Tag Archives: philosophy

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In some ways, economics is like medicine two centuries ago. If you were ill at the beginning of the 19th century, a physician was your best bet, but his knowledge was so rudimentary that his remedies could easily make things worse rather than better. And so it is with economics today. That is why we economists should be sure to apply the principle “first, do no harm.”

This principle suggests that when people have voluntarily agreed upon an economic arrangement to their mutual benefit, that arrangement should be respected. (The main exception is when there are adverse effects on third parties — what economists call “negative externalities.”) As a result, when a policy is complex, hard to evaluate and disruptive of private transactions, there is good reason to be skeptical of it.

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The judge, Sterling Johnson Jr., sent staff members to visit several Brooklyn businesses that were sued by Mike Costello, a paraplegic man, and found that most if not all were never made more accessible to disabled people.

The judge used the observation as part of a strident ruling last year denying more than $15,000 in legal fees to Mr. Costello’s lawyers, Ben-Zion Bradley Weitz and Adam Shore, finding that their lawsuits did nothing to ensure that Mr. Costello or any other disabled person had better access to the businesses.

But this week the appellate court reversed Judge Johnson’s decision and took the rare move of ordering that the case be assigned to a different judge. The appellate panel found that while Judge Johnson may have been correct in his observations that the businesses had not been repaired, and while most of the arguments in the appeal “lack merit,” judges are not permitted to observe, or take “judicial notice,” of facts that are subject to dispute.

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– http://ift.tt/1gjfALu

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Students of Jean-Paul Sartre will recognize here the problem of existential anguish, which he explains in “Being and Nothingness” through the metaphor of vertigo. The sense of vertigo you feel when walking along a narrow mountain path, Sartre writes, is not the fear that you will fall off but rather the fear that you will suddenly decide to jump. Free will is terrifying because it necessarily entails the freedom to change radically in the future.

The freedom to do anything we want later becomes the freedom to thwart our present desires. I decide to quit smoking now, but later, when someone offers me a Lucky Strike, I exercise my free will to decide that what I really want to do is quit smoking tomorrow. Halfway to the filter, I realize that actually I wanted to quit all along, and the question of who is in charge becomes depressingly complicated.

The tattoo tries to make an end run around this problem by indelibly marking the one part of the self that remains tangible and consistent: the body. It is what behavioral economists call a precommitment device, ensuring that our present values remain in force in the future. You take a cab to the bar when you are sober, so that you will not be tempted to drive home when you are drunk. You wish to stop texting your ex-girlfriend late at night, so in the clear light of morning you delete her number from your phone.

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– http://ift.tt/1chDARX

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In science, the days are long gone when Michael Faraday, who started out as a bookseller’s apprentice, could teach himself enough to revolutionise a field. But “the questions that philosophy asks are questions that my 11-year-old nephew could understand, and I think that’s significant,” says Crane. If there is a God, who made God? But he adds: “Philosophy is a discipline. You’ve got to discipline your thought. It’s not just making stuff up. And disciplining your thought is very hard to achieve.”

Even so, amateurs have managed it. Ludwig Wittgenstein was an engineering student when he began reflecting on philosophy, and if we no longer categorise him as an outsider, that’s only because his work proved so persuasive. Copernicus and Galileo were spurned by the mainstream, but we never hear about the countless outsiders whose ideas rightly sank into obscurity. Anyway, the problem with theories such as Birnbaum’s is not that they’re ridiculous, Crane argues; it’s that they don’t go deep enough. “Lots of philosophers have thought of potential as being something that really exists,” he says. “But if it’s going to explain anything, it has to be something real. And if it’s something real, then it can’t explain how reality itself came into existence.” Philosophy’s darkest question persists.

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– http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/19/david-birnbaum-jeweller-philosopher

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Above all he approves of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which states that government can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Historically, many of these provisions were introduced in order to head off the danger of violence in the name of religion, though they function nowadays mainly to protect small churches and cranky sects that pose no real threat to anyone. But their real justification, according to Dworkin, has nothing specifically to do with religion: there is no special right to religious freedom, but only what he calls a “general right to ethical independence” – or, to put it differently, a restraint on any government activity based on the assumption that one conception of the good life is superior to another. He admits that it may be hard to decide what this principle implies, but has no doubt that it rules out any attempts to criminalise homosexual acts or early abortions, outlaw same-sex marriage or force schools to teach intelligent design.

Dworkin’s secularist defence of religious freedom is thus not as paradoxical as it might seem: for him, it is no more than specific application of a purely secular right – the right to “ethical independence”. But he puts a double lock on his doctrine with an argument to the effect that, strange as it may sound, religion should not be defined in terms of belief in God, and that secular atheism of the kind he espouses should be treated by the law as a form of religion.

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– http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4313/wrong-in-the-right-way

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An argument in southern Russia over philosopher Immanuel Kant, the author of “Critique of Pure Reason,” devolved into pure mayhem when one debater shot the other.

A police spokeswoman in Rostov-on Don, Viktoria Safarova, said two men in their 20s were discussing Kant as they stood in line to buy beer at a small store on Sunday. The discussion deteriorated into a fistfight and one participant pulled out a small nonlethal pistol and fired repeatedly.

The victim was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening. Neither person was identified.

It was not clear which of Kant’s ideas may have triggered the violence.

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– http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_268786/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=jXkDndmC

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