The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer

Author:Michael Huemer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2013-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

1Though I have followed the established terminology here, it should be noted that the terminology is misleading, since it falsely suggests that one of the doctrines is philosophical but not political, while the other is political but not philosophical. In fact, both kinds of ‘anarchism’ are philosophical and political claims.

2U.S. Code, Title 18, section 2422: ‘Whoever knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual to travel in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or Possession of the United States, to engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.’

3See Huemer 2010a, 361–2.

4See Huemer 2010a, 356–7.

5See Huemer 2010a for elaboration.

6Tullock 1987.

7See Friedman 1989, 42–4, for discussion.

8This example is from Huemer 2010b, which defends the argument of this subsection at length.

9Murphy and Nagel 2002, 173–7. Compare Holmes and Sunstein 1999, chapter 3.

10Locke 1980, chapter 5.

11U.S. Census Bureau 2011b, 310, table 467.

12See Huemer 2003 and forthcoming for arguments against egalitarianism.

13Singer 1993, chapter 8; Unger 1996.

14The formulation in terms of ‘expected benefit’ is intended to allow for the possibility that a coercive act might be justified by virtue of its merely reducing the risk ofof something very bad. It need not be clear that the coercive act in fact prevents the bad event; however, it must at least be reasonably clear that the coercive act reduces the risk. If the coercive act creates some other risk, it must also be reasonably clear that the reduction in the original risk outweighs the newly created risk.

15Lerner 1944, chapter 3; Nagel 1991, 65.

16Murray 1984. See also Olasky 1992; Schmidtz 1998.

17Murray 1984, 8–9.

18See Jencks 1992, chapter 2; Murray and Jencks 1985; Cowen 2002, 39–44.

19Schmidtz 2000; Cowen 2002, 44–9.

20Horton et al. 2009. Other extremely cost-effective programs include zinc supplementation, iron and folate fortification, salt iodization, and deworming – all in the developing world (Bhagwati et al. 2009).

21Borenstein 2008. In other words, the EPA considers a regulation to be worthwhile if it imposes a cost of no more than $6.9 million for every American life that it is expected to save.

22See Goodin 1988 (but note the last sentence of the article, which comes close to taking back what the rest of the article seems to say). See also Wellman 2000.

23Though Unger does not discuss the Charity Mugging case directly, his remarks about other cases (1996, chapter 3) suggest that he would endorse the argument mentioned in the text.

24Unger (1996, chapter 2) discusses a similar pair of examples and considers several potentially relevant differences, including essentially (a) and (b) above. He finds (a) morally irrelevant (42). Roughly, he holds that the distinction between an ‘emergency’ and a ‘chronic problem’ consists merely in the fact that the victims of the latter have been suffering for a longer time; but this surely cannot lessen the reasons for helping victims of chronic problems. It is not obvious, however, that Unger’s account of the we treat this as distinction must be accepted.

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