the devils of liberty steal the souls of the free
Oh, Holbo. His latest post on Crooked Timber, on how to sell a weaker intellectual property regime to the American people suffers from a bit of framism, the idea that your political preferences will surely win out if only you can "frame" them properly. (I got enough of this in the Bush era. To me it smacks of looking for your keys under the streetlight, because that's where the light is best; except the people doing it fancy themselves better at marketing than they actually are.)
But the post it links to shows him at his philosopher-clown best, squishing words around until he can--somewhat convincingly!--demonstrate that libertarianism is actually feudalism:The question is really what 'liberty' means. That last thought from Nozick is nice, because a defender of my hyper-propertarian utopia would no doubt deploy this thought against any socialistic scheme to redistribute babies to themselves. This sort of 'patterned theory' of distributive justice--everyone gets 4 limbs and a mewl, to have for their very own, at birth--violates proper regard for 'liberty'. Everyone owning themselves is a flagrant violation of liberty.
(i say clown affectionately! he is very glib and entertaining, with perhaps the tiniest bit of sleight of hand; and as for philosopher, that is his day job, on top of which he has footnotes to show you how serious he is. and he is on the side of the angels.)
But the post it links to shows him at his philosopher-clown best, squishing words around until he can--somewhat convincingly!--demonstrate that libertarianism is actually feudalism:The question is really what 'liberty' means. That last thought from Nozick is nice, because a defender of my hyper-propertarian utopia would no doubt deploy this thought against any socialistic scheme to redistribute babies to themselves. This sort of 'patterned theory' of distributive justice--everyone gets 4 limbs and a mewl, to have for their very own, at birth--violates proper regard for 'liberty'. Everyone owning themselves is a flagrant violation of liberty.
(i say clown affectionately! he is very glib and entertaining, with perhaps the tiniest bit of sleight of hand; and as for philosopher, that is his day job, on top of which he has footnotes to show you how serious he is. and he is on the side of the angels.)