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Clear-headed applications of moral and political theory to current affairs.
An Internet connection has only now materialized in my new Houston pad, so perhaps you'll forgive me if I kvetch about last week's David Brooks column. In the wake of the "you didn't build that" controversy, Brooks applies himself to the following question: "How much of my success is me, and how ...
The killings in Aurora, Colorado are literally sickening. I've been a little sick about it all day. And I find myself with the urge to say that this sort of horrifying mass murder is "senseless," that it defies comprehension, though it's not clear to me why I want to say that. I guess some part of ...
Intervening on the great Crooked Timber vs. Bleeding Hearts Libertarians debate on freedom in the workplace, Matthew Yglesias says: My standard approach to this is that in almost all political contexts, including this one, both the concept of freedom and the concept of property rights are ...
Matt Yglesias replies to an argument from Mike Konczal: Mike Konczal has a fairly compelling argument that it would make sense to dismantle the entire crazy quilt of "submerged state" tax deductions and credits designed to help make college affordable and just use the money to directly ...
So Cato Institute president Ed Crane is taking an "early retirement" and megabucks former BB&T CEO John Allison is set to take his place. It's easy to see why Allison makes sense as a peacemaking Crane replacement. He's a High Church Randian -- indeed, he's on the board of the Ayn Rand Institute ...
On the basis of having for a time shared a house with a John Roberts clerk who conveyed to me no useful information about the Chief Justice's cast of mind, here is my prediction about tomorrow's SCOTUS decision. The court will uphold the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Roberts ...
In an illuminating piece, the Washington Post's Ezra Klein traces the trajectory of the constitutional argument against the individual mandate from preposterous, fringe position to a real, greatly-feared legal possibility. The concept at the center of Klein's account is something called a ...
A new Pew poll, and the global perception captured in the chart below, leads Ali Wyne, a fellow Big Thinker, to inquire in an interesting post about the meaning of the idea, recently in vogue, that the U.S. is in decline. Wyne writes: [T]he more that folks opine on the question of ...
Christian Lorentzen makes an excellent point excellently: Tougher for the novelist are the tasks of rendering convincing characters across the class spectrum and capturing economic intricacies in a way that’s both cogent and readable. I’ve not heard of any institutions that offer joint MFA ...
Amid the tiny din of two-hundred micturating rodents, Ralph X. Bumblefutz goggled in disbelief at a discovery that would forever lay waste to the West's most cherished ideas about incontinence. It was a clear Autumn morning in 1974, in a cluttered basement laboratory occupying a disused corner of ...
The aftermath of Wisconsin's recall election seems like a perfect time to reflect on the role and desirability of labor unions. I've argued elsewhere that public- and private-sector unions are quite different beasts and that public-sector unions cannot be justified on liberal-democratic grounds ...
Here's a little philosophy/psychology experiment you can try for yourself. It just takes a few minutes, and the rest of this post will make much more sense if you do it before reading further. Go! How'd it go? Did you think the wholesome mom was happier than the party girl? To those of you ...
Noah Millman intervenes sensibly in the great Douthat-Sanchez debate about morality and religion: Okay, so humanists don’t have strong reasons for their faith in human rights. Do Christians have strong reasons for believing in Christianity? Strong in the terms Douthat is talking about here ...
Richard Marshall of 3:AM interviews the philosopher Eddie Nahmias about his work on free will. Everyone who would prefer not to be trapped in a thicket of confusion about free will ought to read this. I think Nahmias gets it right at every level. That is to say, I agree with him about everything ...
What could it mean to say that the self is an illusion? Here’s Bruce Hood, author of the new book The Self Illusion , in an interview at Sam Harris’ joint: Most of us have an experience of a self. I certainly have one, and I do not doubt that others do as well – an autonomous individual with a ...