Posts by: Jacob Levy

Against Social Justice

By On April 30, 2012 · 17 Comments · In Social Justice

Jason Brennan writes

Social justice is a moral standard by which some people judge political and economic institutions. Advocates of social justice believe the moral justification of our institutions depends on how well these institutions serve the interests of the poor and least advantaged. The basic institutions of society must sufficiently benefit all, [...]

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A Bleeding-Heart History of Libertarianism

By On April 2, 2012 · 38 Comments · In Uncategorized

Over at Cato Unbound, our fearless leader Matt and our onetime guest-blogger John Tomasi write this month’s lead essay, “A Bleeding-Heart History of Libertarianism.” Co-blogger Roderick Long will be one of the respondents.

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Morning link

By On March 13, 2012 · 2 Comments · In Current Events

Alec MacGillis, Is the South too Republican for Republicans?

Well, here’s one thing to think about. What if the South has become so monolithically Republican that actual conservative proposals and argument of the sort that Santorum and Romney have been offering don’t actually resonate all that much?

Consider: Republicans in Alabama and Mississippi [...]

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Charles Taylor at 80

By On February 3, 2012 · Leave a Comment · In Academic Philosophy, Current Events

This is a little outside BHL’s writ, but we have a lot of political philosophy readers here, so I’ll just post a link: Charles Taylor at 80, a conference in Montreal, March 29-31, 2012

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Talk at IEA

By On January 17, 2012 · 1 Comment · In Current Events

I’ll be giving a lecture at the Institute for Economic Affairs a week from today: “Freedom and Pluralism,” 4 January 2012, 6.30pm, IEA, 2 Lord North Street, London, SW1. It will cover some of the ground I’ve talked about on BHL a few times: the complicated relationship between liberalism and state power, and between [...]

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Some theses

By On December 31, 2011 · 15 Comments · In Libertarianism

1) Libertarianism (like the liberalism of which it is a subset) is, as such, best understood as a political doctrine, not a comprehensive account of the good life and a desirable social order. Indeed, libertarianism is perhaps even more necessarily a political doctrine than is the kind of liberalism defended by John Rawls in Political [...]

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Ron Paul continued

By On December 23, 2011 · 41 Comments · In Current Events, Libertarianism

In my first post here, I wrote that among my reasons for embracing a liberal kind of libertarianism and wanting to publicly emphasize libertarianism’s liberal-ness is

the great importance, in America in particular, of sharply distinguishing the cause of freedom from the cause of slavery which is happy to claim its name.  The [...]

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A different distinction

By On December 17, 2011 · 3 Comments · In Libertarianism, Social Justice

Below, Matt differentiated between “Contingent BHLs”
“This group has what might be described as standard right-libertarian views for standard right-libertarian reasons….What makes members of this group bleeding heart libertarians is the belief that libertarian institutions are good for the poor and vulnerable, and, perhaps, the belief that this fact about the consequences [...]

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Maybe

By On November 1, 2011 · 4 Comments · In Current Events

This post suggests that Elizabeth Warren’s “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own” is a deliciously ironic appropriation of Adam Smith’s insights about economic interdependence against the right.

But maybe– just maybe!– the fact that Adam Smith wrote the quoted passage, or the fact that free-market types love [...]

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There’s more to be said than this of course…

By On October 30, 2011 · Leave a Comment · In Current Events

but this unexpected comic at Zach Weiner’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal seems to just call out for a B-HL link.

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