PEA Soup

Blog Symposium on Libertarianism and Land

Over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, we're running a symposium this week on the topic of "Libertarianism and Land," featuring essays by Eric Mack, Hillel Steiner, Fred Foldvary, Kevin Carson, and David Schmidtz.

The first essay went up this morning: "Natural Rights and Natural Stuff," by Eric Mack. The other essays will go up one per morning for the rest of the week.

Consumers’ Obligations in Labor Disputes

Over at The Business Ethics Blog, Chris MacDonald has a very interesting post on ethical issues surrounding the labor dispute at the Westin St. Francis, the site of the 2010 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.  Specifically, he asks what obligations the existence of such a dispute might impose upon consumers.  Should consumers stay away from businesses when unions are calling for a boycott, or are on strike?

Chris raises a number of good points in his post, and I won’t repeat them here.  And I won’t try, just yet, to answer the big question of what consumers have all-things-considered reason to do in such situations in general, or in the situation faced by the APA in particular.  But I do want to set out a few questions that I think are worth addressing in the course of trying to answer that larger question.  I’d be curious to hear what PEA Soupers think about them, as well as what they think about the other issues Chris raises.

Price Gouging Redux

Apropos our earlier conversation about price gouging, I've written up a full length paper on the topic.  I got quite a bit out of the our discussion in the comments section even if, presumably, I didn't get what many of you wanted me to get out of it, viz., that price gouging is clearly immoral. :-)

You can access the paper here.

The States of Nature

After having contributed one whole substantive post to this blog, I’m now going to take selfish advantage of the power of this public forum to request our readers’ help with an issue I’ve been working on.  I have an idea that seems original to me, but want to be sure I’m not overlooking important work already developed in the literature.

By no means am I an expert on either Locke or Hobbes.  But my understanding is that the scholarly consensus is that these two philosophers offer us very different, and mutually incompatible understandings of the State of Nature (SoN).  I think the assumption of mutual incompatibility is mistaken, and that that this has important implications for contemporary moral and political debate.

How Useful is Moral Theory for Applied Ethics?

The following are some thoughts I've been mulling over in anticipation of a lecture I will be giving at CSU Long Beach's Applied Ethics Center next Thursday.   I've been thinking about these issues with regard to business ethics, but I think the concerns extend to most other areas of applied ethics as well.