April 28, 2015
Folk ideal theory in action
“People aren’t supposed to burn buildings, destroy property, trash cars, break windows, or vandalize buildings, so when I see those things happen I immediately know that I can criticize them…
Posts filed under non-ideal theory
January 05, 2015
Libertarian Theory for the Real World
Last month, I presented a paper at a Georgetown University conference on “The Ethical Limits of Markets.” The title of my paper was “A Libertarian Case for the Moral Limits…
August 25, 2014
A methodological point and its substantive implications
Methodological: Starting from the status quo at any given time, tax cuts, spending cuts, deregulation, free trade agreements, and privatization (group 1) are policy changes. That means that they must…
August 14, 2014
Parenting Failure and Government Failure
Adam Gurri has raised a number of good points about Andrew’s post, and I want to offer some remarks of my own. Some of these are versions of points I…
July 09, 2014
The Dominance Argument for Capitalism
In the past 30 years at least, we’ve seen that arguments about markets vs. socialism in philosophy inevitably turn to arguments about the methodology of philosophy. In particular, we see…
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…