Category: Philosophy

I don’t enjoy any debate that has to do with history or exegesis. But I found myself right in the middle of one such debate today that I found absolutely hilarious. So I wrote this post at Demos today. It’s a pretty vacuous post in which I observe that being economically insecure harms your genuine… Continue reading Jason Kuznicki just makes things up sometimes

One of the popular memes coming out of this Syria debacle is an assertion that there is no difference between conventional and chemical weapons. I’ve yet to see someone explain what the Just War Theory response on this is (granted I don’t follow this stuff anymore). So I figure I will just take a stab… Continue reading There is a difference between conventional and chemical weapons

How do you ever initiate property ownership without introducing injustice? This is a question that occupied much of my intellectual energy not too long ago. The answer I came to is that you can’t, at least not if you are trying to come up with some standalone justification for property ownership of the sort libertarians… Continue reading The Nozickian case for Rawls’ difference principle

Peter Buffett has a piece in the New York Times titled The Charitable-Industrial Complex. From the article: As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about… Continue reading The Soul of Man under Socialism in the New York Times

My prior post was about cash transfers versus in-kind benefits. In the twitter thread which motivated that post, I noticed Mike Konczal linking back to a TM Scanlon argument on his old WordPress site on the issue. I am pretty sure Mike and I have had this argument out in a comment section somewhere before,… Continue reading TM Scanlon is wrong about in-kind benefits and you might be too