How philosophers talk to their sweethearts.
The Aristotelian: “I wish to marry you, for I know that my happiness, both of body and soul, is contingent upon our union in the best and deepest of friendships.”
The Utilitarian: “Would our marriage contribute to the greatest happiness for the greatest number? Please consider waiting for me, dearest, while the best social science does its calculations.”
The Kantian: “I do not love you. Indeed, I find you repulsive in every way. But if I do thus marry you, I can be certain that my motives for marrying are pure and dutiful.”
The Paternalist: “Those who know best have decided that I should marry you. Who am I to question their wisdom and authority?”
The Machiavellian: “Why bother? It is better to be feared than loved, and I can get what I want from you more simply by a judicious mix of threats, bribes, and occasional indulgences.”
The Stoic: “You and I are creatures of Time and Chance, and to embrace you is to embrace a dead thing.”
The Pessimist: “Over half of all marriages end in divorce, so why don’t you just take half my stuff now, 
and we’ll go our separate ways and save ourselves a lot of grief.”
The Christian: “I will not marry you, for as the Apostle says, ‘It is better for a man not to marry.’”
The Malthusian: “In this world of limited resources, would it not be wrong of us to contribute to the geometrically-increasing rate of population growth?”
The Altruist. “Love is selfless, and I would like you to know upfront that I will get no personal benefit from our marriage; but I will do it because I love you, and love is sacrifice, and marrying you will be major sacrifice for me.”
The Existentialist: “If I commit to you, I thereby commit all of mankind to you, and the responsibility for a decision of that enormity fills me with dread.”
The Nietzschean: “We are fated to marry and remarry for all eternity, and I embrace my fate vigorously!”
The Humean: “Marriage is neither a matter of fact nor a relation of ideas, so I commit it to the flames.”
The Platonist: “As a philosopher-king candidate, I cannot marry you, 
for our selves and offspring belong to all communally, while marriage is a private and selfish thing.”
The Heraclitean: “Can I marry you? I cannot marry you twice — nay, I cannot even marry you once, for the you and the I have no identity in the flux and flow.”
The Parmenidean: “I cannot marry you, for to marry is to change from not being married to being married and, as has been proved, one cannot change from not being to being.”
The Marxist: “I spit upon bourgeois marriage, yet our synthesis will breed a mass of revolutionaries dedicated to the cause.”
The Leibnizian: “It is impossible for us to marry, for our monads are complete within themselves and must of pre-established necessity realize all of their possibilities independently.”
The Hegelian: “The generative World-Spirit moves within me greatly, and I will not shrink from crushing to pieces the innocent flower that you are in bringing forth the Divine Self-realization.”
The Augustinean: “I lust for you, and for that I tremble that God in his infinite justice will condemn me to damnation for all eternity.”
The Objectivist: “Before one can say I do, one must know how to say the I.”
Posted 13 hours, 23 minutes ago at 9:28 am. 3 comments
One question on the final exam for my Philosophy of Art course asked students to identify the best or worst theorist of art we studied this semester. We devoted significant time to five major philosophers — Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and Rand — and discussed a few others along the way more briefly.
In deciding best or worst, the students were to specify their criteria, give an overview of the theory in question, and explain why the theory succeeded or failed at meeting the criteria.
Ten students selected the best theory option, and they chose as follows:
Kant 4
Aristotle 2
Nietzsche 2
Rand 2
Three students chose to do the worst theory — and all of them chose Plato.
So I hereby declare Immanuel Kant to be the most sublime philosopher of art for the Spring 2012 semester.
(That was a hard sentence for me to write, somehow. Two indications of my thoughts on Kant’s aesthetics: Is modern art too complicated for us? and Kant and modern art.)
In addition to studying the above philosophers, we also spent time in four art-historical eras — ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Golden Age, and nineteenth-century France — blending a study of the era’s art with its history, philosophy, and culture.
Posted 1 week ago at 3:55 pm. 9 comments
Entrepreneurial Research Science
My full interview with physicist R. Paul Drake is now posted at the the CEE site.
I met with Dr. Drake in Michigan to discuss the realities of professional science — multi-tasking, grant-writing, travel, and learning from failure — the adequacies and inadequacies of American science education, and the likely future of America’s pre-eminent position in world science. A shorter version of the interview was published in April Kaizen.
More of my Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or CEE’s site.
Posted 1 week, 1 day ago at 3:17 pm. Add a comment
One of the great publishing events in all of history was the French Encyclopédie of the eighteenth century, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert. It was a massive project: many authors, 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations, published in 28 volumes over 25 years.
During my working visit to Guatemala, Luis Figueroa took me on a tour of Francisco Marroquín University’s library, and UFM’s rare book collection has an almost-complete set of the original Encyclopédie. I had the awesome experience of being able to leaf through the volumes with my own hands.
(Click to enlarge the images.)
Posted 1 week, 5 days ago at 8:33 am. 1 comment
Wean Yourself
By Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi
Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.
From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.
Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheat fields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.
At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”
You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.
Listen to the answer.
There is no “other world.”
I only know what I’ve experienced.
You must be hallucinating.
* * *
Translated by Coleman Barks. Thanks to Russell Roberts for the pointer.
Posted 1 week, 6 days ago at 3:42 pm. Add a comment
Jumping into the debate about “bleeding-heart libertarianism” (Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, Bryan Caplan and again, David Friedman, David Henderson, and others), which seeks to integrate libertarianism with social justice. 
“Social justice” is one of those vaguely-specified, usually suspect phrases, defined by one defender of BHL as the position that “the moral justification of our institutions depends on how well these institutions serve the interests of the poor and least advantaged.”
Thus stated, BHL accepts the basic Rawlsian line about the morality of politics, and its advocates seek either (a) to wrest the “social justice” label away from the lefties who use it most by showing that ends of social justice are best achieved by free-market liberalism, as Edmund Phelps tries to do, or (b) to find common ground with lefties on moral issues.
Five quick points against BHL:
1. As a political-philosophical method: BHL says we should start politics by dividing people into groups and granting one group special prior ethical status. In this case, BHL divides people into poor and non-poor and holds the poor to have a special moral position in politics-making. That is not the way to ground politics, for two reasons: (a) Politics should start with individuals, not individuals-as-members-of-a-sub-group; and (b) politics should initially treat all individuals as having equal moral status — in my view, as self-responsible, free agents — not as having preferred status by belonging to a sub-group.
2. As a moral justification of liberty: BHL says your liberty and mine are justified only if and to the extent that it serves or benefits the interests of others, especially poor others. This means that its moral principle is serving or benefiting others. This is not the way to do the ethics of politics: Liberty as a basic principle means that each individual’s life is his or her own, whether or not the individual’s choices serve or benefit others. Individuals’ political freedom is justified because they need it in order to think and act independently to produce the values their lives need. My liberty to be a philosopher or a poet or an explorer is not morally contingent upon my doing so’s demonstrably serving the interests of others.
It’s fine to argue the general point that free-market liberalism leads to win-win results for everyone involved, and it’s a worthy effort to show how free markets are beneficial to various sub-groups — women, immigrants, the poor, and so on — but all of that is a consequent sub-topic to the basic moral point that individuals have a right to live their own lives freely.
3. As a conception of life’s core values: By focusing on the poor, BHL seems to make politics essentially or primarily about economics. If political institutions are to be designed by reference to their relative economic impact on the poor and non-poor, then economic wealth is the critical factor. But that is much too narrow a conception of liberty’s scope and the proper purpose of politics. Family, art, sports, religion, and so on, as well as economic pursuits, are parts of life, and the principles of politics should cover them all generally. A narrow conception of BHL would seem to imply that one is free to engage in art, religion, or whatever only if that can be shown to be to serve the interests of the poor.
Or perhaps the BHLs intend for poor to be taken more metaphorically to refer to anyone in a weaker position in any sphere of human life. The final phrase in the above definition adds the “least advantaged.” But then BHL implies that the political rules governing family, religion, and so on, should be crafted to serve the interests of the least advantaged participants. For example, in basketball, short people are less likely to be successful. Does the BHL principle imply that the rules of basketball should be devised and justified by reference to their ability to improve the basketball outcomes of the short? Or religion: Who would the least-advantaged members of religious groups be, and what would it mean to craft political rules about religion to serve their interests? Not a perfect analogy, but: Politicians should not care about the poor any more than they do about men who can’t get a woman to start a family with them — or any more than referees care about short basketball players.
4. As a marketing strategy: This is only speculation, but I know a number of libertarians who complain that their position comes across as too rational and coldly analytic. So to gain broader appeal, they argue, libertarians need to go out of their way to show that they have feelings and care. So perhaps the BHL strategy is to lead with their emotions by emphasizing their empathy.
Well, certainly reason and passion should be integrated, and a morally normal person feels for those who are in poverty through no fault of their own. This takes us into the fascinating territory of the moral emotions, and for BHL our question should be: Why should exhibiting those particular feelings be primary in making the case for a free society? Other passions are part of the morally-healthy package: Admiration for those who have achieved a lot. Anger at those who violate rights. Respect for those who exhibit independence and integrity. And of course empathy for those who are struggling with poverty. But empathy for the poor is not more morally special than respect for integrity or anger at bullies and tyrants, and it is a mistake to single it out for special foundational political status. Instead, political theorists concerned with the moral foundations of liberal society should be concerned with general principles of moral character that enable individuals to live freely.
(Side note: I think a case can be made that admiration for achievement is a more important moral emotion than empathy for the poor is, but that is another post.)
5. As a rhetorical strategy to get the lefties who dominate academic life to talk to us: Again a speculation, but perhaps BHL is partly an internal-to-academics strategy to make nice with the social justice crowd in order to get a seat at the table. Maybe there is some merit to this strategy, and I am all for seeking common ground when possible. But our problem with “social justice” academics is not that they just didn’t realize that we care about the poor too. The modern history of the social-justice movement from Rousseau to Marx to the 20th century is not a story of people with an unworkable theory but whose hearts are in the right place. Of course, social-justice academics come in a variety of degrees, and it may be that some of the moderate and open-minded ones will listen to our case if they are first convinced that we genuinely care about the poor. Fine. But that is at most a tactic within the overall strategy of making the case for the free society, which requires hard-nosed economics, plenty of empirical history, and vigorous and passionately-argued ethics of individualism.
[Update: Further commentaries on BHL: Jason Kuznicki, Jacob Levy, Andrew Cohen, Will Wilkinson, Jason Brennan.]
Posted 2 weeks, 1 day ago at 4:36 pm. 11 comments
On my trip home from Brazil, I had a lengthy layover in Panama, made enjoyable by two fun and smart young people who took me to the canal (awesome) and to lunch at a Panamanian fusion restaurant. Tasty — I’d never had fried plantain before.
I was struck by Panama City’s skyline — it’s experiencing a building boom, and many of the towers are strikingly slim. The explanation I received was that Panama does not experience hurricanes or earthquakes, so the engineers and architects have more high-and-slender options.
The Panama Canal is undergoing a major expansion project, to be completed by 2014, enabling this generation’s much larger vessels passage. A fascinating large-scale engineering project. The economic numbers are also large-scale: on average, each ship going through the canal pays $200,000 to do so, but that is much less than the average $1,000,000 cost of going around the tip of South America.
My thanks to Surse Pierpont, Javier Yap Endara, and Cristina De Roux of the Fundación Libertad for a pleasurable experience.
Posted 2 weeks, 2 days ago at 5:32 pm. Add a comment
The Aristotelian: “I wish to marry you, for I know that my happiness, both of body and soul, is contingent upon our union in the best and deepest of friendships.”
and we’ll go our separate ways and save ourselves a lot of grief.”
for our selves and offspring belong to all communally, while marriage is a private and selfish thing.” 
