collected snippets of immediate importance...


Monday, July 23, 2012

nozick (excerpt: 'how liberty upsets patterns')

(163) why 'forbid' capitalist acts between consenting adults'? in other words, maintenance of a given distribution requires continuous intervention (Wilt Chamberlain, etc., etc.)

[but, it should be clear that Wilt is a terrible analogy for social institutions, and the 'choice' that people make. if we could agree that people voluntarily opt for work in which they consistently lose 25 cents to their boss, then this has some merit. but that's just a terribly impoverished conception of what makes an act voluntary.

in response, Nozick's analogy--that the condition of the low-wage worker is like the condition of a man stuck with an unattractive bride--is idiotic, for three reasons. first, he takes it to suggest that unfreedom can only be the product of deliberate human intervention, which is simply untrue. second, our intuitions from one don't travel to another, because the stakes of the two realms are different. third, it depends on our assuming a limited supply of good jobs, which is not at all a natural fact in the same way that the distribution of attractiveness/unattractiveness is.]


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