Month: July 2010
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Consent Revisited in Light of New Facts
In a previous post, I argued deception robbed sexual and marriage partners of their capacity to grant informed consent: attempts to reduce consent to the simple act of saying “yes” actually ignore the ways in which fraudulently representing oneself may be coercive. We can hate the bigotry and prejudice that make the lies seem necessary…
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Links, Aggregated 7/23/10
Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys? An individual psychology primarily disposed to consider the interests of all equally, without fear or favor, even in the teeth of social ostracism, might be morally admirable, but simply wouldn’t cut it as a vehicle for reliable replication. Such pure altruism would not be favored in natural selection over an impure altruism…
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Consent
If you lie about your ethnicity in order to procure consent for sex, is that rape? Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two…
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Do our students have reasons to be libertarians?
In a post on the fate of the university, Steve writes: We appear to have a situation where the public will not invest in education because it is more concerned in distributing the state’s patronage to older citizens, which has created an education system which has had to cut spending on public service, and saddled students…
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What I’m reading today
Was the credit crisis like an asteroid impact? A Thomist take on Hayek and ‘Scientism’: Part 1 and Part 2 An answering machine can help nudge us into monitoring our energy usage Implicit racial bias in empathic responses to the pain of others Does Stuart Buck’s Acting White echo the claims of Akerlof and Kranton’s Identity…
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Cowen’s Epistemic Portfolio Theory and Flaubert’s Maxim
A portfolio theory is a way to minimize risk by diversifying one’s commitments or investments, using hopefully countercyclical strategies so that some part of your portfolio is always growing. Tyler Cowen suggests an amusing epistemic portfolio theory: That is, most people have an internal psychological need to fulfill a “quota of dogmatism.” If you’re very dogmatic…