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Anyone can criticize existing procedures, fault them for moral blind spots, and propose criteria and means for further inclusion. What is problematic is not the claim that present arrangements have failed but the claim that the critic and
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Akiva Malamet liked this
“The auction proposes what the envy test in fact assumes, that the true measure of the social resources devoted to the life of one person is fixed by asking how important, in fact, that resource is for others. [The auction] insists that the cost, measured in that way, figures in each person's sense of what is rightly his and in each person's judgment of what life he should lead, given that command of justice.”
― Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality
― Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Bird by Bird
― Bird by Bird
“it was Böhm-Bawerk who defeated them so effectively with economic theories and critiques such that Marxism did not take root in economics to the degree that it has in other professions, such as sociology and history.10 Using impeccable logic, Böhm-Bawerk showed that the workers who are employed by the entrepreneur are paid immediately for the “full value” of their labor, so long as that value is correctly calculated by including the time element. After all, in most production processes the input of labor hours doesn’t immediately yield a finished good.”
― The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World
― The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World
“Perhaps it is more generally true that in order to learn from tradition, one has to be able to push against it, and not be bowed by a surfeit of reverence. The point isn’t to replicate the conclusions of tradition [...], but rather to enter into the same problems as the ancients and make them one’s own. That is how a tradition remains alive.”
― The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
― The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
“I believe that the methods needed to understand ourselves do not yet exist. So this book contains a great deal of speculation about the world and how we fit into it. Some of it will seem wild, but the world is a strange place, and nothing but radical speculation gives us a hope of coming up with any candidates for the truth. That, of course, is not the same as coming up with the truth: if truth is our aim, we must be resigned to achieving it to a very limited extent, and without certainty. To redefine the aim so that its achievement is largely guaranteed, through various forms of reductionism, relativism, or historicisim, is a form of cognitive wish-fulfillment. Philosophy cannot take refuge in reduced ambitions. It is after eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that it is not what we are going to get.”
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Political Philosophy and Ethics
— 6150 members
— last activity Dec 22, 2025 10:06AM
Study and discussion of the important questions of ethical and political philosophy from Confucius and Socrates to the present. Rules (see also the ...more
Nick’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Nick’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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4,746 books
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1,260 friends
2,223 books
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43 friends
873 books
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186 books
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153 friends
1,147 books
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251 friends
558 books
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17 friends
1,690 books
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449 friends
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