Today I’d like to talk a little bit about value monism–the philosophical idea that all of our moral beliefs ought to be reducible to a single guiding principle or value. There is a tendency, in some circles, to see value monism as inherently dogmatic or unreasonable, to prefer value pluralism, the idea that there are multiple independent moral values. I’d like to counter that argument and illustrate some of the ways value monism advantages us by clarifying our thinking and simplifying the moral landscape.
Author: Benjamin Studebaker
Blog News
As is my custom, I like to keep readers abreast of any reason that arises that slows my usual writing pace. At the moment, the issue is a group of three papers I have to get written before the end of the quarter at the University of Chicago. Combined, it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 words of writing. At present, one of the three is done, the others are partway complete. I expect to do some blogging beginning on Monday, with the regular rate of postage resuming sometime in the next week or two. Once I finish these papers, I will be on break through the beginning of January, and will likely post more than usual. I hope the reader will be kind enough to be patient with me while I get this work out of the way.
Do We Treat College Students like Indentured Servants?
I recently heard someone compare the modern student experience in the United States to indentured service. This comparison seems hyperbolic on first analysis, but I want to take it seriously. To what extent, if any, is the process of taking out student loans or working unpaid internships similar to the experience of poor 18th century opportunity-seekers in the United States?
Continue reading “Do We Treat College Students like Indentured Servants?”
What’s Really Going on with Obamacare?
I’ve had a couple requests to do an examination of the Obamacare rollout. I haven’t commented to this point primarily because the returns are still early. There’s a lot of additional data that will come out in the coming months and a lot of unknowns–what will healthcare.gov look like a month from now, let alone by the end of March, the current sign-up deadline? Nevertheless, there are some useful things that can be said not merely about the rollout, but about the way in which the rollout is being covered in the popular press.
Resisting Stagnation and the New Dark Age
There’s a lot of talk lately by Summers, Krugman, and others that we may be in a period of secular stagnation, in which the rate at which the economy grows in the wealthiest countries falls substantially and permanently. Observing this, some are quick to point to demography as the cause. If populations are not growing as swiftly as they once did, it would indeed make sense that growth rates would fall. Under this thinking, slower growth isn’t a problem, because per capita growth is theoretically still strong–the economy is growing slower in aggregate, but it’s growing at the same speed relative to the size of the population. The trouble is that on further investigation, the demographic explanation does not sufficiently account for what’s going on. Not only are growth rates slowing, but per capita growth rates are slowing, and have been slowing for a while, beginning far before the recent economic crisis. This throws Kurzweil’s theory of accelerating returns into doubt, and undermines the central precept underlying our capitalist society–that the labors of this generation today are meant to make the next generation’s lives go better. If stagnation is the way of the future, it’s a much more serious problem than we presently recognize, one that ultimately threatens not merely our dreams of better lives for ourselves, but the very stability of our civilization.
Continue reading “Resisting Stagnation and the New Dark Age”
