Harry Frankfurt has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on...
Here's a taste:
> Insofar as a person loves himself — in other words, to the extent that he is volitionally wholehearted — he does not resist any movements of his own will. He is not at odds with himself; he does not oppose, or seek to impede, the expression in practical reasoning and in conduct of whatever love his self-love entails. He is free in loving what he loves, at least in the sense that his loving is not obstructed or interfered with by himself.
RIP.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Love-Princeton-Classics/dp/06...
As On Bullshit explains, there’s the truth teller who is only concerned with the truth. The liar who tells the opposite of the truth, and thus must know the truth. Finally the bullshitter who neither cares about the truth or lies but rather the appearance of truth. He could be telling the truth, he could be lying, and he doesn’t care as long as you believe him.
And not just the overt stuff either, but a whole slew of religious philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and more.
Stugeon's Law holds. There's also the whole publishing / academic clique environment which incentivizes such styles. And there are refreshingly clear and accessible authors in philosophy from both the present time and the past. I've been following a number of podcasts for a few years now which tend to be both reasonably high quality and quite listenable: Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy, Stephen West's Philsophize This, a set of podcasts each from Nigel Warburton nd David Edmunds (Philosophy Bites, Philosophy Sites, and a few more) and David Runciman (Talking Politics, History of Ideas, Past Present Future, etc.). Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and Will Durant's Story of Philosophy are also engaging.
A number of these are surveys of philosophy rather principle works, but there's at least work in the genre that's readable.
This book essentially concatenates two essays, "Economic Equality as a Moral Ideal", and "Equality and Respect". In the first essay, Frankfurt argues that economic equality is less important than the worst-off having enough. As a result, political appeals to the importance of equality are bad philosophy. In "Equality and Respect", he generalises this to a general attack on the concept of egalitarianism.
The basic problem with his work is that the social world is so incredibly abstracted that the truth value of his claims is simply irrelevant -- they have no insight to offer about our actual world. In his essay, he considers different distributions of resources, but gives no serious thought to the actual mechanics of how resources are distributed.
This is fatal to his argument because resource actual distributions are endogenous, rather than exogenous, and so they can't be compared in a vacuum -- to say something meaningful, you genuinely have to take seriously the fact that control of resources is a form of power, and that the powerful tend to use their power to reinforce and maintain their status. So politics and policy -- things he explicitly denies having anything to say about -- are fundamental to understanding the issues involved.
Even making the tiniest possible effort towards taking these issues seriously blows up his argument. For example, suppose that we have people living in a perfectly competitive market. This is about the smallest possible step towards social realism that you can possibly take!
But even here, Negishi's theorem tells us that at a Walrasian equilibrium, the implicit social welfare function maximises the sums of each person's utility, scaled by the inverse of each person's marginal utility of wealth. Now, suppose our people have a utility function which is logarithmic in their wealth -- U(w) = log(w). Then their marginal utility U'(w) = 1/w, and the inverse of that is w. That is, ideal markets value individuals linearly in proportion to their wealth. So the utility function of the ideal market says that saving Jeff Bezos's life is worth the lives of 1.2 million Americans of median wealth, 8 million Poles, or 36 million Indians.
It makes one think that Frankfurt must have used "On Bullshit" as an instruction manual when writing "On Inequality".
Just googled it for a refresher and found this[1] comprehensive but readable explanation of the above idea. The obituary refers to it briefly as well.
May he rest in peace.