In Original Rights and Just Redistribution, Hillel Steiner attempts to answer three questions: to what sorts of things do we have original property rights?; how do we distinguish these sorts of things to which we have non-original property rights?; and finally, who counts as being one of ‘us’ with these rights? He begins with the concept of self-ownership: for someone to have any rights at all, he must not be part of another’s bundle of possessions. After establishing that laboring within’s one domain produces products within one’s domain, he asks how initially unowned things outside of one’s domain becomes justly ownable. He concludes that our equal original property rights entitle us to an “equal share of (at least) raw natural resources.”
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[Readings come from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Part II, Sections I & II]
Locke’s Theory of Acquisition
Nozick’s goal in this section of AS&U is to, in his words, “introduce an additional bit of complexity into the structure of the entitlement theory.” To do this, he uses as a starting point Locke’s approach to justice in property acquisition—namely, that ownership of an object originates in one’s mixing of labor with that object. Nozick then proceeds to ask the standard gamut of questions calling attention to some difficulties in Locke’s theory of acquisition, like whether dumping a can of tomato juice in the ocean constitutes “mixing one’s labor” with the ocean. Essentially, the questions seek the strict boundary between what constitutes a mixing of labor sufficient for just acquisition and what does not. Under the Lockean notion of acquisition, it seems that one naïve interpretation would say that improving upon an object entails full ownership of the object. Of course, as Nozick points out, if the stock of improvable unowned objects is limited, this view is unfeasible. He uses the appropriation of a grain of sand as an example of one’s appropriation removing another’s liberty (as Hohfeld uses the word) to act on a previously unowned object, but intuitively suggests that this particular removal is not problematic. The central concern, he says, “is whether appropriation of an unowned object worsens the situation of others.”
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I don’t think I’ve covered feminism anywhere in my blog, so I’d like to quickly render my position for reader reference. It’s certainly more nuanced than what I’ve provided with the following, but this will be a start. I bring this up because I was recently reviewing Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland, which portrays a society run solely by women. It’s also been the object of a renewed wave of radical separatist feminism, which often is based on the premise of some sort of fundamental dissimilarity between men and women that makes civil society with both genders unacceptable.
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February 20th, 2009
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John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) is a majestic tale of a prophecy, a king, his wizardly guardian, and the many heroes of his quest. This makes for awesome battle scenes, no doubt, as well as slow-motion 80s sex scenes that always involve the presence of a fire place, fire pit, or 30-plus candles, and bad 80s hair. A byproduct of battle scenes, and sex that eventually leads to more battle scenes, is a lot of dead people.
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A standard Wittgensteinian response to philosophical problems is that they are reducible to mere linguistic puzzles. Since the origins of the so-called problem of induction lie in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1740), we might naively expect an inimical view to Hume from a Wittgensteinian standpoint. However, given Hume’s general spirit of philosophy elsewhere, Hume’s empiricism, from the Wittgensteinian standpoint, is at least very robust and sensible. So much ground is shared between these two grand thinkers, that to criticize Hume for his shortcomings is to be unfairly anachronistic toward the first philosopher to truly shatter the grandiose illusions of traditional philosophy. Further, these illusions were the very same ones which Wittgenstein would later come and elegantly but almost perplexingly smash further. Yet, not only must we afford Hume respect and credit for his ideas relative his place in time, as we often do with other philosophical giants, but we must still contend with his ideas in a very real sense in the present. In fact, the ground we will share here with Hume is indeed so great that an effective critique of Hume on any epistemic issue—like problem of induction—does not come easily, and we can only accomplish it with careful precision.
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Imagine the famous scene in the 1973 movie American Graffiti involving mischievous persons attaching the rear axle of a stationary police car via steel cable to a post, an accomplice speeding by, and the intent police officer pulling away in pursuit only to find the car jerked into the air and its rear axle pulled away from under it. With that in mind, now imagine there were two very science-focused vandals intent on wreaking havoc upon police property. One postulates to the other, “Remember American Graffiti? We could attach that police car’s rear axle to a pole; then the car will be immobilized like in the movie, and then the police will look embarrassingly bad in front of everyone!”
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Michael Otsuka’s position, as outlined in “Self-Ownership and Equality,” puts him fairly strongly on the left. This is because he advocates an egalitarian position which he hopes to put forward as not incompatible with self-ownership, as Cohen would like to argue. He puts forward the thesis that equality of access to welfare between individuals of differing capacities to derive welfare from their resources can theoretically be achieved through an egalitarian distribution of initially unowned worldly resources, as a matter of contingent fact. In that regard, Otsuka is not a hard-left end-all egalitarian, but is by far the left-est of the authors in Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics (Peter Vallentyne) I’ve read so far; namely, Robert Nozick (who is undoubtedly similar in his “Lockean” libertarian approach, and who Otsuka borrows from a little bit but obviously contradicts on some important points), Hillel Steiner, and Phillip Van Parijs. The course of his article is as follows, briefly.
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In the relationship of mankind to nature, there is absolutely no place in it for religion or mythology, just as there is no place for any other false metaphysical statements. As one of my favorite quotes goes (best uttered in a booming voice): “Nature, to be commanded, MUST BE OBEYED.” It turns out that the world has issued us no commands for us to obey relating to worship or ritual, as evidenced by the fact that nature is just so bafflingly indifferent to our commands in dances, sacrifices, very focused thoughts with clasped hands, shuffling processions, and organized flames in front of an idol. Yet lots of people, even those free of myth’s delusions, spend an inordinate amount of time discussing it with great intellectual furor. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are two of many scholars who have made a fortune crusading against Christ. Why? What could the intense study of imaginative, but false stories offer? We can certainly watch the Star Wars films, play its games, and read it books. That’s plenty fun. But are there thousands of Star Wars scholars engaged in constant debate? Put aside the forum geeks for a moment, and focus solely on those in the respected intellectual institutions of society: how many people care about the force, Death Stars, and X-wings?
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Samuel Butler’s speculation (in Erewhon’s Book of the Machines) that machines could eventually develop consciousness was something of a joke, but the debate on robot consciousness has developed into a major issue in philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as becoming a huge pop-culture phenomenon. The Matrix details robots taking over the world; I, Robot does something similar; Bicentennial Man portrays an increasingly human-like robot; AI does the same, except with a very human-like child. If the human mind, as science has begun to reveal, is nothing but a very extremely complicated interaction of material elements, why can’t a computer reach the same level of complexity and hence achieve consciousness? There’s no doubt that they could eventually look and act like human beings, but the question remains whether they can, for example, have the same moral rules apply to them as apply to human beings, or even simpler, actually have experience and not be “zombies.”
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At the foundation of modern moral justifications for the establishment of a coercive state is the voluntarization of that coercive power – in other words, the implication that obedience to governments is in some way chosen and thus morally binding. The philosophical construct that has come to embody this approach is described by the term “social contract.” Though the works of important philosophers like Hobbes and Locke employed a version of the social contract, the work which came to inhabit and popularize the phrase was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential 1762 treatise, Du Contrait Social (“The Social Contract”).
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