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Clear-headed applications of moral and political theory to current affairs.
My pals over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians are having an interesting conversation about the best justificatory foundation for their brand of classical liberalism. Kevin Vallier argues, correctly in my view, that "Utilitarianism is too consequence-sensitive and self-ownership is too consequence ...
Jonah Lehrer reports on new research from Steve Sapra and Paul Zak on the neurochemistry of Wall Street success: Drs. Sapra and Zak began by analyzing the genes of 60 professional traders working in five major Wall Street firms. (They collected the DNA samples in 2008—only three of the firms ...
So the Susan G. Komen Foundation has withdrawn its financial support of Planned Parenthood. Wailing and gnashing, wailing and gnashing. Erica Greider, my colleague at The Economist, offers an evenhanded overview of the dust-up, and she concludes: As for the Susan G. Komen grants, they added ...
Speaking of Deirdre McCloskey, Dalibor Rohac offers a nice overview of her recent work in a WSJ profile. Here's the core argument of McCloskey's most recent book, Bourgeois Dignity : Modern economic growth, she claims, is a result of an ideological and rhetorical transformation. In the ...
Writing in the New York Times, Peter Singer and Agata Sagan ask "Are We Ready for a 'Morality Pill'?" I dunno. Why? The infamous Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments showed that given the right circumstances, most of us act monstrously. Indeed, given pretty mundane circumstances, most of us ...
My post discussing Brian Leiter's proposal to seize 75% of the 1%'s wealth reminded me of a Michael Kinsley piece I meant to comment on last month, but never got around to. Here's Kinsley: My problem with Obama’s ["this isn't about class war"] speech is that the president muddles together a ...
The Institution for Economic Affairs, a free-market British think-tank, has released a freely-downloadable edited volume titled ... and the Pursuit of Happiness, packed with papers summarizing the public-policy implications of recent work in happiness research. Here are a few highlights gleaned ...
Large swathes of the Internet today are protesting legislation now pending in Congress that would censor the Internet and burden many sites with impossible-to-meet regulatory demands. What's the rationale behind enormously meddlesome regulations like SOPA/PIPA? Among others reasons, the "piracy" of ...
University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers, whose work with Betsey Stevenson I cited in my recent post on why economic growth is a moral imperative, sat down recently to talk with Patrick Bernau of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's economics and finance blog to discuss his Betsey's most ...
Brian Leiter, the law and philosophy ratings maven, is an interesting guy. He's an insightful Nietzsche scholar and legal theorist with a bit of a reputation as a bullying ideologue. (He's treated me disrespectfully on a few occasions for what I assume are political reasons, which I mention in the ...
Some say our sense that life means something is an illusion, or that it would be an illusion if there were no god. Some say free-will is an illusion. These claims confuse me. The water I seem to see on the hot horizon is an illusion. The bend in the stick in the water in the pond is an illusion ...
This column (flagged by one of our eagle-eyed editors) by Kenneth Rogoff on "rethinking the growth imperative" is incredibly puzzling. Rogoff, a Harvard economics professor and former IMF chief economist, runs through a few hackneyed and largely discredited factoids about the limited relevance of ...
I didn't make any New Year's resolutions, because why would I? Why make resolutions? Why do it at the beginning of a year? As ever, the wisdom of master Yoda must prevail: "Do or do not. There is no try." Intention is indispensable. We do need plans! But "I'm going to go to the bank before five ...
Following Julian Sanchez's lead, I've argued that now that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shining a spotlight on its primary concerns -- rising inequality, political corruption, and debt peonage -- Occupiers and their allies now ought to pull up stakes, give up their whimsically undemocratic ...
Andrew Sullivan quotes this passage from Jennifer Fulwiler's account of her conversion to Catholicism from atheism: If everything that we call heroism and glory, and all the significance of all great human achievements, can be reduced to some neurons firing in the human brain, then it's all ...