Friday Philosophy

Some slippery slope arguments are a case of bad reasoning, but those presented by Mises and Hayek are not among them.

Michael Huemer has written outstanding book exposing many of the ways that many people fail to misunderstand logical fallacies in many ideological debates today. 

Paul Samuelson thinks that if the state coerces you to make an exchange with someone or taxes you, this isn’t much of a problem.

The philosopher Roger Crisp has asked us to consider the bright side of the wholesale extinction of sentient life: a lot of suffering would be prevented.

Michael Huemer has recently come up with some cases in which taxation is justified. Is it, though?

Isn’t the Austrian school behind the times in not availing itself of the modern tools that mathematics provides? One of the world's greatest living mathematicians doesn't think so.

Do people have a duty of distributive justice, leaving the state aside?

 According to customary analysis, public goods will not be supplied efficiently. But it does not follow that the good will not be supplied at all, or in a quantity insufficient to “do the job.”

If scarcity is at the root of all conflict, what does that tell us about rights?

There's a problem in a discipline when scholars don't realize that a view is controversial and needs to be supported by argument. Deirdre McCloskey is one such scholar.