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Comment by scythe | Hacker News Reader

You can't reduce philosophy to the people involved. After all, the foundations of neoconservatism drew heavily on ideas introduced by Trotskyists [1]. That's about as dramatic of a political about-face as it gets.

1: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/1995-07-...

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The person I'm responding to is wrong on both the people and the substance.

I'm wrong that Nussbaum wants people to involuntarily serve the needs of others?

You have a very simplistic understanding of what is voluntary and what is involuntary, and taking such an understanding as the basis of your moral and political thinking can only lead to utter confusion.

What's hard for you to understand about the word "voluntary?"

A man points a gun at me. He says: Give me the money, or die. I make the voluntary decision to give him the money.

how the word "voluntary" is actually used by people is complex in interesting ways. People report (degrees and shades of) involuntariness and coercion in lots of different situations. For example "I hate this shitty job but I don't have a choice". So as a matter of language use there's lots of different kinds of involuntariness that doesn't cleanly map onto any libertarian-ish view. At which point libertarians tend to make the move of proposing their own, much more narrow definition of "voluntary". Which implicitly embeds normative assumptions that would need to be argued for, which libertarians fail to do.

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