Tag Archives: liberty

life, liberty, and bodily integrity: thoughts on routine infant circumcision

A while back, I shared this blog post on Twit­ter: the only nec­es­sary argu­ment against rou­tine infant cir­cum­ci­sion Although I’ve lost track of the @replies, I recall that there was sig­nif­i­cant push­back from a cou­ple of my fol­low­ers, and so I wanted to say more about the issue. Basi­cally the argu­ment offered at L’Hôte is this: “In a

book review: Schmidtz and Brennan's "A Brief History of Liberty"

Actu­ally, this is more of a book rec­om­men­da­tion than a book review. David Schmidtz is one of my favorite philoso­phers; it was his book “Social Wel­fare and Indi­vid­ual Respon­si­bil­ity: For and Against” (writ­ten with Robert Goodin) that first began to wake me from my dog­matic polit­i­cal slum­bers circa 2006, when I was an under­grad back

I don’t know how free Amish women are

Bryan Caplan writes: Ques­tion: How free are Amish women com­pared to other Amer­i­can women?  I say they’re just as free.  I also say, against Will Wilkin­son, that their “for­mal free­dom” is morally sig­nif­i­cant. If the Amish used threats of vio­lence to keep their women in, it would be a ter­ri­ble crime.  As mat­ters stand, though,

is cultural libertarianism entailed by political libertarianism?

A cou­ple of months ago, I had a debate with a lib­er­tar­ian friend over whether cul­tural lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is correct/good/necessary/whatever. At the time, I was sure that I was what you would call a “cul­tural lib­er­tar­ian fem­i­nist,” as spec­i­fied in the Lib­eral Fem­i­nism entry on the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy (a rep­utable source). Recently, Kerry How­ley