Down the slippery slope

By -
Libertarians usually claim that anything that is consensual ought to be permitted by law.

But some of them go beyond that, and claim that anything that is consensual is moral. That, I think, is an obvious mistake. In a Facebook discussion, I just offered the following example: A drunk who is killing himself with liquor and his enabler may, fully consensually, have the enabler supplying the drunk with oodles of liquor. While I would not want this made illegal, I have no problem declaring it immoral.



Comments

  1. Bob Murphy10:20 PM

    Yes, some of the social commentary by libertarians is ridiculous. "Hey, as long as they're not initiating aggression, don't criticize." Note that such a person is criticizing ME even though I didn't initiate aggression either.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah11:04 PM

      Yep, in fact the first principle is one I generally on board with. The second one is nonsense.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more