July 01, 2014
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby: Modest Progress Towards Justice
My view: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby brings US law closer to justice, legitimacy and liberty. I don’t agree with Jacob’s (seeming) argument to the contrary. I. My Take in More…
Author: Kevin Vallier
June 25, 2014
Property-Owning Democracy: From BHL to a Philosophy Journal
Some of you may recall that I wrote a series of blog posts criticizing Rawls’s idea of a property-owning democracy and the arguments offered for it. I received enough good feedback…
June 13, 2014
Piketty’s Philosophical Problems in 250 Words
Here’s a quick summary of the philosophical problems with Capital in the 21st Century, with links substantiating these claims. Increasing inequalities of income and wealth are problematic from a moral…
June 12, 2014
Piketty’s Problematic Political Philosophy V: The Democratic Control Argument
In this post, I will review Piketty’s democratic control argument, which holds that increasing wealth and income inequality make democratic control over society difficult, if not impossible, and that a…
June 09, 2014
Thomas Piketty’s Problematic Political Philosophy Part IV: Inequality and Transparency
We come to the normative argument that Piketty regards as the most important: that the great and increasing amount of wealth inequality is too easy to hide and so makes…
June 05, 2014
Thomas Piketty’s Problematic Political Philosophy Part IIIB: Criticisms of Piketty’s Egalitarianism
In my last Piketty post, I outlined Piketty’s arguments 2E and 2P, namely that patrimonial capitalism generates unjustified inequalities and that a global capital tax will contain those inequalities in…