Bob, where does your link say that? Where does Augustine say that? Point me to a passage.
Yes, he has two cities. No, that's not what they mean. Don't worry, I won't ask again, if you don't answer this time. I know it is pointless to ask, when you clearly don't know, and your purpose here is condemnation and condescension rather than, well, anything else. Like I said, love of self.
Also, I see there is nothing behind your words. You can't argue them, or show how they apply specifically in the situation at hand. You simply use them to condescend and condemn, and when pressed, call your interlocutor disordered, and look the other way. Even your love of God turns out to be little more than love of self.
I think Steve's right. There often a claim that atheism takes just as much faith, and you sometimes see it as even more faith (can't prove a negative, or some old wive's tale like that), than Christianity. They also call atheism a religion for this reason.
That's not to say that people don't sometimes or even often mean also that atheists behave like religious folks, but the claim is usually specifically about the beliefs themselves.
Except that creates a distinction that is impossible to track in reality. Beliefs have different levels of justification, most of them unavailable to us. It's true that some beliefs are more outrageous than others, and we can judge them by the standards of reason, but even those standards are not unequivocal, as the premises matter, and those premises are often built beyond our level of awareness. Beliefs are inevitable, and everything you think about the world is one, true and justified or not, and it's better to simply try our best to evaluate individual ones than to get rid of them altogether. Doing the latter simply leaves you with a world-view that has no practical application.
Anyway, I appreciate the vague psychoanalysis, but I still ask you: what about what anyone has said here requires "amor sui"?
Did you read the Kaufmann piece that Jaybird linked, by the way? It's actually a shorter version of one of the works that I gave to my parents, man years ago, to help them understand my conversion from Catholicism to atheism (over a period of years). I find little love of self in that essay, or the book. I wonder where you see it. My suspicion, and I'd be happy if you disconfirmed it, is that you've convinced yourself that if it is not love of God it is love of Self, of logical/metaphysical necessity. It's that position that I was criticizing you for (that and the whole Pauline "see the unseen" thing, but that's just because I find that silly not simply as a statement, but as a way of dismissing nonbelievers as having rejected something rather than as having not actually seen it), and I continue to suspect whether you are the least bit capable of defending it. Particularly if you think you can actually find it in Augustine's two cities.
I don’t believe that anyone necessarily could teach me to paint new masterpieces. They could probably help me to get better at painting, but the ability to produce a truly great work of art is not something as easily taught. Studying a chess book will maybe help me play better, but even studying Kasparov isn’t necessarily going to make me a world champion.
This is because there are always two components to a work of art (in the broad sense: I include painting and a mass-produced chair in this): know-how and ability + context. Teaching know-how from knowing-that will always run up against the limits of talent and context. It is possible to teach someone to paint a Cezanne: forgery is taught. It is impossible to teach someone directly to paint something on the level of a Cezanne because that is the combination of teaching know-how, socialization, and innate (though cultivated) talent. It's all algorithmic, in that it's all the product of algorithms, but it is impossible to teach (even if, theoretically, it might be possible to describe). So I guess on this we agree, even if we use a different language in describing our positions.
But I use the language I do because it points out the limits of the thesis that the market is the most efficient use of knowledge when it is left alone. That may be true, but it is an empirical hypothesis, rather than a deduction from self-evidently true axioms, and it is an empirical hypothesis that has not been confirmed, because the markets that function more or less well in our society today and in our history are informed, regulated, and otherwise limited by outside sources, some of which may, if properly used, make properly limited markets function even better than markets left to their own devices entirely.
Put a different way, some knowledge is better gained outside of markets proper, though still in distributed networks (centralization is right out). And putting that knowledge into markets isn't (always) simply a function of letting the markets appropriate them as markets appropriate things. Somtimes, you have to add them in artificially (through regulation, e.g., or through supplementation, as in the case of healthcare).
Jason, since operation of the vehicle, when it is automated, is turning the autodriver on, your point still fails.
What's more, I read The Sensory Order as an argument for the way in which knowledge is represented in the brain (namely as a neural-network like series of assocations). By the time he published it, algorithms representing that sort of information had already been described (Hebb published The Organization of Behavior in 1949, and Hayek was aware of it). There is a difference, and a nontrivial one, between being able to articulate knowledge in a way that, for example, allows us to transmit it to other people in a way that lets them use it in their own actions (e.g., teaching how to paint new masterpieces), and being able to articulate them algorithmically. I can look right now at an algorithm describing color vision in such an accurate and complete way that I can model it nearly perfectly in machine vision (putting aside issues of qualia), but I can’t, no matter how hard I try, teach you to see red. This isn’t a problem with the information itself, or its ability to be articulated, but with the way we learn. This, I take it, was part of the point of The Sensory Order (or at least a subtext).
The reason this is non-trivial is that there are ways of describing, and perhaps even explaining, things that otherwise look like they can’t be articulated, but such ways require distributed expertise and careful study. They’re not the sort of thing that a committee does very well with, but they are the sort of thing that can actually help us to do things better without going through markets. We don’t even need complete knowledge. Corporations use what we’ve learned just in the last 10-15 years about the processes underlying creativity and innovation, for example, to teach their employees how to innovate more effectively. They don’t teach them how to come up with an idea for the next Twitter or iPad-type idea, because too much of that is contextual and, let’s face it, arbitrary, so the algorithms underlying it are too specific to be useful, but they do teach them how to come up with ideas that are as novel as Twitter or the iPad, if not more so. And that’s precisely the sort of thing that saying that don’t admit algorithm precludes. And it’s also the sort of knowledge that comes from outside of markets (or at least, it comes from a heavily regulated market: the market of scientific ideas).
No person shall operate a motor vehicle upon the streets of the city without giving full time and attention to the operation of the vehicle.
Reasonable? Yes! Makes a level playing field? Yes, because getting killed by reckless drivers is no way to run a society.
But note that it also makes driverless cars illegal — even if, as seems likely in the near future, driverless cars become safer and more fuel-efficient than the ones run by humans.
Who knew computers were persons!
I think you're suffering here from the same sort of either/or thinking that plagues Bob. It's perfectly possible to have a market that's not a free for all, culturally or otherwise, and that still functions effectively. In fact, there's no a priori reason to think that it won't function better. The reason, of course, is that the market isn't the only kind of distributed knowledge base (science, e.g., is another one, and one that sometimes does and sometimes doesn't work like markets), and these other distributed knowledge bases can be used to create and refine market interventions (or, some of us might argue, market alternatives).
Also, all of the things you list in the post are susceptible to algorithm. They are, in fact, the products of algorithms. Sorry to quibble, but since I've spent most of my adult life studying such algorithms, I couldn't resist. Also, Hayek knew this even at a young age.
Bob, when you veer into incoherence, I find you much less interesting (saying “invisible qualities” are “seen” is sort of amusing, but only sort of in this context). By the way, you’ll find me much closer to Husserl than you, and about as far from scientism as you. But since you can only trade in your either/or’s, you’ll never be able to see that (I suppose it’s an invisible quality for you).
I would find it interesting if you could show, through what I and others have said, that what we are actually trading in is love of self, since we’ve abandoned faith and “love in freedom” of God. You’re not going to do that, because you don’t actually have a reason for your either/or, just some barely comprehended Voegelin and your own “infantile illusion” that is clearly more feeling than reason, and more vague sense than clear representation. It’s why you have to deal in either/or’s in the first place: nuance is beyond you at this level, but you need the certainty and the righteousness that comes with placing yourself on the right side of a divide that you have created and now consider the objective state of affairs. Not being a Voegelin scholar, or even someone who’s spent much time or attention on him, I can’t say what he would think of your condescending, self-righteous appropriation of some of the words he used in his writings, but I’m pretty sure “amor dei” would not be how he’d describe its origins. It’s quite clear that you’re operating strictly out of ego.
And seriously, you should actually read Augustine, instead of reading someone who read him. You might find his thought much more… rich than your second-hand version has led you to believe, and therefore much more rewarding.
It must be nice to have such an "Either/Or" world view, and in particular to be able to place it in an ancient source, even if it doesn't actually appear in that source (sure, Augustine had the two cities, but he never paints it as an either/or).
I don’t really believe in belief. People should stop talking about belief and just start addressing the state of the argument. Belief is what happens when you start caring more about being right than about understanding. It usually involves social commitments more than logic and reason.
I don't mean to attribute a position to you that you don't actually hold, but this sounds an awful lot like what you get in the Dawkins-Myers version of "New Atheism." I've always found the position to be naive in the extreme, but perhaps you hold a different position that just sounds very similar. In order to separate them, potentially, I'll just ask, what do you mean by "belief?"
By any definition of belief that I know, either in common, philosophical, or scientific parlance, belief just means holding something to be true, mentally. In psychology and philosophy, any mental proposition that is held to be true is a belief (we talk about representations: beliefs are representations that are about what is the case). In that way, beliefs are ubiquitous.
But to a psychologist, so is faith, even if it's not always the sort of faith that the religious profess, and I suspect you mean beliefs based on faith. I wonder, then, why you think they're usually about being right more than understanding, and what, precisely, you mean by that.
You've retreated to, "Whatever! Obama's a hypocrite, and antiwar liberals criticize him but it must eat them up inside." That's disappointing.
I was, believe it or not, interested in your, take on just war theory, since you're clearly either Catholic or staunchly pro-Catholic. But if you can't argue with a cartoon (and I admit it's a silly one), you become one, it appears.
Tom, a.) calling it Marxism in reference to a center-to-center-left party is poisoning the well. I've done nothing more egregious than that, to be sure, and b.) that article suggests that by siding with labor to an extent that labor itself felt woefully insufficient is a sign that Obama is a radical. I take that argument as seriously as it warrants, which is to say, no more seriously than I take silliness about Marxim.
Koz, yeah, I've seen you make the point. It's silly in that it's both confusing (redistribution in the abstract and Marxism are hardly one in the same) and inaccurate. But whatever, man. I can take Tom seriously, even if he crosses back and forth over the line dividing the rational the absurd and paranoid, but you are impossible to take seriously, because you're a myopic partisan hack.
Ya know, one almost wonders why, if people like Tom, Bob, and Koz (and Tom and Koz, at least, are pretty boilerplate) are going to continually say that the Democrats are Marxists, there aren't any actual Marxists among the Democrats. I mean, deep down, I know that it's because the people who actually vote for Democrats wouldn't vote for actual Marxists, but still, it seems like if Democrats are going to constantly be accused of Marxism, a few actual Marxists could slip in unnoticed. That seems like it'd be easier than actually asking the Tom's, Bob's, and Koz' of this world to actually read some Marx, at least.
The operative text would probably be this one: http://www.ditext.com/rawls/rules.html
He also has a brief, though much discussed section on punishment in ToJ. I have to admit that I’m not quite sure how to approach Rusty’s reasoning from a Rawlsian perspective. I’d have to think about it for a bit, and I suspect that any explanation of that perspective on this particular issue would be lengthy. However, I think we can say that in the abstract, Rawls’ view of the sort of utilitarian reasoning that Rusty applies is that it only applies at the institutional level, or at the level of justifying punishment for crimes in general, but can’t be adequately applied to individual instances of crime or individual criminals. So he would likely have an issue with Rusty’s reasoning, if not because the practical result is that a man gets punishment that he deserves for other crimes, then because a man who did commit the crime didn’t get punished for it since, again, utilitarian reasoning of the sort Rusty is employing doesn’t apply to the individual application of punishment.
I’m not sure what you mean by “liberal progressiveness” exactly, but I suspect that you’re forgetting a substantial portion of your American history, including people with names or initials like Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, all of whom were around before 1972. The southern Democrats and northern Democrats were, for much of the post-Civil War period (and hell, much of the pre-Civil War period), essentially two different parties. That was the case at least until the Dixiecrats began leaving the party in the late 40s. To some extent, it’s still true (Blue Dogs, Zell friggin’ Miller, etc.). So while Wallace was an important figure in the history of this country, and of the Democratic Party, progressivism in the Democratic party preceded him by decades.
Kinda, but not really in the context of Rawls. That is, there's nothing on Rawls' theory either of the role of free will (except a mention of his "pragmatic" approach, without elaboration) or his views on anything like that situation.
Look, I can see brining Rawls into this. I'm just not sure why Tom's doing so, or what the hell he's saying about it, in this discussion or the last. And the article doesn't clarify that any more than Tom's disconnected and vague comments on it.
Yeah, the essay is actually on a brief criticism by Rawls of Aquinas’ theory (or lack thereof, in Rawls’ mind) of tolerance. So again, I find it odd to include, and the jabs about free will make it even odder (perhaps Tom doesn’t know Rawls’ view of metaphysically-based political and moral theories and how it relates to the use of free will to ground them?). I suppose I’m just trying to figure out what Tom’s going on about, given this comment and his Rawls comments on the previous thread.
If Tom really wants to read some Rawls on Aquinas, at length, I’d recommend this:
Jay, it’s not so much that Rawls shows up, but that he shows up in the context of Tom’s comments, which seem to have nothing to do with Rawls, that I find baffling (he was digging on Rawls in another recent thread, too). I’m willing to accept that there’s a point to it, but if there is, Tom hasn’t laid it out very clearly.
Tom, I gotta second what Mac says below. What the hell does any of this have to do with Rawls? Have you even read Rawls, or is he simply your bogeyman for all things left, or at least all things “social justice?”
Tom, I can't think of anything particularly (or remotely, for that matter) Rawlsian about "self-empowerment," or the equality thereof. I wonder where you see Rawls in it.
Also, for Rawls, justice (and I assume freedom) was not a zero-sum game, though zero-sum games do pose problems for justice and freedom.
On “Apostasy: an open thread”
Bob, where does your link say that? Where does Augustine say that? Point me to a passage.
Yes, he has two cities. No, that's not what they mean. Don't worry, I won't ask again, if you don't answer this time. I know it is pointless to ask, when you clearly don't know, and your purpose here is condemnation and condescension rather than, well, anything else. Like I said, love of self.
"
Bob, you should read Augustine.
Also, I see there is nothing behind your words. You can't argue them, or show how they apply specifically in the situation at hand. You simply use them to condescend and condemn, and when pressed, call your interlocutor disordered, and look the other way. Even your love of God turns out to be little more than love of self.
"
I think Steve's right. There often a claim that atheism takes just as much faith, and you sometimes see it as even more faith (can't prove a negative, or some old wive's tale like that), than Christianity. They also call atheism a religion for this reason.
That's not to say that people don't sometimes or even often mean also that atheists behave like religious folks, but the claim is usually specifically about the beliefs themselves.
"
Except that creates a distinction that is impossible to track in reality. Beliefs have different levels of justification, most of them unavailable to us. It's true that some beliefs are more outrageous than others, and we can judge them by the standards of reason, but even those standards are not unequivocal, as the premises matter, and those premises are often built beyond our level of awareness. Beliefs are inevitable, and everything you think about the world is one, true and justified or not, and it's better to simply try our best to evaluate individual ones than to get rid of them altogether. Doing the latter simply leaves you with a world-view that has no practical application.
"
Always being logical is neither possible nor desirable. However separating your logical justifications from your passions is important.
Except, it turns out, without your passions, your logical justifications aren't particularly logical, or practical for that matter.
"
incorporated into the idea of pershing
The fear of World War I army generals? Weird.
Anyway, I appreciate the vague psychoanalysis, but I still ask you: what about what anyone has said here requires "amor sui"?
Did you read the Kaufmann piece that Jaybird linked, by the way? It's actually a shorter version of one of the works that I gave to my parents, man years ago, to help them understand my conversion from Catholicism to atheism (over a period of years). I find little love of self in that essay, or the book. I wonder where you see it. My suspicion, and I'd be happy if you disconfirmed it, is that you've convinced yourself that if it is not love of God it is love of Self, of logical/metaphysical necessity. It's that position that I was criticizing you for (that and the whole Pauline "see the unseen" thing, but that's just because I find that silly not simply as a statement, but as a way of dismissing nonbelievers as having rejected something rather than as having not actually seen it), and I continue to suspect whether you are the least bit capable of defending it. Particularly if you think you can actually find it in Augustine's two cities.
"
It sounds distinctly sexual.
On “Market Anticonservatism”
I don’t believe that anyone necessarily could teach me to paint new masterpieces. They could probably help me to get better at painting, but the ability to produce a truly great work of art is not something as easily taught. Studying a chess book will maybe help me play better, but even studying Kasparov isn’t necessarily going to make me a world champion.
This is because there are always two components to a work of art (in the broad sense: I include painting and a mass-produced chair in this): know-how and ability + context. Teaching know-how from knowing-that will always run up against the limits of talent and context. It is possible to teach someone to paint a Cezanne: forgery is taught. It is impossible to teach someone directly to paint something on the level of a Cezanne because that is the combination of teaching know-how, socialization, and innate (though cultivated) talent. It's all algorithmic, in that it's all the product of algorithms, but it is impossible to teach (even if, theoretically, it might be possible to describe). So I guess on this we agree, even if we use a different language in describing our positions.
But I use the language I do because it points out the limits of the thesis that the market is the most efficient use of knowledge when it is left alone. That may be true, but it is an empirical hypothesis, rather than a deduction from self-evidently true axioms, and it is an empirical hypothesis that has not been confirmed, because the markets that function more or less well in our society today and in our history are informed, regulated, and otherwise limited by outside sources, some of which may, if properly used, make properly limited markets function even better than markets left to their own devices entirely.
Put a different way, some knowledge is better gained outside of markets proper, though still in distributed networks (centralization is right out). And putting that knowledge into markets isn't (always) simply a function of letting the markets appropriate them as markets appropriate things. Somtimes, you have to add them in artificially (through regulation, e.g., or through supplementation, as in the case of healthcare).
"
Jason, since operation of the vehicle, when it is automated, is turning the autodriver on, your point still fails.
What's more, I read The Sensory Order as an argument for the way in which knowledge is represented in the brain (namely as a neural-network like series of assocations). By the time he published it, algorithms representing that sort of information had already been described (Hebb published The Organization of Behavior in 1949, and Hayek was aware of it). There is a difference, and a nontrivial one, between being able to articulate knowledge in a way that, for example, allows us to transmit it to other people in a way that lets them use it in their own actions (e.g., teaching how to paint new masterpieces), and being able to articulate them algorithmically. I can look right now at an algorithm describing color vision in such an accurate and complete way that I can model it nearly perfectly in machine vision (putting aside issues of qualia), but I can’t, no matter how hard I try, teach you to see red. This isn’t a problem with the information itself, or its ability to be articulated, but with the way we learn. This, I take it, was part of the point of The Sensory Order (or at least a subtext).
The reason this is non-trivial is that there are ways of describing, and perhaps even explaining, things that otherwise look like they can’t be articulated, but such ways require distributed expertise and careful study. They’re not the sort of thing that a committee does very well with, but they are the sort of thing that can actually help us to do things better without going through markets. We don’t even need complete knowledge. Corporations use what we’ve learned just in the last 10-15 years about the processes underlying creativity and innovation, for example, to teach their employees how to innovate more effectively. They don’t teach them how to come up with an idea for the next Twitter or iPad-type idea, because too much of that is contextual and, let’s face it, arbitrary, so the algorithms underlying it are too specific to be useful, but they do teach them how to come up with ideas that are as novel as Twitter or the iPad, if not more so. And that’s precisely the sort of thing that saying that don’t admit algorithm precludes. And it’s also the sort of knowledge that comes from outside of markets (or at least, it comes from a heavily regulated market: the market of scientific ideas).
"
Consider the following law:
No person shall operate a motor vehicle upon the streets of the city without giving full time and attention to the operation of the vehicle.
Reasonable? Yes! Makes a level playing field? Yes, because getting killed by reckless drivers is no way to run a society.
But note that it also makes driverless cars illegal — even if, as seems likely in the near future, driverless cars become safer and more fuel-efficient than the ones run by humans.
Who knew computers were persons!
I think you're suffering here from the same sort of either/or thinking that plagues Bob. It's perfectly possible to have a market that's not a free for all, culturally or otherwise, and that still functions effectively. In fact, there's no a priori reason to think that it won't function better. The reason, of course, is that the market isn't the only kind of distributed knowledge base (science, e.g., is another one, and one that sometimes does and sometimes doesn't work like markets), and these other distributed knowledge bases can be used to create and refine market interventions (or, some of us might argue, market alternatives).
Also, all of the things you list in the post are susceptible to algorithm. They are, in fact, the products of algorithms. Sorry to quibble, but since I've spent most of my adult life studying such algorithms, I couldn't resist. Also, Hayek knew this even at a young age.
On “Apostasy: an open thread”
Bob, when you veer into incoherence, I find you much less interesting (saying “invisible qualities” are “seen” is sort of amusing, but only sort of in this context). By the way, you’ll find me much closer to Husserl than you, and about as far from scientism as you. But since you can only trade in your either/or’s, you’ll never be able to see that (I suppose it’s an invisible quality for you).
I would find it interesting if you could show, through what I and others have said, that what we are actually trading in is love of self, since we’ve abandoned faith and “love in freedom” of God. You’re not going to do that, because you don’t actually have a reason for your either/or, just some barely comprehended Voegelin and your own “infantile illusion” that is clearly more feeling than reason, and more vague sense than clear representation. It’s why you have to deal in either/or’s in the first place: nuance is beyond you at this level, but you need the certainty and the righteousness that comes with placing yourself on the right side of a divide that you have created and now consider the objective state of affairs. Not being a Voegelin scholar, or even someone who’s spent much time or attention on him, I can’t say what he would think of your condescending, self-righteous appropriation of some of the words he used in his writings, but I’m pretty sure “amor dei” would not be how he’d describe its origins. It’s quite clear that you’re operating strictly out of ego.
And seriously, you should actually read Augustine, instead of reading someone who read him. You might find his thought much more… rich than your second-hand version has led you to believe, and therefore much more rewarding.
"
It must be nice to have such an "Either/Or" world view, and in particular to be able to place it in an ancient source, even if it doesn't actually appear in that source (sure, Augustine had the two cities, but he never paints it as an either/or).
"
I don’t really believe in belief. People should stop talking about belief and just start addressing the state of the argument. Belief is what happens when you start caring more about being right than about understanding. It usually involves social commitments more than logic and reason.
I don't mean to attribute a position to you that you don't actually hold, but this sounds an awful lot like what you get in the Dawkins-Myers version of "New Atheism." I've always found the position to be naive in the extreme, but perhaps you hold a different position that just sounds very similar. In order to separate them, potentially, I'll just ask, what do you mean by "belief?"
By any definition of belief that I know, either in common, philosophical, or scientific parlance, belief just means holding something to be true, mentally. In psychology and philosophy, any mental proposition that is held to be true is a belief (we talk about representations: beliefs are representations that are about what is the case). In that way, beliefs are ubiquitous.
But to a psychologist, so is faith, even if it's not always the sort of faith that the religious profess, and I suspect you mean beliefs based on faith. I wonder, then, why you think they're usually about being right more than understanding, and what, precisely, you mean by that.
On “How the State Works”
You've retreated to, "Whatever! Obama's a hypocrite, and antiwar liberals criticize him but it must eat them up inside." That's disappointing.
I was, believe it or not, interested in your, take on just war theory, since you're clearly either Catholic or staunchly pro-Catholic. But if you can't argue with a cartoon (and I admit it's a silly one), you become one, it appears.
"
Or being a libertarian.
On “When did the American political system jump the shark?”
Tom, a.) calling it Marxism in reference to a center-to-center-left party is poisoning the well. I've done nothing more egregious than that, to be sure, and b.) that article suggests that by siding with labor to an extent that labor itself felt woefully insufficient is a sign that Obama is a radical. I take that argument as seriously as it warrants, which is to say, no more seriously than I take silliness about Marxim.
Koz, yeah, I've seen you make the point. It's silly in that it's both confusing (redistribution in the abstract and Marxism are hardly one in the same) and inaccurate. But whatever, man. I can take Tom seriously, even if he crosses back and forth over the line dividing the rational the absurd and paranoid, but you are impossible to take seriously, because you're a myopic partisan hack.
"
Ya know, one almost wonders why, if people like Tom, Bob, and Koz (and Tom and Koz, at least, are pretty boilerplate) are going to continually say that the Democrats are Marxists, there aren't any actual Marxists among the Democrats. I mean, deep down, I know that it's because the people who actually vote for Democrats wouldn't vote for actual Marxists, but still, it seems like if Democrats are going to constantly be accused of Marxism, a few actual Marxists could slip in unnoticed. That seems like it'd be easier than actually asking the Tom's, Bob's, and Koz' of this world to actually read some Marx, at least.
On “Selling Prosecutorial Overreach to the Masses (with pre-order bonuses)”
The operative text would probably be this one: http://www.ditext.com/rawls/rules.html
He also has a brief, though much discussed section on punishment in ToJ. I have to admit that I’m not quite sure how to approach Rusty’s reasoning from a Rawlsian perspective. I’d have to think about it for a bit, and I suspect that any explanation of that perspective on this particular issue would be lengthy. However, I think we can say that in the abstract, Rawls’ view of the sort of utilitarian reasoning that Rusty applies is that it only applies at the institutional level, or at the level of justifying punishment for crimes in general, but can’t be adequately applied to individual instances of crime or individual criminals. So he would likely have an issue with Rusty’s reasoning, if not because the practical result is that a man gets punishment that he deserves for other crimes, then because a man who did commit the crime didn’t get punished for it since, again, utilitarian reasoning of the sort Rusty is employing doesn’t apply to the individual application of punishment.
On “When did the American political system jump the shark?”
I’m not sure what you mean by “liberal progressiveness” exactly, but I suspect that you’re forgetting a substantial portion of your American history, including people with names or initials like Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, all of whom were around before 1972. The southern Democrats and northern Democrats were, for much of the post-Civil War period (and hell, much of the pre-Civil War period), essentially two different parties. That was the case at least until the Dixiecrats began leaving the party in the late 40s. To some extent, it’s still true (Blue Dogs, Zell friggin’ Miller, etc.). So while Wallace was an important figure in the history of this country, and of the Democratic Party, progressivism in the Democratic party preceded him by decades.
On “Selling Prosecutorial Overreach to the Masses (with pre-order bonuses)”
Kinda, but not really in the context of Rawls. That is, there's nothing on Rawls' theory either of the role of free will (except a mention of his "pragmatic" approach, without elaboration) or his views on anything like that situation.
Look, I can see brining Rawls into this. I'm just not sure why Tom's doing so, or what the hell he's saying about it, in this discussion or the last. And the article doesn't clarify that any more than Tom's disconnected and vague comments on it.
"
Yeah, the essay is actually on a brief criticism by Rawls of Aquinas’ theory (or lack thereof, in Rawls’ mind) of tolerance. So again, I find it odd to include, and the jabs about free will make it even odder (perhaps Tom doesn’t know Rawls’ view of metaphysically-based political and moral theories and how it relates to the use of free will to ground them?). I suppose I’m just trying to figure out what Tom’s going on about, given this comment and his Rawls comments on the previous thread.
If Tom really wants to read some Rawls on Aquinas, at length, I’d recommend this:
http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Inquiry-into-Meaning-Faith/dp/0674033310
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Jay, it’s not so much that Rawls shows up, but that he shows up in the context of Tom’s comments, which seem to have nothing to do with Rawls, that I find baffling (he was digging on Rawls in another recent thread, too). I’m willing to accept that there’s a point to it, but if there is, Tom hasn’t laid it out very clearly.
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Tom, I gotta second what Mac says below. What the hell does any of this have to do with Rawls? Have you even read Rawls, or is he simply your bogeyman for all things left, or at least all things “social justice?”
On “On Bottom-Up Liberalism & Pity-Charity Liberalism”
Tom, I can't think of anything particularly (or remotely, for that matter) Rawlsian about "self-empowerment," or the equality thereof. I wonder where you see Rawls in it.
Also, for Rawls, justice (and I assume freedom) was not a zero-sum game, though zero-sum games do pose problems for justice and freedom.
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Wait, is Koz Bob? Sometimes, he's even more parodic.
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