Benjamin Studebaker

Yet Another Attempt to Make the World a Better Place by Writing Things

Tag: Coercion

January 29, 2015

It’s Time for the State to Put an End to the Anti-Vaccination Movement

Measles is on the move again in Disneyland. Unvaccinated children are catching and spreading the disease in California. Things have gotten so dire that kids with cancer (whose immune systems are compromised and so cannot be vaccinated) are afraid to go to school for fear that unvaccinated children will give them the disease. The risks are not merely to unvaccinated children, but to the general population as a whole–unvaccinated people provide breeding grounds for long forgotten pathogens, giving them opportunities to mutate into strands that the vaccines do not protect against. Enough is enough. It’s time for the state to put an end to this nonsense. Here’s why.

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August 19, 2014

The Rick Perry Indictment Conundrum

Earlier today, I was asked for my opinion on the Rick Perry indictment. Texas Governor Rick Perry was indicted for abusing official capacity and coercing a public servant. Is there anything to the charges?

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February 5, 2014

A Critique of Habermas

Today I’d like to put on my democratic theory hat and offer a critique of Jürgen Habermas‘ theory of deliberative democracy. Habermas gives his answer to the question of what kind of government we ought to have by appealing not to any specific goal or end that he thinks government ought to have, but by instead offering standards by which we can judge a procedure through which one would determine one’s society’s ends. I argue that Habermas relies too much on moral intuitionism to substantiate these standards and consequently provides insufficient reason why we should choose to determine our form of government by appeal to procedure rather than by appeal to result.

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