Friday 25 May 2012

If Obama is a socialist, so was Adam Smith

James Otteson, professor of philosophy and economics and author of learned books on Adam Smith and other weighty subjects recently wrote a short paean to capitalism - An Audacious Promise: The Moral Case for Capitalism. He begins by noting that "President Obama has oddly claimed that we’ve tried free-market capitalism, and it 'has never worked'." Yet by the criterion Otteson is using - criticising the sufficiency of free markets in any way - Otteson's own libertarian hero, Adam Smith, must also have been against capitalism.

Friday 11 May 2012

Does moral theory create extremism?

Moral theory is what most moral philosophers spend our time doing. We try to clarify our moral intuitions about things like fairness, freedom, and responsibility and how they relate to each other. We do that by working them out as specific concepts which operate according to consistent and coherent rules (theory). When done well in an academic context this exercise produces not only a private aesthetic pleasure to the philosopher, but also an incremental contribution to the public good of human understanding. But when the same approach is directly applied to our political debates about complex moral issues - like abortion and vivisection - it can easily give rise to extremism.