No one thinks we should all get the same stuff. A bed is a piece of stuff, but there isn’t room enough for us all to sleep in the same bed. Okay, so it’s that some people think we should… Read More ›
Rawls
HOW THE ‘LIKE-ALIKE’ AXIOM REALLY PLAYS OUT IN MORAL AND POLITICAL JUDGMENT
Abstract This paper reads like – because it is – a meditation. Its ‘moments’ are these: That like cases are to be treated alike seems to be the core axiom behind all our moral and political reasoning. And yet this… Read More ›
A PROOF THAT EGALITARIANISM IS EITHER FALSE OR BANAL
Abstract In this paper I argue that the only equality that need be postulated between agents qua heading into a theory of normative ethics and/or politics is that the agents in question be equally involved in interactivity in which there’s… Read More ›
COERCION
I argue that if the notion of coercion is given a non-normative interpretation, then it can do no work for us. Of its normative interpretations – any precisification of the term and condemnation of coercion arising from natural law is… Read More ›
A THEORY OF WAR
ABSTRACT: By virtue of what I call the Counterfeit White Flag Problem, a state of civil society and a state of war are shown to be both phenomenologically and epistemically indistinguishable. From this – or so I argue – it… Read More ›
CHARLIE HEBDO VS THE PROPHET
Rightly or wrongly we can decide when we’re more at our leisure; but in the meantime, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice can be taken as pretty much the canon on distributive justice, at least in our relatively affluent Western… Read More ›
THE SUMMA POLITICA
I’d like to buy the world a Coke. I imagine you would too, though perhaps we’d both make it something a little lower in sugar. Unfortunately, making the world a better place for some people, even for the vast majority… Read More ›
RAPE CULTURE
Apparently there’s something called ‘rape culture’. I wouldn’t have guessed that. Having specialized in the Philosophy of War, I’d have thought rape was pretty much endemic to the human species. In fact isn’t there a biologist, Randy Thornhill, and an… Read More ›
Anthropogenesis
WHY MY COLLEAGUES ARE IDIOTS – Rant # 164 – ANTHROPOGENESIS Suppose the world came into being five minutes ago, precisely as it was five minutes ago, with all those pseudo-history books on those shelves and all those pseudo-memories in… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 