June 18, 2014
Reverse Hugo, with a Twist
In Victor Hugo’s great novel Les Miserables, Jean Valjean is sentenced to five years on the prison galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. It is an outrageous…
All posts in: Social Justice
June 16, 2014
The Cohen Fallacy: Why Cohen’s and Rawls’s Arguments about Institutions Are, Well, Garbage
Chapter 3 of Why Not Capitalism? explains why Cohen’s argument for the intrinsic moral superiority of socialism fails. Even though I agree with Cohen that we should not dumb down the…
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 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…
June 04, 2014
Thomas Piketty’s Problematic Political Philosophy Part III: Inequality and the Common Utility
I will address Piketty’s arguments that patrimonial capital generates unjust inequalities and that a global wealth tax can suitably reduce those inequalities in two parts. In this post, I’ll simply…
June 02, 2014
Thomas Piketty’s Problematic Political Philosophy Part II: Inequality and Social Stability
In my last post, I claimed that Piketty offers four evaluative and four prescriptive arguments in Capital in the 21st Century. In this post, I will reconstruct and examine claims…