May 24, 2017
Democracy and Prosperity
Tom Christiano, a leading theorist of democracy, has just reviewed Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy. In it, he accuses Jason of having an ill-equipped micro-theory that fails to account for the…
All posts in: Academic Philosophy
May 19, 2017
Why the “Conceptual Penis” Hoax is Just a Big Cock Up.
After the revelation that a paper on “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” was submitted as a hoax to the journal Cogent Social Sciences there’s sure to be a…
May 02, 2017
Burn the Heretic!
Rebecca Tuvel, an untenured assistant professor at Rhodes College, recently published “In Defense of Transracialism,” at Hypatia, a feminist journal. In that article, she argues we have more or less…
May 01, 2017
Humanitarian non-intervention
Over the past two posts, I have explained why we should be skeptical of foreign military interventions. Historically, military interventions have extremely low success rates. And there are structural reasons…
April 24, 2017
Against intervention – ex ante / ex post
As I explained in my previous post, military interventions are almost never morally acceptable. The basic reason is relatively straightforward. Such interventions fail much more often than they succeed. And…
April 14, 2017
The Syrian Bombings and Just War Theory, Part II
Our previous posts disclosed the central disagreement that Bas and I have regarding humanitarian intervention. Bas thinks that the commander’s ex ante decision to intervene can almost never be justified…