domination, non-domination and (republican) freedom

Posted on by under Uncategorized

The following two thoughts are prompted by reading the first chapter of Pettit’s Republican Freedom, Talisse’s criticism of Pettit (“Impunity and Domination: A Puzzle for Republicanism”), and (the first two sections of) an unpublished essay by Derek Bowman on Pettit’s ideas about republican freedom and non-domination (“The Modality of (Republican) Freedom: Non-Domination As Effective Rights Recognition”). And by discussing Pettit’s ideas of domination and republican freedom with Derek.

(1) I take republican-style freedom to be something like this (and thus probably not what Pettit takes it to be on a consistent basis): 

the social condition of custom and law providing reliable assurance that one will not be dominated by private parties or by the government (or by other inescapable customary or institutional elements in society). 

This is not merely the absence of domination (which might occur by happenstance or through some different means). It is not clear to me that Pettit’s account has it that republican freedom is specifically the (desirable) assurance condition not just the (desirable) basal condition. But I think we should go with the assurance condition (and I think Pettit does sometimes).

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Where Ignorant Armies

Posted on by under anarchism, Art/Literature, liberty and the left, Rand, Uncategorized

I was once parodied on a YouTube video (by whom I don’t recall) as holding that “people who are right and people who are wrong are basically saying the same thing.”  While I obviously wouldn’t endorse the claim in the form stated, the line does insightfully capture something about my approach – a suspicion of stark oppositions.   Suspicion, not invariable rejection: sometimes one side of an opposition is just completely and uninterestingly wrong.  But I’m regularly finding my way to angles from which supposedly stark oppositions can be seen as complicated or subverted by unexpected affinities – which is why, e.g., I was never fully satisfied, even at the height of my Randian period, with the cops-and-robbers approach to intellectual history that prevails in Randian (and not only Randian) circles, consigning all of e.g. Plato’s or Augustine’s or Hume’s or Kant’s or Hegel’s or Marx’s or Heidegger’s or Rawls’s writings to the Dustbin of Total and Irredeemable Worthlessness, rather than approaching them with the expectation that they might have something valuable to teach.

Hence my tendency to question such oppositions as libertarianism versus social justice, analytic versus continental, social anarchism versus anarcho-capitalism, deontology versus teleology, eastern versus western thought, theism versus atheism, Hayekianism versus Rothbardianism, and most recently, Randian discipline versus Kerouacian spontaneity.  (And no, it’s not a rejection of the law of non-contradiction to question whether positions presented as mutually contradictory really are so.)

One of the most important pieces of advice I would give to young scholars beginning their intellectual journeys is not to structure their conceptual landscape so as to close themselves off from the opportunity to learn from both sides of supposedly unbridgeable gaps.

Silence, Complicity, Genocide

Posted on by under Palestine

Ever since the October 7 attacks on Israel, I’ve repeatedly threatened to go silent for a year, only to backslide a week or so later and sound off on something that somehow “demanded” comment. Having done this some eight times in a row, I decided to give myself until the end of 2023 to get any public comments out of my system, and then really stop. The reflex to keep talking was hard to kill, but I finally think I’ve succeeded. 

I happen to be writing this on the last day of 2023, so it’s my last day to avow the resolution in public and explain it. It seems absurd to explain a so-far failed resolution to go silent, but the situation itself is so surreal that the addition of yet one more absurdity on top of all the others seems like a drop in the bucket. In short: Why go silent now? Isn’t silence complicity in atrocity and injustice? 

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The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund

Posted on by under General announcements, Health Care Series, Palestine

I hope readers will consider contributing to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund for Gaza (ht: Norman Finkelstein). My further hope is that opportunities will open up after the war, if we can allow ourselves that phrase, for health care-related work in Gaza.

Planning for THE DAY AFTER

This Fund is dedicated to the children of Gaza: providing medical attention to the children who need it the most, helping to rebuild & relieve the medical sector in Gaza, and, eventually, establishing a sponsorship program for the over 20,000 children orphaned in Palestine. Continue reading →

Go Fund Me for Hisham Awartani

Posted on by under General announcements, Health Care Series, Palestine

Below the fold is an Instagram post from Morgan Cooper, an American living in Ramallah these past two decades with her Palestinian husband and two children, and something of a rising star on Instagram. (Mashjar_juthour and handmadepalestine are the names of two of her business enterprises, the first an arboretum outside of Ramallah, the second a handicraft business.) I’m not sure the Instagram post will come out in its entirety, but it’s a plea from three weeks back for a GoFundMe for one of the college students shot in Vermont in late November, Hisham Awartani. The man pictured on the right of the photo is Hisham’s father, Ali. In Western nomenclature, he would be “Ali Awartani,” but in Palestinian nomenclature, he’s known as “Abu Hisham,” the father of Hisham.

The son has been rendered a paraplegic from the shooting, is paralyzed from the chest down, faces a long recovery, and naturally, can look forward to large medical bills. His current status is likely what we in medical billing parlance call “DNFB”: Discharged but Not Final Billed. The billers and coders are no doubt trying to calculate the bill, and the insurance companies are likely trying to figure out how to avoid paying it to whatever extent they can. The charges are probably astronomical, beyond anyone’s ability to pay. But every little bit will help.

The Go Fund Me link is: https://gofund.me/026fa8da

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Israel: Hier Ist Kein Warum

Posted on by under Palestine

An interesting item I haven’t seen anywhere in the news: Al Jazeera reports that Israeli forces yesterday raided and vandalized the Freedom Theatre of Jenin, arresting its two codirectors without charge (or even accusation), holding them for the better part of a day, and then releasing them the next day. Read the article for the backstory, but what’s of interest to me are the particular details of the arrest. Mustafa Sheta, one of the co-directors of the theater (and a Facebook friend of mine), 

told Al Jazeera how he was handcuffed and blindfolded before soldiers kicked him in the head and stomach. He was then taken to the Al-Jalama checkpoint, north of Jenin, where he was held in the cold, rain and mud for about 14 hours before being released.

“They did not tell me why they were there,” he said. “They did not tell me if I was wanted for any crime. No questions asked. They just took me.” Continue reading →

Sunstein versus Hayek on the Rule of Law

Posted on by under Hayek, MTSP Discussion: Fuller's Morality of Law

We’ve been doing some philosophy of law in the PoT reading group lately, and a recent piece came up by Cass Sunstein on “The Rule of Law.” The abstract claims that “this [Sunstein’s] account of the rule of law conflicts with those offered by (among many others) Friedrich Hayek and Morton Horwitz, who conflate the idea with other, quite different ideas and practices.” This statement caught my attention because Sunstein’s account of the rule of law seems very sensible. It is in fact quite similar to the account given by our current reading group book author Lon Fuller (that’s how Sunstein’s piece came up), which also seems sensible. At the same time, I am a strong admirer of Hayek. So, if the sensible Sunstein/Fuller account of the rule of law conflicts with Hayek’s, what’s the conflict? What “different ideas and practices” does Hayek “conflate” the rule of law with? Essentially none, it turns out. Sunstein’s, Fuller’s, and Hayek’s conceptions of the rule of law are largely the same. Sunstein misunderstands Hayek’s argument that the rule of law requires economic freedom. At least, so I will argue in what follows.

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“The Future Is Being Bulldozed”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

An email to me from a reader of the blog who asked to remain anonymous. As it happens, about a month ago, I wrote to two of the Times’s correspondents, Jeffrey Gettleman and Edward Wong, asking similar questions about their coverage of the West Bank. I have yet to hear back from either of them.

This report from a guest reporter to the NY Times is so different in so many ways from the dozens of other pieces, both news and opinion, that they publish. It reports from places where their own reporters never set foot, describes places and events in a specific and granular manner, directly quotes both Palestinians and settlers’ real words rather than quoting only official propaganda statements, and includes the relevant historical context of the places in the report. Continue reading →