For years now, I’ve been railing against an argument of Jason Brennan’s concerning character-based voting. Brennan’s argument holds that when it comes to voting, unless a candidate’s character can be shown to be a proxy for the policies he’ll adopt, predictions about those policies should trump judgments about character. In other words, when it comes to voting, the policies you predict that a candidate will adopt are more important than any character-based fact or set of facts about his fitness for office right now. Continue reading
Tag Archives: jason brennan
Character-Based Voting and Genocide
It’s been a while since I’ve beaten up on Jason Brennan’s “argument” against character-based voting, but I’m feeling the urge again, so here I am, hot to go.(1) The crux of Brennan’s argument is that it’s wrong to vote for political candidates on the basis of their traits of character, except when character is a predictive proxy for the policies they can be expected to enact once in office. In a formula (Brennan’s formula, made in discussion here on PoT): “policy > character.” Taken literally, the argument proscribes voting against any candidate, no matter how evil, if the evil he exemplifies is policy-irrelevant. My aim here is to add yet another counter-example to my ever-growing list of counter-examples to Brennan’s thesis, partly for the understanding it affords, and partly for the fun of it. Continue reading
Markets with and without Limits
Some more bragging to compensate for the free-riding modesty of PoT’s bloggers: Roderick Long has an article out on the dispute over markets with and without limits: “The Limits of Anti-Anti-Commodification Arguments: James Stacey Taylor in Markets with Limits versus Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski in Markets without Limits,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 37:2 (Fall 2023), pp. 1-10. The publication date is given as 2023, but the issue just came out. Continue reading
In the Wake of Dobbs
For whatever reason, PoT has not, in the eight years of its existence, focused much on abortion or related issues. But we’ve run a few relevant posts, all written by yours truly. Most, I suppose, nibble at the edges of relatively peripheral issues; few are directly relevant to the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade through Dobbs vs. Jackson. Still, for whatever it’s worth, I thought I’d dig a few out of the vaults.
In 2015, in the wake of the mass shooting at an abortion clinic in Colorado Springs, I wrote a pair of posts on whether opponents of abortion were logically or morally obliged to engage in vigilante violence in order to oppose abortion. Jason Brennan had argued that they were; I argued that they weren’t. Continue reading
Voting on Character Means Voting Republican
So here’s a case of character-based voting–not a particularly dramatic one, I’ll admit, but a case just the same, and evidence that character-based voting can, under the right circumstances, make perfect sense.
I recently got my mail-in ballot for the upcoming general election. One of the offices on the ballot is that of Hunterdon County Clerk (for Hunterdon County, New Jersey). The Republicans are running incumbent Mary H. Melfi as their candidate; the Democrats aren’t running a candidate this time. Assuming that I vote in this election (as I plan to), I have three options:
- I could vote for Melfi.
- I could leave the relevant part of the ballot blank.
- I could write someone in besides Melfi, or write something in the relevant slot, whether or not it’s the name of a candidate, up to and including a ballot-spoiling piece of profanity.
As it happens, I’m a Democrat strongly opposed to the Republican Party in its current incarnation. In previous elections where a Republican was running unopposed by the Democrats (or I was, due to a bureaucratic glitch, forced to vote Republican in a primary), I’ve either left the ballot blank, or in some way voted against the Republicans by some ad hoc expedient–e.g., making use of the write-in option, and writing “Not X” with the Republicans’ name for “X,” or writing in “NOTA” (None of the Above) in rejection of everyone on the ballot. In general, I have no problem with taking a party-line stance on voting, whether for the Democrats or against the Republicans.
In this case, however, I’ve decided to vote for Melfi on grounds of character. So yes: voting on character means voting Republican, at least in this case.
Continue readingHe’s Immune to Parody, Too
Jason’s Brennan’s self-parodic idea of a parody, titled “I Am Immune to Criticism” (my italics):
Continue readingI’ve decided to copy-cat a style of argumentation which is prominent among democrats and socialists in the philosophy literature. This move will now render me and my work immune from criticism.
By epistocracy, I henceforth mean not only a system that gives greater weight to the wise during voting, but which actually makes substantively wise decisions! Thus, any time a seemingly epistocratic decision-system makes a bad choice–such as a choice that runs afoul of the demographic objection–it wasn’t *true* or *real* epistocracy! Epistocracy by definition always makes the wisest choices. Therefore, to oppose epistocracy is to oppose good choices and favor bad ones.
Character-Based Voting FTW
Lorenz Kraus is (or was) a candidate for US Senate, based in Troy, New York. My knowledge of his candidacy is based on about ten minutes’ Internet search after he sent me a crank email cc’d to Counter-Currents Publishing, a white nationalist website, among other recipients. Ten minutes is all it took to figure out that Kraus was a crank, and all it would have taken to figure out not to vote for him.
How? Because Kraus’s entire campaign is based on anti-Semitism of a wild, overt, over-the-top sort. No need to hash through the details; once was enough for me. If you don’t want to take my word for it, spend maybe ten minutes scrolling through his Twitter feed below (underneath the separator), or whatever else comes up in a Google search. If it takes you more than ten minutes, you’re doing it wrong.
Continue readingStopped Clock: Jason Brennan Gets It Right on the Niskanen Center
If you ignore the well-poisoning horseshit he dishes out against Will Wilkinson, Jason Brennan manages, for once, to get something right: Jerry Taylor really is a hypocritical asshole for firing Will Wilkinson from the Niskanen Center, and, in consequence, the Niskanen Center should, as Brennan says, be boycotted (see Brennan’s post for details).
In addition, I think Brennan is right to put some pressure on Niskanen’s erstwhile supporters to stop supporting the Center. That’s what solidarity is, and how it works. Either you side with Will, or you side with Taylor, or you remain neutral because you’re in a position to be neutral. The latter gambit is not available to those who have supported Niskanen in the past, and intend to do so in the future. They have to make an autonomous, moralized decision one way or another. Do they support institutionalized hypocrisy, or do they support journalistic integrity? It really is that simple. Continue reading
Stalker’s Delight
People sometimes wonder why I pick on–“stalk”–Jason Brennan so much. The answer is that I like wringing concessions out of his arrogant ass, and often get exactly what I’m looking for.
Like this:
UPDATE: I modified this slightly, because I realized that I don’t know what Krugman thinks about trade all-things-considered.
No, I don’t mean the claim about Krugman. I mean the hyper-conscientiousness Brennan now shows about alerting his readers to the substantive changes he makes in his posts for 200-Proof Liberals. Remember when, at BHL, he self-righteously asserted the prerogative to write and re-write and re-write and re-write his posts without notice so as to evade criticisms? I do, and so does everyone who read the site. Now, without further ado, he’s forgotten all his “arguments” on that issue, and changed course by 180 degrees. Conscientious Brennan now makes sure to tell us when he’s made substantive changes. Continue reading
From Bootleg Liberalism to Trumpist McCarthyism
I’m not a big booster of my undergraduate alma mater, Princeton, or a big fan of its current president, Christopher Eisgruber. But when a self-proclaimed “libertarian” academic gleefully defends an absurdly unwarranted federal investigation into the institution, relying on transparently idiotic arguments, one reaches a point of discursive futility: this is not a person worth arguing with, or even all that much worth spitting at.
https://200proofliberals.blogspot.com/2020/09/princeton-plays-with-bull-and-gets-horns.html
No one with Brennan’s credentials can be stupid enough to believe the bullshit arguments he’s trundling out at this point. As a friend of mine pointed out, Brennan’s blog posts are not meant to be taken seriously. They’re just the efforts of a hostile well-poisoner working off his animosities in public in the confident belief that he can say anything about anyone with impunity. All I have left to say is: feel free, dude–and feel free to fuck yourself while you’re at it. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 