Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In reply to boydstun. Thanks for those references. I’m pretty sure I’ve read the Branden piece, but I don’t remember the argument, and my copies of The Objectivist Newsletter are sitting in storage a few towns away, so they’re n…

It’s been raining a lot where I live, and that’s given me both the impetus and the material for reflecting on one of the examples Sher gives in chapter 3 of Desert of a case of desert meant to illustrate what he calls “the expected consequence” model. I’ll have more to say about chapter 3,…

This is intuitive: if person A needs something desperately and B can easily supply it, then B is obligated to A to supply it. Scanlon calls this The Rescue Principle (easy rescues are the paradigm case, though it probably applies to cases that are not …

In reply to <a href=”https://radicalclassicalliberals.com/2021/08/11/triage-and-the-rise-of-the-delta-variant/comment-page-1/#comment-161″>Daniel L. Schmutter</a>. Also to be clear, I agree that there is good supply-based reason to tolerate markets in organs. The point of the example is just to show that triage decisions are to some degree inevitable and that sometimes persons’ choices reasonably bear on how those decisions are made.

In reply to <a href=”https://radicalclassicalliberals.com/2021/08/11/triage-and-the-rise-of-the-delta-variant/comment-page-1/#comment-161″>Daniel L. Schmutter</a>. Markets might be the best way to allocate scarce resources. But it’s nevertheless true that some people with strong preferences to access a good will lack the ability to pay for the goods under market allocations. I think it makes sense to say of those people that their…

This analysis ignores the upward sloping supply curve. Especially in the case of organ transplants, a true market in organs would increase the quantity of organs available. In the economic sense, all resources are scarce. Markets are still the best way we know of to not only allocate such scarce resources but also to maximize…

It is a truism that when coveted resources are scarce, some people’s preferences must be frustrated. Only the stakes change when access to the relevant resources means the difference between life and death. When scarcity forces us to choose who gets the resources necessary to sustain life, we face pressing distributional questions about how they…

Thanks for these stimulating reflections, Irfan. I just wanted to mention a couple of writings that relate to these issues. For the Objectivists, there is the piece by Nathaniel Branden in the December 1962 issue of THE OBJECTIVIST NEWSLETTER addressin…

I don’t know about desert, but as far as rights go, Rand says: “Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival.” It sure sounds like she’s at least grounding rights on needs. LikeLike