Journalists in many Afiican countries have long been caught between differing ideals i n their relationship between press and government. Two models viefor dominance-the western, libertarian and development journalism models. This article uses Walzer's (1983) theory of distributive justice to illuminate the ethical significance of this debate. A t issue is political power. A case study of the 1996 proposed press law i n Kenya illustrates the ethical arguments mounted for each press model and how the arguments are marshaled (...) not necessarily for moral purposes but to gain political advantage. Finally, a viable third alternative avoids a false dilemma between the libertarian and development journalism models. Communitarianism preserves the independence from government SO central to the libertarian model while providing a basis for activist journalism. (shrink)

The album Echo was produced in a depressed, drug-riddled phase when Tom Petty’s first marriage was ending and his physical condition so degraded that he took to using a cane. Petty filmed no videos, avoided playing the album’s songs on the follow-up tour and reported little memory of its making. The thoughtfulness and self-reflection that traumatic circumstances spur distinguish the album. So too does the tendency to look backwards in times of crisis, whether in hopes of finding solidity in the (...) past or just out of exhausted inability to cope with the present. -/- While melancholically creative, the album might be regarded as an echoing of past musical fragments. The sprightly mix of acoustic and electric guitars, the backing vocal harmonies and the stories of loss in songs such as “Won’t Last Long” and “This One’s for Me” harken to Petty’s albums from the late 80s to mid-90s. “Accused of Love” similarly contains echoes of Petty’s more upbeat work, but with depressing lyrical undertones. The production qualities and lyrics of “Rhino Skin” recollect “Asshole,” a Beck cover from Petty’s previous album. “I Don’t Wanna Fight”—a Heartbreakers performance composed and sung by Mike Campbell—returns to the hard driving rock of Damn the Torpedoes. The lyrics, straight-laced drums and layered drones of electric guitars of “Free Girl Now” go back further to “American Girl,” which itself was influenced by psychedelic music. At the same time, all of this typifies Petty’s oeuvre. Throughout his career, he made music steeped in past rock traditions. He was also a seminal figure in Southern rock, with its emphatically nostalgic character. -/- The crisis that Petty was experiencing echoes throughout the album in more specific ways, with many songs repeating the theme of being up or down, high or low. The theme of fighting or not wanting to has an especially strong echo, showing up in “Swingin’,” “Billy the Kid” and “I Don’t Wanna Fight.” These songs, in turn, exhibit nostalgia for past icons, with protagonists going down hard like Billy the Kid; or going down swinging like Sonny Liston; or again like Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Sammy Davis in a punny reference to the swing era. -/- The retrospective feel of the album is one of looking to the past for the sake of self-preservation in the present, along lines discussed by Nietzsche. While symptomatic of illness, Nietzsche maintains this movement “springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for existence.” This seeming denial of growth can, as Nietzsche continues, be “among the greatest conserving and yes-creating forces of life.” Petty clearly associated Echo with personal grief, refusing to listen to it for years. As with many other examples of art, however, the album was also a way of surviving and growing beyond a present trauma, and one more specifically that compelled him to overcome an important part of his past, namely, his wife of 20-plus years. One can speculate that clinging to fragments of the past—musical and otherwise—was a way of coping with a difficult present and a fading past. (shrink)

Partial grounding is often thought to be formally analogous to proper parthood in certain ways. Both relations are typically understood to be asymmetric and transitive, and as such, are thought to be strict partial orders. But how far does this analogy extend? Proper parthood is often said to obey the weak supplementation principle. There is reason to wonder whether partial grounding, or, more precisely, proper partial grounding, obeys a ground-theoretic version of this principle. In what follows, I argue that it (...) does not. The cases that cause problems for the supplementation principle for grounding also serve as counterexamples to another principle, minimality, defended by Paul Audi. (shrink)

J. S. Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures is often thought to conflict with his commitment to psychological and ethical hedonism: if the superiority of higher pleasures is quantitative, then the higher/lower distinction is superfluous and Mill contradicts himself; if the superiority of higher pleasures is not quantitative, then Mill's hedonism is compromised.

We began with three propositions: that people have a right not to be treated as mere means to the ends of others, that a woman who voluntarily becomes pregnant nevertheless has the right to an abortion, and that a woman who voluntarily gives birth does not have a right to abandon her child until she finds a substitute caretaker. These propositions initially seemed inconsistent, for the prohibition on treating others as mere means appeared to rule out the possibility of positive (...) rights, thus making it impossible to countenance the right to abort or the right not to be abandoned . But we have seen that the prohibition on treating people as mere means to the ends of others is best understood as ruling out basic positive rights while permitting derivative ones. Since a willing mother is responsible for bringing her child into the world in the first place, she cannot abandon it without violating its negative right not to be killed, and so such a child has a derivative positive right not to be abandoned. A pregnant woman, on the other hand, has a negative right not to have her body invaded, and from this negative right derives a positive right to abort her fetus, so long as doing so is not disproportionate to the seriousness of the threat . Therefore, far from being in conflict, propositions , , and have been shown to be in harmony with one another, the latter two being plausibly grounded in the first. Insofar as we have reason to accept , then, we have reason to accept and . Moreover, we have seen that a proper understanding of allows us to embed and in a larger moral perspective in which the limits of compulsory altruism are firmly drawn: enforceable rights to the use or assistance of others may be allowed into the moral domain only if they are “sponsored” by some negative right. Every putative positive right must find such a sponsor, or perish. (shrink)

Once one accepts that certain things metaphysically depend upon, or are metaphysically explained by, other things, it is natural to begin to wonder whether these chains of dependence or explanation must come to an end. This essay surveys the work that has been done on this issue—the issue of grounding and infinite descent. I frame the discussion around two questions: (1) What is infinite descent of ground? and (2) Is infinite descent of ground possible? In addressing the second question, I (...) will consider a number of arguments that have been made for and against the possibility of infinite descent of ground. When relevant, I connect the discussion to two important views about the way reality can be structured by grounding: metaphysical foundationalism and metaphysical infinitism. (shrink)

Realists about universals face a question about grounding. Are things how they are because they instantiate the universals they do? Or do they instantiate those universals because they are how they are? Take Ebenezer Scrooge. You can say that Scrooge is greedy because he instantiates greediness, or you can say that Scrooge instantiates greediness because he is greedy. I argue that there is reason to prefer the latter to the former. I develop two arguments for the view. I also respond (...) to some concerns one might have about the view defended. I close by showing that analogous views regarding the truth of propositions and the existence of facts are supported by analogs of one of these arguments. (shrink)

A number of philosophers think that grounding is, in some sense, well-founded. This thesis, however, is not always articulated precisely, nor is there a consensus in the literature as to how it should be characterized. In what follows, I consider several principles that one might have in mind when asserting that grounding is well-founded, and I argue that one of these principles, which I call ‘full foundations’, best captures the relevant claim. My argument is by the process of elimination. For (...) each of the inadequate principles, I illustrate its inadequacy by showing either that it excludes cases that should not be ruled out by a well-foundedness axiom for grounding, or that it admits cases that should be ruled out. (shrink)

A Paper on the Foundations of Projective Geometry - (Read before the Aristotelian Society, Dec. 13, 1897) is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1898. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these (...) books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future. (shrink)

Kit Fine (2000) breaks with tradition, arguing that, pace Russell (e.g., 1903: 228), relations have neither directions nor converses. He considers two ways to conceive of these new "neutral" relations, positionalism and anti-positionalism, and argues that the latter should be preferred to the former. Cody Gilmore (2013) argues for a generalization of positionalism, slot theory, the view that a property or relation is n-adic if and only if there are exactly n slots in it, and (very roughly) that each slot (...) may be occupied by at most one entity. Slot theory (and with it, positionalism) bears the full brunt of Fine's (2000) symmetric completions and conflicting adicities problems. I fully develop an alternative, plural slot theory (or pocket theory), which avoids these problems, key elements of which are first considered by Yi (1999: 168 ff.). Like the slot theorist, the pocket theorist posits entities (pockets) in properties and relations that can be occupied. But unlike the slot theorist, the pocket theorist denies that at most one entity can occupy any one of them. As a result, she must also deny that the adicity of a property or relation is equal to the number of occupiable entities in it. By abandoning these theses, however, the pocket theorist is able to avoid Fine's problems, resulting in a stronger theory about the internal structure of properties and relations. Pocket theory also avoids a serious drawback of anti-positionalism. (shrink)

Responsibility is often thought of as primarily a legal concept. Even when it is moral responsibility that is at issue, it is assumed that it is above all in moralities based on law-centered patterns and models that responsibility takes center stage, so that responsibility is a legal concept at its core, and is applicable to the realm of private morality only by extension and analogy.

Libertarianism needs a theory of class. This claim may meet with resistance among some libertarians. A few will say: “The analysis of society in terms of classes and class struggles is a specifically Marxist approach, resting on assumptions that libertarians reject. Why should we care about class?” A greater number will say: “We recognize that class theory is important, but libertarianism doesn't need such a theory, because it already has a perfectly good one.”.

The author reviews Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand’s Political Philosophy, edited by Gregory Salmieri and Robert Mayhew, and finds it to be a rich and provocative anthology. However, the author is unpersuaded by the arguments, from a number of the contributors, for separating the prohibition on initiatory force as an ethical principle, from individual rights as a political principle—a separation that, on the ethical side, unduly discards the Aristotelean ethical approach with which Randian ethics claims affiliation, (...) and on the political side, is employed to ground an unconvincing case for the legitimacy of the state. (shrink)

Libertarians often assume that a free society will be one in which all (or nearly all) property is private. I have previously expressed my dissent from this consensus, arguing that libertarian principles instead support a substantial role for public property. (" In Defense of Public Space ," Formulations, Vol. III, No. 3 (Spring 1996).) In this article I develop this heretical position further.

Speaks defends the view that propositions are properties: for example, the proposition that grass is green is the property being such that grass is green. We argue that there is no reason to prefer Speaks's theory to analogous but competing theories that identify propositions with, say, 2-adic relations. This style of argument has recently been deployed by many, including Moore and King, against the view that propositions are n-tuples, and by Caplan and Tillman against King's view that propositions are facts (...) of a special sort. We offer our argument as an objection to the view that propositions are unsaturated relations. (shrink)

While regarding Gregory M. Browne as mainly on target in his Rand-inspired treatment of reference and necessity, as well as in his rejection of the analyticsynthetic dichotomy, Long argues, first, that Browne is mistaken in rejecting some other vital distinctions, such as the a priori / a posteriori distinction; second, that Browne is nevertheless implicitly committed, under different terminology, to these very distinctions that he purportedly rejects; and third, that Browne's treatment of kinds and definitions leads him to misdescribe (...) and misprescribe ordinary language use, and also to embrace unnecessary semantic incommensurability. (shrink)

Probably no intellectual has suffered more distortion and abuse than Spencer. He is continually condemned for things he never said – indeed, he is taken to task for things he explicitly denied. The target of academic criticism is usually the mythical Spencer rather than the real Spencer; and although some critics may derive immense satisfaction from their devastating refutations of a Spencer who never existed, these treatments hinder rather than advance the cause of knowledge.

There are at least three vaguely atomistic principles that have come up in the literature, two explicitly and one implicitly. First, standard atomism is the claim that everything is composed of atoms, and is very often how atomism is characterized in the literature. Second, superatomism is the claim that parthood is well-founded, which implies that every proper parthood chain terminates, and has been discussed as a stronger alternative to standard atomism. Third, there is a principle that lies between these two (...) theses in terms of its relative strength: strong atomism, the claim that every maximal proper parthood chain terminates. Although strong atomism is equivalent to superatomism in classical extensional mereology, it is strictly weaker than it in strictly weaker systems in which parthood is a partial order. And it is strictly stronger than standard atomism in classical extensional mereology and, given the axiom of choice, in such strictly weaker systems as well. Though strong atomism has not, to my knowledge, been explicitly identified, Shiver appears to have it in mind, though it is unclear whether he recognizes that it is not equivalent to standard atomism in each of the mereologies he considers. I prove these logical relationships which hold amongst these three atomistic principles, and argue that, whether one adopts classical extensional mereology or a system strictly weaker than it in which parthood is a partial order, standard atomism is a more defensible addition to one’s mereology than either of the other two principles, and it should be regarded as the best formulation of the atomistic thesis. (shrink)

Part III: Law vs. Legislation - Socrates on Law - Two Senses of Law - Natural Law and Human Law - Natural Law and Customary Law - Law vs. Legislation: Documentary Evidence..

Maureen Donnelly’s (2016) relative positionalism correctly handles any fixed arity relation with any symmetry such a relation can have, yielding the intuitively correct way(s) in which that relation can apply. And it supplies an explanation of what is going on in the world that makes this the case. But it has at least one potential shortcoming — one that its opponents are likely to seize upon: it can only handle relations with fixed arities. It is unable to handle relations with (...) variable arities. I argue that, all else being equal, relative positionalism ought nonetheless to be preferred to its closest competitors — at least to the extent that the explanation it supplies of relational application is plausible — even though those competitors can handle variable arity relations in addition to fixed arity relations. (shrink)

This article begins a new series explaining the reasoning behind the various detailed provisions of my Virtual-Canton Constitution. At Disneyland the term "imagineering" is used for the creative process of designing a new Disneyland attraction. I've borrowed the term to describe the process of designing a libertarian political system.

(to table of contents of archives) This talk was delivered at the Auburn Philosophical Society’s Roundtable on Hate, 5 October 2001, convened in response to the September 11 attacks a month earlier. The events of September 11th have occasioned a wide variety of responses, ranging from calls to turn the other cheek, to calls to nuke half the Middle East—and every imaginable shade of opinion in between. At a time when emotions run high, how should we go about deciding on (...) a morally appropriate response? Should we allow ourselves to be guided by our anger, or should we put our anger aside and make an unemotional decision? (shrink)

Two years ago, at our Spring 1994 Forum on Systems of Law, I suggested that those seeking to build and maintain a Free Nation would face three problems, which I called "the three Leviathans": "Leviathan Past (that is, the dangers posed by the state presently occupying the territory within which the Free Nation is to arise), Leviathan Present (that is, the dangers posed, once the Free Nation has arisen, by the threat of other states existing outside the Free Nation's territory), (...) and Leviathan Yet to Come (that is, the dangers posed by the unwanted but all too possible emergence of a state within the Free Nation's territory — that is, the possible evolution of the ... Free Nation into a [statist régime]." 1 With regard to Leviathan Past, I noted that there are two ways of getting an existing régime to give up its power and turn libertarian: force and persuasion. Arguing that force was impractical, I suggested three possible modes of persuasion: a) convert the rulers of a country to libertarianism (a daunting prospect); b) convert the ordinary citizens to libertarianism and get them to vote in a libertarian system; and c) pay the rulers to relinquish sovereignty over some portion of their territory. (shrink)

What would the constitution of a free nation look like? In trying to answer that question we immediately think in terms of a Bill of Rights, restrictions on governmental power, and so forth. And any constitution worth having would certainly include those things. But if a constitution is to be more than a wish list, it must also specify the political structure necessary to ensure that these freedoms are not eroded or ignored. Consider the old Soviet Constitution, which guaranteed all (...) sorts of fine sounding freedoms for its citizens -- but which in practice proved only an empty promise, since its interpretation and enforcement lay in the hands of an unfettered monolithic centralized state. (shrink)

In his essay “Rand, Paterson, and the Problem of Anarchism,” which appeared in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (July 2013), Stephen Cox argues that the principles of consent and non-initiation of force on which anarchists rely are too strong, and would require undue violation of the principle of non-sacrifice unless modified. But properly interpreted, these principles do not generate the conflicts that Cox describes, and such modifications as are defensible still do not rule out anarchism; hence Cox's case against (...) anarchism fails. (shrink)

The idea of forming a new libertarian nation is an attractive one for two reasons: first, as an alternative to persuasion; second, as a tool of persuasion.

In False Wisdom, Gary H. Merrill develops criteria for distinguishing genuine from pseudo-philosophy, and then applies his criteria to several case studies, including Ayn Rand, all of whom he finds to be pseudo-philosophers. While offering a mostly helpful overview of better and worse ways of doing philosophy, Merrill fails to motivate adequately his way of distinguishing pseudo-philosophy from mere philosophical vices, errors, or failings. He is inconsistent in his characterization of the criteria for pseudo-philosophy and his application of those criteria, (...) harbors a narrow conception of what counts as philosophy, and displays a lack of interpretive charity toward several thinkers. (shrink)

In December 1851, French President Louis Bonaparte – the future Emperor Napoléon III – seized power in a coup d’état , in violation of his oath to uphold the Constitution. He arrested the legislature; imprisoned, deported, or executed his political opponents; and deterred future dissent by massacring civilians in the streets.

JEL Classification: B41, B53, B31, B2, P48, A12 Abstract: Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox has important implications for two aspects of Austrian theory. First, it makes it possible to reconcile the Misesian, Rothbardian, and hermeneutical approaches to methodology; second, it provides a way of defending a stateless legal order against the charge that such an order lacks, yet needs, a final arbiter.