Blog Links (“Blinks” if you will) August 13/13
- I’m reading Owen Anderson’s book, The Natural Moral Law, The Good After Modernity, which recently came out in the much cheaper paperback form. So far it is excellent (I’m about half-way through). He’s careful and clear in his overview of how beliefs about the good have changed with epistemological and metaphysical beliefs over ancient, modern, and post-modern times. I’m looking forward to reading his own version of what the natural moral law is near the end of the book.
- I’m also reading Michael Huemer’s book, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey. It is also excellent and one of the best books I’ve ever read. Huemer begins with common sense morality and ethical intuitionism and shows how political authority is inconsistent with them. Huemer has an earlier book defending ethical intuitionism. I haven’t read it and I’m not an ethical intuitionist. Which means that The Problem of Political Authority to me is a brilliant rhetorical device rather than a sound justification. People already believe that government is unjust based on the moral beliefs they already have. There also might be overlap between ethical intuitionism and the correct moral philosophy from which Huemer’s book can derive problems for political authority.
- Bryan Caplan reports a new financial service Upstart, which makes human capital contracts. Individuals raise money from investors in exchange for a fixed % return on future income. It was very well thought out.
- Robin Hanson connects inequality talk to evolution. I find his story kind of weak, but he asks an important question, why is so little concern expressed about all the other sorts of inequality?
- Someone I know on Facebook is worried about Colony Collapse Disorder a.k.a. the Beepocolypse; basically the bees are dying and the results are going to be catastrophic. My meta-analysis is that world-wide catastrophes are too rare to be predictable, but if we want to get substantive, here’s some economic counter-evidence.
- Bryan Caplan’s Ideological Touring Test is on Wikipedia. Here is Bryan’s description of it. The idea is brilliant; can ideologues on one side convincingly argue for the other side? I wish more writers would give it a shot. I might attempt to convincingly argue as an atheist or liberal / conservative some time.
