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Li Europan lingues es membres del sam familie Friday, Mar 31 2006
Uncategorized 8:44 am
Odd Advertising Photo Of The Day Friday, Mar 17 2006
Uncategorized 5:33 pm
Threatening to crush childrens’ heads is a good career move? For what career exactly? I was afraid to click on this Slate ad …
When More is Worse: Schmidtz on Inequality Friday, Mar 17 2006
Uncategorized 5:32 pm
David Schmidtz, one of my favorite current philosophers, has an essay “When Inequality Matters” on the excellent* “Cato Unbound” website. At his best, Schmidtz offers a rare combination of thoughtfulness, and blunt, surprisingly personal prose.*
If you have time to read the Schmidtz essay, I would be interested in your thoughts. Those of you who do not follow analytic political philosophy may not know that for the past 30-odd years, equality has exerted a strange fascination on the field. There is even a literature known in the business as “The Equality of What,” devoted to the question of what type of thing society should be in the business of equalizing: is it money, deficits or benefits due to luck, access to opportunity, or something else? This focus always struck me as odd. For while the standpoint of morality does require a certain uniform consideration — a willingness to treat equal cases equally – the equal distribution of goods does not seem the obvious first, second, or forty-fifth requirement of personal or social morality. What is bad about hunger is not that someone, somewhere is getting fed. And for inequality to matter, it must be the case that more can be worse.
More is not usually worse. Wealth, in particular, is almost the paradigmatic example of something where more is better. If I unearth an enormous diamond tomorrow, inequality has risen, but my gain has not been anyone’s loss. So when does in inequality matter? Zero sum games, or competitions, are classic examples. If I gain the right to vote 100 times in the next election, or am provided with brass knuckles in advance of my next boxing match, my gain can reasonably be described as another’s loss. But who loses, exactly, if convicting a certain class of people for murder requires the unanimous assent of 35 jurors, instead of the usual 12. It is hard to identify the loser, but this seems an intolerable inequality. Possible response: your intuitions are a poor guide; this inequality is permissible. Possible response which I like quite a bit better: there are some aspects of equal consideration which cannot be violated without offense to human dignity.
Lorem ipsum Friday, Feb 17 2006
Uncategorized 12:24 pm
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