That is the title of Richard A. Epstein’s latest book. We are attending a two-day colloquium in Philadelphia this week-end to discuss various aspects of Prof. Epstein’s book with a small group of other legal scholars. We will keep you posted.
Was the Facebook mood experiment “fair” or “foul” from an ethical perspective? Is it even possible for ethics to produce a determinate or “right” answer to this question? Several armchair philosophers, for example, have concluded that Facebook’s recent study of user behavior is “scandalous,” “violates accepted research ethics,” and “should never have been performed.” Michelle Meyer, by contrast, recently wrote this well-reasoned defense of Facebook’s research methods:
But if it is ethically permissible for Facebook to offer a service that carries unknown emotional risks, and to alter that service to improve user experience, then it should be allowed — and encouraged — to try to quantify those risks and publish the results.
Although we agree with Professor Meyer’s analysis on the grounds that more knowledge is generally better than less knowledge, what about the problem of consent? That is, even if these secret online experiments are useful from a consequentialist perspective, are they not still unethical (illegal even) from a contractarian or Kantian perspective?
Moreover, why do we celebrate “Labor Day” instead of Constitution Day? We propose the following: Instead of celebrating Labor Day on the first Monday of September, why not abolish this meaningless holiday and celebrate Constitution Day every Sept. 17 instead? (On that day in 1787, most (but not all) of the delegates attending the secret Philadelphia Convention signed the first draft of the U.S. Constitution, which was later submitted to local State conventions for formal ratification.)
Where are you hiding? (Your last tweet was two weeks ago; see below.) Have you replied yet to this letter dated Sept. 10 from several members of Congress? Also, what are you waiting for in the Adrian Peterson case? A video?
That is the melodramatic title of this short essay by Emile Simpson, an English scholar and former British infantry officer. (Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the pointer.) Although we are not certain when a tragedy becomes a “moral tragedy,” Simpson’s paper is worth reading because he explains why tomorrow’s independence referendum is not really democratic at all, since the voting rules establishing who gets to vote — and who doesn’t get to vote — are arbitrary and thus questionable. (As an aside, we tentatively agree with Prof. Cowen when he writes: “Regardless of the result [of tomorrow’s historic referendum in Scotland], allowing this referendum to go forward likely will go down as one of the greatest unforced errors in recent times.” We say “tentatively agree” because of the “ex ante” vs. “ex post” problem.) In any case, will the case of Scotland set a precedent for other regions in the world, such as Catalonia in Spain or California in the U.S., for that matter?
Have you ever seen a crazy-looking bearded man high-five random strangers? Neither have we, until now … Meir Kalmanson is a genius.
We are re-blogging for our vampire friends our guest blog post below on the subject of “Vampiric medical technology.” Our post builds on our chapter (“Buy or Bite?“) in the book The Economics of the Undead in which we make the case for legal markets in blood sales between vampires and humans. In our blog post below, we extend this argument even further …
Guest Post by Enrique Guerra-Pujol
In Chapter 12 (“Buy or Bite?”) of The Economics of the Undead, I observed how most members of the vampire race resort to coercion, compulsion, and confiscation to procure fresh supplies of blood — an essential staple of the vampire diet — and I posed the following fundamental question: “Are vampires ‘bad’? Are they inherently evil or unethical creatures?”
My main argument in “Buy or Bite?” is that vampires are not necessarily bad, that without a legal market for the purchase and sale of blood, vampires have no other choice but to steal their supplies of blood through fraud and force. I thus proposed the creation of legalized “blood markets” to allow us humans to transfer our property rights in our blood to vampires on a consensual and contractual basis.
The domain of my argument, however, was limited to the fictional world of vampires…
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Common enough to merit this fascinating entry in Wikipedia for “Cheating in chess“:
Cheating [in chess] can occur in many forms [citation omitted] and can take place before, during, or possibly even after a game. Commonly cited instances of cheating include: collusion with spectators or other players, linking to remote computers, rating manipulation, misuse of the touch-move rule, and the pre-arranged draw. Many suspiciously-motivated practices are not comprehensively covered by the rules of chess and so, on ethical or ‘moral conduct’ grounds only, may be judged by some as acceptable and by others as cheating.
Next question: is there an “optimal level” of cheating?
Why cheat?
That is the title of this little paper by economist Steve Landsburg. In his blog post with the same title, Professor Landsburg introduces the coin-flipper’s dilemma with this story:
When I was in high school, my English teacher must have had a free period at the time when my math class met, because every day he would march into the math class and empty his pockets on the table, whereupon my math teacher did the same. Then whoever had put down the most money scooped up everything on the table. I am ashamed to admit that it took me until this summer to think about computing the equilibrium strategy is in that game …
If you were the English teacher (or in the alternative, if you were the math teacher), how would you play this game?
Let’s start with some small questions, shall we?
Anyone who lives in the Americas, including but not limited to citizens of the United States. People in the U.S., however, like this culturally-insensitive law professor, often use the term “American” to refer exclusively to themselves. But this is wrong and blatantly offensive … An American — or un americano in Spanish — is anyone who calls North, South, or Central America home. Or, as David Post writes in this beautiful blog post:
Brazilians and Colombians and Argentines are “Americans,” because they are from the Americas. There are many circumstances … where the meaning of the term “American” is not clear from the context at all, and it would be extremely helpful to distinguish between features that are common to all “Americans” (including those who live in places other than the US) and those belonging specifically to one of the American nations (i.e., the US) …
Thank you Professor Post.
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