“It's a Wonderful Life” -- the Metaphysics

Memory of Christmas movies being about to fade away for another year, it is high time to explore the metaphysics of counterfactuals – as Frank Capra no doubt did when screening for his own family every Christmas George Bailey's odyssey in Bedford Falls and Pottersville.

What Happened to the 20 Hour Work Week and the 8 Vacation Weeks?

A half century or so ago futurists and the popular press predicted that the proportion of work in our lives would be decreasing. Machines would do more and more, producing more and more, and so people could do less and less.

Machines are doing more and more, producing more and more. Why aren't people working less and less? What did the futurists get wrong?

Can Putin Blackmail Trump?

Can Putin Blackmail Trump?

By the inaugural week we have reason to be concerned that Putin may have some serious material with which to blackmail Trump. Even Trump's initial denial that Russia interfered in the election, however, already gave Putin some leverage. Trump's post-briefing concession that the Russians did it, lessens the damage Putin could do by publicly elaborating just how much the Russians did. Even if not one word of the Steele report turns out to be accurate, Trump's use of the Russian-hacked emails on the stump, his reluctance to admit Russian involvement, and his less than honest attempts to minimize election effects have left him vulnerable to Putin's future extortions.

Electoral College Democracy

Some failing arguments in defense of the Electoral College, and a look at two possible steps forward without constitutional amendment. Possible, but not likely.

Again Cause in Fact

There is a dispute among criminal law theorists of particularly theoretical bent as to whether a reasonably rigorous and intuitively sound definition can be given of “cause in fact.”  I here argue the negative.

Death in the Desert

The desert traveler’s water bottle maliciously tampered with by one malefactor and then stolen by another has bedeviled the jurisprudence of criminal causation since 1929.

Interacting Poisons and Criminal Causation

A recent case note: “United States v. Smith, District Court Denies Oxycodone Distributor's Post-trial Motions in Penalty-Enhancement Case.” 129 Harv. L. Rev. 2297 (June 10, 2016) makes the point that understanding such statutory language as “result” and “causes” in terms of “but for” causation runs into a problem with concurrent sufficient cause cases, what philosophers call “overdetermination.” I want to take a look at some hypothetical poisoning cases, with independently sufficient causes, to pursue some issues of interaction, timing, and the general way to approach hard questions of criminal causation.

With intent to kill, and knowledge of efficaciousness, Badone surreptitiously mixes substance A into Vic’s green tea. Without knowledge of this, Badtoo, with similar intent and knowledge, puts substance B into the cream that Vic used with his tea.

Lottery Democracy

Adding a little randomness to democracy is sometimes to the good. Why, when, and how far?

The Second Amendment: Not One or Two but Three Rights

I will here argue that the Second Amendment constitutionalizes three rights.  One is a right to participate in the military, in Latin jus militiae, from its origin in Roman law. The second is a right to possess weapons for the purpose of the participation guaranteed by the first right. The third is a broader right to possess weapons unrelated to matters military. I do not argue this interpretation because I think it conduces to good public policy. What it does is make good sense both of the operative language of the amendment and its militia clause.

Unlawful Immigrants and Tax Cheats

People are residing in the United States unlawfully and people are cheating on their income tax returns. Relatively few in either category face enforcement action in any given year. Many conservatives, including one candidate for president, favor a dramatic increase in immigration enforcement and a dramatic decrease in tax enforcement. Can this be justified?

Rationality and the Belief in a Greatest Prime – with Side Trips to the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Kavka’s Poison

A puzzle current in some philosophical circles involves an eccentric billionaire who offers you a million dollars if you come to believe that there is a greatest prime number. This is, of course, a little challenging for you, knowing as you do Euclid’s proof that there are infinitely many primes.

Doctrinal Adam & Eve and Genetic Adam & Eve

Many of those who believe that the Book of Genesis is divinely inspired also believe in evolution, and, in particular, in the descent of humankind from earlier species going all the way back to the unicellular. “God behind evolution” and “guided evolution” are popular ways of expressing their view. Most of these believers take the Adam and Eve story to be a myth, albeit a myth bearing important spiritual truth. Some, however, take Adam and Eve to be actual, particular persons, even though they had biological parents. How well does this sit with the science of human pre-history?

Self-Ownership and Individual Rights

It has been said that all rights we have as human beings are rooted in individual self-ownership. If taken literally, and not as some sort of metaphor, this cannot be right.

Some talk suggesting self-ownership is the source of rights might be nothing more than rhetorical flourish, elaborating the observation that we have rights with respect, e.g., to our hands that are, in many respects, at least as strong as our rights with respect to our gloves. That I will not dispute. I here take issue only with those, perhaps few in number, who have been carried away and truly embrace the theory that the fundamental basis of individual rights is a property right of self-ownership

Of Voter Identification, Fraudulent Votes, and Closed-Out Voters

I hope you will all agree that increasing the stringency of voter identification requirements at the polls may prevent some unlawful votes, but will also result in some perfectly lawful votes not being cast, as voters, from various causes, do not get the right identification in their hands by election day.

What it seems, naively, should determine the policy for identification stringency is minimizing the sum of unlawful votes plus lawful votes that would otherwise have been cast but were not as result of the stringency. Naive or not, this is the voter identification policy test for which I will argue.

The 2nd Amendment Right to the Open Carry of Swords and Shoulder Launched Missiles

As everyone knows the Second Amendment is not about guns. The objects of the right it constitutionalizes are “Arms.” Swords, bayonets, and hatchets, as well as muskets, were the arms of the Revolutionary War. Current arms of individual use include body armor, hand grenades and shoulder rockets.

The fact that shoulder rockets are a tad dangerous and of little socially approved private use surely has some bearing on their constitutional status. A frank recognition of this fact will show the supporter of the open carry of large clip semi-automatics that his mode of constitutional interpretation is not so different from those who contend that the carry of said semiautomatic, and perhaps also of a Saturday night special, is outside constitutional protection.

Fear of Fascism and Fear of "Fascism"

I have both a fear of political and social trends reminiscent of fascism in the United States and Europe and a fear of overusing the word the word “fascism.” Much use at all, I think, would be overuse.

God and the Friendly Universe

The proposition that the universe is hospitable to human life, potentially supporting a teleological argument for God, is implausible at a first glance. So far as we now know with certainty, the universe is congenial to human life only on the rind of one minor planet of one among 10²¹ stars. Almost all of the real estate of the universe is distinctly hostile to biological organisms, and this will remain the case as a matter of the percentages even if the recent success in finding extrasolar planets turns up some that are good candidates for life.

A second glance, however, reveals some developments in theoretical cosmology that may seem to give currency to the old saw that God made the world for our use and enjoyment. Theists (and a few of the very few deists there are) draw our attention to the “fine tuning” of certain physical constants and initial conditions, a fine-tuning that makes the existence of life possible.