Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Talking with Bob at lunch on Saturday, I realized that our differences on matters political can be boiled down to a single question: "If one is morally certain that a collective action problem exists but can be solved if someone is granted the power to enforce a solution, is it moral to enforce that solution?" For instance, if there were an asteroid heading towards a destructive collision with the earth, would it be moral to tax people to blow it up? I say the answer is clearly "yes": someone resisting paying such a tax is acting immorally . And coercing someone to prevent them from acting immorally is moral.  Put another way: no one has a right to act immorally. (Nevertheless, it may not always be right to prevent them: I am not in favor of coercing people to be polite, for various reasons, but if it could be done in a way that would actually make them genuinely polite, it would not be immoral.)

My review of Alex Pentland's Social Physics is now available online .

Listening to Daniel Kuehn talking about Georgia's job-creation tax-break program, I noted that in the wealthiest 25% of Georgia counties, the break is only only available to firms that create at least 25 jobs. So if I employ 5 people, I need to increase my payroll by 500% to get the subsidy, while if I employ 2500, a mere 1% increase will do. And of course there are thousands of other laws that similarly favor large concentrations of capital.

They have a used, of course, but be careful, or you wind up writing something like: "Rodriguez was coming off a season-long ban last year for his links to performance enhancing drugs. Now, not so much." -- The Star-Ledger , Feb. 26, 2016 He's "not so much" coming off a season-long ban? How about "not at all"?

Could he have written a more embarrassing column than this ? But it is funny that none of these "pundits" is ever dismissed for their terrible punditry.

"Manners and decorum differ from culture to culture, but in their highest aim they manifest the same recognition that human beings should act with dignity, elegance, and courtesy." -- Claes G. Ryn, A Common Human Ground , p. 24 Manners are excellent domain for illustrating the point I have been stressing concerning the relationship between the universal and the particular. Much of our society falls into one of two camps on this topic, each of which, in its own way, misunderstands that relationship. On one hand, we have those who recognize the universal element in, for instance, morality. But they miss the particularity of the way their own culture embodies the universal, and misunderstand their genuine insight as meaning that what is right for one person or one culture in one time and place must be right for all people or all cultures in all times and all places. The result is an imperious rigidity and a closure to knowledge one might glean from cultures other than on...

but because they are empowered to solve collective action problems.