Disqus - Latest Comments for JA

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

JA — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:53:12 -0000

"_Does J.A. think that the fact Americans are so rich weakens the obligations of Americans to non-citizens?_"

Oddly enough, I do not recognize _any_ pre-existing obligations, so the question of whether or not our success weakens them is moot.

By referring to our success I was positing a limit case. Obligations to non-citizens do not exist a priori, so we must ask ourselves whether they might emerge with circumstance. Obviously, the limiting circumstance is one in which we are rich and they are poor -- a situation where the claims flow strongly in one direction, and in the greatest number.

I'm not sure how you imagine these obligations to arise. The categorical imperative? Surely you have in mind something less...intuitive.

These obligations you speak of, do they pre-exist human beings? Were they products of the Big Bang, settling into the fabric of spacetime during the Era of Decoupling?

I am not trying to be unlikeable, here. I just want to know how you ground your claims in reality. And if they are not so grounded, wherefore the strident certitude with which you present them?

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

JA — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:55:45 -0000

"But everyone, no matter who printed their passport, has equal claim to the respect of their basic rights."

I may be precluding a future political career here, but this is a polite -- though useful -- fiction.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

JA — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:46:34 -0000

Last one, I promise:

You write, "So, think of the Earth as a big commons, and imagine borders as fences. Can we justify the system of nation-states and its migration controls in the same way? Evidently not."

Think of the earth as a big commons, and imagine selectively-permeable membranes as fences. Can we justify the system of cellular exclusivity and its transport controls in the same way? Evidently not.

There is no hard-break in the physical world between cells and the superorganism we call society, though we're not disposed to see it.

The great disillusionments of human history all had one thing in common: the discovery that Man was not the center of the universe. Moral Truth as the last illusion is more ensconced, since morality itself is an instinct of human nature. But like the Ptolemaic system of cosmology, it too will be replaced by fact, and none too soon.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

JA — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:03:57 -0000

"If it’s useful, how is it a fiction?"

Surely a distinction must be made between useful and true. Especially given the vulnerability of our neo-cortical world-modeling to conceptual placebos.

There is no inherent contradiction in the idea that a false belief might result in benefits -- to the person, the society, or both -- if, via its subjective force, it leads to the types of "behavioral constraints" you mention. In fact, this must be the case more often than not, since so many ancient and mutually exclusive belief systems abound on this planet. Did they not have some utility, personal or collective, they probably would not still be extant. Of course, given the sheer number of them, it's also possible that human beings, via their more natural virtues, inhabit a state of ecological release.

But the point remains: there is no inherent tension between having utility and being false.

Now, you make a good amount of sense when you talk about the benefits of behavioral constraints. Were everyone to follow their impulses, complex civilization and its attendant benefits would be impossible: the systemic consequence of each person obeying nothing but appetite is maximum entropy. As Omar says, "A man's got to have a code." And as Jesus said, "Depart from me, ye who are lawless." Without the centripetal force of a common ethic, the resulting existential randomization would keep mankind in a very bad way indeed.

But you cannot get from there to the idea of a priori moral obligation. You can speak in terms of ethics; if you define a destination point you can speak in terms of strategy. But morality itself is an illusion; it is an evolutionarily-evolved, subterranean constant of human nature, it operates via intuition and emotion and only belatedly (and tenuously) accords with reason, and as a tool for survival it is unwieldy and highly imprecise.

Instantiations of "moral judgment" are largely inscrutable, heteroglot and discordant, as you would expect from a blunt, evolutionarily derived faculty like the moral instinct. Thus, while it is true that the concept of "justice" is universal in human beings -- not exactly a precise statement but enough for our purposes -- its conceptions can be and often are diametrically opposed to one another. This is no mystery, but a natural result of each man judging his world from the inside looking out, using the same repertoire of mental metrics.

Thus, an argument based on moral rights and obligations is inherently problematic unless you first destroy the distinction between the in-group and out-group, and even then it is less isomorphic to reality than it should be. Much better to find an external standard that is measurable, like, ah, Kolmogorov complexity or something (for society), rather than use the slippery concepts of moral truth.

And believe me when I say I have no intention of out-naturalizing you. My goal was to find common ground that was, ah, actual ground, rather than conduct the conversation on different levels of air. Each of the latter has, over the past few hundred years, been disassembled and reduced to rubble, while the former remains immutable as ever.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

JA — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:14:13 -0000

I wrote, "This is no mystery, but a natural result of each man judging his world from the inside looking out, using the same repertoire of mental metrics."

Another way of saying this: fundamental conflict in moral judgment is precisely the result you get when you think of each man as a prepared, complex, and adaptable algorithmic singularity.

Re: The Moral Claims of Non-Citizens

JA — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:29:05 -0000

Oh man, I just read that you were a philosophy major, so let me clarify this:

"But the point remains: there is no inherent tension between having utility and being false."

I am, of course, speaking about propositions -- "true that" rather than "true how". E.g., it is true that if you are a good boy Santa will bring you presents -- useful, beneficial, but false.

One would be hard pressed to argue that a false technique has more than nominal utility (e.g. showing how not to do it).

Re: Nationalist Moral Chauvinism

JA — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:36:56 -0000

"And I am more or less abreast of the latest genetic determinist arguments. I am also more or less abreast of the latest work on brain plasticity and cultural adaptation, which I find rather more powerful than genetic explanations for understanding human diversity."

Not exactly mutually exclusive, but you are right to think as you do. Epigenetic rules, though themselves determined, allow for quite a huge amount of diversity in outcome.

Epigenetic Rules + Sum of Experience = Mental Quanta (Mindspace).

Epigenetic Rules can't even be considered constants, since they can brighten, dim, and even turn off over time. Add to this the fact that the other variable, experiences, differ between humans even on the radically local level (e.g. siblings), and the fact that experiences combine non-commutatively while being subject to a complex array of limbic accents (themselves subject to scheduling), I would say you are on extremely solid ground to reject the genetic determinists and their followers.

Re: Nationalist Moral Chauvinism

JA — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:53:26 -0000

Interestingly, if you modulate the A-theoretical experience of a subject, you can increase or decrease the genetic determinism of that subject's behavior, almost like a thermostat.

An experience which "looms large", say an immediate crisis like a bear trying to eat you, generally bypasses all the learned responses and constraints held in your neo-cortex. This leaves just the behavioral script written by evolution -- i.e., it is highly probable that your next behavior will be genetically determined (you can, of course, fix this by training -- e.g. the military).

Immediate crisis quite literally takes away the franchise. The flip side -- diminishing uncertainty (entropy) in the local environment -- restores it. An interesting fact, no?

Re: Education, Inequality, and Complementarities

JA — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:25:56 -0000

Will, you write:

"I think “gaming the system” is a bad way of looking at the structural barriers to the upward mobility of the poor created by the behavior of wealthier people. The problem is that (a) the reasonable motivation of the middle and upper classes to do the best they can for their kids and (b) the structure of our public educational institutions together combine to create a de facto barrier to the opportunity of poorer kids to get a decent education and subsequently a decent wage that really makes work worthwhile."

Truly, 'A' is incomplete: it's not the motivation but the performance of that motivation that combines with 'B' to create the de facto barrier.

That doesn't mitigate Ygelsias's idiosyncratic error, of course, but it's worth noting for this reason: Yglesias can't argue against parents, of whatever wealth, being motivated to care for their kids, but I'm quite certain he'd have no problem imposing a ban on particular performances of this motivation, if he deemed them to have negative external effects on the thrice disadvantaged. I think that's a conversation worth having, if only to flush out what Conrad called the "flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly" that animates much of Yglesias' politics.

Re: A Hypothetical Contract with People You Cannot Escape

JA — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:34:56 -0000

I apologize for the drive-by at midnight, but damn if I'll be able to sleep without saying something about this.

The original position is -- and this is a serious, well-researched statement -- nothing but an ideal concept with which moral philosophers might tease out the Universal Moral Grammar.

Of course, that's great and worthwhile. We should all feel grateful that Rawls thought REALLY HARD about Justice and provided us with an incredibly detailed layout of pressing moral problems and their "finite and somewhat accidental corpus of observed utterances", as Chomsky would say (Syntactic Structures, pg. 15).

But that's it, Will. Seriously. Rawlsian theory, except as a jumping-off point in Moral Psychology, will soon be an historical oddity.

There are far more interesting currents underfoot. Five years from now, we'll all chuckle about how preoccupied we were.

Re: A Hypothetical Contract with People You Cannot Escape

JA — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:28:36 -0000

Will, I don't doubt that Rawls had positive ripple effects in political philosophy. He's provided a generation of thinkers -- friend or foe -- with a common light and language, and his elaboration of subtle issues like publicness and overlapping consensus is indeed profound (though the latter, which speaks to stability, is so thoroughly (and accidentally) treated by Bakhtin in his Discourse in the Novel that I get impatient reading Rawls). So I'll agree that I overstated his impending obsolescence and underbid on his importance to political thought.

But we're talking leaves and branches of a tree planted in shallow soil. A strong wind, and, well...

And oh my do I agree with you about the "uselessly over-Kantian clutches of his students."

Re: A Hypothetical Contract with People You Cannot Escape

JA — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:38:51 -0000

And I think I'll leave-off the drive-bys for a while. The acid wash of sunlight and sobriety and all that. Who knew?

Re: A Hypothetical Contract with People You Cannot Escape

JA — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:42:42 -0000

Will, thought you might find this interesting (from Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds, HarperCollins Publishers, New York (2006).

Citing the studies of Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer: "Just as Rawls predicted, subjects readily settled on a principle of fairness. But the winning principle was not quite as Rawls predicted. No group selected the difference principle, where distribution is anchored by the worst off. Instead, groups settled on a principle that maximized the overall resources of the group while preventing the worst off from dropping below some preestablished level of income. This principle provides a safety net for those who are disadvantaged, for whatever reason, while allowing for extra benefits to flow toward those who contribute more to society." Pg. 88

"Attitudes toward these principles were high, and showed little change over the course of the experiment. However, when subjects had the freedom to choose, and vote unanimously, their satisfaction and confidence in the principle were significantly higher than when the same principle was imposed on them. The average-income [maximizing] -and-floor principle emerged as the clear winner. As a principle, it was stable after multiple iterations of the work-pay-redistribution cycle, but functioned to instill confidence in people, both those at the top and those on the floor. Contrary to many current political analyses, an income-distribution principle that allows for inequalities while taking care of those who are most in need does not reduce incentives to work hard, nor does it create a sink of free riders...Those who received from other players, and who actively participated in deciding the best principle, almost doubled their efforts in order to contribute to the overall income. In contrast, those working under the same regime, but with the principle imposed, cheated and decreased their efforts, because they perceived redistribution through taxes as their right." Pg. 89

I'd say more, but I'm trying to save it until it's ready to release all at once.

Re: Better to Be Richer

JA — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:27:41 -0000

Not only can you show them the graph, but you can then bring up Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's work on Prospect Theory to elevate your point to an inescapable fact of human nature.

You are probably already familiar with Kahneman's work, Will, but here's a link to his Nobel lecture for your readers.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/la...

Re: Better to Be Richer

JA — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:28:00 -0000

Kahnemann, natch. heh.

Re: Better to Be Richer

JA — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:31:29 -0000

Did it again. KAHNEMAN. It's Kahneman, even though the link says Kahnemann.

Mi dispiace.

Re: If You Own It, You Can Sell It

JA — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:54:49 -0000

If we all agreed to place the burden of persuasion on those who would criminalize it, prostitution would be legal. Principled humility always beats moral stridency when the latter carries the burden.

Re: Justifying the Prohibition of Markets in Sexual Services

JA — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:56:08 -0000

This won't be a completely satisfying comment, but hey, it's a subentry on a blog, what do you expect?

The cognitive tension about prostitution -- indeed, about a vast spectrum of issues -- is released by starting with the physical definition of Law and working up. Ask yourself, what does Law do? What problem does Law address; what selective advantages did and does Law deliver? Why Law at all?

Before you accuse me of whatever -- ignorance, tediousness, triteness, pedanthood -- and before your brain starts priming all your rehearsed responses, please understand that yes, I am well-aware that all these questions have been asked and answered by generations of thinkers, and I am intimately familiar with the received wisdoms and their interplay. That said...

A precise definition of Law, tethered to the concepts of physics (our sturdiest discipline) -- this has never been tried, yes? (In fact, if someone knows of an effort, I would be much obliged if they told me.) Inherent in this definition is the proper role of Law, its objectives, priorities, and constraints.

Out of this definition comes the proper lexicon with which to discuss issues such as prostitution. Armed with that, the knottiness of this binary dilemma -- to criminalize or not -- unravels, and we come up against the first question of principle: where is the burden of persuasion?

This latter can only be decided by the affected, by those living under and with the decision. This simple assertion is a necessary consequence of the primary objectives of Law: success (as described by physics) is the measure of Law, and the vicissitudes of those beholden to it directly informs the question of success.

Humans are the (potentially volatile) constituents of the system, and prudence demands a measure of fealty to their psychologies. If legalizing prostitution, by violating the moral expectations of the people, leads to an anti-Law entrenchment in mind and behavior, then it is not worth it. If, however, the people as a whole agree to place the burden on those who would criminalize it, then I am certain that, just by this subtle cognitive frame-shift in the citizenry, prostitution would no longer be illegal. For instance, the appeal to principle by the legalizers would be preordained; a people who consent to the initial burden-placing are already prepared to respond to the principles of the libertarian. And the inability of the criminalizers to deliver unqualified evidence against prostitution-the-concept (as opposed to prostitution-as-practiced) puts it over the top.

As a prediction of what my fellow countrymen would decide -- should they, say, prepare the battlespace by voting for the burden shift on a non-binding resolution -- I think it's pretty sound. But hey, what do I know?

Re: How Sex Is Different, Part I

JA — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:18:13 -0000

You write, "To reify or essentialize this pattern, and to unthinkingly endorse it, is to compound mistake upon mistake."

This is true in its weak form, but as presented I think you overstate it. The human pattern of moralizing concepts related to reproduction is not _necessarily_ a mistake; if it's not, unthinkingly endorsing it could very well be the best strategy of a skeptical species.

Also, this type of moralizing is something of a frozen component in human psychology, and you're right that it's this fact of homo sapiens which creates (for us) the distinction between the sex-act and more banal activities. But I wonder how far you allow this train of thought to go? I refer, of course, to your certainty that moral obligations actually exist. If prostitution is, in your words, not wrong in general, but judged wrong by us according to our evolutionary psychologies + socialization, then you must agree that there is no moral obligation in general, just moral obligation judgments which emerge out of our evolutionary psychologies + socialization.

And so I'll repeat: "To reify or essentialize this pattern, and to unthinkingly endorse it, is to compound mistake upon mistake."

Re: Balancing Risks

JA — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:50:33 -0000

"Why don’t more people believe something like this?"

Freddie's post is emblematic. Global warming is not a precautionary issue, it is a moral one. The former lends itself to the balancing of risk and reward; the latter type does not.

Moralizing an issue reduces deliberative freedom by scrubbing out shades of gray. Too bad if the situation calls for an etcher's needle; everybody around you carries hammers and chisels.

Re: Difference Makes No Difference in the Difference Principle

JA — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:09:06 -0000

The difference principle is a principle of justice only insofar as it would be chosen by free rational beings in the quasi-noumenal original position. "Thus men exhibit their freedom, their independence from the contingencies of nature and society, by acting in ways they would acknowledge in the original position"(255-6). If chosen in the original position, the principles of justice have the status of categorical imperatives without all the arbitrariness problems of Kantian transcendence. This "simply reflects the fact that no contingencies appear as premises in their derivation."

As Michael Sandel points out, the original position is an "empirical" effort to hit the bulls-eye between Kant's radically removed subject, and the radically situated subject of unreflective experience. To rise above the muck of contingency Rawls abstracts away all "morally irrelevant" circumstances and desiderata; to then stay tethered to the ground Rawls stops the abstraction when all remaining contingencies are global -- i.e., the remaining atmosphere of assumptions is "thin" enough to apply to all humans beings. Thus, when Rawls writes that the "fundamental principles of justice quite properly depend upon the natural facts about men in society" (159), or that "moral philosophy must be free to use contingent assumptions and general facts" (51), he explicitly concedes that principles of justice, whatever they might be, are those principles which would be unanimously chosen by Human Beings, however idealized, were they to individually and freely contract into a social arrangement in a state of pure equality (behind the veil).

Thus, what has been left on the table is the possibility of Rawls' stated principles being undermined by new empirical facts about universal human nature. As he himself admits, "None of [the difficulties in theoretically defining ideal beings] affects the contention that in the original position rational persons so characterized would make a certain decision...Thus, to say that the principles of justice would be adopted is to say how these persons would decide being moved in ways our account describes." In other words, if we were somehow lucky enough to be invited to take minutes during a contracting session in the original position, the foundational principles our subjects did in fact decide to unanimously adopt are, by definition, the substantive principles of justice Rawls is looking for.

I say this because there has been a set of very interesting experiments indicating that the difference principle would not be chosen by equal human beings in the original position. Not only that, these experiments actually suggest another distribution principle, a principle whose outcome looks much more like Row D than any of the others alternatives.

This is Marc Hauser, Moral Minds, citing the studies of Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer: "Just as Rawls predicted, subjects readily settled on a principle of fairness. But the winning principle was not quite as Rawls predicted. No group selected the difference principle, where distribution is anchored by the worst off. Instead, groups settled on a principle that maximized the overall resources of the group while preventing the worst off from dropping below some preestablished level of income. This principle provides a safety net for those who are disadvantaged, for whatever reason, while allowing for extra benefits to flow toward those who contribute more to society." Pg. 88

"Attitudes toward these principles were high, and showed little change over the course of the experiment. However, when subjects had the freedom to choose, and vote unanimously, their satisfaction and confidence in the principle were significantly higher than when the same principle was imposed on them. The average-income [maximizing] -and-floor principle emerged as the clear winner. As a principle, it was stable after multiple iterations of the work-pay-redistribution cycle, but functioned to instill confidence in people, both those at the top and those on the floor. Contrary to many current political analyses, an income-distribution principle that allows for inequalities while taking care of those who are most in need does not reduce incentives to work hard, nor does it create a sink of free riders...Those who received from other players, and who actively participated in deciding the best principle, almost doubled their efforts in order to contribute to the overall income. In contrast, those working under the same regime, but with the principle imposed, cheated and decreased their efforts, because they perceived redistribution through taxes as their right." Pg. 89

This is strong, but not definitive, evidence that Rawls got it wrong with the difference principle. If we could somehow expand this study to a large random set of diverse cultures, and if the results of distribution-choice stayed the same, I think the curtain would fall on DP for good.

I'm not a Rawlsian, but I it's clear that -- using his own formula! -- his difference principle is in a lot of trouble.

Re: Geoffrey Sayre-McCord on Free Will

JA — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:25:55 -0000

"That is “good of the species” talk that one would have hoped died with the advent of neo-darwinism and the selfish gene."

Not really. When the benefits of the collective -- and the costs of its absence -- redound to individual gene carriers, so-called "facts of collectives" deform the fitness landscape of the gene and thereby become selective forces in evolution.

Human beings began their evolutionary careers with the grouping legacies of genus Australopithecus (or, alternatively, an as-yet-identified common ancestor of Homo and Australopithecus); our "moral" instincts tended to small intimate bands, hierarchically organized, with strongly-enforced in-group "culture" and "taboos" (this is an uncontroversial statement).

Using the principle of parsimony, we then assume that, rather than whole-sale replacements of this "morality" with new schemata, what we recognize as "modern morality" grew "on top of" rather than "in spite of" these primitive instincts, creating a new moral "language" by combining, modulating, and suppressing the largely unconscious automated drives that, when aggregated, tended to support a thriving collective for our primitive ancestors.

Now, you can say all this every time you broach the subject, filling your speeches with extended caveats to ensure the integrity of your point, or you can shorten it to "keeping us together to keep us alive" and move on. Sometimes it's okay to do the latter.

Re: Shaun Nichols on Free Will (Among Other Things) on Free Will

JA — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:56:37 -0000

MK: _That gives us good predictive power, and it means that the leftover “free will” part might appear as “total randomness.”_

I'm not so sure. Nobody denies that, absent some artificial control or physiological damage, humans have the freedom to "attend" to different objects. I can choose to focus on my foot, or my hand, or that TV over there, so long as I am not being overwhelmed by stimuli so that such a feat is prohibitively difficult.

These sensory gestalt shifts are not deducible from brain state information, however accurate and timely (thought they can probably be instigated by external manipulation).

As we go forward with the large task of knowing ourselves inside and out, it should become increasingly clear that human agency is weighted, limited, real and very much expandable -- its enablers, the brain, reflection, and self-reification.

Re: The World Is Not a Zoo

JA — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:44:13 -0000

Thanks for the heads-up, Will. There is much to say, but I'll keep it brief.

Mr. Malik writes: "The logic of the preservationist argument is that every culture has a pristine form, its original state."

Cultural preservation is, I think, a worthwhile goal; however, as a statement, it's incomplete, elliptic: it suppresses its implication. Without its implication, which derives from the idea of the "subject", multi-culturalism can lead to great folly in theory and practice.

I find it useful to think in terms of biology, here. We preserve the whale, the owl, the seal, and the eagle without question -- they are beautiful, and they do not kill us. We preserve the wolf, the bear, the lion and the tiger only after a point -- i.e., after our dominion has turned our predators into our wards. We do not seek to preserve the tick, the mosquito, the cockroach, and the disease -- they are biologicals, but they are not and cannot be symbiotic.

We make these decisions as human beings, unembarrassed in our anthropocentrism. We should be as wise in our dealings with other cultures.

Re: The World Is Not a Zoo

JA — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:09:26 -0000

Two more things.

1. Americanism (now called Westernism) is unstoppable, precisely because it is metacultural (even though the shape and contours of the outcome remains unpredictable).

2. The effect of metaculture is exactly as Mr. Malik writes: the infection begins with the conception of one culture among many, with the concept of culture as such.

3. Many cultures will have to settle for being anachronisms -- i.e., self-consciously eccentric clusters of history within the overarching, fast-evolving, complex networks of modernity. This will cause the world much heartache and headache.

Re: The World Is Not a Zoo

JA — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:09:53 -0000

Three more things, I guess.

Re: J.R. Lucas on Equality and the Multidimensionality of Status

JA — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:41:45 -0000

Agree with Mutt -- very nice post.

Re: Blame It On Ayn Rand?

JA — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:30:48 -0000

muirgeo, structured products might be market esoteria, but they are not problematic per se. the same goes for mark-to-market valuation. rather than being responsible for the mess we're in, these practices *aggravated* it because of the complex interdependencies they create.

The "but-for causation" is the fundamentally flawed lending strategies pushed by Fannie and Freddie et al. It wasn't "design flaw" or "material failure" that caused this collapse. It was the original decision to build on sand.

Re: Blame It On Ayn Rand?

JA — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:36:27 -0000

DMonteith, I'm genuinely confused by this. Are you saying the current crisis disproves Will's thesis?

If so, that's a funny.

Re: Blame It on Gerald Dworkin for Blaming It on Ayn Rand

JA — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:12:24 -0000

There's nothing cuter than academic jingoism [*] -- especially from the syndics.

That doesn't mean I don't get it. I'd be jealous of my territory too, if I had to endure years of logical misdeeds and lexiconic hazing to attain it. In fact, I did so endure, but on my own rather than that other way.

Of course, getting a Ph.D. in philosophy is a must if you want to stay at the university.

[*] -- I think we need a term for the autodidactic wiseguy, one They can use derogatorily and We can use with pride (like, er, "queer" or "wilder" or something).

Re: Readings for Jacob Weisberg

JA — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:20:38 -0000

That spinach was tainted?

Re: The “Conservative” Moral Sentiments: Do We Need Them?

JA — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:53:24 -0000

I'll just add three things. One, we mustn't forget about the requirements of survival vis-a-vis the external environment. Two, the reciprocity instinct motivates us toward redress/revenge (when we experience an "affecting perception of injustice"); this motivation cannot be removed from the in-group instinct; in many ways it alters and amplifies it; and yet this "concept of justice" is absolutely necessary for liberal society, the center of mass in Hayekian and Rawlsian liberalism. Three, a society must have both order and chaos to survive and adapt; it must be "balanced on the border" between the two; infiltration-expeditions into new realms of design space must be a central feature of a healthy society, or it will soon be overtaken and vanquished by its competitors.

Overall, this kind of binary analysis is interesting, but not very helpful.

Re: Canada’s Leading Public Intellectual

JA — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:23:56 -0000

Did I just figure out how to have my comment read second?

Re: What’s Wrong With Empathy?

JA — Mon, 18 May 2009 09:19:05 -0000

Federalist No.10:

"Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true."

Our evidence has grown since then, enough to make Will's post "Uncontroversial" as a description of the universe.