A hopefully complete list of all the debates we’ve had so far appears below. Note that it appear chronologically, allowing you to browse the whole history of our discussions on the site before you come to the most recent. Enjoy.
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ETHICS OF BEGGING:
At least once a week, the average American is solicited by a beggar for spare change. Most such requests are ignored. Whether such responses are morally proper, however, is a deceptively complex question. Broadly speaking, when it comes to giving to panhandlers, there are four ethical possibilities: (1) it is morally required to give to beggars and immoral to refuse; (2) it is morally salutary to give to beggars, but it is not required; (3) it is morally neutral to give to beggars; or (4) it is morally wrong to give to beggars.
THE TROUBLE WITH TRANSPARENCY:
The Sunlight Foundation loves transparency. Lawrence Lessig is against it. They’re both right, but for the wrong reasons. Lessig’s right on what’s wrong, but wrong on what’s right. Put slightly more confusingly: Sunshine’s wrong and Lessig’s right, but Lessig’s wrong: we should do Sunshine right. We shouldn’t care about the money going into the system, not because it cripples our confidence in Congress, but because we’ll miss the real issue: the money coming out.
BLOODY PUNISHMENT:
Whatever might be said for such a policy, there’s simply no getting around the following fact: it makes the violent depletion of a child’s bodily fluids into a state-sanctioned method of discipline. It lets students atone for their misbehavior — for, say, throwing a paper airplane across the classroom — through a procedure in which a needle punctures their skin, penetrates their vein, and forcibly pumps out blood by the pint.
Government Debt and Metaphysical Identity:
Governments, just like persons, acquire debts. Some of these debts are contractual: Country A borrows a sum from Country B, thereby acquiring an obligation to repay the sum (usually with interest) by some date. Other debts are reparational: Country A impermissibly harms Person C, thereby incurring an obligation to compensate the victim of A’s tortious conduct.
Tainted Goods:
Now whether or not you believe that the disappearance of South East Asian rain forests is a problem, you have most likely accidentally consumed an object which is the output of a process you would normally oppose on moral grounds: the bride-to-be receiving an engagement ring set with blood diamonds, the vegetarian who realizes mid-mold that gelatin is made of ground-up bones. Although I didn’t participate in the morally reprehensible action, the property is morally tainted by virtue of its provenance. It is on similar grounds, that leather made from many endangered species is banned from importation.
What’s Wrong With the Internet: I
If there’s one thing that aging newspapermen, self-righteous politicians, and “civic-minded” pundits love to decry, it’s the pernicious effects on modern man of the internet echo chamber. To hear the neo-Nostradamus types tell it, the partisan love of dialogue ranks just below Pig-pen’s ablutomania, but with far less entertaining effects. We apparently are but days away from a perfectly polarized polity, each end of the spectrum deafened by the screams of its most extreme members, blissfully unaware of counterarguments as a concept, and quite unconcerned with the deleterious effects on the public square and political practices. In 750 word increments, these prophets pick up Laocoön’s legacy and beg us not to be seduced by the gift of the intertubes, lest our downfall result.
This is, of course, nonsense.
What’s Wrong With the Internet: II
In the words of a favorite comic, something is wrong on the internet. Ina previous essay, I demolished the notion that how we consume information on the internet, specifically the process of distilling and refining who we read, contributes to the “crisis” of political polarization in our country. So thorough was my excoriation of this specific correlation, one respondent imputed a “boundless libertarian optimism” regarding the internet and its uses at large. Sadly, the truth is anything but.
In fact, not only does the internet create and augment terrible trends in how we eat our info, but we don’t even notice. As we worry about “political extremism,” the internet is making us smug, slothful, sinful gluttons.
Open the Door Yourself
In this way, this seemingly trivial custom speaks to a larger phenomenon: the bureaucratization and general malaise of American public life. In a society animated more by unthinking obedience to rules than meaningful concern for one another, cheap acts of “humanity” seem to obviate the need for any genuine courtesy, kindness, or sociality.
Nietzche is Dead
A field like English literature or intellectual history will, by its very nature, rely on original texts. At the same time, the hard sciences will eschew obsolete theories and antiquated historical sources. But what of philosophy, political theory, psychology, social theory, and the host of other disciplines that lie in between? The answer, I believe, is that to the extent they purport to seek “truth,” even if only to disparage the idea, they should emphasize contemporary works and deemphasize historical ones. In other words, they should adopt the pedagogy of the sciences. Banish Bentham, excise Epicurus, dismiss Derrida (okay, he’s a contemporary figure, but he still sucks). Aside from some very limited exceptions (discussed below), reliance on “classical” texts constitutes unjustifiable history-worship.