Ryan Cooper

I made a (somewhat slapdash) video about Lord of the Rings and why America has no tradition of dutiful conservatism

Of course the same applies to liberalism. "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal" only came out in 1970, and A Theory of Justice was published in 1971

In the work of Rawls, Dworkin,  Arneson, and Cohen, a central example that clinches the case against equality of welfare as the ethically correct kind of egalitarianism is the required treatment of a person with voluntarily cultivated expensive tastes. Under welfare egalitarianism, such a person must receive a larger-than-normal bundle of scarce resources, which appears to render him a kind of exploiter of others with more frugal tastes. In the model I have presented, a person who has a high rate of time discount (r) or who views education as very costly (low value of s) has expensive tastes, for he will choose a low level of education (ceteris paribus) will consequently have low expected future income, and will have a low expected welfare. 

To take a the classic example, consider the person who derives satisfaction from a drink only If it is a pre-phylloxera claret. Such a person requires more money to derive the same satisfaction that a beer lover derives from her brew. Here is how Dworkin, Arneson, and I would differ in the treatment of a person. Dworkin would not compensate the one who could derive satisfaction only front pre-phylloxera claret if she identifies with those tastes. Arneson would not compensate her if it had been prudent for her to learn to like beer: presumably, if she knew that she would not have the income to purchase the ancient claret, and if she had the opportunity to develop frugal tastes, then it would have been prudent for her to do so. I propose that the decision whether to compensate her depends on how the median person of her type behaved. Let us say that her type is "child of impoverished aristocrats." If the "median preferences" of persons of that type are for pre-phylloxera claret, then she is entitled to compensation to increase her level of welfare to what the person of frugal tastes, who exercised a median degree of responsibility in other circumstances can experience with his resources.  

If you click through the links they get you back to Rawls, Roemer et al. 

And Cooper contracts something he wrote less than a month ago. 

At bottom, the argument that socialists need to behave virtuously for political reasons is liberal and individualist – the same fallacy seen from Matt Bors' famous Mr. Gotcha. The whole point of leftist politics is to solve problems through collective coordination, not by convincing individuals to behave differently. 

And as always

SE: "Arguments for the nobility of greed are a recent development."
Chris Bertram: "If, by 'recent' you mean 1705, you may be right."

To match this, Leiter has a new paper calling for a return to Hart. Varieties of pseudoscience and anti-politics.

I'll add the Aristocrats tag. I don't have one for virtue ethics. And The Discovery of Experience. It's still Tolkien but at least Cooper is trying. But the video is pretty bad. 

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A day later he tries again: "I spent like 60 hours making this video, pls watch"

Because it fits. Because an ex-editor of Commonweal[!]  asks: Does motherhood make us less free?

And that's why the fascist Sophie Lewis calls for abolition. End the family, in the name of freedom, 

self-interest, and self-hatred. 

And we're back to the previous post: "It might be worth defining fascism as the rebellion of individualism against itself, since fascists are incapable of functioning within a community. "