Tag: Epistemic Institutional Design
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The Will-Be/Ought Gap: Marking Ideas to Market and Moral Realism
(What follows are some reflections on two related problems. One is Robin Hanson’s discussion of prediction markets to counteract status quo bias, and the other is my friend Leigh Johnson’s meditation on strong moral relativism. Because of length, I have cut my extended reflections on Dr. J’s “strong relativism” for a post tomorrow.) If there’s…
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“More Light!” Lying, Police Work, and the Exclusionary Rule
In the 1961 case Mapp v. Ohio, the Supreme Court declined to protect the the possession of pornographic material, but instead decided to exclude all evidence gained through unconstitutional searches. Last month, the Supreme Court revisited that decision in Herring v. United States, where they reconsidered the rule of evidence that excludes evidence gained unconstitutionally. Exclusion,…
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Democracy and Coffee
Jakob Norberg synthesizes some of the thinking on coffeehouses that hangs at the edges of contemporary democratic theory. Without reifying it as a miraculous commodity, he works through some of the ways that Habermas and Carl Schmitt used the figure of the coffeehouse to represent the pretensions and triumphs of the middle-class after the industrial…
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Cost-benefit analysis of drug policy
Here is why I love the economic analysis of policy. It’s an article by Mark A. R. Kleiman, detailing some simple rule changes and common sense redistributions of law enforcement budgets in order to maximize the efficiency and fairness of our drug enforcement policy. Imagine if we asked the DEA, the FBI, and the Army…