Here’s a little paradox.  Suppose we propose to meet for a drink at The Passenger after work, and I tell you that it’s on 7th just above Massachusetts Ave in Northwest. Perhaps being acquainted with my spotty geographic instincts, you ask if I’m certain. And of course I am, I go there after work often, [...]

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Harvard economist and fellow Catonian Jeff Miron suggests that the Kagan nomination will spark renewed discussion of the question: “Should judges follow the Constitution?” I hope not, because in practice those are seldom particularly useful discussions.
I tend to agree with Ronald Dworkin that there is just not that much interesting disagreement about whether [...]

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My friend Glen Whitman has an excellent essay over at Cato Unbound that takes aim at what’s been variously called “new” or “soft” or even “libertarian” paternalism. I’ve been relatively open to at least some of the ideas circulating under those banners—at least as libertarians go—but Glen’s arguments certainly provide ample reason for severe skepticism.  [...]

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All this discussion of morality and epistemology—and especially Freddie’s latest post—reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Robert Nozick, in the introduction to Anarchy State and Utopia. I think it captures my sense of human intellectual inquiry as (what I’ve elsewhere called) The Great Wiki:
[T]he usual manner of presenting philosophical work puzzles me. [...]

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Will Wilkinson is a little snarky about it, but basically right: Freddie DeBoer’s post on naturalism and the skeptical conclusions that follow from it is fuzzy philosophy. (The Sam Harris TED talk he’s riffing on is worse, but that’s another story.)  Regular readers will recognize this as one of my minor obsessions, an instance of [...]

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It’s been a while since we had a good blogmeme, but this past week a slew of my favorite writers have been playing the “name ten books that influenced you” game.  Scanning my shelf, the ones that jump out:
Code — Lawrence Lessig I can trace my interest in most of the core issues I’ve spent [...]

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A long New York Times profile this weekend advances the proposition that philosopher Robert P. George—whose work I first encountered back in college—is now “this country’s most influential Christian conservative thinker.” I have my doubts, but to the extent the profile itself helps make the claim more true, that’ll be welcome.  Andrew Sullivan argues—and I [...]

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I’ve written about this at some length before, but I want to quickly repeat the point because I keep seeing reader submissions to Andrew Sullivan’s running colloquy on free will that make a point to the effect that, whatever the metaphysical truth of the matter, we all have this “illusion of free will,” and ordinary [...]

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This is put a bit more bluntly than anything Hayek says, but I do think there’s a strand of it running through some of his arguments:
What Rawls doesn’t see is how [a society based on the Difference Principle] would create conditions for an uncontrolled explosion of resentment: in it, I would know that my lower [...]

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John Searle makes a game attempt to give an account—what Nozick would call a “philosophical explanation”—of how there could possibly be free will, of what it would have to look like if there were, in spite of all the familiar problems with the concept. He admits, frankly enough, that it is a loose and sketchy [...]

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