Very hard to be taken seriously as a philosopher if you don't admit your mistakes.
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher who wrote on every subject he could get his hands on. He is well known for his lone venture into political philosophy; Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In that book, he argues for a minimalist state that never infringes on personal liberties. At one point, he even muses over how an income tax is akin to part-time slavery, as a worker is paid in wages and a part of them are given to the state without the chance to opt out. His ideal state wouldn’t have any taxation.
His adjustments to his earlier stances are subtle but notable. He doesn’t fundamentally change his position but rather admits problems with it. He endorses the idea that the state can ban discrimination against various groups, admits that the realization of personal freedom may require mandated group effort, and yields to the use of taxation or mandated donation to specific charities as a means to assure society continues to function. While in later interviews he assured readers that he had not abandoned libertarianism, he took the edge off a few of the more hard-line views as he aged.
http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/four-philosophers-who-realized-they-were-completely-wrong
Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
An Astonishing Level of Humanisation
I've mentioned the difficulties of both promoting/censoring violent action on social media before and I can't really think of much ...
-
"To claim that you are being discriminated against because you have lost your right to discriminate against others shows a gross lack o...
-
Where Americans think Ukraine is These are the guesses of 2066 Americans as to where Ukraine is. Only 1 in 6 were correct. Presumably the...
-
Hmmm. [The comments below include a prime example of someone claiming they're interested in truth but just want higher standard, where...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.