There’s a running conversation over at the Corner about the parallels between opposition to torture and pacifism, which is really just a thinly-veiled version of one of those tendentious hypotheticals about the nuclear bomb in Manhattan whose location (you know with apodictic certainty) can only be uncovered through the judicious application of thumbscrews. As such, [...]

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Chris Bertram reminds me that Ronald Dworkin’s view of justice in health care is actually quite similar to the “distributive-justice-plus-paternalism” account that I’ve argued is a more coherent progressive position than a nebulous “right to health care.” On this view, what society should do is, in effect, buy for each person the sort of insurance [...]

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In a previous post, I suggested that the most adequate conception of a purported right to health care is as really consisting of two distinct elements: a distributional right to a fair share of social resources—with the understanding that one’s fair share can depend on the other burdens and misfortunes one faces, so that the [...]

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I don’t know why, in light of everything else that’s already come to light—we clearly did worse than making horrific but (I presume) idle threats—but this bit of the recent interrogation report filled me with a profound sense of sadness and shame:
CIA interrogators threatened to kill the children of one detainee at the height of [...]

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I’ve suggested before that the best version of progressivism—by which I mean, the most internally coherent version—would not include a distinct right to health care for competent adults as a moral or theoretical right, though it may in practice recommend that some degree of access to publicly provided or subsidized health care be afforded as [...]

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I don’t have particularly strong views either way about health care reform, but it’s depressing that the one part of the Obama plan that seemed like an obviously, unambiguously good idea has become a casualty of the requirement that all political disagreement be cast as a war between good and evil. There are not a [...]

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Via Doug Bandow, Theodore Dalrymple makes an argument against a right to health care—though it applies to positive or welfare rights more generally—that I used to find persuasive, and now find less so:
Where does the right to health care come from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, [...]

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Look, I don’t expect Mark Krikorian to champion the moral worth of non-human animals—hell, getting him to evince some concern for non-Caucasians would be a miracle—but this is unusually silly:
Just so you know, I think we do eat too much meat, and salt, sugar, and fat, because our species evolved to crave these once rare [...]

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Everywhere in politics, but in discussions of healthcare in particular, there is a powerful bipartisan impulse to insist that tradeoffs are illusory—infinite ponies can now be yours! Progressives are too eager to believe that national health care will make it possible to expand coverage while reducing costs—reducing deficits, even!—apparently because all those costs are in [...]

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Via the magic of an alert for inbound links, I find an artblogger riffing on a recent post here who, oddly enough, brings up that old game theory classic the Snowdrift Game:
The situation of the Snowdrift game involves two drivers who are trapped on opposite sides of a snowdrift. Each has the option of staying [...]

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