anotherpanacea

Month: April 2011

  • Unions versus Women

    Literacy is one of the major factors in female empowerment: As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves. Increases in girls’ secondary school enrollment are associated with increases in women’s participation in the labor force and their contributions to household and national income. Women’s increased earning…

  • Caplan’s Pacifism

    Bryan Caplan echoes my own pragmatic/consequentialist arguments for pacifism : P1: The immediate costs of war are clearly awful. P2: The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain. P3: For a war to be morally justified, its long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs. C: [B]efore you kill innocent people, you should be reasonably sure that your…

  • Arendtian Natality, Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and Antinatalism

    Because of my work on Hannah Arendt, I often struggle with the apparent incongruity between her account of natality and my own tendency towards antinatalism. Natality is at the heart of Arendt’s project, a rejection of the Heideggerian obsession with mortality and being-towards-death: “It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started…

  • Publicity Without Politics

    Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Following Nietzsche, Arendt speaks of the Christian publicity without politics as world-destruction and ultimately as ‘desertification’: “the…

  • Charity as a Flight from Politics

    Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Auden’s criticisms of Arendt explicily call for a flight into the invisible and eternal world, which comes…

  • Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments

    Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics In order for us to understand Arendt’s “prejudice against charity” properly, we must evaluate her idiosyncratic understanding…