Disqus - Latest Comments for willwilkinson

Re: Why Are There So few Women in Philosophy?

willwilkinson — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:33:52 -0000

Maybe!

Re: Hey, I Can’t Actually Quite Imagine a World in Which Things Are Exactly as Different as the Need to Be to Give Me What I Want, but It Would Be Neat if I Could!!

willwilkinson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:35:21 -0000

Hmm indeed. I don't mess with comments.

Re: Hey, I Can’t Actually Quite Imagine a World in Which Things Are Exactly as Different as the Need to Be to Give Me What I Want, but It Would Be Neat if I Could!!

willwilkinson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:08:37 -0000

If the real objection is to conventional Senate rules, you have to admit that it's strange to make this objection in the form of an argument for the abolition of the Senate. No?

Re: Hey, I Can’t Actually Quite Imagine a World in Which Things Are Exactly as Different as the Need to Be to Give Me What I Want, but It Would Be Neat if I Could!!

willwilkinson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:05:15 -0000

"I think it's fair for Yglesias and Ezra to assume that a unicameral legislature would have, in 2008's electoral climate, resulted in a similar 60% Democratic composition."

Just totally baffling! Would politics running up to the 2008 elections have looked anything like it in fact did with a unicameral legislature? (When do you imagine we made this transition?) Would GW Bush have been president rather than Al Gore or Gary Hart or somebody. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain would not have been senators in a U.S. with a unicameral legislature. Presumably that sort of thing would have affected who ran for won the presidency. Have we also switched to multiparty proportional representation? For all we know the coalition government under prime minister Mike Huckabee passed single-payer years ago.

Re: Hey, I Can’t Actually Quite Imagine a World in Which Things Are Exactly as Different as the Need to Be to Give Me What I Want, but It Would Be Neat if I Could!!

willwilkinson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:04:45 -0000

I've been following MY's blog since he was in short pants. I know about his bugbear here. It's still completely senseless to pretend you can project current D to R ratios onto a fundamentally redesigned democratic structure.

Re: Liberty in Context

willwilkinson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:01:15 -0000

I took a glance. I did not, in fact, find your thoughts interesting.

Re: Liberty in Context

willwilkinson — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:15:04 -0000

Sorry. That really is convoluted. Shouldn't have been one sentence. The thought is....

Societies where women are universally believed to be naturally inferior and dependent are societies in which women's liberty is curtailed. The norms of behavior generated by these beliefs are the immediate threat to women's liberty. This is easy to see and it should not be hard to admit. But libertarians do find it hard to admit, which suggests ideology is interfering with common sense. It simply wouldn't occur to most people to locate the primary threat to liberty in the method of norm enforcement, since it's so plain that liberty is restricted if the norm is enforced at all.

Re: Liberty in Context

willwilkinson — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:40:15 -0000

No one has made an argument against having social norms. Indeed, Kerry's argument is that social norms are pervasive, largely inescapable, and influence us strongly. Grasping how norms can shape us, can limit or expand our horizons of possibility, can inculcate a sense of helpless dependence or efficacious independence, etc., is to grasp why norms matter to liberty.

I think pluralism is inevitable in a liberal society. But some norms are terribly illiberal, and those of us who value liberty ought to at least acknowledge that they are and at best will participate in the attempt to install countervailing norms by working to achieve broad social consensus about the bounds of liberality that will raise the social cost of adopting norms on the wrong side of the line.

Re: Liberty in Context

willwilkinson — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:29:19 -0000

Peter, It's definitely not a semantic argument. To say that systemic cultural conditions can restrict liberty independently of the kind of physical coercion libertarians have traditionally defined liberty in terms of amounts to a pretty substantive dispute.

In my experience, most libertarians are not really aware of left-leaning, sociology-style arguments about structural discrimination or the social construction of ethnic or gender identity. Many libertarians are able to call up a a glib, disparaging script about these things (usually including some ignorant jab about "post-modernism"), but that's not the same thing as ever having thought seriously about it. The usual reaction is EXACTLY like the usual liberal reaction to the claim that excessive taxation is immorally exploitative. When liberals roll their eyes about these claims, that's no reason to believe they've really thought hard about it.

"Aren't you just trying to co-opt these terms here to try to get more people to fight for causes you like?"

No. Because most people use "freedom" and "coercion" when discussing things that libertarians have been trained to say aren't matters of freedom or cases of coercion. And many libertarians themselves have a hard time not using "freedom" in the positive sense. I don't know how many libertarians I've heard over the years saying that the reason they opened their own business was "freedom" or that they worked hard to get relatively wealthy for the "freedom" that affords. Sure, I would like more people to fight for causes I like, but I don't think Kerry or I are playing a word game. The claim is that these are causes you ought to care about if you care about liberty.

"What I'm curious about, though, is the extent to which Kerry's line of argument doesn't turn into a radical second-wave feminist critique of all sorts of cultural values and status pursuits. If cultural norms can inhibit freedom, how far can these arguments be taken? I find these discussions really interesting, I just don't see myself as wearing my libertarian hat when I'm engaged in them... I see it as a sort of a general cultural progressivism which is somewhat orthogonal to my libertarianism."

A lot of people seem to be saying this, and I think I understand it. But (in large opart thanks to Kerry) it's come to seem pretty obvious to me that the possibility of a society with libertarian institutions requires a huge degree of cultural change. And to will the end is to will the means, as Kant said. The possibility of actually existing libertarianism depends on a good deal of progressive cultural change. Once you start thinking about the kind of culture that could sustain libertarian institutions, I think you start seeing certain cultural constraints rather differently. At least that's been my experience.

Re: Technology Technology, Institutional Technology, and Global Warming

willwilkinson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:25:06 -0000

Right!

Re: Inequalities in Health Care

willwilkinson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:37:24 -0000

I'm not sure this is helpful!

Why is your sense that moral propositions are bunk (meaningless? false?) not just another example of what Robin's talking about?

Re: Inequalities in Health Care

willwilkinson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:17:35 -0000

Thanks. Fixed.

Re: For More Responsible Climate Politics

willwilkinson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:14:56 -0000

This is all very hand wavey. Take a technology like artificial carbon sequestering "trees." What that would do is simply remove carbon from the atmosphere, like real trees, but at a much greater rate. They would be relatively easy to calibrate and fine tune. This is the sort of thing I had in mind. It wouldn't "throw a wrench" into the climate. It would pretty straightforwardly change "too much" carbon in the atmosphere to "not too much" carbon in the atmosphere. That is to say, it would fix the problem. That would be fantastic, right?

Re: For More Responsible Climate Politics

willwilkinson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:03:43 -0000

Do the "perpetrators" bear the costs even theoretically? Countries like China and India will have to bear much of the cost. And they won't agree to emission caps unless rich countries pay for much/most it. But that's just to say that they won't agree to (or stick with) a political "solution."

Some important rich countries (ahem!) won't agree to regulate themselves as it is. Others have simply flouted self-imposed targets when convenient.

Re: For More Responsible Climate Politics

willwilkinson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:50:42 -0000

"there is an undeniable pure economic case to be made for aligning incentives towards renewable energy. Why waste money on elaborate efforts to harvest these increasingly scarce resources, when the sun is just throwing energy away, all the time? Do you agree?"

No. When carbon-based energy becomes more expensive than alternative sources of energy, THEN it will be a waste to dig it up, and no one will want to. To try to accelerate this eventuality by "aligning incentives" through taxes and subsidies is simply to harm people by forcing them to pay more for energy than they they otherwise would. The usual economic justification for this sort of thing is that it prevents a greater expected future harm, but given IPCC forecasts, you basically have to cheat to make the math work.

Re: http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/10/14/3821/

willwilkinson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:38:43 -0000

I think Jim's right. Kenworthy's saying there's utility in savings not captured by nominal consumption measures. I think this is obviously true. The question is the extent to which this fact complicates consumption as a proxy for material welfare. As an issue of usage and communication, I think it's confusing to label as "consumption" the utility derived from savings. Judging by his usage, I think Kenworthy would agree.

Re: Yes, Bill Ayers Is Messing With People

willwilkinson — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:09:58 -0000

Bill Ayers ghost-writes Dave Weigel's blog posts.

Re: A Matter of Justice

willwilkinson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:13:37 -0000

Let's see Steve. Let's round up and call 40% of 109 million 45 million. The population of the United States was 226 million in 1980 and 304 million now. That's over 70 million more people! Where did we put them?!

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

willwilkinson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:57:41 -0000

Baby steps, my friend. Romania and Bulgaria weren't initially members of the EU. Now they are.

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

willwilkinson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:56:38 -0000

Mexico's GDP per capita is higher than Romania's and the two countries are at about the same spot on the corruption index, yet Romanians are already free to travel, live and work in 15 EU countries, and will be eligible to work in all in a few years as the remaining EU countries lift their restrictions. Also note that the level of corruption in Romania was higher than Mexico's. Since accession to the EU, corruption has dropped to a level slightly lower than Mexico's.

If there's a special problem with Mexico, it's that, unlike Romanians, many of them are brown, and that, unlike Europeans, Americans are not accustomed to hearing other languages.

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

willwilkinson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:42:53 -0000

I think we have ALL SORTS of moral obligations. Not sure what you're talking about.

The point of the quoted text is that Americans are in the grip of "deeply held mythologies" about poverty and inequality and that our immigration policies reflect and reinforce them. I agree!

I have no interest in abolishing citizenship. I'm for a guest-worker program as a temporary solution until the establishment of a common North American labor market.

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

willwilkinson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:51:55 -0000

Jen, I'm asking for justification of what the state does and does not allow.

Private ownership of land (and state-backed property rights) is justified because the system as a whole tends to leave people better off than does common ownership. There are, however, reasonable limitations on property rights. Some are based in the fact that the system doesn't leave everyone in a better position than they'd be otherwise, and thus some redistribution may be needed to make the overall system truly mutually beneficial. Some limitations on property rights are based in conflict with other rights. For example, easements of right of way protect freedom of movement. As I understand it, in many places it is not trespassing to walk across someone's property if there is no nearby public path. But you'd know better than I would.

I think the restrictions on rights to free movement and association created by border and immigration policies need justification in the same way that the limitations on individual liberty implicit in private property rights need justification (e.g., if your lawn was still in the commons, I'd be free to camp there, eat fruit off the trees there, etc.)

I haven't said that the state may not legitimately enforce immigration rules or control the border. I think screening for threats to public safety and health are totally legit. Likewise, I think limiting the level of immigration to a level compatible with social stability can be legit. So who determines the level? In this particular post, the idea was that the the legitimacy of border policy, according to a very widely accepted theory of the source legitimate political authority, might require that the people directly affected by the policies be allowed to weigh in on what they will be. The idea isn't that there can be no legitimate policies. Also, this isn't contesting the legitimacy of the use of state power in the public interest. It's contesting that national citizenship defines the relevant public.

A large guest-worker program would be a big improvement in terms of justice. Eventually, we should move to an EU-style system in which North Americans are free to travel, live and work anywhere in North America.

Re: A Matter of Justice

willwilkinson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:22:54 -0000

Suspicion of collective interests in this case is based in the suspicion that either (a) though they participate in shared institutions, a collective including people in Maine and Arizona lacks the kind of cohesion needed to have the relevant common interests or (b) if people in Maine and Arizona are part of a collective with common interests in the relevant sense, then people in Monterrey, Manitoba, and Maine are also part of a collective in the same sense. Societies aren't bounded by national borders.

I argued that democratic sovereignty over national territory is not analogous to an individual or firms ownership of property here:

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2007/06/...

Other thoughts about that here:

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/02/...

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

willwilkinson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:00:32 -0000

Especially when they have become classified as felons due to unjust laws.

Re: The Legitimacy of Border Policy

willwilkinson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:15:20 -0000

Thanks, mk. I really appreciate that.