Eugene Volokh and Ed Feser both elaborate at some length—rather more than one would think necessary—the point that complaints about some group (usually conservative Christians) “legislating morality” don’t make sense if read literally, since just about any policy advocacy—whether it’s banning murder or mandating daily prayers—entails taking some moral stand or other. They’re right in […]

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Clarke at Boileryard thinks it’s odd that conservatives normally disdain arguments about how social conditions create bad or criminal behavior as absolving bad actors of responsibility, but themselves make those sorts of arguments about various awful regimes in the Middle East. There’s actually a more general tension there: Conservatives tend to be very sensitive to […]

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My friend Andrew Chamberlain offers up the following as a useful definition of (economic) injustice courtesy of economist Paul Heyne: It seems to me that our reflections on economic justice would be far more satisfactory if we recognized the connection between justice and the keeping of promises. I have increasingly come to think of justice […]

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Still clearing out the backblog from Chicago: Last Wednesday I stopped by Roosevelt University for a talk by economist Deirdre (née Donald) McCloskey about her forthcoming book on “bourgeois virtues”—there’s a preliminary paper on the subject here. The upshot is, interestingly, that both Chicago School trumpeters of “greed is good” paeans to capitalism and the […]

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I’m having an argument with Will Wilkinson in the course of which a little thought experiment came up. I’m curious what others think. Take the following scenario: Suppose an impenetrable black cube lands on your lawn. Simultaneously, you receive a message from God telling you that the cube is conscious, and contemplating the nature of […]

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Erstwhile roomie Glen Whitman has a good, thoughtful post up on why most analogies used in abortion debates don’t really work. Now, I don’t often find myself reaching argument of this kind. I don’t think fetuses are persons or that they have any rights, and you don’t need elaborate thought experiments to explain why you’re […]

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