DISQUS

Greg, Good point. I definitely think we should ditch the link.

Luka,

Yeah, I read Browne's book back in college, and remember him telling me not to get married or have kids, because they'll weigh down my free spirit with all their damn demands. Am I remembering wrong? (I voted for him twice, too!)

I just read Stirner, in order to write an encyclopedia entry on him. What a ridiculously weird book! I think it's important to understand Stirner in order to understand the history of American libertarianism. His first American publisher, Benjamin Tucker, the individualist anarchist and founder/publisher of Liberty magazine was deeply influenced by him. The dialectic between antinomian Stirnerite "subjectivist" anarchism and natural law "intrinsicist" anarchism, set up in the pages of Tucker's Liberty has been with us for over a century.

I think of Browne as a hybrid between Stirnerite expression of the unconstrained will and Randian rationalism. (The mix, I think, is toxic. The way Browne applies the law of identity to other people tends to depersonalize them. He encourages us to see other people as objects, more or less, whose natures have to be discovered and respected, so that we can more ably maniupulate them. Sociopathy as a guide to life.)

But more importantly, Luka, WHY DO YOU DOUBT ME!!!???

Bill, I agree efficiency on the margin matters, and I certainly don't ignore it. But I haven't seen any evidence one way or the other to indicate that the current adminstration is overseeing the bureaucracy marginally better or worse than other adminstrations. Are there any non-anecdotal measures of bureacratic effectiveness? And it is extremely implausible to see Bush administration appointees as either cynical or anti-government ideologues. They are more likely to be evangelical utopian zealots, or rah rah efficient government let's apply my MBA to the business of government types.

Does this help? The pans are gone.

Eric, I considered the relative status point. But would it be BAD if we had an "arms race" in breast size? Gil, you're right to point out the positive externalities, and the fact that it's a joke.

Well Provine's argument against free will is likely a result of philosophical ineptitude. What he's arguing against is something like indeterministic individual agency. But he shouldn't confuse that for free will.

Gil, The point about liberal neutrality is that it doesn't require that ANYTHING in particular be taught in classes, other than the minimum necessary to give someone a decent chance in life. A good school, almost by definition, won't teach ID. Some religious schools might. And a neutral state should have nothing to say about either, as long as the kids are getting reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic.

What did you read about it?

Bill, I agree.

Dave, I think you're right about how IDers operate. But the pretense is that this is science, and has nothing to do with faith. So they can't have faith-based axioms. The ID hypothesis that that fully rational inquiry will lead to a designer. I'm just trying to show that that gets them nowhere.

I also think you're right about the public schools. This issue would not be an issue but for the state enforced hegemony of secularism in public institutions that should not be public. ID is a predicatble form of self-defense by believers given the nature of our over-politicized institutions. The fact that our institutions would lead to a movement "unflinchingly devoted to subverting science and science teaching," in Bill's words, shows that there is something deeply wrong with our institutions. That is, state-sponsored hegemonic secularism breeds its own opposition. So we have a kind of Marxist "cultural contradiction." The way to cut the knot is to get the state out of the provision of education, even if it remains in the business of financing education.

By "in this kind of case" I meant the Sheehan case, not wrongful death cases. My fault for the ambiguity.

Will, You're truly a font of legal knowledge!

By unconstitutional, do you mean if the conflict or military action in which he died was unconstitutional?

Gil, I didn't know that. And I do think that changes things.

Matt, For the record, I don't think it is obvious or easy to tell whether the present war is just or unjust. That's why I'm not strident about my own view. Clearly, on my analysis, if someone thinks the war is just, Sheehan has a basis for sorrow, but no moral case against the President. For cynics like you . . . do you countenance a distinction between necessary and unnecessary wars?

Dave, I meant to more or less dismiss (3), since the analogy is weak. But it is also not that case that civil wrongful death suits, which happen all the time, bring back the dead. In this kind of case, redress simply amount to an admission of injustice, and a symbolic, institutional expression of guilt and regret.

The beloved GF.

Yup. Her general idea is right, but the execution is awful. Sweatshops are almost the worst imaginable example for her case. They are generally a positive symptom of the partial amelioration of the underlying disease. The relevant issue is what it is that explains the economic condition of countries in which working in a sweatshop is a great deal for workers. It's generally going to be a complex set of relationship between wealthier states, multilateral aid agencies, corporations, and the criminality/failure of the local state.

I'm baffled why she treats this as a throwaway:

"The poverty of the countryside that impels many people in developing countries to seek work in overcrowded cities. The export processing zones many governments have established where some of them find work, for example, are both consequences of a history of structural adjustment programs that many indebted governments have been pressured to implement by international financial institutions. The background conditions of the lives of these young workers today are partly a sedimented consequence of decisions and aggregated economic processes beginning three decades ago."

What she calls "social structure" is pretty much what the NIE guys call an "institution." Hers is a better term, I think.

I do like this passage from the young paper:

"Critics of the position that limits the scope of
obligations of justice to common political membership, on the other hand, are right to
argue that it is arbitrary to consider nation-state membership as a source of obligations of
justice. Political communities have evolved in contingent and arbitrary ways more
connected to power than moral right. People often stand in dense relationships of
exchange and cooperate with others outside their political communities, and they rightly
expect fair terms in these relationships."

Yeah, I don't think Young and I have a lot in common, but perhaps in this instance there is something, I'll definitely look at the paper. My own views were strongly influenced by my time at the Mercatus Center's Global Prosperity Initiative. "Social structural processes" are indeed the problem. We called them "institutions" in the New Institutional Economics sense, but perhaps the same thing?

I think the first world has materially harmed the third world through aid regimes. But this is a problem of the design of political institutions. Politicians in wealthy countries can use support of aid to build domestic support, and because the people who are most harmed by the transfers have no domestic political voice, there is little political feedback for the negative consequences. Similarly, wealthy states use aid as a carrot/stick to get other states to do their bidding. This, too, is largely due to perverse incentives within domestic political institutions, but serves to prop up illegitimate regimes, and perpetuate oppression.

I predict that "sweatshops", i.e., improved labor opportunities and conditions for the poor through trade, probably aren't going to be a good example of injustice.

Tim, Great stuff. First, I think mutual interaction is very important. If I'm flying an airplane over your country and dumping garbage on your head, and there's nothing you can or will ever do about it, and I will never hear from you, or be affected by you in any way, then we are not in the circumstances of justice. You are related to me like you're related to the weather. If something about your life is the effect of something I have caused, that's not interaction or interdependence.

Second, I don't think even mutual "influence" is enough to put us in the circumstances of justice. Each party has to be in a position to bargain, make agreements, and enforce them. Statist bias leads to thinking of Cote D'Ivoire as a party to a social contract. But it's not. It is quite likely not a legitimate state, just a gang in control of land. That's why it's morally illegitimate to send aid to Cote D'Ivoire, the state, since it does not have moral standing. And the rulers of the people of the region stand in the way of those people entering fully into the circumstances of justice with folks outside the borders, by blocking (predating on) trade and reinforcing dependency.

Pogge has to be careful not to equivocate on "global interdependence." There are relations of interdependence that extend across borders and around the globe. But it is not the case that any two people (or even any two economies) on the globe are in any sense interdependent.

Matt, thanks for the pointer on the Heath paper. I don't let not reading papers and not having access to books from stop me from making sweeping pronouncements about them!

Javier, Good points all. But, first, principles of justice aren't all principles of the justice of distribution. Second, principles of market cooperation are principles of distribution. When people across boundaries trade, say, there are gains from trade, and the division of the gains is a matter of distributive justice. No? But it is not at all clear what this has to do with participation in a common coercive legal structure.

Naturally, I don't buy Blake's claim (if that's right) that the legitimacy of state coercion depends on redistribution. In fact, I don't understand it. Doesn't the legitimacy of coercive redistribution depends on the prior legitmacy of state coercion. I'll have to check out the Blake paper.

Pogge's just factually wrong about the harm to the global poor. And the claim about compensation is clearly an abandonment of contractualist logic.

Bill, I'm talking about the rationally ignorant avrerage citizen, not peculiarly well-informed people who are exceptionally intellectual even for graduates of Harvard Law School. The point is that almost no one remembers high school social studies, much less Beard, almost no one has never heard of Lochner, and most don't even know what's in the constitution, aside from the fact that states have two senators, you have to be 35 to be president, and maybe bits of the first and second amendments.

Bryan's argument may not "prove" that it is rational to reject Lochner, just that it for most people, it is more reasonable to agree to defer to courts than to dissent.

It doesn't retain the same meaning. 'Authority' would be ambiguous between religious, political, moral, etc. Likewise with 'problem'. Anti-jargonists are the bane of people who like jargon.

Well, he's being funny, being Mencken and all. But he's only sort of joking. You're right! That's the joke!

Bill, try these:

Taylor, Shelley E. Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind.
New York: Basic Books, 1989.

Taylor, S.E. and Brown, J.D. "Illusion and Well-Being: A Social Psychological
Perspective on Mental health," Psychological Bulletin, 1988, 103.

RAMACHANDRAN, V. 1997. The evolutionary biology of self-deception, laughter,
dreaming and