Special Rights for Religion?

One often hears the suggestion that people have a right to live according to their religious beliefs. (A current example - via B&W - is the Catholic Church's resentment at not being allowed to discriminate against gay adopters.) This puzzles me greatly, because the suggestion is so plainly ludicrous. Consider a religious fanatic whose beliefs prescribe doing harm and violence to others. No sane person would grant them the right to live according to their religious beliefs. There simply is no such right -- not when the beliefs in question are in conflict with the antecedent rights of others.

Now, liberals in the tradition of J.S. Mill might hold that people have the more general right to live however they like so long as no-one else is harmed (roughly speaking). That of course encompasses religious expression of the harmless variety. On this view, there is no special right to religious expression, as distinct from every other kind of expression. Just the same basic freedom for everyone, to live as they like (within reasonable limits), whether the basis for their choice is religious or not.

That sure sounds reasonable to me. But I might be missing something, so I'd like to hear from any supporters (a devil's advocate would do) of "special rights" for the religious. Room for such a view may open up once we retreat from pure liberalism, so that fewer activities are allowed to start with. My question is: are there any cases where a liberty should be granted only to the religious? For example, if an ancient religious ritual involves an illegal hallucinogen, should a special exemption be made for these practitioners alone?

Or you may think it's the 'ancient' rather than the 'religious' bit that matters here. Should there be "special rights" to ensure that old traditions can endure, when they would otherwise involve illegality?

Philosophers' Carnival #42

... is here!

The carnival is getting so many submissions these days that hosts can be very selective and yet still end up with a large selection. The offerings this time look to be of especially high quality, so do check it out!

New Blogger Convert

I've finally upgraded my Blogger account, though I'm keeping my old template for now. Hopefully it will work with new features, e.g. labels, comment feeds, etc. Otherwise I might end up switching to a new template (and slowly convert it back to this one's style). Time to start experimenting...

What is a "valid" belief?

Okay, while I'm expanding my vocabulary, any idea what a "valid" belief is?

For example, D.A.N. writes that standing up for your beliefs involves "understanding that other belief systems are valid, and no less valid than your belief system." We are also meant to understand that "beliefs do not always have [need?] concrete evidence to support them and that a lack of evidence does not necessarily make a belief system invalid."

Now what in the world does he mean? I would have thought that "valid" meant something like "good", "reasonable", or "justified" (i.e. epistemically permissible). But then D.A.N.'s claims would be plainly false. It's just not true that all belief systems are equally well grounded. You really shouldn't hold baseless beliefs. And it wouldn't make much sense to "stand up for your beliefs" if you didn't think they were objectively any better than the alternatives. Emotivists aside, opposing torture isn't like cheering for your local sports team.

In short: relativism is false. But are those who claim that 'all beliefs are equally valid' just silly relativists, claiming that all beliefs are equally good? A more charitable interpretation, I guess, would be to understand 'valid' in this context as meaning something more like 'tolerable'. All belief systems are equally tolerable. Some are stupid, perhaps, but that's no excuse for persecution.

But now we seem left with a truism. (Who seriously advocates a new Inquisition to forcibly root out false beliefs? Setting aside socially pernicious ones, at least...) There's not much point asserting something that no-one disagrees with anyway.

Perhaps it's simply a metaphorical call to refrain from expressing negative judgments. Some beliefs may be daft, but you shouldn't say so. It ain't nice. For that matter, you probably shouldn't even suggest that some beliefs are false. Believers might be offended. Now, it really wouldn't do to imply that people are ever less than perfect -- they might not like that, see. What? Something to be said for recognizing room for improvement? No, no, that clearly implies that we're not already perfect. That just won't do at all. Not at all. No.

*cough* Sorry, just had to get that out of my system.

To be fair, overly harsh scorn and derision might take the fun out of life. But if we value truth and rationality at all, there must be some legitimate place for reasoned criticism in the public sphere. If weaselly talk of "validity" is used to undermine these values, that's something to watch out for.

What is "collectivism", and why is it bad?

I've noticed that ideological libertarians tend to denounce utilitarian interventions (e.g. redistributive taxation) as "collectivist", or favouring "the group" over "the individual". I can't make the slightest sense of this charge. Can anyone help me out?

The obvious problem is that "group", in this context, means nothing more than "several individuals". There's nothing obviously anti-individualistic about harming one individual in order to benefit many other individuals. On the contrary, it's hard to see what could possibly be more pro-individual than the utilitarian's desire to maximally benefit every individual in the world!

When libertarians talk about "the individual", I can only charitably interpret this as a definite, rather than generic, description. As established above, their claims would make no sense in relation to individuals in general. They must be talking about that particular individual - call him Bob - who is being harmed for the benefit of others. When they call utilitarians "anti-individual", they just mean we're "anti-Bob" -- in the weak sense that we give greater weight to the interests of multiple people than we do to Bob alone. But then what sort of criticism is this? Who in their right mind wouldn't think that, say, one life could be outweighed by a million? So if this -- the denial of deontological absolutism -- is all that they mean by "collectivism", it's a charge without bite.

A more intuitive definition of the term, I think, would invoke the notion that the group is somehow more than just the sum of its parts. On this understanding, a collectivist would elevate abstractions over real people, pursuing the glory of the group at the expense of the actual people who make it up. Now, I can understand why this anti-human ideology might be thought pernicious -- I'd probably agree, in fact. (Even worse is when an authoritarian leader dishonestly appeals to the "greater good" merely as a smokescreen for consolidating their own power. But I don't imagine anybody supports that!) But of course none of this bears any relation at all to the utilitarian trade-offs that some libertarians seek to slur.

Or am I missing something?

Posthumous Procreation

Wow. A dead soldier's parents have "won the right to [extract and] use their dead son's sperm to inseminate a woman he never met." Is this ethical?

The news article focuses on the family, and how happy they are to be able to continue their bloodline. Thom Brooks seems to focus on the dead soldier, worried that all this is happening without his consent. But what about the child? What will life be like for him, knowing that he was fathered by a corpse? Might it be psychologically damaging -- could it, for example, destabilize his sense of identity?

David Velleman has forcefully argued [PDF] against anonymous sperm donation on the grounds that children have a vital interest in knowing their biological parents. This isn't quite the same, since the child can at least know who his father was, but the underlying concerns are at least similar. As Harry at CT summarized it:

Velleman’s deeper project is to criticise what he regards as an ideological view that simply wanting a child is sufficient grounds to be able to have one; the redefinition of the family to mean “whatever arrangement the adult seeking to procreate has created for the child”.

I think it has to be acknowledged that the child is morally relevant here, and it does seem unfortunate to be born without a father - let alone to have been conceived by a dead man! So there is at least something morally unfortunate about this story. Whether it's serious enough to make the family's actions wrong is, of course, a further question (especially since the child is not, strictly speaking, harmed by being brought into existence so).

It's also worth bearing in mind Majikthise's argument that "the world is manifestly better off when couples can become happy parents and wanted children are brought into the world... Valuing families should imply valuing the creation of families for people who want them." So perhaps the worst that can be said of this family's situation is simply that - like every other - it falls short of perfection.

What say you?

Meta-ethics Quiz

Here (HT: Siris). My results:

Naturalism
You scored 55 Objectivism, 63 Naturalism, and 91 Cognitivism!

There are moral facts, they can be reduced, and they can be the subjects of true or false propositions. You are probably a Naturalist. "Different philosophical doctrines travel under the heading of “naturalism.” We can usefully distinguish two broad and important categories: methodological (or M-naturalism) and substantive (or S-naturalism) (Leiter 1998; cf. Railton 1990 and Goldman 1994). Naturalism in philosophy is most often a methodological view to the effect that philosophical theorizing should be continuous with empirical inquiry in the sciences. Such a view need not presuppose a solution to the so-called “demarcation problem”—i.e., the problem of what demarcates genuine science from pseudo-science—as long as there remain clear, paradigmatic cases of successful sciences. Some M-naturalists want “continuity with” only the hard or physical sciences (Hard M-naturalists); others seek “continuity with” any successful science, natural or social (Soft M-naturalists). Soft M-naturalism is probably the dominant strand in philosophy today."

Where Next for the CoC?

My original hope for the Carnival of Citizens was that it would facilitate dialogue by bringing together a diverse bunch of bloggers who shared a meta-political commitment to deliberation across partisan lines. (There seems a niche for such a service: where else would one look to find such people from across the spectrum?) Nothing too much is then required of the carnival itself -- it just provides a common meeting space, in effect.

Unfortunately, that dream doesn't seem to be working out. Perhaps it'll develop in time, as the Philosophers' Carnival did, but at present the CoC just hasn't gotten enough publicity. A couple of other bloggers have expressed their support, which has been great, but we'll never get off the ground until more people do the same. Granted, it takes a fair bit of time and effort to write a post to contribute, and people are often busy with other things. But I expected more bloggers to at least express support for the carnival, raising its profile by giving it a brief mention on their site. (Note to readers: you can always start now, if the fancy takes you!)

Anyway, I've been wondering whether some changes may be required. At least while the carnival has low visibility, just having each edition sit there as a bunch of links isn't going to achieve much. Perhaps the carnival could be organized to more actively encourage discussion between participants -- get them commenting on each other's posts, etc.

Any suggestions for how to achieve this? I've received a few helpful ones already:

1) Keep each edition of the carnival to a small, manageable size. (That way, hosts can provide a detailed introduction of each entry, and readers won't feel swamped.)

2) Stick to themed editions, to provide a common focus. [An extreme variation on this suggestion might be to solicit submissions in response to a particular article -- but that might be getting too narrow.]

3) A more ambitious suggestion was to "make the carnival sort of like a symposium":

The authors of the posts that are accepted could be required to read and respond to the other posts—few in number—that were also accepted. (Also, if all this could be kept at the main carnival page, or centralized somehow, I think that would help. Less clicking around.) This would, I think, help start the dialogue. Maybe, too, the original authors could then be given a chance to respond to all the required critiques (this could all be done before the carnival was first posted) then I'm sure that would help jumpstart discussion.

4) An older idea was to have a "progress" section summarizing the resulting discussion from last month's carnival. But that's a non-starter until we get some more discussion developed in the first place!

Any other ideas to improve the Carnival? Having small, themed editions sounds pretty sensible to me. I'm not sure whether something like #3 could be made to work. What do you think?

Then again, this all might be moot if we can't find any more hosts. If you'd like to host the next edition, do send me an email. Otherwise, I guess there's always the default option -- (0) Give up on the whole idea as a lost cause -- but I think it's a bit early for that yet!

Populism and Civic Initiative

An interesting conservative criticism claims that welfare liberalism erodes individual responsibility and autonomous agency by encouraging dependency on the state. There may be something to this – though the risk comes not from wealth redistribution, but statism. One sees this time and again, reading through the various case studies in Scott London’s ‘Creating Citizens through Public Deliberation’ [PDF]. For example:

There is a tradition in Puerto Rico of being policy-takers, not policy-makers. This fact became clear to Miranda-Marín early in his campaign for mayor. “We had study circles and forums with political leaders, community leaders, professionals, and private sector people,” he told interviewer Alfredo Carrasquillo-Ramírez. “We would ask people, ‘What are your problems?’ And we would get long lists and pages and pages of problems. Then we would ask, ‘What are your strengths?’ And we would get silence. Everybody would remain silent. Instead of sharing their strengths, they would share stories about what the government brought to the community. And I would think to myself, ‘How much dependency!’”

Miranda-Marín saw that the first step in breaking the cycle of dependency was to introduce a new language for discussing public issues. “The traditional political logic was blunt and simple: ‘I give you my vote in exchange for having you solve this or that, or in exchange for your giving me this or that.’ That discourse had to change.”

When citizens see themselves in this way as purely private actors – customers that some distant government agency is meant to serve – that is no democracy worthy of the name. Genuine democracy arguably requires active citizenship and participation in the public sphere, towards the ideal of collective self-government. Rather than waiting for someone else to fix everything, we should work together to address our common concerns. So claims a meta-political view – call it ‘populism’ – that emphasizes initiative and civic engagement.

Isn’t it then populism, rather than capitalism, that is the true opposite of communism’s “statist” aspect? This may be a variation on the old 'two kinds of liberty' debates (though I haven't framed it like that before). Totalitarianism deprives us of both private and civic agency. Capitalism restores our agency within the private sphere, whereas populism empowers us in the public/political sphere, i.e. in our role as citizens. (The core populist thesis, as I understand it, is that we ought to have a say over the structure of our society, rather than having it imposed on us from without.)

The two are at least logically independent, though in practice they may come into tension, e.g. if mass consumer culture undermines a community’s self-conception. This then raises the question: which has priority?

Carnival of Citizens #3

... is up at Sportive Thoughts -- don't miss Brandon's entry on complicity and solidarity. He points out that we are materially (though non-culpably) complicitous in evil because we enable the wrongdoing through, e.g., the liberties we uphold. This reminds me of Pogge's argument for significant negative duties. ("Even if I owned no slaves or employed no servants myself, I would still share responsibility: by contributing my labour to the society's economy, my taxes to its governments, and so forth.") Insightful stuff.

Results

I just received my GRE results today. I apparently scored a perfect 800 for both the verbal and quantitative sections, and a shockingly mediocre 4.5/6.0 for the analytical writing section -- what should have been my strongest area! Bizarre. Unless there was some kind of clerical error, it seems I must have lost my analytical abilities for a day without realising it. Incredible. Oh well, hopefully graduate school admissions committees will disregard it after seeing my other work.

Results from my year at ANU were rather better. I was awarded a University Medal for "outstanding first class honours", and the Quentin Gibson Prize for topping my honours class. My thesis went especially well, with one marker calling it "an outstanding piece of work, easily the best thesis I’ve read in a long time." So that was nice!

Questioning Forgiveness

Is forgiveness an unquestionably good thing? I think it is generally a good thing, for at least two reasons. Most obviously, it may benefit the forgiven one ("an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," and all that). And - perhaps more importantly - it may also help the forgiver, since bottled up hatred and bitterness can't be good for you. Granting all that, I want to instead discuss some problematic aspects of this topic.

For one thing, holding forgiveness in high regard may risk creating an expectation of forgiveness that is unfair on the victims. Consider: forgiving is a part of "getting over" some harm or grievance. But even granting that it's a good thing when people can get over their problems and move on with their lives, still it may be callous and inappropriate to snap "get over it!" to someone whose wounds have not yet healed. "Forgive and forget" is merely a politer version of the same. In some cases, it may even serve to deny the legitimacy of the victim's anguish -- when surely they've been through enough without now also placing their reactions under the knife.

So we must beware perceptions of a "duty to forgive". Do you think that understanding forgiveness as supererogatory ("above and beyond the call of duty") is sufficient protection here?

A related problem, I think, is the practice of asking forgiveness. Contrition is all well and good, but to go that extra step and "beg forgiveness" creates a weird moral inversion. The victimizer now claims the moral high ground, and if their victim doesn't (or can't) oblige, then suddenly they're the villain (e.g. made to seem "un-Christian").

Does this mean it's always wrong to ask forgiveness? On the one hand, it seems awfully selfish to place such a burden on someone you've already harmed. But can contrition always be expressed so well by an apology alone? Is there something laudable about taking that extra step towards reconciliation? Other factors I've missed? Suggestions welcome...

Guest post: Reconciliation

[Many thanks to Don Jr. for contributing the following essay -- RC.]

Reconciliation, it seems to me, involves putting things back; more specifically, it involves putting things back together. In a word, it is to reunite. Now a thing is in need of re-union only if it has been divided. In the realm of human affairs, divisions are caused, for the most part, because one party has been injured (or feels it has been injured). Reconciliation, then, must be sought either by the party that has injured or by the party that has been injured. It is usually held that the party which has injured—that is, caused the injuring—has the harder job of the two; however, this opinion tends to exist, I believe, because reconciliation—or really forgiveness—is often misunderstood. It is misunderstood (I will clarify later) in the same sense that a child might mistake the band-aid for the actual healing.

I said that reconciliation involves putting things back. But you cannot put something back until you have let it go; and this is where the injured party frequently falls short, for the injured party has the difficult task of having to forgive, of having to put back, to let go. It is often said that one must "forgive and forget," as if the two were distinct. In a sense, though, forgiving is forgetting, for it is agreeing to act as if the thing never happened. It is almost literally to put things back. This is where the misunderstanding occurs. Many are content to forgive for the time being. However, as soon as they are injured again they will bring up, as if they never really forgave them, any past injuries they can recall. But there is no such thing as partial or temporary forgiveness. A band-aid is a temporary fix. However, to stick a band-aid on an injury and act as if it is healed is naive at best. Actual healing needs to take place. And actual healing is nothing more than "putting things back." The same applies to actual forgiveness. Thinking this through, one might begin to see how difficult it is to truly forgive. This is why I think the injured party has the harder task.

Forgiveness, though, is not merely a thing given; it is also a thing received. And in the instance that it is not received, it falls short of being fully complete. Reconciliation is a reunion which requires the efforts of both parties. The injured party, in my opinion, has the more difficult task in that they must not merely strike a line through the record (a line which may subsequently be erased) but must erase the record entirely; they must "put things back." The party that has caused the injury also, though, has a difficult task; they must humble themselves enough to accept the gift of forgiveness — and it is a gift. It is a gift in the sense that it can never be merited. One can never earn the chance to undo time. No number of my rights can ever erase a single wrong. The only ones able to erase those are the persons who were wronged. Unfortunately, most of us have poor erasers.

-- Don Jr.

Carnivals

Philosophers' Carnival #41 is up at Westminster Wisdom with loads of great links.

Carnivals of Citizens #3 was pushed back a week, so there are still a couple of days left to send in a submission. If you'd like to contribute a post but don't have a blog of your own, feel free to email it to me and I can post it here on your behalf.

Constructivism and Intuitions

A major issue in philosophical methodology concerns the use of "intuitions" -- perhaps as foundational premises, or else the initial data points which our theories then aim to systematize. The difficulty, as Alex recently pointed out, is that we don't have any obvious reason to think that such intuitions are in tune with the facts. Philosophers occasionally speak of a faculty of "rational intuition", which is supposed to somehow detect ("intuit") moral, mathematical, or other abstract truths of the Platonic realm. But it all sounds a bit wacky. (How is this mysterious faculty supposed to work, exactly?)

But perhaps the problem is not so bad if we reject Platonism. I tend to think that philosophical (as opposed to material) facts are not really things that exist out in the world. Though objective enough, their ontological status is better seen as that of a rational construction. According to this view -- call it "Conceptualism" [Update: "Constructivism" seems a better label] -- philosophical truth "just is the ideal limit of a priori inquiry; it does not answer to the sort of independent reality that might sensibly be considered beyond all epistemic reach." Whereas physical facts are made true by existing things in the world, philosophical facts are made true simply by the fact that they are what ideally rational agents would believe. For example: the truthmaker for "the cat sat on the mat" is a particular physical event involving a cat and a mat in the appropriate arrangement. The truthmaker for "2+2=4" is that ideal rational reflection would lead one to endorse the belief.

So what does all this mean for the reliability of our intuitions? Well, if they no longer have to answer to an independently existing realm of facts, perhaps they're not in such bad condition as we thought. Note that I'm not denying that there is an objective truth of the matter for many philosophical questions, so that our intuitions may in fact lead us astray (if ideal rational reflection would cause us to revise them, for example). Our intuitions must answer to this rational construction; the point is that the construction may not be wholly independent of them in the first place.

In short: the views we hold now, which are prima facie coherent and plausible, are reasonable - if fallible - guides to what we would find coherent and plausible on ideal rational reflection (which, for philosophical questions, is simply to say what is true). Intuitions have justificatory force because they're already on the road to constituting truths. Sure, obstacles might arise on further reflection that prevent the initial beliefs from being true after all. But otherwise, they're home free.

Deliberative Benefits and Challenges

There are at least four classes of benefit that may arise from developing a more deliberative democracy:

• Substantive: better policy results from a broader knowledge base, drawing on local skills and expertise to develop innovative solutions.


• Instrumental: increased popular support, trust in government, perceived legitimacy, and sense of ownership over policy.


• Normative: resulting policies really are more legitimate. The deliberative process upholds key democratic values, including civic respect, empowerment, autonomy, and popular sovereignty.


• Transformative: aside from these governmental advantages, meaningful democratic participation may also influence culture and create better citizens. Over the long term, it can promote civic engagement, develop citizen capacities, and boost civic awareness and commitment to democracy and community among the citizenry.

There are also significant challenges that face any attempt to achieve meaningful deliberation, including:

• Motivation: Self-selection is unrepresentative, given disparities in political engagement. Because people are not motivated to step forward, the State must do more to come to them – e.g. inviting randomly selected citizens to participate in a jury-like process.


• Close-mindedness: meaningful deliberation requires that participants be willing to revise their views upon learning of new reasons and evidence. Participants should show respect for one another’s perspectives, and pursue the common good in a spirit of open inquiry. Skilled moderators and well-designed deliberative institutions may help to promote and enforce these democratic norms.


• Culture of Competition: deliberative institutions must guard against adversarial forms of argumentation (rhetoric), which are all too familiar from other spheres of life. Special effort may be required to foster a more cooperative atmosphere.


• Groupthink/polarization: empirical research suggests that the risk here is greatest when groups are relatively homogeneous to begin with. Hence there is a need to include diverse views and encourage constructive criticism.


• Unequal abilities: political equality is undermined when some people are naturally more capable and confident of performing in deliberative contexts. Education should seek to alleviate such disparities in the very long term, but more immediate steps must be taken in the meantime, for those the education system has failed. At the very least, skilled moderators should take care to reign in dominant personalities during group discussions, and ensure that every participant has the opportunity to contribute meaningfully.


• Psychological biases / systematic human irrationality: the psychological literature reveals systematic biases in human thought, e.g. confirmation bias, the salience heuristic, etc., that could undermine rational deliberation. Again, the guidance of skilled and knowledgeable moderator/facilitators may help groups to guard against common fallacies.

Any other suggestions?

Carnival of Citizens Calling

Jared at Sportive Thoughts has put out the call for submissions to the third Carnival of Citizens. The theme this time is reconciliation, though more general submissions are also welcome, so long as they advance the deliberative purpose of the carnival.

Note: The Carnival of Citizens needs your support, in any or all of the following ways:
1) Contribute with a submission!
2) Spread the word: post about it on your own blog, and encourage your readers to sign up to the carnival newsletter to keep informed about upcoming editions.
3) Volunteer to host an edition of the carnival!

P.S. I guess just one edition per month would be a more realistic goal at this stage. I do hope we can at least manage that much. To any readers who are less than perfectly inspired by the whole project (and there must be a fair few of you, given that only a couple of others have yet expressed the slightest support for the carnival), what would you suggest we do to improve the carnival?

2006: My Web of Beliefs

A new year -- and time also for a new "web of beliefs" post, to highlight some of my recent strands of thought. One significant trend is that I've shifted away from reductionism about normativity and modality, and now prefer to grant these as conceptual primitives. Anyway, here are some of the main areas that captured my attention this past year...

Metaphysics and Modality

This time last year, I was deeply confused about the foundations of modality (possible worlds). An especially pressing concern was that the possible worlds framework seems to commit us to 'narrow fatalism', or the non-contingency of the actual world. Fortunately, I eventually figured it out: our world is not, strictly speaking, a "possible world" (though it does exemplify one of them). I was pretty elated to have finally ironed out that confusion, though it turns out Kripke beat me to it, and my discussion might seem rather lame to a more experienced philosopher who never suffered my confusion in the first place. The other main thing that had puzzled me was how to understand the notion of "could have been" in the first place.

I soon abandoned my old reductionism, and instead set about exploring an intuitive 'primitivist' account, which became the third chapter of my honours thesis.

And then there's 2-D semantics, and all that "conceivability and possibility" stuff that my thesis is about. I think that turned out pretty well, actually. In short, my current view is that there are two kinds of "metaphysical" possibility: there's the primitive one, which is something pretty close to nomological possibility, and then there's the conceptual one, which is something pretty close to broadly logical possibility. Typical uses of "possible worlds" and related modal notions (supervenience, etc.) concern the latter.

Other fun discussions include World Essentialism, The Limits of Truth Conditions, Knowing Sentences, and ontological deflationism.  

Rational Holism 

This was basically just a continuation of my old interest in indirect utilitarianism and Parfit's "rational irrationality", culminating in my writing sample: "Global Rationality". The basic idea is that we should only employ decision-procedures that we can consistently endorse from a timeless perspective. I've also discussed how such holism might apply to ethics. 

In a pragmatic vein, there are some curious theses that we seemingly should accept simply because we have "nothing to lose", epistemically speaking, by doing so. 

Meta-Politics 

Another major focus of mine has been procedural liberalism (more here) and related meta-political issues. Better to be rationally mistaken than dogmatically correct, and all that. I see this as a natural extension of my earlier thoughts on 'investing in rational capital'. Rather than narrowly focusing on the immediate problem, our primary objective is to set up a broader system that can be seen in the abstract to produce globally optimal results. (So I guess this is related to the holism stuff too.) As far as the practical implications go, I've developed quite an interest in deliberative democracy, and would like to see implemented more Citizens' Juries and the like.

At least I got the Carnival of Citizens up and running, though I don't know how long it'll last unless it starts receiving broader support. (Have you promoted it on your blog yet? Go on...)

Oh, and some interesting issues are raised in the post on Political Representation: selection vs. control. I'm not too sure what I think of all that.  

Ethics 

I've posted a bit on applied ethics and "philosophy of life" stuff, e.g. I think there's something to be said for open relationships, but tend to take a pretty hard line on the need for honesty, etc. There was a fun discussion on the ethics of aiding infidelity. Enlisting my evil twin to play devil's advocate - defending a "pro-life" position on abortion - was also fun.

On a more serious note, Suicide and the End of Persons explores an interesting argument from David Velleman. The Temporal Acrobatics of Harm is probably my favourite ethics post of the year.

Authoritarianism and Meta-ethics revists an old theme, explaining why dogmatism is a greater threat from relativism than moral objectivism.  

Miscellany

As far as first-order politics is concerned, I'm still a big fan of basic income, and think that "taxation is theft" libertarians have a confused conception of rights -- especially in light of Significant Negative Duties.

My post on Experience and Testimony refines my earlier criticism of "religious experience" as a basis for theistic belief.

I posted a little bit on representationalism and philosophy of mind.

Infinite Spheres of Utility provide a fun logical paradox. Unchanging Time and the Infinite Past tackles the metaphysics of time (I'm still a 4-dimensionalist). And I figure Hostage-taking Metaphysics is worth a quick mention too.

Finally, from a meta-blogging perspective, I guess my most significant change of attitude came mid-year, with my defence of polemic lasting a whole day before I changed my mind.

So, that was 2006. I wonder what my web will look like this time next year? Thanks for reading, in any case, and have a Happy New Year.