Depressed Metabolism

In the March 2010 issue of Reason magazine Tim Cavanaugh writes about the rift between transhumanists who favor biological enhancement versus those who favor non-biological “mechanical” enhancement:

These days transhumanists talk a lot about subcutaneous data ports, permanent immersion in virtual reality, even extending male life spans by removing the gonads. But they spend noticeably little [...]

Whenever there is a major economic event (a rapid decline of stock prices, a spike in the price of oil, high unemployment, etc.) the media can be counted on to feature a person who was predicting these events all along. This should not be surprising because there are so many professional economists and commentators who [...]

For most of the decade one of the authors of this blog maintained another website called Against Politics to disseminate information about the theory and practice of a depoliticized society. Topics that held Against Politics together included non-cognitivism, contractarianism, polycentric law, and an emphasis on the work of thinkers such as David Gauthier, Jan Narveson [...]

What is the relationship between individual choice and collective choice? What should be the domain over which a democracy chooses? Prevailing answers to these questions are an important factor affecting the size of government. One argument why imperfect foresight should favor limited government, or no government at all, involves the difference between how individual and [...]

In the introduction to his collection of writings, Socratic Puzzles, Robert Nozick writes that  he never responded to the sizable literature on Anarchy, State and Utopia. His natural inclination would be to defend his views. As Nozick notes, “How could I learn that my views were mistaken if I thought about them always with defensive [...]

Can politics become an addiction? A more realistic question is to ask why politics is an addiction for so many people. The most straightforward answer would be that a compulsive interest in politics just reflects a natural preoccupation with advancing one’s interest (or that of others). But as was discussed in the previous installment, The [...]

Perhaps no political philosopher has done as much painstaking work to review the legitimacy and need for political authority as Anthony de Jasay.  What makes de Jasay’s work stand out is his ability to engage with the technical arguments of political economists and philosophers without sacrificing common sense. For example, de Jasay understands the complications [...]

Nine-Banded Books has done the world a great favor in publishing a new edition of L.A. Rollins’ The Myth of Natural Rights. Although one could argue that in one sense it is a mixed blessing because it indicates that there is still a need for such a book. While the idea of natural rights seems [...]

In a recent opinion piece for Forbes, legal scholar Richard A. Epstein draws attention to the political philosophical aspects of the financial meltdown:
Fannie and Freddie didn’t design their horrific lending policies by chance. No, behind this lending fiasco lay the strong collective preference for the “patterned principles” of justice that Robert Nozick attacked so powerfully [...]

All politics is redistributive. Although this is often hidden from view through appeals to the social contract, democracy, and the common good, the recent attempts to reward unsound business practices with taxpayers’ money make even the most sophisticated appeal to the “common good” look suspicious. Although advocates of liberty have offered persuasive accounts about the [...]

The publisher Liberty Fund has republished Anthony de Jasay’s book “Social Contract, Free Ride: A Study of the Public Goods Problem.” In this book, de Jasay, one of the most original and sharpest political philosophers of our age, offers a critical review of the public goods argument for the state. He argues that a) economists [...]

The Ludwig Von Mises Institute Senior Fellow, David Gordon, recently wrote an article on the legacy of the political philosopher John Rawls. In this piece, he discloses some interesting information about the relationship between John Rawls and Robert Nozick:
“In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he had praised A Theory of Justice as a great work of [...]

In his paper “Frog’s legs, shared ends, and the rationality of politics” (PDF), Anthony de Jasay discusses the role of rationality in political philosophy. He writes that “much of the old confusion we deplore in political theory, and much of the fresh confusion we spread when trying to get rid of what has been spread, [...]

Economic illiteracy and the human bias to look for a scapegoat conspire to single out speculators in oil futures as the reason for high oil prices.  Exploiting this ignorance about economics, airline executives call on Congress to curb excessive speculation in one of the most blatant examples of corporate socialism in recent history. What is [...]

In Cato Journal, Volume 28, No. 1 (Winter 2008), the independent scholar Anthony de Jasay reviews four common fallacies (as presented in the works of John Stuart Mill, Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Armen Alchian) that many social scientists and political journalists keep repeating without rigorous analysis.
The first fallacy is that production should be governed [...]

If there is one thing that characterizes contemporary political discourse, and contemporary political liberalism in particular, it is the obsession with “rights.” Individual rights are absolute, or “trumps,” that do not permit to be overridden by collective goals, and can only be defeated by another trump. But since every right implies a corresponding obligation (a [...]