Author Archive | Roderick

Ruwart Update

I’m back from Indianapolis – about which more later. In the meantime, I note that Mary Ruwart has an interesting article on how the LP is turning its back on libertarianism’s “natural constituency … the impoverished, the downtrodden, and the young.”

Speaking of Ruwart, I’m surprised that, despite widespread dissatisfaction with Barr, I haven’t seen any online discussion of a Ruwart write-in campaign. (If I vote at all this year, it’ll be a write-in – most likely of Ruwart.) Also, this (admittedly not much publicised) petition for Ruwart to run again in 2012 has only 13 signatures so far.

Agorist Demerit Count: 5.5


How Many Philosophers Can We Cram Onto a Panel?

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The Molinari Society will be holding its fifth annual Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Philadelphia, December 27-30, 2008. Here’s the latest schedule info:

GIX-3. Monday, 29 December 2008, 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Molinari Society symposium: Authors Meet Critics:
Crispin Sartwell’s Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory and
Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?

Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, 1201 Market Street, Room TBA

Against the State & Anarchism/Minarchism

Chair: Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhattan College)

Critics:
Nicole Hassoun (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jennifer McKitrick (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Christopher Morris (University of Maryland)

Authors:
John Hasnas (Georgetown University)
Lester H. Hunt (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
Jan Narveson (University of Waterloo-Canada)
Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson College)
William Thomas (Atlas Society)

As part of the APA’s new policy to prevent free riders, they’re not telling us the name of the room until we get to the registration desk. As part of our policy of combating evil we will of course broadcast the name of the room far and wide as soon as we learn it.

Happily, we have once again avoided any schedule conflicts with either the American Association for the Philosophic Study of Society (Dec. 28th, 11:15 -1:15) or the Ayn Rand Society (Dec. 28th, 2:00-5:00).

In other news, the schedule for next month’s Alabama Philosophical Society meeting in Orange Beach is now online.


Without You, How Would I Ever Manage?

I often disagree with Scott Adams’ “nonfiction” remarks (he’s neither sufficiently libertarian nor sufficiently left), but his comic strip continues to capture what the actual experience of being in the business world is like – as in today’s installment. As long as libertarians are perceived as offering denials of, rather than solutions to, this pervasive feature of most people’s everyday life, we won’t make many converts – nor will we deserve to.


Deconstruction on the Mount

During the Saddleback forum, when Obama was asked about evil, he replied:

Postmodern ObamaEvil does exist. I think we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil – sadly – on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children. And I think it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely. And one of the things that I strongly believe is that we are not going to – as individuals – be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process. And we can confront it when we see it.

Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil. Because a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil, in the name of good. And I think one thing that’s very important is having some humility in recognizing that just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t mean we are going to be doing good.

Then during the televised postmortem, Charles Krauthammer referred to this remark as “postmodern.” Funny; I thought it was Christian.


The Wages of Sin

The following letter appeared in this morning’s Opelika-Auburn News. The passages in bold represent text present in my original letter but deleted from the published version. [Note added later: since the new format of this blog bolds everything indented, I’ve changed the bold to underlining.]

To the Editor:

Anita Bledsoe (Aug. 8th) argues that if we’re glad we’re alive, then we logically ought to oppose abortion, since we wouldn’t be alive if our mothers had chosen abortion.

Norman Rockwell's family tree - click for more detailBut this doesn’t follow. After all, if you go back far enough, most (maybe all) people alive today are also descendants of rape. That means that if no rapes had ever occurred, then most of the particular people who exist today would not have existed (since some of their ancestors would have formed mutually consensual, and so presumably different, genetic pairings from the ones that in the actual course of history resulted in us).

So does that commit us to approving rape? Of course not. Evaluating the present existence of something and evaluating the process by which it came about are two different things. Likewise, then, I can be glad of my own present existence and still think my mother would have been perfectly entitled to abort me – since the right to life does not include the right to exist in somebody else’s body.

Roderick T. Long

Incidentally, I said “most” and “maybe all” rather than simply “all” only to avoid having to explain “all,” but “all” is almost certainly correct. We don’t know what percentage of pregnancies among our earliest ancestors were the result of rape, but we don’t need to; even if it were a tiny figure, with each subsequent generation the “trait” of having been descended from rape would spread farther through the population.


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