E.G.

For each comment added to this post, the author’s friend will give a dollar to Oxfam.

It’s good that the author’s friend is going to give money to charity, but I don’t see why the amount should be related to the number of comments added to a blog post.  Doesn’t it make more sense to let the amount be determined by things like the person’s degree of moral obligation, the limitations of his personal finances, etc.?

Another, similar thing: the ACS’s Bike-a-Thon asks one person to agree to donate an amount of money equal to the number of miles another person rides on a bike.  (I participated in the Bike-a-Thon every year during elementary school.  It was a lot of fun.)

This practice of tying amounts given to charity to unrelated quantities probably has a number of psychological advantages.  For one thing, it gives people who may not know how much is appropriate to give to charity a way to determine a precise amount.  Some people, I guess, hesitate to give at all because they are afraid they might choose the wrong number.  For another thing, this practice can allow people to feel like they are directly participating in the work of the charity.  The Bike-a-Thon, for instance, creates the illusion that you are curing cancer by riding your bike around and around. 

Submissions have been requested for the next Philosophers’ Carnival.  Should I submit any of the posts I’ve made thus far?  If so, which one should I submit? 

Having spent an embarrassingly high number of hours playing Xbox Live, and having asked an embarrassingly high number of Xbox Live players about their political affiliations, I think I am now qualified to speculate that a very large percentage of American Xbox Live players are Republicans, support the war, and voted for Bush if they voted at all.  A similar percentage of non-American Xbox Live players (mostly Canadians and Europeans) express opposite views.

If you play Xbox Live, look for me online!  I’m "TWIN OF SHAPE." 

In my previous post on this topic, it was noted that there are ways in which libertarianism neglects pressing concerns about human well-being.  We saw that this fact forms the basis of a powerful criticism of libertarianism.  The goal of this series of posts is to supplement libertarianism in such a way that it can answer some of these criticisms.  (It was granted in the previous post that we will be unlikely to find a way to answer all of them.)  But our task is to provide the needed supplement without "breaking" libertarianism — that is, without in the process abandoning either libertarianism or the ideas which make libertarianism appealing (to some) in the first place.   

In this post, I will lay some groundwork for this effort by trying to clarify the "libertarian principle" mentioned in the last post.  As it stood in the previous post, the "libertarian principle" has it that "persons have an absolute right to dispose of themselves and the fruits of their labor however they please."  This formulation is inadequate.  Any real, live libertarian would want to deny that I have a right to use my property ["property" being an umbrella term I’ll use to denote "oneself and the fruits of one’s labor"] to destroy or damage the property of others — even if this is how I "please" to dispose of my property.  But as it stands, the libertarian principle appears to allow me to do this.  So, in the following post, I will try to reformulate the libertarian principle in such a way that it can render verdicts more obviously consistent with the verdicts real, live libertarians would give.

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As I understand it, the libertarian view on government, at least in its most extreme form, is that persons have an absolute right to dispose of themselves and the fruits of their labor however they please — and that no other considerations, however compelling they may seem, will ever justifying a government’s violating that right.  Let’s call this the "libertarian principle."

I have libertarian sympathies.  I believe that people do have the "absolute right" described in the libertarian principle, and believe that whenever it is violated, something bad has happened.  But I have a problem when I evaluate cases like this one:

A boy is trapped in the well.  Old Man Johnson has the only rope in town; it’s sitting in his barn, unused.  But he’s a stubborn fool and won’t allow us to use the rope to save the boy — he says he "might need it later."  So in order to save the boy, we have to steal Old Man Johnson’s rope. 

I, for one, would steal Old Man Johnson’s rope in this case.  And so, I suppose, would anyone sane; the costs of the "libertarian principle" are just too high in this case.  But this opens a floodgate: If considerations about human welfare can trump the libertarian principle, then why not abandon the libertarian principle altogether and just maximize human welfare?  "How bad off would obedience to the libertarian principle have to make people in order to justify violating it?"  I don’t see a principled way to answer that latter question.  So, despite my "initial" sympathy for the libertarian perspective, I am set drifting toward the opposite shore by "boy in the well"-style cases — cases in which the libertarian outlook disallows the very action which absolutely must be performed.

I don’t think it’s possible to reconcile all considerations about human well-being with the libertarian principle.  Sadly, I think that if you’re going to be a consistent libertarian, you’re going to have to let a certain number of boys in wells die.  But I think it’s possible to supplement the libertarian principle in such a way that comparatively fewer boys in wells die than one might think.  Over the course of two or three posts, scattered over the next few days, I’m going to try to do this. 

Warning: No point of any significance is made in the following post.

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In Russ Shafer-Landau’s Moral Realism: A Defence, SL divides views about the "reality" of the moral domain into three types.  Here, I’ll ignore one of those types (moral nihilism), and will focus on the contrast SL provides between moral constructivism and moral realism.

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As Egarwaen points out in comments, there are numerous problems with putting together a reasonable voter test.  We obviously would not want to test people on questions for which there is no consensus on the answer.  But politics is such that almost every question which is not extremely basic is contentious.  As a result, it’s difficult to come up with questions whose answers are both (1) non-controversial and (2) not immediately obvious to everyone; yet it seems that the questions on any useful voter test would have to be both.

I don’t have any firmly-held beliefs about what specific questions should go on a voter test.  But my tentative suggestion is that the test should include questions about extremely basic facts about recent political history.  These should be questions which anyone who has been paying reasonably close attention to politics for the last year or two can answer easily. 

The purpose of such questions would not be to weed out absolutely every unqualified voter.  A test which did so would be undesirable, since a test that rigorous would probably also weed out some qualified voters.  Being able to answer the questions on the test should be necessary, but not sufficient, for being a qualified voter.

Rather, the purpose should be to weed out potential voters who (a) have not even bothered paying attention to recent politics, or (b) who have been deeply misled by mendacious pundits or partisan hacks.  I believe that there are many such voters, and that their numbers are increasing each cycle.

Our everyday methods of evaluating arguments make both foundationalist and coherentist chains of inference appear to be unsound.  In this post I’ll say a few things about the possible implications of this fact.

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Those of you who’ve noticed my rambling comments at Left2Right or Majikthise probably expected a post on this topic would appear here eventually.  There’s very little new here, so I’ll put most of this post below the fold.  Click on if you dare… 

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