phlogma

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 […]

Aristotle on matricide

Notes on: Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870-1939

Notes on:
Lars O. Ericsson, “Charges against Prostitution: An Attempt at a Philosophical Assessment”
[See also Pateman on prostitution.]
Is “mercenary sex” undesirable? Should it be eliminated? Ericsson defends it against many classic charges. Most interesting to me is the source of our discomfort with it.
… I shall argue, [337] the major culprit is the hostile and […]

Weininger writes:
Nonetheless, every man evaluates somehow or other each of his traits, even each of his morally indifferent character traits…. The omen of this evaluation, I now believe, determines, even essentially decides, the tone of a person’s inner life. To be sure, it is only the man, not the woman, who has an inner […]

Notes on Jean Hampton’s moral educationist theory of punishment

Why mother’s may kill, but governments may not…