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96574.589539
In the third scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Gavin Elster asks his old college pal Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) to spy on his wife, because, Elster says, in what we later learn is a set-up, he suspects she’s been possessed by a dead woman. …
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301249.589774
“Sing, Muse, the rage of Achilles,” the Iliad says at its start. And what enraged Achilles? The fact that Agamemnon took from him a young woman he had captured in battle, who was originally given to him as part of his prize. The disputes at the start of the Iliad aren’t about whether you can take goods and people captured in battle—nobody doubts that. The question is who among the victors gets what. The English language still has more than one word for these goods, including “booty” and “spoils.” Then there’s predation, which comes from the Latin word for these spoils: praeda. The Greeks had the verb ἁρπάζω (harpadzo); in German, the noun is Kriegsbeute.
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319451.589819
In November, I chided Austrian economists for neglecting the John Haltiwanger’s empirical work on creative destruction:
Around 2000, I discovered that John Haltiwanger, a very mainstream economist, had a pile of empirical evidence vindicating the importance of Schumpeterian creative destruction. …
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323361.589837
The other day on LinkedIn the following message (written by a political philosopher whose identity is irrelevant here) came into my feed:
It caught my attention because it indirectly relates to a key question that all societies, especially liberal societies, have to answer: up to which point are we not accountable to others for what we do? …
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325929.589853
Introduction: Cotard delusion—the delusional belief “I am dead”—is named after the French psychiatrist who first described it: Jules Cotard (1880, 1882). Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998) proposed that the idea “I am dead” comes to mind when a neuropathological condition has resulted in complete abolition of emotional responsivity to the world. The idea would arise as a putative explanation: if “I am dead” were true, there would be no emotional responsivity to the world.
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493587.589874
Miles Tucker’s (2022) ‘Consequentialism and Our Best Selves,’ defends a “maximizing theory of moral motivation”, on which we should have just those motives (among those “available” to us) that would make things go best. …
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578474.589889
As promised, here is my reply to Tanmay Khale’s recent guest post. He’s in blockquotes, I’m not. Dear Prof. Caplan,
I have a quick question regarding your arguments in favor of open borders, and particularly the influence of adverse selection. …
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703161.589905
Sam: Let’s dive right in, the book’s main ideas don’t take long to explain. Iambic pentameter, the dominant verse form used by Shakespeare, permits a great deal of rhythmic flexibility; and that flexibility can be exploited for expressive purposes. …
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1113732.589953
As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person’s emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve an elaborate practise of imaginative pretence: a make-believe in which the artificial agent is attributed a life of its own. We attend, specifically, to the temporal characteristics of these fictions, and to what we imagine artificial agents are doing when we are not looking at them.
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1231646.58997
I discuss the right to participate in science, which is part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (1966). Building on my previous work on this right as an ‘epistemic-cultural’ right, in this paper my goal is to clarify how fulfilling this right requires engaging with varieties of local knowledges that are too often severed in scientific narratives. I tease out three main varieties of local knowledges and highlight their distinctive features and their intersectionalities. In the second part of the paper, I argue that a more careful appreciation of varieties of local knowledges is not only key for the fulfilment of the right to participate in science but also for other human rights. I focus my attention here selectively on the right to food, and right to clean water. I conclude by highlighting the implications of this discussion for ongoing legal debates on rights of nature.
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1357737.59001
The Jews have been subject to hatred and suspicion throughout history, culminating in one nation’s serious effort to literally kill all of them during World War II. The Holocaust was the worst of it, but there had been a long history of anti-Semitism before that. …
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1442953.590027
|The Scrooge McDuck model of obscene wealth, as propagated by inequality activists |
There are supposedly more than 2,500 billionaires in the world these days. While I certainly agree that these people are very very rich, it is important to be clear that they are not as rich as the infographics put about by the likes of Oxfam imply. …
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1502172.590043
It seems as though we have a duty to read the news—that we are doing something wrong when we refuse to pay attention to what is going on in the world. But why? I argue that some plausible justifications for a duty to read the news fail to fully explain this duty: it cannot be justified only by reference to its consequences, or as a duty of democratic citizenship, or as a self-regarding duty. It can, however, be justified on the grounds that we have a positive, imperfect duty of respect for strangers, even when our actions do not affect them directly. Reading the news is a key way, sometimes the only way, that we can respect those who are strangers to us. I close by considering some of the implications and limitations of this duty.
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1502195.590062
I Used to Live in a City Where Live a Great Story Kept Appearing on Abandoned Buildings. It Turned Out to Be the Handiwork of an Instagram Influencer-Slash-Entrepreneur, but It Speaks to Something Many of Us Have Probably Felt: That Our Lives Can Be Understood as Stories, with Characters and Plots and Themes. If I Live a Great Story, Maybe Something with Compelling Adventures or a Sense of Purpose, I’Ll Have Had a Good Life.
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1516702.590082
Modelling systems of oppression and domination with the structure of graded inequality helps us understand the operation of these systems. In this paper, I will focus on how it illuminates mechanisms by which systems of oppression and domination stabilize themselves in ways that a binary model does not. First, it shows how even people disadvantaged overall by systems of oppression and domination can nonetheless have some group interest in maintaining it. Second, it reveals the stabilizing role of what I will call affective misdirection the redirection within the system of affective energies that could be otherwise devoted toward undermining the whole system. These are illustrations of the more general point that social structures shape the moral psychology of those agents who live, think, feel, and act within those structures in ways that stabilize those social structures. So as a general methodological point, understanding structures of oppression and domination involves understanding the moral psychology of the people within those structures. Social philosophy should be connected to moral psychology.
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1516721.590098
of which might even cause disastrous failures, meaningless sacrifices, or irreparable losses. Obviously, we cannot rewind time and change the past, but the idea of redemption suggests a possibility of salvaging bad episodes in our life. Despite the religious connotation, redemptive narratives are prevalent in secular movies, novels, and even real-life stories. While some philosophers in the literature on well-being mention or briefly discuss the idea of redemption, none of them has attempted to provide a systematic account of it. This by no means indicates that redemption has nothing philosophically interesting to theorize about. What does it mean to redeem the past in secular settings, and why does redemption even matter without the religious underpinnings?
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1516739.590112
This challenging text has been interpreted in a variety of ways. One prominent approach is an “anthropological interpretation,” which purports to take Kant’s naturalistic language seriously. First advanced by Sharon Anderson-Gold, this interpretation takes radical evil to be an intrinsically communal phenomenon; it refers to the antisocial elements of human nature that arise in us once we enter society. Allen Wood compares it both to Rousseau’s account of amour propre and to the concept of “unsocial sociability,” taken from Kant’s own philosophy of history. In this way, commentators have situated Kant’s account of radical evil in the context of his writings on history, politics, and religion, and not just within his moral philosophy.
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1516780.590127
Rousseau proposes the idea of the general will as an answer for a problem regarding humans’ interdependence. Insofar as we depend upon others’ cooperation to meet our needs, we are subject to their wills and hence seemingly unfree. Rousseau suggests, though, that each person can enjoy the benefits of society and “nevertheless obey only himself and remain as free as before.” The key is to be ruled by the general will. If all are subject only to the general will, and if the general will is the will of each citizen, then each citizen is subject only to his own will — and therefore free.
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1695145.590142
Bet On It reader Tanmay Khale sent me a critique of Open Borders that I hadn’t heard before. Reprinted with permission. I’ll post my reply in the coming weeks. Dear Prof. Caplan,
I have a quick question regarding your arguments in favor of open borders, and particularly the influence of adverse selection. …
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1923386.590156
Eugenic arguments are not a thing of the past. In 2016 prominent geneticist Michael Lynch published an article in Genetics arguing that human physical and mental performance is currently and will continue to decline at a rate of 1% per generation, if nothing is done to stop it. This estimate is not based on measurements of physical and mental performance, but on an argument from mutational load: medical interventions are relaxing selection on the human population which will lead to a buildup of deleterious mutations, dragging down human fitness. No policy recommendations were made, but the implication of the argument is clear. In this paper I show that the simple argument from relaxation of selection to fitness declines is invalid. When the argument is made valid it is not clear that there are any significant consequences to human population health.
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1949710.590171
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Editor in Chief: Let’s start with some fan mail. Readers have asked about the recent cluster of essays touching, in one way or another, on religion. Can you talk about where they came from? …
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1949711.590185
One of my more radical meta-philosophical views is that moral philosophers, collectively speaking, don’t have any clear idea of what they’re talking about when they talk about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. There are too many candidate concepts available, and no obvious reason to expect different theorists to have the same one in mind. …
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1966685.590199
David Estlund has recently asked: how can structural injustice warrant resentment and indignation, given that it cannot fully be traced to culpable conduct? This article answers Estlund’s question. I propose that a social structure is an object that persists through time and is materially constituted by humans in relation. I use accounts of the point of blame to vindicate attitudes of resentment and indignation that target social structures themselves, without necessarily targeting their human constituents.
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1981038.590214
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and begin all over again. – Andre Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse
Thus reads one of the very few epigraphs that I remember well. …
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2096501.590229
Sepkoski has written a history of the ‘extinction imaginary’, the immense variety of cultural ideas and expectations surrounding what has happened and what could (catastrophically) happen to life on Earth. As he skilfully argues, this has enabled ‘Western culture’s imaginary’ more broadly to seamlessly connect present ecological worries with narratives about ‘deep time’, from the earliest discovery of extinction to the contemporary claim, now taken to be self-evident, that biodiversity conservation is a good thing.
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2096517.590247
In Science on a Mission, Naomi Oreskes aims to document how US Navy funding shaped research in oceanography from the twentieth century through to the present. The book seeks ‘to determine whether Navy patronage a ected the content of the scienti c work that was done and, if so, how’ (p. 9). Oreskes’s short answer to this question is ‘yes’. Her long answer consists of meticulous case studies on how the Navy’s interests came to shape the priorities and practices of American oceanography.
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2096549.590264
Reproduction, after all, is a good yardstick for biological success. Organisms succeed when they leave more of their descendants in future generations. It is not, however, the only measure. Lineage persistence is another. On such a metric, the four extant species of horseshoe crabs are remarkably successful, having crawled around since the Ordovician. Though there are noticeable di erences, these two measures have a great deal in common. Both are about the continuation of lineages. This may be the lineage constituted by one’s o spring (and their o spring, and their o spring, and so on) in a breeding population. Or the lineage at stake might be the ‘meta-populational lineage’ of interbreeding organisms sticking it out over the generations.
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2108056.590282
Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) was the most prominent
rationalist of the black American enlightenment thinkers in the
nineteenth-century. He stands out among his
contemporaries—Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T.
Washington, most notably—for his robust defense of the central
place of reason in moral agency. His attempts to work out the
consequences of that view for the nature of language and history lends
his philosophy a breadth and depth not matched by other enlightenment
thinkers. The prominence of his protégé, W. E. B. Du
Bois, helped ensure Crummell’s continuing influence during the
rise of pragmatism, but he eventually fell out of favor as such
relativistic thinkers as Alain LeRoy Locke and Zora Neale Hurston
emerged.
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2208974.590297
We humans think a lot about agency – about what people do, about what they can do, and what they ought to do. I want to highlight four puzzles raised by the way we tend to approach these questions. None of the puzzles is new, but they are usually discussed in isolation; I will argue that they have a common source and a common solution. The first puzzle, to be discussed in sections 2 and 3, arises from two features of the “perspectival ‘ought’ ”. On the one hand, the perspectival ‘ought’ appears to supervene on the agent’s perspective or evidence. On the other hand, this sense of ‘ought’ seems to imply ‘can’. But couldn’t an agent lack information about what they can do?
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2260142.590311
The received view is that Kant denies all moral luck. But I show how Kant affirms constitutive moral luck in passages concerning radical evil from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. First, I explicate Kant’s claims about radical evil. It is a morally evil disposition that all human beings have necessarily, at least for the first part of their lives, and for which they are blameworthy. Second, since these properties about radical evil appear to contradict Kant’s even more famous claims about imputation, ‘ought implies can’, and free will, I unpack Henry Allison’s proof of radical evil and show how it is consistent with interpretations of Kant’s broader views about morality. Third, I define and illustrate the category of constitutive moral luck and argue that Kant embraces the existence of constitutive moral luck given Allison-style interpretations of radical evil. This provides a reason for philosophers to reject the received view, and it creates an occasion for Kantians and Kant scholars to check their reasons if they deny moral luck.