Update!

by Will Wilkinson on July 31, 2008

Sorry so quiet! I’ve been busy doing things. You know how it is. Here is the latest Free Will, in which I talk with Jesse Prinz, whose book The Emotional Construction of Morals is awesome. Here is today’s Marketplace commentary, in which I note that T. Boone Pickens is trying to use the public’s anti-foreign bias and bottomless ignorance to help rig the regulatory structure in his favor. I think of it as the Swift Boat Veterans for windmills project. (Some of the commenters seem not to realize that this kind of mixed environmentalist/energy independence play is exactly how we got the now locked-in subsidies for ethanol they so vigorously decry. Also, I am an idiot for thinking that people will buy things, and producers will produce them, when the price is right.)

I’ll be off next week to Michigan for a Liberty Fund conference on Adam Smith. And then I’m moving to Iowa City with Kerry, where she will start work on her MFA in creative nonfiction while I will do exactly the same thing [as I am doing now, i.e., working for Cato], but from a different place. We will be so far from the Orange Line. Expect puppy-blogging.

  • Iowa City has some fun places to eat.
  • Ryan
    I thought your discussion with Professor Prinz was fascinating. Listening to your Free Will podcasts and reading your blog has ignited an intense interest in philosophy and how it strives to interpret our beliefs, customs, and actions. Unfortunately I'm relatively unfamiliar with philosophy (major works, top thinkers, etc). Other then a 100 level survey course at my university I know nothing of the wider discipline. I have read Hayek, Mises, and a few other social philosophers extensively but I'm now looking to branch out further. Could you possible recommend a sort of starter kit of books and articles that would serve as a useful introduction? I would really appreciate it as your discussions have made learning these concepts appear all the more important. At least to me. Thanks!
  • Ryan,

    The best place to start in moral philosophy, imho, is James Rachels' "The Elements of Moral Philosophy." It's used as a textbook in many intro to ethics courses, for good reason.

    For slightly different (and more libertarian) takes in the same style, see Jan Narveson's "Moral Matters" and David Shmidtz' "Elements of Justice."

    Also, the articles found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are both free and generally high quality (if a bit terse). Combined with Wikipedia, find a general topic or thinker who interests you and go from there.

    Also, if you like Hayek, read Ludwig Wittgenstein. They are like brothers from another mother (well, distant cousins), except Wittgenstein is a much better writer. Also: David Hume.
  • Ryan
    Thanks!!
  • Joe English
    I really enjoyed the interview with Prof. Prinz. I think one of the difficulties organized religion imposes on its believers is the requirement that they profess certain things to be immoral while simultaneously experiencing no emotional investment in the professed immorality.

    As Professor Prinz points out, without an emotional investment, a professed moral belief sounds hollow. As a result, religious followers come to interpret their own inability to really feel the Church’s proscriptions as a reflection of their own imperfections – something to work on, pray about, etc..

    By reversing the cause and effect of morality – first come the biblical proscriptions, then comes the duty to feel strongly about them – organized religion causes inarticulable feelings of guilt in those striving to be good adherents.
  • Ben
    "We will be so far from the Orange Line."

    It's obvious that the MFA is a front. You two are being sent as an advance team to supervise the building of the NAFTA Superhighway.
  • Chris
    I'm not sure I agree with you regarding the T. Boone Pickens article. Even if his attempt to push through an energy policy change isn't successful, a plan like it will almost certainly result. Specifically, energy policy is very likely to become greener over the next several years and wind energy producers will almost certainly benefit. I don't like rent seeking and lobbyists any more than you do, but I don't really feel like I can fault the man for having the financing to run a national public opinion campaign and the foresight to put his money this far ahead of the curve. So I guess what I'm wondering is: are you advocating a totally free market approach towards energy policy, or is there some other combination of subsidies, regulation and taxation that you'd prefer?

    Or to put it another way: maybe we should be thinking about investing in wind.
  • Tyler Blalock
    So does that book basically support Hume's view of morality?
  • Kip, one thing you can do is just speed up the playback. Using itunes+ipod, for example, you can Convert To AAC, rename the files .m4b instead of .m4a, and then tell your ipod to play audiobooks Fast. I finally did this today after never having listened to podcasts because of a weird time-wasting phobia thing w.r.t. listening to spoken conversations; it's great!

    See you in Michigan, Will! =)
  • Matt... Yeah that is confusing. Fixed.
  • Really enjoying your BHTV segments. But often you pause way too long -- try to work on that. ;-)

    P.S. Ditto on Matt's comment.
  • I was quite confused by your second-to-last sentence for a while, taking it to mean that you'd first move to Iowa city, where Kerry would work on and MFA, and then you'd also work on an MFA (exactly the same thing) but you'd do it from a different place (than Iowa City.) That seemed to not make any sense at all. After a minute I figured it out, though. Good luck w/ the move, though. I hope you get some cheap books at the liberty fund thing.
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