October, 2011

Talking To, Talking At: Some Further Words

by Eric Mack
The Conversation
October 31st, 2011

I’m sorry that Jerry Gaus thinks that we have merely been going around in a circle, because I have the sense that quite a bit of progress has been made in bringing into sharper focus some of the critical features of Gaus’s New Liberalism. I guess what I see as sharper focus Jerry sees as [...]

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Talking To and Talking At

by Gerald Gaus
The Conversation
October 26th, 2011

As happens in many philosophical discussions (or, I suppose, simply in many discussions), we seemed to have ended up where we started. Eric Mack and Richard Arneson are essentially once again pressing their cases for what I have called sectarian political philosophies, arguing that we must appeal to moral truth, or the truth about reasons, [...]

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Final Words (for now) on Liberalism, Reason, and Authority

by Eric Mack
The Conversation
October 24th, 2011

I have really enjoyed and really benefited from this month’s Cato Unbound, “For a New Liberalism.” My only regret is that I have focused entirely on Jerry Gaus’s lead essay and Jerry’s responses to my responses and not taken up any of the very interesting ideas of my fellow respondents, Dick Arneson and Pete Boettke. [...]

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The Religious Fundamentalist and Nonsectarian Liberalism

by Richard Arneson
The Conversation
October 24th, 2011

I’m not sure how Professor Gaus’s nonsectarian liberal methods would deal with my religious fundamentalist. Consider a favorable case. Over a stretch of time a stable majority of voters in a democratic society brings about the enactment of a pretty good set of laws. They are consistent and coherent. In various ways they are deeply [...]

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Moral Equilibria

by Gerald Gaus
The Conversation
October 21st, 2011

Once again, I must express my gratitude to Dick, Eric and Pete for reflecting on the view I am trying to develop, and helping me appreciate where worries occur (and, hopefully, where they don’t). Unlike Arneson and Mack— and probably eighty percent of the philosophical community—I think that the problem of drawing the precise lines [...]

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Constitution Making from the Ground Up

by Peter J. Boettke
The Conversation
October 20th, 2011

Gaus’s vision of public reason liberalism is unique in that it is grounded in a rational actor approach, but doesn’t equate human rational actors with robot rational actors, as is often done in economics and philosophical literatures. The puzzle for such robot rational actors is how disagreement would ever emerge in their interactions. The agreement [...]

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More on Who Is In and Who Is Out of Public Reason

by Eric Mack
The Conversation
October 19th, 2011

I want to respond briefly to Jerry Gaus’s “On the Ins and Outs of Public Reason.” In doing so, I will redouble my efforts to avoid even the appearance of that ultimate of dialectical wrongs, viz., having “metaphysical” commitments lurking somewhere in the background of one’s remarks. Beyond my attempt to provide a reasonably sympathetic [...]

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Drawing the Baseline

by Richard Arneson
The Conversation
October 19th, 2011

Suppose we are convinced by Gerald Gaus’s proposal for a nonsectarian liberalism and resolve to form a political society on this basis. As I understand the proposal, we are to rank proposed political orders from the standpoint of each reasonable person in society. In carrying out this enterprise, we are urged not to be narrow-minded [...]

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