Best Libertarian/Classical Liberal Group Academic Blog: Positive Liberty

Best Libertarian/Classical Liberal Individual Academic Blog: Abstain

Best New Libertarian/Classical Liberal Group Academic Blog: Positive Liberty

Best New Libertarian/Classical Liberal Individual Academic Blog: Theory & Practice

Ghertner: Aggression is a bad thing. Making people less aggressive, either through cultural/environmental influences or genetic influences is a good thing. Thus, were we to invent a chemical solution to aggression, it would be wise to release this upon the population at large.

That’s an interesting plan you’ve got there for curtailing aggression, but it has one minor flaw. Specifically, forcing drugs on innocent people against their will is a form of aggression.

Oops.

Ghertner: Perhaps they should have done more testing. But at what point do we conclude that a product has been thoroughly tested and is considered safe?

When someone freely decides that it’s worth the risk and chooses to take it.

One of the chief benefits of being a libertarian is that it makes a lot of things easier. Who needs a central plan for safety testing when people are free to make their own individual decisions about risks and rewards? Or, well, their own minds?

She shares responsibility in this child’s death. But she was acting in good faith in what she thought was the best interests of her child. I don’t see any crime in that.

I don’t see any justice in punishing the mother either, but what you’ve said so far here is surely not enough of a reason for the conclusion. Supposing that you, acting in good faith on what you think is the best information possible, take my treasured Ming vase (because you mistakenly believe that it was stolen from you). Does the fact that you were acting in good faith mean you don’t have to give it back?

Supposing that in the process of trying to forcibly “recover” the vase from me, you drop it and it shatters into a million pieces. Does the fact that you were acting in good faith mean that you don’t have to pay me compensation for the destruction of what was, in fact, my vase?

Supposing that I try to stop you from taking the vase and you break my leg in the process of trying to forcibly stop me from forcibly stopping you. Does the fact that you were acting in good faith mean that you don’t have to make restitution to me for breaking my leg in the process of taking and destroying what was, in fact, my vase, from my own property?

Broadly speaking, what does the fact that someone is acting in good faith have to do with anything? If it’s somebody else’s property you’re damaging or taking, why should good faith or acting on what you think is the best information have any mitigating effect on your guilt or what you owe for the damage?

An exegetical note off to the side:

Protagoras: Frege seems to have thought sentences with non-referring expressions are meaningless, ….

This is a common misunderstanding of Frege’s view, one that I suspect comes about from people reading Russell and Wittgenstein’s thoughts about propositional meaning and truth-valuability back into Frege, who did not share their conclusions. Wittgenstein and Russell held that any significant proposition has a truth value, but what Frege explicitly states in “Ãœber Sinn und Bedeutung” is statements with empty proper names express a thought but have no truth-value. Since Frege’s claim is that the sense of a statement is the thought expressed by it, and the referent of a statement is its truth-value, this means that he regards them as having a sense but no reference, just as (he thinks) the empty designator in them has a sense but no reference. Here’s the relevant passage:

“The thought, accordingly, cannot be the Bedeutung of the sentence, but must rather be considered as its sense. What is the position now with regard to the Bedeutung? Have we a right even to inquire about it? Is it possible that a sentence as a whole has only a sense, but no Bedeutung? At any rate, one might expect that such sentences occur, just as there are parts of sentences having sense but no Bedeutung. And sentences which contain proper names without Bedeutung will be of this kind. The sentence ‘Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep’ obviously has a sense. But since it is doubtful whether the name ‘Odysseus’, occurring therein, has a Bedeutung, it is also doubtful whether the whole sentence does. Yet it is certain, nevertheless, that anyone who seriously took the sentence to be true or false would ascribe to the name ‘Odysseus’ a Bedeutung, not merely a sense; for it is of the Bedeutung of the name that the predicate is affirmed or denied. Whoever does not admit the name has a Bedeutung can neither apply no withhold the predicate. But in that case it would be superfluous to advance to the Bedeutung of the name; one could be satisfied with the sense, if one wanted to go no further than the thought. If it were a question only of the sense of the sentence, the thought, it would be needless to bother with the Bedeutung of a part of the sentence; only the sense, not the Bedeutung, of the part is relevant to the sense of the whole sentence. The thought remains the same whether ‘Odysseus’ has a Bedeutung or not.” (32-33)

Hope this helps.

H.B.: They had several booths set up celebrating this most important of anatomical objects. Well, until the last one which was about the horrors of sexual assualt.

Well, how dare they. Didn’t those crazy feminists know that the point of feminism is to make you feel comfortable and pleased with the world?

Tony: Hate to break it to Maureen and all her soul sisters, but powerful men are not interested in women who behave like men. They are interested in women. Feminine women. Women who make them feel like men, not geldings. Women they can protect. Women for whom they can open doors. Women who specifically need what men can and want to provide.

Please don’t presume to speak for the desires, interests, and beliefs of men you have never met. Some men aren’t dependent on overt rituals of vulnerability, dependence, and machismo to make them feel good about themselves. Some men don’t even think that feeling “like men” specifically is all that important to living a good life. I don’t know whether this is true of “powerful men” specifically, but I don’t have much reason to think that their desires, interests, and beliefs are any less diverse than those of the men that I do know. Do you?

T. J. Madison: Rad Geek, most tyrants seem to do rather badly.

This is certainly true. In fact, I think it’s analytically true that all tyrants do badly, because one of the things that tyrants have to do in their lives is be tyrannical, and living your life by lording it over other people and living off of their honest labor is a pathetic and rotten way to be.

If you mean that tyrants also suffer from psychological or material evils (like anxiety, frustration, loneliness, discontent, material deprivation, etc.) then that is certainly also true more often than a lot of people realize. But given that a life of cannibalism, bullying, and phoney posturing at martial glory is pathetic even if it is pursued in absolute contentment and full of the most exquisite pleasures, that sort of appeal to the external punishments that a life of monstrous vice may, empirically, end up inflicting on you, seems to me to be wholly beside the point.

Stefan: Then on what basis can we condemn Agathocles for slaughtering old men for his personal gain if he was happy with the results, secure in his position, and had successfully repelled Carthage and governed Sicily peacefully for many years before dieing in old age?

The basis on which we can condemn him is pretty obvious: he’s a murderer and a tyrant. (If condemnation, as a social practice, was not made for murderers and tyrants, who was it made for?) You might think, though, that having condemned him, there is still an open question about whether or not we can convict him of being irrational, or give him reasons not to do what he did. I think that you can; they are roughly the reasons that I sketched out in replying to T.J. above. (If you could be absolutely sure that you could get away with murdering a rival and taking all his possessions, would you do so? If not, why not?)

Echidne: But it is odd that some take advantage of the gains while doing their utmost to make sure that there will be no more gains in the future, or for other women even today. I think that is what some of us find a little upsetting, because it looks two-faced.

Sure, and it is two-faced, and it is maddeningly frustrating. Just to be clear, I wasn’t objecting to anything you said in your post along these lines. I think you’re completely right. What I was objecting to is the way that some of the things comments that other people made, which seemed to go from making that point, to making the vindictive claim that some women don’t have a right to complain about sexism, or deserve to benefit from feminist achievements, because they are on the wrong side of the political line.

Echidne: I am not sure what you are referring to here. Dowd was criticized for doing sloppy research for an article. Maybe you are talking about something else.

Nancy was referring to specific post at Bitch Ph.D., where Bitch Ph.D. objected to the sexism that she saw in some of the common criticisms of Dowd. Nancy seems to be suggesting that this was foolish or wrong because of Dowd’s role in attacking or undermining feminism. (As it happens, I think a lot of other comments in this thread also expressed similarly vindictive attitudes towards the appallingly sexist assaults on Ann Althouse.) Nancy said that Bitch Ph.D.’s position was hard to understand; I think it’s easy to understand: she objected to rhetoric that she saw as sexist because sexism is wrong, even if the woman targeted by that rhetoric isn’t an objective ally of feminism and even if the position she has taken really is mistaken or weakly argued. That’s not to take any particular stance on whether or not Bitch Ph.D. was right to think that the criticism of Dowd was tinged by sexism. It’s just to say that she’s pretty clear about her reasons, and if you accept that the attacks are sexist, they’re pretty good ones, even if the target of those attacks is Maureen Dowd. And there are similarly good reasons to object to the way that Ann Althouse was treated at LGF (where there just isn’t any quesiton at all that the attacks were sexist). Broadly speaking, sexist attacks are wrong no matter who the victim is, and we shouldn’t be telling women “You’re on your own, sister” out of partisan spite.

Did Savage claim that there isn’t a right to privacy in the Constitution? As I read his column, he seemed to be saying that whether there is one or not, it’s a matter of dispute and that the dispute could be settled unambiguously by adding an explicit amendment protecting the right to privacy. And further that it would be politically advantageous for supporters of the right to privacy to do so. But of course you can believe that while fully believing that the constitution already recognizes the right to privacy.

(You could make a similar argument that the whole first section of the 14th Amendment merely makes more explicit what any reasonable reading of “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” in Article IV Section 4 would demand; but that it was helpful, ca. 1868, to pass an amendment in order to make sure to settle a particular dispute over the kinds of state governments that white Southerners could get away with imposing.)

Howdy. I noticed your post through Technorati.

Are you still having problems getting FeedWordPress to work? If so, what problems are you having with it?

vulture: “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s women who don’t identify with feminism at all — and who, indeed, will grab any opportunity to dump on it — yet will eagerly take advantage of all the gains feminism has won for them.”

Shouldn’t all women be able to take advantage of all the gains feminism has won for them? Wasn’t that the point?

Nancy: “You guys are exactly right. Which is why I don’t understand why feminist bloggers like BitchPhD defend Dowd. Clearly Dowd is no sister.”

I think it’s because sexism is wrong. Even when the woman suffering from it also happens to be a bad person.