September, 2011

The Moral Arc Bends Toward Justice

by Michael Shermer
The Conversation
September 23rd, 2011

I would like to respond to Ron Bailey’s well-crafted argument for “The Evolution of Liberty” by expanding his point to include morality and moral justice. Bailey notes that “[t]he sweep of history clearly shows that the natural state of humanity is abject poverty.” As Thomas Hobbes argued in his 1651 book Leviathan, the sweep of [...]

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Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence

by Eliezer Yudkowsky
The Conversation
September 22nd, 2011

Maybe I’m severely dating myself here, but I remember a time when the Republicans at least seemed like the lesser of two evils. I’ve heard about the studies showing how government spending and debt grew faster under Republican than Democratic administrations, meaning that I was fooled by surface rhetoric, but still, I remember a time [...]

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Are Conservatives Fearful Dogmatic Thugs?

by Michael Shermer
The Conversation
September 19th, 2011

This exchange was enlightening, and I have several comments. But first, since we all share many values in the libertarian philosophy, with a nod toward some conservative values (e.g., Joe Carter in this exchange), I thought you all might appreciate a smackdown of my book’s political chapter, from which the excerpt in this Cato Unbound [...]

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The Evolution of Liberty

by Ronald Bailey
Reaction Essay
September 12th, 2011

Ronald Bailey argues that the freedom envisioned by classical liberals is congruent with science and democracy, and that the progress of all three together has enriched much of the world in the last two centuries. The enemies of this libertarian project hearken back to tendencies from mankind’s evolutionary history; for much of that history, experiment of any type could often be fatal, and therefore we find within us what may well be an evolved resistance to experiment. This resistance manifests politically as either conservatism, or a yearning for a purer, more primitive time, when noble savages walked the earth. It is a vice found on both left and right, Bailey argues, and one for which the antidote is libertarianism.

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Should Libertarians Trust the Monkey Mind?

by Joe Carter
Reaction Essay
September 9th, 2011

Joe Carter invokes an argument by philosopher Alvin Plantinga: If purely naturalistic evolution created the human brain, then we should expect our brains to be tuned for survival, not for truth detection. Michael Shermer appears to agree, at least so far. But if this is the case, then we have no reason to consider the theory of purely naturalistic evolution, or for that matter any other set of propositions, to be true. Under this rubric, truths are at best possible; they can never be necessary. Indeed, the monkey mind can never know the truth

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Is That Your True Rejection?

by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Reaction Essay
September 7th, 2011

Eliezer Yudkowsky suggests that the partial mutability of human traits is an auxiliary reason at best for Michael Shermer’s libertarianism. Take that fact away, and Shermer’s politics probably wouldn’t go with it. Yudkowsky says that his own small-l libertarian tendencies come from the long history of government incompetence, indifference, and outright malevolence. These, and not brain science, are the best reasons for libertarians to believe what they do.

Moreover, we make a logical error when we infer shares of causality from shares of observed variance; the relationship between nature and nurture is cooperative, not zero-sum. One thing, however, is clear: Human genetic variance is tiny, as indeed it must be for human beings all to constitute a single species. Environmental manipulation can only achieve so much in part because of this universal human inheritance.

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Liberty and Science

by Michael Shermer
Lead Essay
September 6th, 2011

Michael Shermer discusses scientific findings about belief formation. Beliefs, including political beliefs, are usually the result of automatic or intuitive moral judgments, not rational calculations. One cluster of those intuitions presumes that human nature is malleable; these usually produce a liberal politics. Another group of intuitions presumes that human nature is static; these tend to produce conservatism. But Shermer argues that humans really fall somewhere in between — malleable, within some important limits. He argues that this set of findings should produce a libertarian politics.

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The Pay of Parking Lot Attendants

by Myriam Miedzian
The Conversation
September 2nd, 2011

Hymowitz argues that childcare workers earn less than parking lot attendants because there are “enough childcare workers available to keep salaries low,” not because women’s jobs have traditionally been paid less. But if it’s all a question of supply and demand, then higher male unemployment and the availability of recent male immigrants who do not [...]

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