Brad DeLong, in a spate of bloggy nostalgia, reposts an old reference to something I wrote back in 2005, a bit of a thumbsucker on hedonistic and preference utilitarianisms, and the pitfalls of conflating them.  I’d actually forgotten about the argument—though I soon remembered that I’d been delighted and flattered to find that it attracted […]

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Apropos of these recent musings on cross-partisan perspective taking, I was recently talking to a friend about the rather open-ended recovery/12-step concept of placing yourself at the mercy of a “greater power.” As a lifelong atheist, this seems like it’s bound to present some problems if I ever develop a sufficiently bad habit, and so […]

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Via erstwhile debate compatriot turned awesome academic Steve Maloney, I discover the “weak man” argument, which actually seems far more prevalent than the better-known straw man. Making a straw-man argument, of course, involves misrepresenting a position opposed to your own so that you can beat up on it easily. The Internet makes it somewhat harder […]

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Matt Continetti finds Sarah Palin quoting Plato, but notes in passing that the line is “perhaps apocryphal”: We like to have other people participate in these activities with us because, as Plato said, “You learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” It’s been a while since […]

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Quick Quiz: Can you determine what, precisely, is meant by “free will” in this dispatch from a panel at the World Science Festival featuring a psychologist, a neuroscientist, and a philosopher? Reading between the lines, it sounds like all three are compatibilists of some stripe,  report later seems to take for granted the traditional dichotomy, […]

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I’ve been binging on TED talks these past few days, among them a 2002 lecture by Daniel Dennett on memetics. Most of what he has to say is by now pretty familiar to anyone with a scintilla of interest in the topic, but I was intrigued by the analogy he offered up between contemporary globalization […]

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While I want to generally direct people  to this post on the shifting abortion debate—though I hope you’re all reading Democracy in America anyway—it strikes me that there’s a potentially handy distinction there that I feel sure someone else has made, but I haven’t come across previously, so forgive me if I’m reinventing jargon. When […]

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I wanted to write some sort of first order reply to Jane O’Grady’s article “Can a Machine Change Your Mind?“—but as I began thinking it over, it became clear that it would end up killing half my day. First of all, I’d have to go back to my library and brush up on my philosophy […]

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As long as I’m quoting Ramesh: In the course of attacking, of all people, Jim Manzi, Daniel Larison writes, “I have started doubting whether people who are openly pro-torture or engaged in the sophistry of Manzi’s post are part of the same moral universe as I am, and I have wondered whether there is even […]

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I want to pull up a few thoughts from the comments to the post below, prompted by an exchange with a commenter. It’s often said—and indeed, I’ve said it—that whether or not we have free will, we cannot help but act as though we have it. As those who don’t think there’s any such thing […]

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