phlogma

the point of the death penalty
The meaning of capital punishment—insofar as it has a meaning and is not a reflex—is concerned with the distribution of responsibility. The field of responsibility is limited to moral agents. Constituted authorities are not moral agents. Individuals, who are, may or may not be missing the requisite nerve. Usually, they […]

Notes on Jeffrie G. Murphy, “Marxism and Retribution”
Editor’s note: The contract theory of punishment gets a well-deserved lashing from Murphy with a borrowed Marxist whip. But Luno lashes out indiscriminately with the utmost discrimination: Let’s go after the theorists…
218-222
The only moral way to punish is the Kantian way but the Kantian way forbids the use […]

Notes on M. O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations” (with Wittgenstein)
Drury recalls what Wittgenstein said about Otto Weininger.
106
He alludes to von Wright’s remarks on Wittgenstein’s high regard for Weininger. Wittgenstein recommended Sex and Character to Drury as “a work of remarkable genius” and Drury remembers that Wittgenstein said that Weininger, at twenty-one and before anyone […]

Notes on Mill, On Liberty, chapter 5
Self-sale into slavery
Not only persons are not held to engagements which violate the rights of third parties, but it is sometimes considered a sufficient reason for releasing them from an engagement, that it is injurious to themselves. In this and most other civilized countries, for example, an engagement by […]

Notes on Catherine MacKinnon, “Pornography: On Morality and Politics”
264
In contemporary industrial society, pornography is an industry that mass produces sexual intrusion on, sexual access to, possession and use of women by and for men for profit. It exploits women’s sexual and economic inequality for gain.
This understanding of the reality of pornography must contend not only […]

Notes on:
Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide.”
44
I do not share the general pessimism about the possibility of resolving the issue of abortion and infanticide because I believe it is possible to point to a very plausible moral principle dealing with the question of necessary conditions for something’s having a right to life, where the conditions in […]

Notes on:
Carole Pateman, “Defending Prostitution: Charges against Ericsson.”
[See also Ericsson on prostitution.]
561-2
Feminists do not see prostitution as unacceptable because it distributes benefits and burdens unequally; rather, to use Ericsson’s language of inequality, because prostitution is grounded in the inequality of domination and subjection. The problem of domination is both denied by and hidden behind Ericsson’s […]

Notes on:
Allan Janik, “From Logic to Animality or How Wittgenstein Used Otto Weininger”.
To begin with we must grasp that Weininger is not concerned with making an empirical generalization about the mentality of actual people, rather, he is producing an ‘ideal type’ or model of what it is to be immoral in itself. The point […]

From a 1984 article in Esquire entitled, “Why Men Love War”, by William Broyles Jr., a well-known screen writer and decorated Vietnam War veteran:
…Like all lust, for as long as it lasts it dominates everything else; a nation’s other problems are seared away, a phenomenon exploited by kings, dictators, and presidents since civilization began.
And I […]

Luno is clearly willing to accept the condemnation of pornography expressed in Longino’s article, indeed, the rightness of the censure he finds rather overdetermined. But the condemnation is a condemnation of something much more than many feminists and their critics, alike, seem willing to admit.
—Editor’s note
 
Notes on:
Longino, Helen E. “Pornography, Oppression, Freedom: A Closer Look”.
Immoral…
41-2
The […]