From the monthly archives: December 2012
Property-Owning Democracy is Authoritarian
By Kevin Vallier On December 31, 2012 · 9 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Social Justice
I’ve argued (ad nauseam) that property-owning democracy is bad because it is unworkable and unjust. I shall now argue that it is authoritarian as well. But before I begin, what do I mean by authoritarian?
The authoritarian, in Jerry Gaus’s terms, is one who
… demands that others [...]
What’s in a Word?
By Fernando Teson On December 21, 2012 · 18 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Liberty, Social Justice
Here, just in time for holiday fun, is some old-fashioned ordinary-language, probably worthless, rumination.
It is often said, when criticizing institutions, that such and such political arrangement systematically hurts the poor and vulnerable. But how is that different from saying that such and such political arrangement hurts the poor and vulnerable? What is the meaning [...]
On the Right to Own a Gun
By Matt Zwolinski On December 21, 2012 · 86 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Current Events, Libertarianism, Rights Theory
In light of the recent calls for a “national conversation” about gun violence and gun control, and in light of the admiration that some of us here at BHL have expressed for the philosophical work of Michael Huemer, I thought I would take the opportunity to refer [...]
Property-Owning Democracy is Unjust, Free-Market Fairness is Not
By Kevin Vallier On December 20, 2012 · 2 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Economics, Liberalism, Social Justice
In my last post, in my series on property-owning democracy (POD), I claimed that it is unjust because POD frustrates the realization of Rawls’s (unmodified) two principles of justice. But another more interesting method of showing that PODs are unjust is to show PODs violate a more plausible, modified version of Rawls’s two [...]
Some excerpts from Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know.
On the dangers of restricting “offensive speech”.
In a free society, everyone has the right to offend others. A society in which no one has the right to offend others is itself offensive. Libertarians add: Giving everyone a right never to be offended might [...]
…it’s an abuse of language to infer he was actually making actionable threats against anyone. As the president of the University of Rhode Island, it is your responsibility not to throw your faculty under the bus in the face of external pressure. By saying that URI “does not condone acts or threats of violence” and [...]
I’m currently writing Compulsory Voting: For and Against with Lisa Hill. After that, though, I’m doing another single-authored book. My working title when I sent the proposal to the publisher was The Politics of Voting: Competence and the Right to Rule, but that’s a bit boring. They’d like something more provocative.
Here are some of the [...]
For a great many people, it is simply not enough to mourn the losses in the Newtown massacre. They want to think about preventative measures, to figure out how to stop these events from happening in the future. I too am interested in prevention but I want to avoid a lot of the unseemly ideological [...]
The review is part of a symposium I’ve edited for The Journal of Politics; it includes reviews by Sheri Berman, Eric MacGilvray, Robert S. Taylor, and myself, and a reply from John Tomasi.
Tomasi characterizes “market democracy as a research program,” (103) and hopes that it is sufficiently capacious to include those who object to [...]
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