The Political Philosophy of America's Guns

This essay argues that gun control in America is a philosophical as well as a policy debate. This explains the depth of acrimony it causes. It also explains why the technocratic public health argument favored by the gun control movement has been so unsuccessful in persuading opponents and motivating supporters. My analysis also yields some positive advice for advocates of gun control: take the political philosophy of the gun rights movement seriously and take up the challenge of showing that a society without guns is a better society, not merely a safer one.

The Revolt Against Liberalism: Diagnosing and Defeating Populism

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy. (Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, p.330)

Liberal democracy won the Cold War but a generation later it is losing the peace. In country after country across the comfortable, safe, prosperous western world populist parties and movements dedicated to its overthrow are advancing steadily towards power. Why is this happening? A righteous indignation enabled by complacency. What can be done? Radical liberalism

Liberalism Insists on the Freedom to Insult Religion

Should insulting religion be banned? The reason the idea is still debated in the 21st century is that it has been reframed as a debate within liberalism rather than against it. The arguments set forward by groups such as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (eg) nowadays have a liberal sound to them: Freedom from Harm; Anti-discrimination; State Neutrality; and Tolerance. But in fact they are not liberal at all. They do not respect individuals, nor are they compatible with a free society.

Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo: Assholes can't be Heroes

Source

Articles in defence of free speech are pouring out of all the usual places. They are eminently unnecessary. We don't need a theory of free speech or a defence of enlightenment liberalism to condemn sadistic murder, or to go through the rigmarole of weighing up the justice of fanatics' pretended motivations.

Liberal principles are at stake here, but they are those principles that constrain democracies from intemperate reactions, the ones that went missing in America after the World Trade Center attacks. Indeed many of the supposed defenders of our liberal values are enthusiastically carrying out the murderers' plan by promoting an us vs them tribalism. The same newspapers who routinely call for banning speech that offends their editors' sense of popular prejudices now pretend to defend the right to be offensive, but only, of course, to those 'who hate our freedoms', the evil muslim threat to civilisation.

The Rights and Wrongs of Libertarian Paternalism

‘Libertarian paternalism' is Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's big idea for improving individual choice-making while respecting our autonomy. It has inspired fierce and sustained academic criticism from philosophers and economists from both the left and the right - as well as from less distinguished commentators like Glen Beck. Ultimately though most of these critiques seem to be complaining more about the depressing findings of behavioural economics research than Thaler and Sunstein's positive proposals to nudge us to choose better.

Why I am not an atheist

The New Atheist movement that has developed from the mid-2000s around the 'four horsemen of the apocalypse' - Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, Dawkins, and various other pundits, has had a tremendous public impact. Godlessness has never had a higher public profile. How wonderful for unbelievers like me? Hardly. I am as embarrassed by the New Atheists as many Christians are embarrassed by the evangelical fundamentalists who appoint themselves the representatives of Christianity.

It has often been noted that the New Atheist movement has contributed no original arguments or ideas to the debate about religion. But the situation is worse than this. The main achievement of New Atheism - what defines it as a more or less coherent movement - is its promulgation of a particular version of atheism that is quasi-religious, scientistic, and sectarian. Atheism has been redefined and rebranded into an identity I must reject. My unbelief is apathetic and simply follows from my materialism - I don't see why I should care about the non-existence of gods. What the New Atheists call 'rationality' is an impoverished way of understanding the world that excludes meanings and values. At the political level, the struggle for secularism requires more liberalism, not more atheism.

Liberalism in spite of Christianity

The idea that 'Western' ethical values and beliefs draw from and continue to depend upon a shared Christian heritage is widely held, and has even been seriously advanced by such notable non-religious philosophers as Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas. Certainly Christian moral theology has left us some valuable ideas and intuitions (and some bad ones) but the Christian origins thesis neglects an essential part of the history: liberalism's birth in the Enlightenment required overcoming the core moral, epistemological and political axioms of Christianity.

If Christianity seems relatively friendly to liberal values nowadays, particularly in juxtaposition with Islam, that is the result not of a deep underlying affinity but of Christianity's intellectual defeat by Enlightenment philosophers followed by its political taming by pragmatic statesmen [previously]. In light of this we should be sceptical of Western chauvinism about liberalism, for example in the Muslim world, for the history of liberalism shows not that only Christian cultures can adopt liberal values, but that even Christian cultures can.

The myth that rights come with duties

Governments and tabloid newspapers constantly bemoan the unbalanced character of civil and human rights. "Don't they realise that society will collapse if rights are not balanced by duties?" they cry. The superficial attractiveness of this reactionary rhetoric has done much to undermine public support for the concept of rights. It must be challenged.

Exile The Rich!

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.  (Justice Louis Brandeis)

The rich have two defining capabilities: independence from and command over others. Those two features make being rich very pleasant indeed. But they are also what make the rich bad for democracy, and indeed even for capitalism itself. The problems I am concerned with are not about justice. Perhaps it is morally wrong that some people are rich and others are poor, and perhaps it would be right to redistribute wealth from rich to poor, and from wealthy countries to poorer countries. But from my perspective that resembles debating the proper (re)arrangement of deck chairs. What I'm concerned with is the sinking ship - the threat the rich pose to liberal democracy itself. Democracies are extended moral communities whose flourishing and indeed survival depend on the interdependence and equality of their members. The rich not only have no place in this kind of community, but their very presence undermines it. Therefore, if we believe our democracy is worth preserving, we should offer the rich a choice: give up your money or give up your membership of our society.

The Welfare State Requires Immigration Controls

Immigration controls by rich countries are mean. They close out the poor and vulnerable who only want the chance to make a better life. They are characterised by arbitrary rules whose effects can be inhumane - breaking up families, locking up children, deporting good people to uncertain futures in godforsaken countries, etc. So the left is quite comfortable blaming conservatives for the whole idea. But in reality, social democrats need immigration controls for their cherished welfare state to function. They're just happy to let the conservatives take the rap.

What's the point of diversity?

Diversity is supposed to be massively important and in need of much protection, for example from the homogenising forces of globalisation: a Starbucks on every street, oh the horror! Diversity has associations with nice things like freedom (more choice), beauty (more variety, more forms), tolerance ('let a thousand flowers bloom'), and truth (more possibilities to explore mean more chance of hitting on the truth of the universe, etc). I suggest however that unless we are more specific about what what we mean by  "diversity", talk about its value is essentially gibberish.

Martha Nussbaum lectures Europe on religious accommodation: The 2010 Unseld Lecture

Martha Nussbaum is an extremely American-liberal philosopher with a strong interest in US constitutional law and freedom of religion [previously]. She has recently been promoting the tradition of religious accommodation she finds in American legal and political history to Europe, including at the 2010 Unseld Lecture at the University of Tübingen that I attended and which this essay is a response to. Unfortunately Nussbaum's lecture was more an assertion of the universality of a particular American model of relations between state and religion than an argument for its relevance to a European audience, with our quite different legal traditions, politics, social make-up and history.

Is Martha Nussbaum a liberal elitist?

Martha Nussbaum is a great philosopher. She has great ideas; writes beautifully, cogently, and persuasively; and offers deep and perceptive reading of others' work (this is not as usual as you might expect). Furthermore you couldn't describe her as an elitist in the usual academic sense of living in an ivory tower making obscure or irrelevant pronouncements on the state of human nature. Indeed she has been involved for decades in development work (most especially with Amartya Sen's Capability Approach) focussing particularly on the awful and coercive social arrangements many women around the world are forced to live under. She once wrote a scathing and influential essay, which I admire very much, condemning American academic feminism for its narcissistic focus on the personal and the West, rather than the political and the rest.

So not an academic ivory tower elitist. But there is still something odd about how Nussbaum works.