From the monthly archives:

September 2004

The Saint Louis Hegelians, Adam-ondi-Ahman, and the Metaphysically Essential Center of the United States of America

September 27, 2004

Matt is whining about the implication that the Northeast isn’t “real” America. I can’t imagine why he’s so defensive about it. He’s so wrong that he should just quietly let it go. The core of real America is, of course, Missouri, and I can prove it. A mile from Missouri is a mile from [...]

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The Curse and Blessing of the Ultimate Comparison Class

September 15, 2004

Patri Friedman makes a nice point about comparison classes and self-esteem over at Catallarchy.

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Flip Flop! Flip Flop!?

September 14, 2004

Regarding the Borders kerfluffle, Alina writes:
While Max should certainly be criticized for his erroneous views . . . , Will should also be criticized for his waffling and wish-washy positions. Sure, it’s great to wait to until you see the results of the war become taking a serious principled position on it. But it is [...]

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Hawk Logic

September 10, 2004

Aeon Skoble, something of a libertarian hawk (who is right to say that lib-hawkishness is a theoretically heterogeneous view), takes issue with my reply to Max below. First of all he thinks that rights are natural, not conventional. I agree with Max that he’s wrong about this, but we need not get into it here [...]

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Libertarian Hawks

September 10, 2004

Max Borders over at TCS attempts to deploy contractarian reasoning in the service of that unlikely composite creature, the libertarian hawk. Max argues the lib-hawk is no impossible monster, like the gryphon. More like the liger, although, sadly, more feracious and no less ferocious.
Insofar as Max is attempting to justify a doctrine of [...]

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Straight Outta Kennebunkport

September 7, 2004

Julian has Bush laying down the mad self-deprecating rhymes like Bunny Rabbit in Eight Mile. Check it.

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Feeding the Horses to Feed the Sparrows

September 7, 2004

Here’s a transcript of a recent episode of Think Tank devoted to John Rawls featuring Samuel Freeman and Robert Talisse.

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Feed Me!

September 2, 2004

I’ve updated the blog to MT 3.1 and installed MT-Blacklist to rid myself of comment and trackback spam. It seems to be working. Good.
Also, you’ll notice that I’m trying out Google ads. They’re over there on the right. You’ll notice that Google has yet to really parse what this blog is about. Dianetics!? But I [...]

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Moral Hazard and International Aid

September 1, 2004

Approaches to global justice like Nussbaum’s are simply inadequate until they can seriously address the problems of moral hazard that seem to me to utterly swamp considerations in favor of large-scale global redistribution. This simply recapitulates the moral hazard argument against certain forms of welfare programs at the domestic level. The best work on this [...]

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Nussbaum on Capabilities

September 1, 2004

Interesting paper by Nussbaum: Beyond the Social Contract: Capabilities and the Social Contract.
I was already moving in a Sen/Nussbaum capabilities direction even before I started to become skeptical of the usefulness of happiness as the standard of evaluation in contractarian normative modeling. So I’m pretty interested in what Nussbaum has to say. My [...]

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