I am sick unto death of people saying that they “believe in equality of opportunity, not outcome” often in a smug tone, as if they had just delivered some bon mot, proven a difficult theorem or made a subtle but crucial conceptual distinction. A neat dichotomy between equality of outcome and opportunity doesn't work. The … Continue reading Stop claiming you believe in equality of opportunity, you probably don’t

Will Big Macs cost ten dollars? No. The reason is that labour costs are only about 20-30% of total costs in fast food. Let's look at the evidence. Consider Norway. In Norway minimum wages are not set by the government, instead they are negotiated, sector by sector, by unions- with the negotiated minimums binding on … Continue reading A simple fifteen dollar minimum wage FAQ

The longer I think about it, the more I start to think that, when peer reviewing articles, you should probably just take an attitude of "let it through unless it's really quite bad". The main reasons being: 1. In an age of online publishing, space constraints aren't an issue. 2. Unless a paper is so … Continue reading The case for being a lenient peer reviewer

The ballad of trying to be In the distance at the fork of a river Off the coast of Canada, a grizzly stands He does not need a mysterious forgiver For he is too simple to do a thing wrong Long have I longed to be known for Faults and virtues. To sing of myself … Continue reading The Ballad of trying to be

"Every woman adores a Fascist,   The boot in the face, the brute" -Slyvia Plath, Daddy For several days now a small to medium sized moral panic has been raging on Twitter about a large number of gay and bisexual men and smaller number of women who expressed attraction to this guy: Jake Angelli, AKA budget Conan, … Continue reading The Jake Angeli theses

Twitter is abuzz with discussion about a post on the subreddit "Am I the asshole". While there's every chance the story in the post is made up (like many stories on "Am I the asshole"), I think it's an interesting case for thinking about the ethics of friendship. Essentially a highschooler is in a group … Continue reading Of calculus, cheating and the duties of a friend and parent

I must emphasize, even more than normal, that I don't have expertise in this area. I'm not a scholar of medieval history, so this will be restricted to a critique of what I was taught rather than how things are. That said, I wanted to spitball an idea about just prices. When I was in … Continue reading A brief remark on just prices

The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy defines realism as: "Generic Realism:a, b, and c and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as F-ness, G-ness, and H-ness is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on." By scientific realism I mean … Continue reading A new(?) argument for scientific realism: the ethical value of certain theoretical entities

I saw this on the old Twitter : And was, of course, instantly infuriated. Any sentence that begins "philosophers believe" is almost certainly thereby wrong. But it got me to thinking about envy again. In particular about the fact that envy is not especially useful as a morally diagnostic term- as a concept to employ … Continue reading The dilemma in using envy to diagnose evil

Going into the election I thought there was about a 10% chance that Trump would make a serious extra-legal coup attempt if he lost- a view I maintained both against people who thought it was way too high, and against people who thought it was way too low. One thing that weighed heavily on my … Continue reading It may be that the reason there was no coup is those damn millennials