Law & Society Blog

Matt Wood’s thoughts on power raise a number of important issues. Ben suggests that questions about power can be separated into 1) questions about what individuals in fact have the power to do, and 2) questions about whether the exercise of certain powers that individuals have is legitimate. Questions in the first category […]

Internet privacy is always a tradeoff between usability and anonymity. That tradeoff differs from application to application and from website to website.

Matt posted a mini-essay recently in the comments section of the “10 Worst Books” thread which I think itself deserves discussion. After musing over a particularily apt headline on “The Onion”, he writes:
The central premise of American government is that all legitimate power flows from the Constitution. And yet the Constitution is not a self-executing […]

More parts of government could in fact be much better, and to significant human benefit and yes that includes more human liberty in the libertarian sense of the word…. Then they retreat to a mental model where the quality of government is fixed and we compare government to market.This is clearly correct.

Human Events, a right-wing online publication that features Ann Coulter pop-up windows and ads for conservative dating services (I kid you not), has this list of the top 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. (HT: Doing Justice).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman […]

In contrast, options (1) and (2) operate mostly at an agent-external level, which is why realists instinctively feel drawn to (1) and (2) as explanations for human behavior and (3) has held great appeal for idealistic reformers of both secular and religious ilk.Let’s assume for the sake of argument that humans, by and large, are in fact fundamentally self-interested, and that they are unlikely to change in that regard…. Democracy follows free markets not because they both share some fundamental commitment to freedom, but rather because free markets are efficient at avoiding violence as a means of solving resource conflicts and, unlike authoritarian and traditional patterns of organizing production, are compatible with our phenomenological experience of and belief in self-determination and the resulting urge to have a say in matters concerning ourselves.

Mark Garber has an interesting post entitled Privileged Victims about a recent Pew survey, in which:Researchers found that core Republican voters can be divided into three groups, Enterprisers, Social Conservatives and Pro-Government Conservatives…. Second, Enterprisers are far more committed to limited government and Bush administration policies during the war against terror than any other group of voters.What?

I work mainly in normative ethics and political philosophy, and I have side interests inapplied ethics, including bioethics, and in radical political thought. Idid my undergraduate work in philosophy and politics as well as aninterdisciplinary Masters degree at New York University.

In my post entitled Capitalism, Utopianism, and Democracy I say this:
What is perhaps most striking about the articles written by the free marketeers is that, despite containing a great deal of commentary on the role of government, there is no mention of democracy. They clearly emphasize that it is an essential role of government to […]

/// What follows is the final installment of a series of examinations of utilitarianism from Harwood’s seminal essay, “Eleven Objections to Utilitarianism”, along with my demonstrations of how these objections are unsound. Previous installments address such topics as integrity, justice, promise-keeping, supererogation, average and total utilitarianisms, rule utilitarianism, and hedonism. ///
10. Utilitarianism makes interpersonal comparisons […]