Entries associated with the tag "Political Philosophy":

"All across the country, proprietors, landlords and residents associations are privately, voluntarily implementing smoking bans," says the Cato Institute's Tom Firey (surely no pun intended). "Because those actions are voluntary and private, market forces will lead to the provision of establishments and housing for both nonsmokers and smokers. This is fitting in a free society that values choice and respects the individual. It also protects public health -- people who don't want to be around tobacco smoke, whether out of health concerns or dislike of the smell and nuisance, don't ave to be around tobacco smoke.

"This legislation [banning smoking in apartments, as proposed in some California jurisdictions] does not respect individual choice and it is not motivated by concern for public health. It is social conservatism pure and simple -- some politicians want to use their office to impose their personal morality on other people."

My first thought was that this was a nice takedown of a characteristic liberal fallacy (all good things should be required by law), and a good example of how markets can promote live-and-let-live. My second thought was that it was also a nice example of a characteristic libertarian fallacy (we're all individuals with no more basic interdependency than a bunch of billiard balls).

How exactly does the market protect the health of smokers' children? I don't think that question refutes Cato's case, because not everything that's bad for kids can be outlawed without producing even worse effects -- but it does suggest that libertarians have a shallow understanding of the way people live together.

IOW, my decisions to smoke, or to leave my motorcycle helmet at home, rarely affect only me. Sometimes it's best to think and legislate as if they do, but exactly when is the question for political philosophers.

When I see Jonathan Rauch's byline I read the story. Simple as that.

In this month's Atlantic (available here if you're too stingy to subscribe), he argues that gay marriage should be left to the states, as abortion rights should have been -- because such a patchwork nonsolution will make the issue less attractive to extremists on both sides, and allow democracy and compromise to do its work.

About abortion rights, it's an old argument (that the Supreme Court should have butted out) and in some ways an appealing one, but now that he's generalized it I have my doubts. Are Second Amendment issues less extreme because they're usually fought out in states and cities? Did Illinois' Stephen Douglas succeed in defusing extremists on human slavery in the 1850s with his doctrine of popular sovereignty?

Let's leave aside the question of which of these rights exist and how they should be regulated if they do exist. There's a knotty question of political philosophy here, and one that doesn't seem to appeal much to the echo-chamber blogosphere on either side. (As Rauch amusingly documents, Mitt Romney, who's no Stephen Douglas to be sure, has come down firmly on both sides.) So -- when should the universality of justice trump local option?

Don't be too quick with the answer -- murder laws differ from state to state, and what could be more important than the right not to get murdered?

There are legitimate universalizing tendencies on both sides: folks on the left tend to think that your rights shouldn't depend on your address; folks on the right tend to think that the market functions more smoothly when people aren't terrified of living in South Dakota or Mississippi.