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2 months ago

in Canadian! on Will Wilkinson
Congrats, Will.
Have you read Joseph Heath's The Efficient Society? As a newly minted Canadian and a Rawlsekian, you should.
1 reply
Will Wilkinson's picture
Will Wilkinson I haven't, but as it happens I recently did a Bloggingheads with Heath about his new book, which should air soon.

7 months ago

in The Indeterminacy of Propertarianism on Will Wilkinson
Check out Karl Widerquist's "A Dilemma for Libertarians"

http://www.usbig.net/papers.html
2 replies
Will Wilkinson's picture
Will Wilkinson Good paper. I like how well his reductio case -- property-owning monarchy -- describes Mencius Moldbug's political philosophy.
Todd Matt, thanks for the suggestion. That was a good paper. It provoked me to think about many things that I have not considered in awhile. The first thing that occurred to me after I read the paper was to appreciate the importance of the idea of a Constitution with enumerated powers. In Will's parlance, our Constitution purported to establish the specific regime of property rights under which we were to live, effectively limiting the influence of the sovereign's will over our lives more strictly than might have, it appears, a pure reference to property rights. The second thing that occurred to me was to question the extent to which each individual incident of full individual ownership that Widerquist identifies can be isolated and distributed. I don't know what the legal precedent is, but it seems to me that it would be awfully hard to grant someone the right to use a piece of property while retaining the right to possess it for yourself. If only certain combinations of incidents can be disentangled and subject to distributed ownership, then it is possible that the idea of a sovereign retaining the power to regulate and tax without bound is inconsistent with the distribution of the remaining incidents, including the power to let things go to waste. Again, thanks for the pointer.

1 year ago

in False Consciousness, Psychological Freedom, and Pluralism on Will Wilkinson
TGGP
Are you an emotivist or expressivist about all normative matters, such as logic (valid/invalid inferences), epistemology (justified vs. unjustified), etc? If not, why not? What is the status of the is/ought distinction in these areas? Am I simply expressing a preference when I say "Here's how we do tend to reason, but here's how we ought to"?

1 year ago

in The Curious Irrelevance of Inequality on Will Wilkinson
On the one hand, your comments echo David's Schmidtz's point about humanitarianism vs egalitarianism: the reason to help fix cleft palates is that cleft palates are bad, not that there is an unequal distribution of them.
On the other hand, insofar as society is seen as a "cooperative venture for mutual advantage" (isn't that Rawls's phrase?) shouldn't we worry when the least well off are not benefitting as much as they could be from growth? How sustainable is this positive sum venture if the poor realistically believe they could be better off with some other arrangement?
Like the others, I'm not yet seeing much Rawls in your Rawlsekianism.

1 year ago

in Comical Conservative Conditionals on Will Wilkinson
Don't you think liberty (or autonomy or substantive freedom or some such related notion) has value in itself? Or is it only valuable because it promotes those other values you mention? Since you're a value pluralist libertarian, I'd have thought liberty would have more than instrumental value for you. Maybe it does, but it's not clear from your post.

1 year ago

in Viciously Darwinian Totalitarian Fascism in One Lesson on Will Wilkinson
Will,
Must redistribution be negative-sum? Couldn't the benefit to the recipients and the positive externalities of an income floor/safety net outweigh the costs? (Imagine a pro-growth, free market economy with a small basic income grant, or something.)
Also, any sense of how a dollar increase in average wealth translates into an increase in the average wealth for, say, the bottom quintile. I doubt it's one for one. Any thoughts?

1 year ago

in What’s the Frequency Lakoff? on Will Wilkinson
8 has a point. Haidt's work reminded me of how things like veganism can powerfully tap into the purity dimension. Also, think of how identity politics can tap into the ingroup dimension. Hardcore lefties are broad-band too, I guess.

1 year ago

in What’s the Frequency Lakoff? on Will Wilkinson
Great post!
It's important to see that Liberals (of all stripes) need to develop a more broad-band approach to the liberal ethic, rather than arguing for the superiority narrow-band liberalism. (Though this does bring up tough questions about public discourse, etc.)One can be a political liberal and still have a robust account of the virtues and human flourishing. What we need is the right blend of Aristotle, Mencius, Smith, Darwin, and Hayek.

2 years ago

in Boudreaux’s Time Machine on Will Wilkinson
OK, I wouldn't want to go back either. But I would be willing to pay A LOT of money to see Dylan piss off all the sensitive folkies (and Stalinist folk singers like Pete Seeger)at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Guess I'll just have to watch the footage on my DVD player at home.

3 years ago

in Putting More on the Table Brings People With More to the Table on Will Wilkinson
Will,
Nice post. Two things that might be added to your analysis. First, there is, of course, the "Bootleggers and Baptists" dynamic. Once egalitarian/public interest claims are taken as a valid reasons to increase the size, scope, and power of the state, there is an incentive to use this rhetoric as a cover for rent-seeking.Second, I think for at least some redistributivist egalitarians, democratic politics is seen as the realm of cooperation, whereas the market is seen as the realm of zero-sum conflict. Thus playing the statecraft game may seem like a better bet for registering the voices of the weak, whereas the marketplace is seen as the realm of the strong. Thus Chomsky the "anarchist," for instance, has advocated an increase in the power of the federal gov't and prefers gov't agencies to corporations ("private tyrannies") on the grounds that at least gov't agencies are open to democratic accountability, while private firms are not. Go figure.
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