A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Philosophy

  • Causal impotence and reasons for vegetarianism

    Scu at Critical Animal says: I think a lot of people spend time explaining why we shouldn’t (or should!) kill animals and/or treat them as property. But where are explanations on the justification for vegetarianism/veganism as a necessary component of opposition, besides arguments about economic boycott? If you define an economic boycott as something intended Read more

  • Addendum on personhood

    Just to further clarify what I think is wrong with Margaret Somerville’s “personhood” argument discussed below: she essentially wants to evacuate the notion of person of any substantive content and make it coterminous with human being. Thus, saying that a human animal is a person isn’t a factually informative statement; it becomes a tautology. Note, Read more

  • Personhood, human and animal

    Well, since we’re on the topic of the personhood of non-human entities, here’s an article by Margaret Somerville, a Canadian law professor, arguing that we shouldn’t apply the concept of “person” to non-human animals (via the First Things blog): My reasons for rejecting personhood for animals include that it would undermine the idea that humans Read more

  • Free speech and corporate personhood

    I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t make an informed comment on the legal aspects of yesterday’s SCOTUS campaign-finance ruling (though I know plenty of lawyers who are likely disgusted with it, including some former Supreme Court clerks). But what I find wrong with it is that it contradicts the heart of one of the Read more

  • Jean Kazez’s philosophy and animal ethics blog

    I just came across the solo blog of philospher Jean Kazez, whose posts at Talking Philosophy I’ve always enjoyed greatly. Prof. Kazez also has a new book on animal ethics that looks to be well worth reading. Germane to some recent discussions here, she has two posts on the vegetarianism vs. veganism debate that are Read more

  • “Speciesism”: a red herring?

    There have been some great comments on the “veganism versus vegetarianism” post below, which you should check out if you’re interested. But I thought I’d shift gears and look at some of the other arguments in Tzachi Zamir’s book. A major concern of Zamir’s is arguing that “speciesism” is a red herring in arguments over Read more

  • Vegan versus vegetarian utopia

    In his book Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir makes an interesting “speciesist” case for animal liberation. But for the purposes of this post I want to focus on his argument in favor of moral vegetarianism, and against veganism. That he makes this argument is surprising since most liberationists, I think it’s safe to say, Read more

  • Rights-talk and some distinctions

    I think I unhelpfully ran a few ideas together in the post on libertarianism that should be more clearly distinguished. First, there is the distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights. That is, I asserted that, in practical political terms, this distinction is fuzzier than often imagined because the protection of any right–positive or negative–requires dedicated Read more

  • “The very groundwork of our existence”: Mill on rights

    Relevant to the post below; from Utilitarianism, chapter five: To have a right, then, is, I conceive to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask, why it ought? I can give him no other reason than general utility. If that expression does not Read more

  • Libertarianism re-visited

    William Bradford has a good write-up of Robert Nozick’s classic Anarchy, State & Utopia, which William just finished reading for the first time. I’ll admit that reading Nozick (and following it up with Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard, etc.) turned me into a libertarian for a while. But the problem with Nozick’s view, as nearly every Read more