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Thomas
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2 months ago
in This Argument Needs Cognitive Enhancement on Will Wilkinson
Isn't "responsible use" in quotations because Henry is responding to the article in Nature entitled "Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy"? I haven't the desire to pay to read the article, but I have a feeling it might answer Will's second question as well. Sometimes you should follow the links.
1 reply
3 months ago
in Libertarian Ideal Theory as Silent Complicity on Will Wilkinson
How is it a gain for libertarians if the subsidy that is marriage is extended? I can see how it could be seen as Will sees it, as a gain for justice, but that is a far cry from seeing it as some sort of gain for libertarianism.
1 reply
greenish
There are plenty of subsidies that would actually be less harmful if they were less discriminatory.
3 months ago
in Libertarian Ideal Theory as Silent Complicity on Will Wilkinson
It seems pretty clear to me that there are big differences between 1958 and today. Thrasher's mother was arrested when she was on a date with his father. Sexual relations between the couple might have been illegal. Recall that in the Loving case, the couple were prosecuted and convicted of violating the law. All of this is much different from what we see today, where sexual relationships outside of marriage are not legally proscribed (and aren't generally stigmatized socially). Gays in Nebraska who marry in Vermont will not be criminally prosecuted. They will not be arrested. They just won't get the same state-granted subsidy that certain other couples get. Marriage today is just a subsidy, and gays are simply arguing for an extension of the subsidy.
So what does that mean for libertarians? Well, I think it's fine for a libertarian to say, I oppose subsidies like marriage, and so I don't have any opinion about how the subsidy is actually enacted. Just as a libertarian might believe that our agri-business subisidies are a bad and unlibertarian idea, and decline to become involved in debates over who receives the subsidy. (If I don't care about whether agri-business subisidies are good or bad for "family farmers" am I a silent partner in injustice?) And I don't see why you believe that the libertarian position is somehow not on the table. Why can't a libertarian say, this is the policy solution I propose, and I think the others are both unacceptable? Why must a libertarian believe that the injustices in the solution you favor are worth accepting and superior to the injustices of the current circumstances? Isn't it possible for a libertarian to believe that the current situation is better, because he favors subsidies for heterosexual marriage,but believe, in a principled way, that it would be better still to not give the state the power to grant such a subsidy?
So what does that mean for libertarians? Well, I think it's fine for a libertarian to say, I oppose subsidies like marriage, and so I don't have any opinion about how the subsidy is actually enacted. Just as a libertarian might believe that our agri-business subisidies are a bad and unlibertarian idea, and decline to become involved in debates over who receives the subsidy. (If I don't care about whether agri-business subisidies are good or bad for "family farmers" am I a silent partner in injustice?) And I don't see why you believe that the libertarian position is somehow not on the table. Why can't a libertarian say, this is the policy solution I propose, and I think the others are both unacceptable? Why must a libertarian believe that the injustices in the solution you favor are worth accepting and superior to the injustices of the current circumstances? Isn't it possible for a libertarian to believe that the current situation is better, because he favors subsidies for heterosexual marriage,but believe, in a principled way, that it would be better still to not give the state the power to grant such a subsidy?
1 reply
huadpe
The one area where state recognition of marriage matters and would have to matter to all but the most strident anarchists (or anarcho-capitalists) is immigration.
The government necessarily regulates citizenship in order to settle claims of jurisdiction as well as sovereignty. I, for example, live in Canada currently, where gay marriage is legal, but I am a citizen of the US. If I were to marry a Canadian man, I would be unable to sponsor him to enter the US as a family member as I would with a Canadian woman.
Since I am a homosexual, and therefore only going to marry men, the US government is discriminating against my freedom of movement, as well as my freedom of association in so far as it fails to recognize my marriage.
The government necessarily regulates citizenship in order to settle claims of jurisdiction as well as sovereignty. I, for example, live in Canada currently, where gay marriage is legal, but I am a citizen of the US. If I were to marry a Canadian man, I would be unable to sponsor him to enter the US as a family member as I would with a Canadian woman.
Since I am a homosexual, and therefore only going to marry men, the US government is discriminating against my freedom of movement, as well as my freedom of association in so far as it fails to recognize my marriage.
3 months ago
in The Moral Psychology of David Brooks on Will Wilkinson
Sam Harris--one of the prominenet "new atheists" Brooks refers to--wrote a response to Haidt for Edge. And, really, it's a fantastically bad piece and, yes, Harris is vulnerable exactly as Brooks says.
1 reply
Duncan
Well if you read... I think it's chapter 7 of The End of Faith; the chapter about his preventing what appeared to be a rape taking place in Prague, Sam comes across very obviously as a) a moral realist and b) one with strongly Kantian overtones, which is to say a moral rationalist. If that picture is accurate then Sam is one of those whose conception of morality is being most directly challenged by the work that folks like Haidt and Greene are doing. But that doesn't have much to do with his atheism; indeed it doesn't seem to have much to do with the 'prudential ought' as opposed to the 'moral ought'.
So, I ought not to torture people. Why? Because it's a bad thing to do. That would be a moral ought, and if the sentimentalist is right then thinking that thought cincerely and acting upon it requires an appropriate sentimental setup as regards torturing which may or may not be innate and may or may not be culturally universal and which psychopaths appear to lack the capacity to form for whatever reason and so on. But not tortuing people in open view of a community who will run me out of town or worse for doing it; saying I ought not to do that seems to stray closer to being a 'prudential ought'. That is, it's still governed by the same affective processes as seem to be behind all action (Damasio) and to a certain extent requires the 'desire' to want to save my own skin, but that's a desire that all of humanity has other things being equal - psychopaths have it; it may even be a presumption we use in interpreting the actions of people in the first place (I'm thinking of Donald Davidson's discussions of interpretation if you're familiar with the philosophical literature). It seems to me there's a pretty strong case for thinking that 'epistemic norms' will fall into the latter camp. After all, 'wanting one's beliefs to be true' might be a 'desire' according to some ways of describing things, but it's so basic that I think it's legitimate to presume all people share in it. So if the worst charge that can be leveled against the new atheists is they go about saying 'you ought not to believe in Christianity' but neo-sentimentalism has shown that all 'oughts' need to be grounded in desires so it presupposes a desire for one's worldview to be correct... I don't think it's a particularly strong charge.
All that's just a roundabout way of saying that it doesn't make any less sense to say to people 'you ought not to believe in the truth of Christianity' (or for that matter, it being topical 'you ought not to beleive in the Easter bunny') in light of the research on sentimentalism, the worst that happens is you have to tell a longer story about what that claim means and what you're presupposing about the desires of your audience.
So, I ought not to torture people. Why? Because it's a bad thing to do. That would be a moral ought, and if the sentimentalist is right then thinking that thought cincerely and acting upon it requires an appropriate sentimental setup as regards torturing which may or may not be innate and may or may not be culturally universal and which psychopaths appear to lack the capacity to form for whatever reason and so on. But not tortuing people in open view of a community who will run me out of town or worse for doing it; saying I ought not to do that seems to stray closer to being a 'prudential ought'. That is, it's still governed by the same affective processes as seem to be behind all action (Damasio) and to a certain extent requires the 'desire' to want to save my own skin, but that's a desire that all of humanity has other things being equal - psychopaths have it; it may even be a presumption we use in interpreting the actions of people in the first place (I'm thinking of Donald Davidson's discussions of interpretation if you're familiar with the philosophical literature). It seems to me there's a pretty strong case for thinking that 'epistemic norms' will fall into the latter camp. After all, 'wanting one's beliefs to be true' might be a 'desire' according to some ways of describing things, but it's so basic that I think it's legitimate to presume all people share in it. So if the worst charge that can be leveled against the new atheists is they go about saying 'you ought not to believe in Christianity' but neo-sentimentalism has shown that all 'oughts' need to be grounded in desires so it presupposes a desire for one's worldview to be correct... I don't think it's a particularly strong charge.
All that's just a roundabout way of saying that it doesn't make any less sense to say to people 'you ought not to believe in the truth of Christianity' (or for that matter, it being topical 'you ought not to beleive in the Easter bunny') in light of the research on sentimentalism, the worst that happens is you have to tell a longer story about what that claim means and what you're presupposing about the desires of your audience.
3 months ago
in Are We Flirting with Fascism? on Will Wilkinson
You should look into how Rahm earned his $16 million in investment banking. Wasn't it an divestiture by SBC required by an incredibly aggressive view of antitrust law in the Clinton administration, in which SBC sold a company to Rahm's friends, who then flipped it a few months later at 2x the purchase price? The Clinton administration signed off on the SBC deal, as I understand it. Expect to see lots more like this.
1 reply
uknowbetter
Rahm is a crook just like his buddy Obama.
Has he returned his $300,000 he got from Fannie Mae to help screw over America? Nope.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/oba...
Has he returned his $300,000 he got from Fannie Mae to help screw over America? Nope.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/oba...
4 months ago
in Missing the Point of Liberaltarianism on Will Wilkinson
The whole "its an ongoing project to change who talks to whom, to freshen the stale dialectic of American politics, and to create new possibilities for American political identity" thing is hard for me to square with the whole "I’m no romantic about democracy" thing. What am I missing?
1 reply
Will Wilkinson
What's romantic about thinking you're more likely to get what you want in a democracy if you can get a whole lot of people to associate what you want with things they've wanted all along?
And the authors of the Nature article are clearly making no such silly presupposition, because, no surprise, they are not morons.