person.

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