The Language of No Compromise
The book we all need to read… twice.
In My Opinion’s Wake
Burt Likko thinks that Citizens United and McCutcheon were correctly decided. But how can he square that conclusion with his recent Ordinary Court opinion?
Subsidized Birth Control and Matt Walsh’s Dubious Theory of Rights
Do you have a right to a product that must be provided to you through governmental coercion?
Shining a Light Across the Water
Nob Akimoto looks at Europe’s method of detaining potential terrorists.
Reasonable Rights
by Mad Rocket Scientist Rights. A lot of ink, both physical & digital, has been spilled discussing the nature of Rights. Are they natural, inherent, divine, granted, or won? Are they positive or negative? What is the relationship of government & society with respect to Rights? I’ve read a lot on Rights, some of it…
Medicare vs. Universal Health Care: An Honest Question for the Right
Over the past two years, our country has raged over the questions surrounding healthcare reform. The Democrats, for better or worse, have taken the need to address serious healthcare system flaws that threaten the country’s economic footing and reframed it as a duty to make sure that even the poor and underemployed have health insurance.…
Political and moral rights
This is adapted from something I posted the other day over at Blinded Trials. I know there are many Friends of Rights who read the front page, and not Blinded Trials, and I’d love to hear their thoughts. My political intuitions and my moral intuitions are totally out of whack. I know there’s a huge…
Marginal cases and virtue
Children are marginal cases. Talking about ethics in terms of autonomy, or rights — Kantian ethics — famously leaves children, especially very young children, in an odd place. I have addressed this elsewhere in a couple of specific applied issues. In this post, I wanted to talk about the greater theoretical issue.
Intellectual Property: Abstract vs. Natural Right, Part V: The Conclusioning
I know. People have been asking themselves for weeks, “So, what were all these posts about, anyway? What’s your conclusion, Pat?” Well… two people, maybe? Okay, here’s my distillation of them, for those two people. It seems evident to me that in the traditional language of either natural right or abstract right there’s no fundamental…
Coverture and Liberty
In which we return to a time that Bryan Caplan appears to love… blindly. Inexplicably. Sort of embarrassingly. I mean the nineteenth century. Back in 2010, Bryan wrote that the legal regime of coverture must have been pretty good for women. Sure, they forfeited all their legal rights, but look at how many of them…
Odium Surplus/Odium Deficit
A common way to talk about crime and punishment is to liken them to debt and repayment: A crime creates a debt to society; if the criminal is caught and convicted, a just sentence will ensure his debt is repaid, but nothing more. This analogy appeals partly because it explains victimless crimes a lot better…
At the Gun Show
This past weekend I went to the gun show. This is the big annual show at the Kentucky Fairgrounds that brings in hundreds of dealers. In that one building there was probably over a quarter million firearms of various types and sizes. Gone are the days of the late 90s where certain types of guns…
Our Unlovable Constitution
A new study by David S. Law and Mila Versteeg concludes that the world’s democracies are no longer emulating the U.S. Constitution, and are instead resorting to other templates that guarantee more “generic building blocks of global rights constitutionalism,” including “women’s rights,” “the right to social security, the right to health care, and the right…
Rights and Responsibilities
Our pal Ken at Popehat (see also Dave Schuler) asks whether there can be an affirmative constitutional right to health care and whether there already exists an affirmative constitutional right that could be compared to an affirmative right to health care. He says no, and I’d be interested to see a coherent argument that there…
Poverty and Human Rights
Will Wilkinson has a fascinating post on whether some basic level of material well-being should be considered a human right. My gut response is that while we have some moral obligation to alleviate poverty, this obligation is too conditional (welfare programs are dependent on outside factors like cumulative wealth) to be considered on with par…
