I post this every year around 9/11, so here it is again with some revisions.
Today is the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from two decades of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list (mostly) minus examples, but I have a feeling that the lessons will ring true enough for many people, and that most readers can supply appropriate examples of their own.
Continue readingThis was originally a post on COVID booster shots, but I’ve now broken it into two separate posts, the first a prologue offering a very general summary of my approach to issues in health care, and the second, a post expressing skepticism about the need to wait any longer before we roll out a COVID booster, as well as skepticism about monopolistic institutional arrangements (distributive and/or regulatory) in health care.
I work in health care, but have no worked-out view on the political economy of health care. In fact, part of the reason I accepted the (full time) job I currently have, in hospital revenue cycle management, is to clarify my thoughts on that very subject. So I’m open to being schooled on issues in health care by anyone willing and able to do so–a category that probably includes a very large number of people. For the time being, I’m willing to remain at least temporarily in a state of curmudgeonly skepticism, willing to take pot shots at almost everyone, but unwilling to pledge allegiance to much of anything. You might regard that as a frivolous position to take, considering the stakes involved. But I don’t.
Since I’m going to be writing here at PoT about health care a fair bit in the near future (I’ve done some already), take what I say in the preceding skeptical (or dialectical) spirit. My aim is, through discussion and experience, to work my way from skepticism to something more definite.
Continue readingMy two latest Agoric Café videos:
In the first one, I chat with philosopher Eric Mack about walking out on Ayn Rand, clashing with Nazi Sikhs in Seneca Falls, libertarian rights theory, Kantian vs. Aristotelean approaches to fixing Randian ethics, Nozickian polymathy, the unselfishness of Samuel Johnson, the ethics of COVID lockdowns, physical distancing in Durango, the CIA as an argument against anarchism, shoving someone in front of a bus as a form of restitution, and the edibility of matter.
In the second video, I chat with philosopher Gary Chartier about Robin Hood, left-wing market anarchism, natural law, free speech and employer power, libertarian secularism, Seventh-day Adventism, religious epistemology, long-arc television, urban fantasy, Lawrence Durrell, Iris Murdoch, Whit Stillman, the evils of giving extra credit and taking attendance, and the attractions of being emperor.
Imagine a person A who confronts a complete stranger, B, and shoots B out of pure malice. A now encounters C and gets ready to shoot her from the same motivation, but is prevented by D, a police officer, who shoots A before A can shoot C.
Who has initiated force in this scenario, and who has engaged in retaliatory force? It’s an interesting question. Walking through a neighborhood park, I overheard a discussion on the subject, carried on by two interlocutors, Simpleton and Overthinker. Continue reading
Way back in July, I announced a “forthcoming” discussion here on a bunch of papers that had just been presented at the 36th annual conference of the North American Society for Social Philosophy in San Francisco. Unlike about half of the promises I make at PoT, it looks like I will deliver on this one, so “forthcoming” means “imminent.” Yes, my track record here is about as bad as the Trump Administration’s, but trust me: I have reliable intelligence that all of this is really about to happen.
The first of the two papers will be Jesse Spafford’s “Initial Appropriation and Duty-Creation,” accepted for publication (and yes, imminently about to be published) in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. It’s a response to Bas Van der Vossen’s “Imposing Duties and Initial Appropriation,” Journal of Political Philosophy 23 (2015): 64-85, so you might want to take a look at that beforehand. Continue reading
The long-awaited second issue of the Molinari Review (the Molinari Institute’s interdisciplinary, open-access, libertarian academic journal) is here! Nearly twice the length of the first issue!
You can order a paper copy from Amazon US, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK, or, I believe, any of the other regional incarnations of Amazon.
(A Kindle copy should be available later this month. In the meantime, the previous issue is available as a free PDF download here.)
So what’s in the new issue? Here’s a rundown: Continue reading
The latest issue of Reason Papers–the first issue edited by Shawn Klein (Arizona State University)–is now out. This issue contains (among other things) the long-awaited symposium on Vicente’s Medina’s Terrorism Unjustified, based on an Author-Meets-Critics session held at Felician University in April 2018. Thanks to everyone who worked on the issue, and especially to Shawn, for the work they put into it. Incidentally, though there isn’t one in this issue, the journal often runs a “Discussion Notes” section for responses to material in previous issues. So if you feel inclined to respond to anything you read here, send something along to Shawn via the journal.
Talk of reparations has come back into common currency in American political discourse–meaning reparations to African Americans for the wrongs done to them since the beginnings of slavery. I don’t have a fully considered view on reparations (many of the arguments both for and against strike me as one-eyed), but I’ve both been surprised (and in another sense, not surprised) to hear libertarians insist so adamantly that libertarianism rules out reparations. Anyone who thinks this owes it to himself to read or re-read Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, if not cover to cover, then through the end of Part I, as I did on a recent plane ride. Continue reading
I am grateful to my friend and professional colleague Irfan Khawaja for his incisive critique of my short piece, Terrorism as a Toxic Term: Why Definition Matters, and for generously allowing me to post my reply on his website. As Irfan underscores, our main difference regarding the definition of the term “terrorism” is a difference in “focus,” but perhaps there is also a difference in kind. That is, the kind of definition that one might find morally adequate for describing terrorist violence. I argue that the disposition of the perpetrators and the objective innocence of the victims should be the focus of an adequate and fair definition of terrorism.
Irfan, however, argues that one “should focus on the reasons that terrorists cite to justify their actions.” He contests “the idea that a definition of terrorism should describe it merely as a use of violence rather than an “initiatory” [my italics] use of violence and a response to one.” Irfan’s suggestion is well taken. I agree with him that there is a relevant distinction “between purely initiatory aggression on the one hand, and disproportionality or indiscriminateness in an otherwise justified response to aggression on the other.” Continue reading
My friend Vicente Medina (Philosophy, Seton Hall University) has a short piece out on the semantics of “terrorism” in Government Europa Quarterly, an online journal. We had a few discussions of Medina’s views on terrorism here at PoT in advance of the symposium on his book, Terrorism Unjustified, that took place at Felician about a year and a half ago (see here and here). A published version of the Felician symposium is about to come out soon at Reason Papers, consisting of three critical responses (by Graham Parsons, Theresa Fanelli, and myself), and a response by Medina. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 