Robert Rodriguez responds to Arizona’s New Immigration Policy
via
Unofficial Gag Rules on Immigration Reform
In the wake of Arizona’s attempt to localize immigration enforcement , I think it’s time for Congress and the Obama administration to return to immigration reform. If anything can justify American exceptionalism , it’s the waves of immigration that have repeatedly demonstrated that we can offer a better life to foreigners without losing our own…
How to get a philosophical education for free
DIY U by Anya Kamenetz (2010) A regularly updated version of this guide can be found here. I teach at the third-most expensive school in the country, where I regularly persuade students that they should major or minor in philosophy. For many students, this is a value question, and as I like to put it,…
Cloning isn’t about Genetic Identity: More on Procreation
Ever since I wrote negatively about the justice of procreation , I’ve been hoping that someone would come along and take the positive position. It’s the kind of argument about which one doesn’t quite want to be right. Sadly, there’ve been no takers. However, there’s recently been a spate of discussions on a more narrow…
Visualizing Bureaucracy
The New York Times has this infographic : In the University of California system, there’s a similar trend :
Democracy, Bureaucracy and the Fear of Statisticians
Often when I am trying to explain problems in the modern political landscape or my own approach to political philosophy, I will return to Max Weber’s account of bureaucracy as more efficient than private office. Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about “efficiency” in bureaucracy, but Weber’s argument rested on the contrast between private and…
Modest Sites
My latest experiment is to try to write my public policy posts at a new collaborative blog Modest Sites and preserve this blog for more philosophical fare. The title comes from Sheldon Wolin’s classic work of political theory, Politics and Vision : The power of a democratic politics lies in a multiplicity of modest sites…
Moral Malapropism: Particularism on Craig Ferguson
Late night television takes on moral particularism : via Peter Levine I’m still trying to get my head around Dancy’s view, so perhaps this post will be more confusing than it ought to be. Here’s the gist from the Stanford Encyclopedia: Moral Particularism, at its most trenchant, is the claim that there are no defensible moral…
Epistemic Institutional Design and the Roman Catholic Church, Part One
The Catholic Church has been having a rough time of it lately . In a series of posts, I want to take up some of the implications of this trouble for epistemic institutional design, that is, for building institutions that ‘get it right.’ First, some background: what has previously been a primarily American problem of…
A Poster
This is from a poster session I did at Penn State University last Sunday. It’s incredibly simplistic, as all posters probably end up being, but it was kind of a cool experience so I’m sharing it here. Click on the image to get a closer look: I now support the use of posters to display…