As promised below, since I wouldn’t want Ramesh Ponnuru to come away from the aftermath of his first book with the impression that supporters of abortion rights can’t do any better than to mimic Leon Kass, it’s worth trying to take a look at the sort of arguments he makes and seeing what kind of […]

[Read more →]

Like plenty of other people, I was duly amused to read John Derbyshire’s stinging review of his National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru’s new book The Party of Death. (Perhaps a way of restoring karmic balance in the wake of NR‘s decision to commission a review of their own senior editor’s book, which struck me as […]

[Read more →]

Neil the Ethical Werewolf has a post up at Ezra Klein’s joint defending the idea of objective morality from Matt Yglesias, who had two quick posts on the topic last week. I’ll agree with Matt at least this far: I very much doubt the majority of the folks who fling the term “relativist” around as […]

[Read more →]

Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg professes confusion as to why anyone who’s generally opposed to abortion might be prepared to make an exception in cases of rape and incest. I think there’s a pretty straightforward reason, though. About 35 years ago, Judith Jarvis Thompson offered a now-classic thought experiment: The Famous Violinist. We’re asked […]

[Read more →]

Sometime Reason contributor John Hood stirs up a tizzy on The Corner with the radical notion that, since it’s the human mind (as opposed to some kind of magic fairy dust sprinked on the 2 percent of our DNA separating us from chimps) that all our ordinary moral categories implicitly recognize as the wellspring of […]

[Read more →]

So, that parentalism article from a little while back provoked a variety of responses. Brad DeLong, who regards it as a kind of self-evident proof of the insanity of non-utilitarian views, just quotes a long stretch of the piece and reports that his “head explodes” when he reaches my claim that it may sometimes be […]

[Read more →]

The residual philosophy undergrad in me had a minor fit of Ed Sullivan Show–style giddiness at the observation that Tim Scanlon popped up in the comments to my post on happiness (in response to Brad DeLong) below. He made essentially the same point earlier at DeLong’s site, and Will’s obligingly extracted it from the thread […]

[Read more →]

My first reaction to a recent exchange between Brad DeLong and Will Wilkinson was simple befuddlement. In response to Wilkinson’s (I thought unexceptionable) assertion that people value things other than—and often more highly than—happiness, DeLong objected, not just that Will had said something substantively wrong, but made some kind of semantic error, asserting a tautological […]

[Read more →]

I was having an argument about whether the conflict between utilitarianism and most people’s intutions is a decisive objection to the theory, and since he’s now blogged about it, I figure I may as well carry it over here. Will writes: [Utilitarianism] is inconsistent with our “sense of justice” and thus utilitarian principles will not […]

[Read more →]

The BBC is holding a vote to select a philosophical champeen: the greatest philosopher of all time, with sound clips from eminent contemporary philosophers defending their choices from among twenty finalists. Now, first, it seems a bit weird to have Plato and Socrates as different entries, rather than one Plocrates entry: All we know of […]

[Read more →]