Experimental philosophy of Freedom...

Reaction mixed on airport gun ruling

Reaction mixed on airport gun ruling:

"Bearden has introduced a sweeping gun proposal, House Bill 615, that he expects could come to a vote for next year's legislative session. The measure, among other things, would ban the seizure of firearms during official states of emergency. But Bearden said it could eventually specifically allow firearms in parts of the airport.

'We're looking at all our options at this time,' said Bearden."

Aside from a very small group of rightwing folks I know and/or read online nobody cares about bringing their gun to the airport. Then again, they don't own guns... if they do... they are hunting guns... not ones you shove down your pants so that your woman knows you can defend her from a band of chineses tourist gone amuck.

This is a very small group of folks... they just all live in GA? Okay not really its quite large and seems to say something more about the insecurity and lack of meaning in peoples lives. When you feel powerless you grab onto anything that will give you power.(And so it is true with bloggers and their words... no?)

Thats not dangerous per say. It just seems sad that so many have such a fixation/fear. Or maybe i'm the sad one because I lack it? What do I know...

Brad Delong nails it....

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Appeal to "Undecidability" as Last Gasp

Friedman's argument against social democracy was that it would not do the job--that you would lose a lot of economic efficiency and some political liberty and in return get no equalization of economic power because the government would redistribute income and wealth the wrong way, and the beneficiaries would be the strong political claimants to governmental largess who would not be those with strong claims to more opportunity.

By the time you have resorted to arguing that "human existence in the shadow of a nanny state doesn't conduce to 'Aristotelian happiness'... because it strips human beings of the deeper sorts of agency and responsibility that ought to be involved in a life well lived..." you have lost the argument completely. And I have not even raised the point that Aristotle thought that Aristotelian happiness was possible only if you yourself owned lots of slaves:

Aristotle:

There is in some cases a marked distinction between the two classes, rendering it expedient and right for the one to be slaves and the others to be masters.... The master is not called a master because he has science, but because he is of a certain character.... [T]here may be a science for the master and science for the slave. The science of the slave would be such as the man of Syracuse taught who made money by instructing slaves in their ordinary duties.... But all such branches of knowledge are servile. There is likewise a science of the master... not anything great or wonderful; for the master need only know how to order that which the slave must know how to execute. Hence those who are in a position which places them above toil have stewars who attend to their households while they occupy themselves with philosophy or with politics...

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, & county commissioners." — Edward Abbey

"The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations." --Noam Chomsky

Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds | Prospect Magazine March 2009 issue 156

Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds

Situations have a bigger influence on how we behave than we think they do. Perhaps, then, rather than worrying so much about character building in an Aristotelian vein we should be making people more aware of how easily apparently irrelevant factors can shape what we do. As Appiah asks: “Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”

Is this all a storm in a common room? The repercussions of the experiments cannot be so easily dismissed. Think of the impact on political liberalism. At the heart of liberalism is the idea that an educated adult is and should be capable of choosing how he or she lives. But if, for example, situations affect us more than the reasons we give for our actions, and we use those reasons to rationalise them retrospectively, this assumption may need revision. This branch of x-phi might be nudging us towards Nietzsche’s view that what we take to be the inexorable conclusions of clear rational thought are nothing but reformulations of our innermost desires—disguised as the products of logic. We are not as in control of our thoughts as we thought. Nietzsche fully grasped how profoundly unsettling this notion was.

Adam Smith and slavery

Adam Smith's lost legacy

Public comment in Britain and North America, aided by endless television repetitions that ‘slavery’ means the ‘slave trade’ from Africa to the USA, is almost completely blind to the fact that slavery from Africa to the Arab Middle East, classical Europe, and all countries to the East, persisted for thousands of years (note the number of African slaves in ancient Egypt) long before America was ‘discovered’.

The appalling practice of slavery was widespread in Eastern Europe and Russia at the time Smith was writing Wealth Of Nations, and Smith was pessimistic that it would ever be abolished.

The camel-led slave-trading 'trains' that left sub-tropical Africa to cross the Sahara, hardly penetrate public consciousness in the way that the African slave ships, made visual by film and television, which only show of the lesser, and shorter in calendar time (though no less evil), slave trade to America.

Not only were Arab traders active in the overland slave trade, they were often the local slave agents active in supplying slaves to slave trading ships from Europe for the American and Caribbean markets.

When the American market was closed eventually by the self-imposed political action of the governments of the USA, Britain, and other European countries, the Arab slave traders continued their despicable trade north across the Sahara, and by sea along the East African coast.

lets hope we don't reach this point...

Israel jails Hamas speaker Dweik

An Israeli military court has sentenced the speaker of the Palestinian parliament to three years in prison for belonging to an illegal organisation.

Although i'm sure some people will tell me i'm wrong and that my opinion should fall under the tag liberty as pathology

Negative vs. Positive liberty

Freedom

Freedom: an Experimental Analysis

Consider the following case:

Tanya lives in a small, newly created country in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most important issue in the region is the treatment of a disenfranchised minority that lives throughout the country. Tanya truly dislikes the minority and wants to further damage them if she can. While public opinion concerning the minority varies greatly, the government has taken the side of the minority. Consequently, a ban has been placed on any action or public speech that is intended to hurt the disenfranchised minority. In other words, the government has made laws against hurting the minority, but Tanya wishes she could hurt them.

Now ask yourself: 'To what extent do these laws diminish Tanya's freedom?'

Once you have decided on the answer to this question, consider a very similar case with one important difference: Tanya wants to help the disenfranchised minority.

Tanya lives in a small, newly created country in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most important issue in the region is the treatment of a disenfranchised minority that lives throughout the country. Tanya truly cares about the minority and really wants to help them if she can. While public opinion concerning the minority varies greatly, the government has sided against the minority. Consequently, a ban has been placed on any action or public speech that is intended to help the disenfranchised minority. In other words, the government has made laws against helping the minority, but Tanya wishes she could help them.

Now ask yourself the same question again: 'To what extent do these laws diminish Tanya's freedom?'

During an experiment I conducted in which participants were presented with these two cases, I discovered an very interesting result. Participants thought that Tanya's freedom was much more diminished in the second case than in the first. In other words, subjects thought that people's freedom was much more diminished when they were prevented from doing something morally good than when they were prevented from doing something morally bad. After noticing this interesting result, I conducted two other studies which further confirmed the interesting effect found in the first survey.

Anythoughts... in regard to the Positive and Negative Liberty debate?


"A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him." --George Orwell