Normally I steer clear of vegevangelism, but surely it says something about the ethics of how we feed ourselves today that when someone actually does take it upon himself to defend modern factory farming, the result looks like this. Perhaps “defend” is putting it strongly: Wesley J. Smith’s strategy isn’t to offer any kind of […]

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The Claremont Institute is apparently posting some “classic” essays from its archives, beginning with Harry Jaffa’s “Macbeth and the Moral Universe.”  As a prelude to his argument about the Scottish Play, Jaffa offers up a modern point of contrast: Macbeth is a moral play par excellence. In this, it stands in stark contrast to two […]

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A paean to stupidity at TCSDaily admonishes conservatives not to worry overmuch about being seen as dim if they adhere stubbornly to tradition, even in the face of countervailing arguments that may seem both cogent and unanswerable. Since dangerous utopian dreamers may be the more intellectually dazzling debaters, “the desire to appear intelligent at all […]

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Kerry Howley is ably defending her phenomenal Reason cover story on guest worker programs against all comers, and en passant makes a wonderful—and generalizable—point worth dwelling on for a moment: Here’s another way to think about it: Clubs have positive duties toward their members, including those of the welfare state. But the negative duty not […]

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I’m reading a book on the psychology of evil in which it’s suggested in passing that judging actions primarily by intent is difficult because people’s “real motivations” are often unconscious, and their conscious motivations essentially rationalizations. The implicit premise here is that the conscious motivation C would not really be sufficient to move the actor, […]

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So, on Wednesday evening, mostly as a show of solidarity with my friend Will, I popped by an America’s Future Foundation panel with the inauspicious title “Are Atheists the New Religious Right?” (Short answer, as the moderator recognized right off the bat: No.) One of the panelists was Keith Pavlischek of the Ethics and Public […]

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Megatron approvingly cites Bryan Caplan on an apparent contradiction opponents of multiculturalism are prone to: Critics of multi-culturalism often mock its proponents for (a) cultural relativism and (b) disrepecting Columbus. The problem, as I’ve explained before, is that Columbus was a pioneer of slavery and barbarism. The only way to excuse his behavior is to […]

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James Joyner writes: While there are many theories and many stripes of libertarianism … it seems to me that at the core of all of them is the Harm Principle…. It would seem, therefore, that any libertarian case for preventing cruelty to animals — or, more correctly, as Sanchez notes, the particular classes of animals […]

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There’s an awful lot of cruelty toward animals in the news lately, and Jim Henley wants to know whether there’s a “libertarian case for animal cruelty laws.” But I actually don’t think the question can really be answered as framed. Libertarianism is a family of doctrines defined by a set of views about the rights […]

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Since most of my readers are not sitting in this coffee shop right now, and therefore didn’t get to hear the louder-than-was-probably-wise argument I just had with Megan McArdle about this post, allow me to offer an alternative to the explanation Megan offers here: My thoughts are a little ragged here, but here goes: most […]

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