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Hot Philosophy Action at Cato Unbound

Started by Will Wilkinson · 9 months ago

The informal blog discussion has kicked off at Cato Unbound! In response to David Schmidtz’s blog reply to the formal reply essays, Peter Singer, evidently unimpressed by the whole point of Tom Palmer’s essay, writes
Why should we assume that sellers have the right ... Continue reading »

6 comments

  • The Andy Kauffman of philosophy strikes again.
  • I hope Schmidtz is joking or making some sort of purely rhetorical point about what impression he gets when he reads the paper, since that would be a pretty dumb impression to get. Maybe the papers in souther arizona are much worse than average, but you'd have to read a lot in to an average paper story, or be an idiot, to get that impression. This makes me wonder if he's being serious, and if not, why I should bother to read his reply in more depth.
  • What Singer misses is that the universe of property rights & markets that matches the goods of sellers with eager buyers (and the vague attentions of buyers with sellers' perishable inventory), itself has a product: Hope & Creativity. Without either of which the human spirit (or whatever term materialists like to use talk about that reality) sickens and collapses, as the Marxists say, "alienated" to the max.

    Schmidtz' redefinition is a sort of micro-advancement of the argument. But it is an advancement over "society," a term that makes me nervously finger a small, self-defense-oriented handbag revolver.
  • That final passage by Schmitz is odd, because it doesn't seem to be about inequality, just about danger. But the crime rate is much higher today than 50 years ago, and I believe that mainly falls on the poor. This is probably an example of inequality of wealth leading to inequality of political power.

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