Notes

The problem with language is that [if] you pick one definition for a term you'll be able over time, and through a process of proximity and drift, to have the word come to mean the opposite. You can't do that with numbers. Liberalism is optimism. The pursuit of happiness as anything other than the happiness of pursuit is the pursuit of banality.

Liberalism as individualism stands for generalized as opposed to individual experience.
Howzzat?

The book is silly, not because it's illogical or wrong, but because it's rational and logical and unobservant.

I remember picking up The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World when it came out and expecting some sophisticated argument. [I hear it's now called a classic by some people] I figured after Foucault et al., there had to be some reference to the obliteration of the body in pain and pleasure. Nada. Zilch. I thought of writing "The Body in Ecstasy: The Making and Unmaking of the World" but got bored and gave up.

From Marquis' essay.

The argument is based on a major assumption. Many of the most insightful and careful writers on the ethics of abortion-such as Joel Feinberg, Michael Tooley, Mary Anne Warren, 1-1. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., L. W. Suiiiner, John T. Noonan, Jr., and Philip Devine'believe that whether or not abortion is morally permissible stands or falls on whether or not a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seriously wrong to end. The argument of this essay will assume, but not argue, that they are correct.

They aren't. The social world is not the world of simple moral logic, and the issue of abortion centers not on the fetus but the state. But as in economics I guess... "Assume 'A' "

This is similar to the attempts to construct a formal moral logic of illegal downloading. But at some point if a crime has become ubiquitous its time to change not the law but the system that made the ubiquity inevitable. But of course no one I know has ever had an abortions for pleasure, or even jouissance. [at least no one I know of]
If philosophy is to be more than the philosophy of knots, it has to include the philosophy of knives, the philosophy not only of untying but of cutting.
An expansive and vibrant philosophy can never be more than a philosophy of engagement. The philosophy of solutions is risible.

"What sort of critique is possible?
Everything is a critique. That means nothing.
Sado-masochism is a critique of the Humanist ideology of the body and the self.
Monarchism is a critique of democratic idealism and of our supposed need to be free.
I’ve always liked The Story of O.
I once had a girlfriend who told me that while she lay on the beach in the south of France reading that book she thought of me.
What happened to that relationship?
Ended badly.
Why?
She was a monarchist.
And what about you?
Oh, you know… king for a day."