Comments Elsewhere

Kennedy, that’s fine. Did anyone suggest that the premeditated murder of prisoners in the US is worse than the systematic human rights violations in the P.A., Iran, Syria, Cuba, China, etc. that Greenwald mentions? Or are they just focused on things that happen bear on them at the moment?

Schreiber, of course there seems to be nothing instrinsically wrong with slavery if you don’t think that people have any rights not to be enslaved. So what? The question is why you’d believe such a ridiculous thing.

As far as freedom goes, you seem to be either neglecting or intentionally obfuscating the distinction that libertarians make between freedom in the sense of uncoerced choice and freedom in the sense of the choice between available alternatives. There are lots of reasons alternatives might not be available to you, but that’s only an actionable problem, from the standpoint of libertarian theory, when what’s restricting your choices is coercion by another person. You might think that that distinction doesn’t bear logical scrutiny, but it’s silly to pretend as if it didn’t exist when trying to make a point in a mostly libertarian forum. And I am not at all clear on why having a different theory about the logical status of the categorical proposition in A, when the domain is empty, commits you to any particular claims about the proper functions of government at all. (I happen to think that they have false presuppositions, and like Strawson, I think that sentences with false presuppositions are neither true nor false, but rather failed attempts at asserting. So what now?)