May 22, 2012
Market Logic vs. Moral Value?
The May issue of Boston Review has a special forum on “How Markets Crowd Out Morals,” with a lead essay by Michael Sandel. Sandel’s essay is, like his recent Atlantic…
All posts in: Academic Philosophy
May 02, 2012
Why Not Utilitarianism?
A lot of very smart non-philosophers are attracted to some form of utilitarianism. Some of these people, like Ilya Somin and Mike Rappaport are generally sympathetic to the idea of…
April 30, 2012
Rawls on Economists and Philosophers
My colleague David Levy recently alerted me to a discussion in Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007, p. 162) on the intellectual relationship between economists and philosophers. As…
April 27, 2012
Land From The Ground Up
Our days are a vast, intricate, evolving dance of mutual understandings.[1. I’m cobbling together threads of articles I’ve written on property. Please visit http://www.davidschmidtz.com/ for more. I have never written…
April 24, 2012
Left-Libertarianism and the Ownership of Natural Resources
To start off: Why should libertarians be bothered about, specifically, rights to natural resources?[1. This paper is a slightly revised version of a paper first published in Public Reason 1…
April 23, 2012
Natural Rights and Natural Stuff
Since there are many different sorts of approaches to libertarianism – including many different sorts of moral approaches – there are many different sorts of routes to the topic of…