Adam Lovett

My book came out today!

@frasmcm @bswud How are you thinking of the electoral incentives here? If the above issue polling really captured everything important (obviously doubtful!) one would think that constituency-level elections would push MPs to support more homebuilding in their localities.

@AdamLovett91 @bswud elite cues also play a role here, nobody is making the effort to explain why building is the solution and all parties are opportunistically nimby when it suits them partly due to the incentives of the electoral system and the structure of local govt

This is correct. But opinions don’t come like manna from heaven. The size of the growth coalition is driven primarily by how many have a stake in growth. Our institutions are uniquely bad at sharing the proceeds of growth. One reason is enervated local government.

@wrwveit I was a little puzzled by this. "Intrinsic value" is something of a term-of-art. I would think the natural Humean idea would be to say the intrinsically valuable things in Eric's sense are things we have a distinctive kind of attitude towards, e.g valuing them for their own sake.

I wrote a new essay responding to Eric Schwitzgebel: Is Diversity Intrinsically Valuable? If you can provide me with better arguments for the existence of intrinsic values I'd be happy to be convinced. walterveit.substack.com/p/is-diversity…

Robbie Kubala, @AdamLovett91 and I have a new paper forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy. It’s called “On the value of irreplaceable objects” – Here’s a thread! 1/n philpapers.org/rec/KUBOTV

@rbnmckenna86 My sense is that it never got *that much* uptake among political scientists. It was kind of cloistered in psychological journals and popular publications. Good, I think, for our assessment of political science...

Reading about moral foundations theory. It's not very plausible, is it? Psychologising political ideologies was probably a mistake.

@hanno_sauer Or a less realistic case: I know arguing for more frequent trash collect throws Terry into a murderous rage, weirdly. I argue for it anyway. Terry predictably murders someone. Terry is obviously responsible. But I think I am too. I'm blameworthy for making an argument here.

@hanno_sauer That doesn't seem right to me. Suppose I'm, say, the US president. I know publicly defending some foreign dissidents will get them imprisoned. I do it anyway. Aren't I responsible for this? It seems that i've done something wrong for which I'm blameworthy.

@BrandonWarmke @resistancemoney I'd be pretty surprised if the egalitarians you have in mind were against public health interventions.

@resistancemoney Esp luck egalitarians!

A great test case for egalitarians: What should we say about the fact that men’s lives are roughly 1/10th shorter than women’s? What policies should be implemented to overcome this inequality in life expectancy?

@xphilosopher I suspect many US students did History and English because they did them at school. As college got more expensive, these students chose more career-focused majors. Philosophy had fewer such weakly attached students—it had much lower enrollments—and so didn't have them to lose.

The discipline of philosophy is not experiencing the kind of catastrophic collapse one finds for more prototypical humanities disciplines (English, history, classics, etc.) Question: What specific features of philosophy are making it fare better than these other disciplines?

@danwilliamsphil I think it's kind of the opposite. Some people think that "X was arrived at democratically" tells decisively in favor of X. But, sometimes, X is something they really don't like! So instead of revising their normative commitments, they revise the claim that X is democratic.

I suspect many within the expert class simply dislike democracy but can't admit this (even to themselves), so they develop this whole technocratic language - "misinformation", "disinformation", etc. - to frame undesirable outcomes of democracy as threats to it.

@rbnmckenna86 Debatably, the BJP. The relevant left wing economic issues involve massively expanding a system of direct welfare payments for poor Indians.

What are good examples of populist right parties who campaign on left wing economic issues and actually deliver, to the extent that any party ever delivers, when in power?

How much will we learn about the U.S. public from American election results next week? Not much, I argue. Commentators will tell us these results teach us big things about how ordinary Americans think about politics, but we should probably ignore them.

@deeesharp In Mondragon and I think La Lega a council is elected then the council appoints the managers, either from within country members or from outside. So here the workers only have indirect power to fire a manager. If a worker gets fired from this role I think they retain their stake.

@deeesharp It depends. In the plywood cooperatives in the US the manager was a hired hand from outside. They stayed on average for about two years. by then, the workers would likely have fired them and they’d have to go elsewhere. It was (by self-report) a pretty unsatisfying job.

@BrandonWarmke Truth be told I think that’s also a good criticism of Chandler’s book. Still, the project of applying abstract political theories to concrete issues seems like a pretty good one to me.

@AdamLovett91 Rawls was working backwards.

I don't want to slam this new book on Rawls too hard (third generation Rawlsians have to make a living, too), but in what sense do philosophers and political theorists need to rediscover Rawls?

@BrandonWarmke Perhaps you’re a little optimistic about the speed at which academic work makes it into party platforms.

@AdamLovett91 That’s been done and it was the 1972 Democratic Party platform.

@WallfacerAG Yeah, I just think sortition is undemocratic. Mainly that’s because I think democracy requires that citizens rule themselves—that there is an actual causal connection between what citizens want and what the government does. And sortition blocks such a connection.

@AdamLovett91 I agree that elections are not necessarily undemocratic! There is a stronger claim made by some—that elections are uniquely democratic—which I think is false. I'm mostly surprised when I see people claim that sortition is undemocratic, or haven't heard of it, etc.

There is a notable tradition in political thought claiming that sortition—that is, using random lotteries to select public officials—is truly democratic, while elections are not. So it's always surprising to see political philosophers identify democracy with the use of elections.