Tag: Friendly Fire
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Meliorism versus Perfectionism
Consider two courses of action: One has a low probability of success but promises to mildly increase welfare (however defined). Call this “meliorism.” Rawlsian liberals, Burkean and Oakshottean conservatives, and Hayekian libertarians frequently identify with this view. Another has an unknown probability of success, but promises to massively increase welfare (however defined). Call this “perfectionism.”…
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Bleg: Honor, Status, Esteem
I’m preparing a version of my review of Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code for publication, and I was hoping that folks might give me their favorite articles, cites, and quotes on esteem and honor. If any other reviews of Appiah’s book really stood out to you, I’d love to read them, too. In my expanded…
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Jonathan Haidt’s Conflation of the Personal and the Partisan
There’s been a conflict running through Jonathan Haidt’s work that it’s time for him to address. On the one hand, he asserts that there are characteristic moral intuitions that distinguish partisan liberals from partisan conservatives. He recently argued that these moral intuitions are demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of social psychologists identify…
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Is more illegal immigration the best we can do?
Will Wilkinson on Bryan Caplan’s (false?) dilemma: Bryan Caplan lays down a challenge to liberaltarians: From what philosophic point of view is “maximizing growth + lots of redistribution + the immigration restrictions lots of domestic redistribution naturally encourage” better than “maximizing growth + no redistribution + free immigration”? Whether you’re concern for the poor is Rawlsian,…
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Left for Dead: Equality of What, Equality for Whom?
There’s a pretty fantastic exchange happening in the blogosphere right now, started by Freddie DeBoer here and followed-up here. The substance of DeBoer’s criticism is that there are no legitimate “far left” bloggers, only center-left “neo-liberals” and the panoply of social conservatives, partisan Republicans, and libertarians. Thus, DeBoer charges, we have a blind spot, an…
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Psychologizing Politics
On the Diane Rehm Show today, Jill Lepore echoed Richard Hofstadter’s diagnosis of political violence: I went back and — a few years ago and reread an issue of Newsweek magazine that was published a couple of months after the Kent State shootings, which is, in some ways, a similar moment to this pause and this…