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Damon Linker has up a response (check the second update) to my latest post at the Scene, in which he grants the importance of “hard-nosed analysis of whether the Bush administration was justified in torturing terrorist suspects in the specific, concrete circumstances it faced after 9/11”, but then objects: … I think thought experiments like [...]
Filed under: morality, philosophy, torture
At the Scene, I explain why thinking clearly about torture means thinking clearly about real circumstances, rather than imaginary ones.
Filed under: morality, personal, philosophy, torture
I pretty much shared Daniel’s opinion of Jim Manzi’s demand for a non-pacifist case against torture, but I’ve got a brief post up at the Scene trying to meet the challenge with some good ol’ Phil 101ing.
Filed under: morality, personal, philosophy, torture
Does Conor Friedersdorf’s great post on torture really lead with a quote in which Damon Linker happily equates Aristotelian phronesis with the Bushian “gut”? Why yes, it does: In the end, the statesman needs to rely on his judgment — on what Aristotle called practical wisdom (phronesis) and President Bush (and Stephen Colbert) called his [...]
Filed under: philosophy
Friends and readers have been inquiring whether, given my previous praise for what I’ve called Alice Waters’s “culinary conservatism” (on which see more from Alan here and here), I’d have anything to say about Julie Gunlock’s criticisms of her project in the virtual pages of National Review Online. To be perfectly honest I’d much prefer [...]
Filed under: conservatism, food, philosophy
by JL Wall E.D. Kain, on Iraq: But that should call in to question why we are so dependent on oil to begin with, and beyond that, why we as a culture have shifted so many of our priorities to a belief in unending growth that can and should be enforced by an omnipotent military. [...]
Filed under: civil liberties, economics, government/law, philosophy, war
A couple of weeks ago, after I posted my unpublished same-sex marriage essay, Eve Tushnet and I had a nice e-mail back-and-forth in which she remarked, among other things, that given that essay’s overall argument it was pretty silly of me to claim at the end that the debate over marriage was nothing but a [...]
Filed under: marriage, philosophy
From John McDowell, “Conceptual Capacities in Perception” (in his Having the World in View): One does not sacrifice one’s freedom if one acquiesces in the authority of what one recognizes as compelling reasons. Recognizing reasons as compelling is itself an exercise of one’s capacities for rational self-determination. If one offers no resistance when one’s beliefs [...]
Filed under: philosophy
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Georgetown’s Tod Linafelt takes James Wood to task for judging the characters of the Hebrew Bible to be “opaque” and lacking in the sort of richness of interior life that marks the greatness of modern literary fiction. As Wood puts it, the biblical David for example is a strictly [...]
Filed under: media/culture, philosophy, religion
Razib Khan helpfully takes issue with my talk of a role for philosophy in “systematizing” our basic moral intuitions “into a rationally cohesive structure”: I think the main disagreement that I might have with John is the pragmatic feasibility of a grand systematic structure, as opposed to my own sense of there being many ad [...]
Filed under: morality, philosophy