Philosophy
« Previous EntriesA bit more on the economics of happiness
Monday, November 10th, 2008I was discussing the economics of happiness with my son, and in particular the Easterlin paradox. Within a given country, people with higher incomes are more likely to report being happy. However, in international comparisons, the average reported level of happiness does not vary much with national income per person, at least for countries [...]
The dormitive quality of rational choice
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007This Matt Yglesias post has already made it on to my colleague Andy McLennan’s door.
Rationality and utility
Monday, September 17th, 2007Over at Cosmic Variance, physicist Sean Carroll offers some admittedly uninformed speculation about utility theory and economics, saying
Anyone who actually knows something about economics is welcome to chime in to explain why all this is crazy (very possible), or perfectly well-known to all working economists (more likely), or good stuff that they will steal for [...]
Conserva-bible
Sunday, May 13th, 2007I can’t resist following Conservapedia, the Tlön version of Wikipedia, in which the liberal, anti-American bias of the latter is replace with wholesome virtue. But where did this bias come from, and how is it so deeply rooted in our culture.
In praise of libertarianism
Saturday, March 17th, 2007Both draw heavily on the 19th century liberalism of John Stuart Mill, who managed to write effectively in support of both classical free-market economics and, later in life, a rather abstract form of socialism.It’s not surprising then, that I broadly agree with libertarians on the classic civil liberties issues - freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, opposition to government intervention in private decisions such as sexual activity and drug use and so on. The attacks on civil liberties since the Iraq war have made many of these issues more vitally relevant and led me and others to stress our areas of agreement with libertarian defenders of freedom such as blogger Jim Henley…. Particularly in relation to the environment (my main area of research) I’m a strong, though not uncritical, supporter of market-based instruments such as cost-based pricing and emissions trading schemes.I got a specific request from Terje Petersen to write about the Australian Banknotes Act of 1910, of which I have to admit I’d never heard.
I refuse to use that word, but …
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006I’m using my blog to beg for help on a minor point.
Pessimism
Thursday, August 31st, 2006This NYT piece by Adam Cohen starts with the observation that Americans are feeling pessimistic about the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and so on, then jumps to a recent work on philosophical pessimism by Joshua Dienstag, whose basic argument is summarised in this sample chapter…. Cohen concludes “Part of Mr. Bush’s legacy may well be that he robbed America of its optimism “.But if optimism holds that applying reasoned analysis will have a positive effect, the experience of the Bush Administration merely illustrates the point that the converse is also true.The most plausible basis for pessimism (at least as it concerns historical progress rather than the human condition) is that humans are simply incapable of collectively applying the reasoned analysis necessary to avoid destroying ourselves with the power we now wield.
The apparent deceptiveness of the world
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006Googling around in connection with my review of Unspeak, I came across an old LanguageLog post on The apparent deceptiveness of the world, which cites the paradoxical statement
Appearances are not deceptive; it only seems as if they are.
and invites Brian Weatherson (who’s now one of the crew at Crooked Timber) to analyse it, saying
Clearly, [...]
BrisScience and BrisReligion
Sunday, August 13th, 2006The next in the BrisScience lecture series is on tomorrow (Monday) night, at City Hall, 6pm for 6:30. Continuing to diversify the range of topics, the speaker is Margaret Wertheim, on the topic ” Space and Spirit: Why Science and Religion Together are Driving us Crazy”.
Conservatism invented in 1953:NYT
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006DeParle’s opening para (”lede” in US newsspeak) introduces us to Russell Kirk, the celebrated writer who a half-century ago gave the conservative movement its name and elaborates later onKirk, who died in 1994, wrote 32 books, the most famous being “The Conservative Mind,â€? which was published in 1953. It championed 150 years of conservative thought, and offered “conservativeâ€? as a unifying label for the right’s disparate camps.
Repost on organ banks
Friday, May 5th, 2006The number of lives saved is the same as in the proposed case, no rights are violated, it’s a Pareto-improvement on the status quo ante and so on. We even save one transplant operation relative to the proposal.Of course, you can impose some sort of ad hoc assumption to rule this out, but this just points up the other flaws of this example.First, it’s an appeal to intuition, but it’s based on so many counterintuitive assumptions that it’s hard to believe that intuition is going to be a reliable guide…. After all, implicit decisions to sacrifice one life in order to save others are made in hospitals every day.FWIW, I’d suggest that the core problem is that we know that it would be a very bad idea [from a consequentialist or any other viewpoint] to let doctors kill people for their organs , and that no amount of counterfactual assumptions is going to shake this belief.PS Coincidentally, Maureen Dowd has an excellent piece on this topic in today’s NYT.
In praise of speciesism (crossposted at CT)
Saturday, August 13th, 2005Nicholas Gruen at Troppo Armadillo is unimpressed by Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation.
Opportunity costs redux (crosspost from CT)
Thursday, July 21st, 2005Harry Brighouse has a question about my post on consequentialism and opportunity costs, as applied to the Iraq war, which raises a couple of important points about consequentialism, and also leads me to suggest a specific correction to my post on this topic.The first is a general one, which is obviously inherent in the notion of opportunity costs, but also arises with consequentialism in general, namely that, when we are evaluating a course of action, the question is always “compared to whatâ€?…. Pro-war British lefties are I think, entitled to disregard this component of the cost, consistently with their general views, while Bushies and libertarians are not.So, a more careful analysis would certainly qualify the argument I put forward last time, but would not eliminate the general point that war is always costly in blood and treasure, and needs large and clear benefits if it is ever to be justified.
War and its consequences (cross-posted at CT)
Monday, July 18th, 2005This is a common feature of pro-war analyses but it is morally indefensible.In the case of the Iraq war, the Coalition and its militia allies have fought at least four different (overlapping) groups of opponents: the Iraqi army during the invasion; Sunni nationalist and ex-Baathist insurgents in the subsequent continuing resistance; jihadists led or symbolised by Zarqawi; and Sadrist militia in the two outbreaks of fighting last years…. Once the decision is undertaken, it is morally obligatory to commit sufficient military and financial resources to make success as certain as anything can be in an inherently uncertain world, and to ensure an approach in which civilian deaths and injuries are minimised in the same way as they would be if the people involved were citizens of the country doing the attacking.Although there are difficulties in all three cases (the most troubling to me being the conduct of the bombing campaign during the Kosovo war) , the interventions in Bosnia (too late, in my view), Kosovo and Afghanistan broadly met these conditions, I think, and an intervention in Rwanda would have done so if there had been the will to organise one.
Heidegger and the Nazis, again
Saturday, June 4th, 2005Back in the Pleistocene era of blogging (2002), there were some interesting discussions of how we should react to the political mistakes and crimes of philosophers.
All bloggers are liars?
Friday, March 11th, 2005Slate runs a good debunking of romantic popular misinterpetations of Godel’s theorem. Key quote
The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel’s theorem doesn’t really say “there are true things which cannot be proved” any more than Einstein’s theory means “everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view.” I’ve lost count of the [...]
Hayek and Pinochet: One more time
Friday, February 25th, 2005Thanks to Bruce Littleboy for pointing me to this complete translation of Hayek’s 1981 interview with the (pro-Pinochet Chilean) newspaper El Mercurio in which he stated
Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic
government lacking liberalism.
As the interview makes clear, Hayek supports the Pinochet dictatorship, on the assumption (correct in the end) that it would [...]
The bleeding edge
Thursday, December 23rd, 2004There’s a new version of the MT Blacklist program out, fixing a critical error in which deleting one weblog could cause you to lose another. Users of MT & Blacklist will be pleased to know that, in the process of fighting off comment spammers and abusive morons, your intrepid host discovered this critical error the [...]
A real life ticking bomb problem
Thursday, December 23rd, 2004A while ago, I looked at the ticking bomb problem and concluded that, whatever the morality of using torture to extract life-saving information in emergencies, anyone who did this was morally obliged to turn themselves in and accept the resulting legal punishment. Reader Karl Heinz Ranitzsch has pointed me to a real-life case, reported [...]
Revolution and Revelations
Thursday, September 30th, 2004While we’re on the interface between religion and politics, here are a couple of questions I’ve been wondering about for a while.
The first one relates to my memories of the late 1960s, when most people of my acquaintance gave at least some credence to the belief that there would be a revolution of some kind, [...]