/lit/ - Literature

>>20241892
No worries OP. I don't have time to reply with anything substantial at the moment but maybe i'll type something if the thread is still up later. As for your cold, i hope you get better soon.

>>20241411
and, uh- you're welcome too i guess.

>>18585748
I was thinking of including Schmitt's argument from exception in the rule of law section.

>>18584756
Just making sure. I don't like to mislead people.

>>18585797
>In my experienced, woke Twitter girls
God help me. I was hoping for disinterested polisci students taking an elective.

Political philosophy is a continuation of moral philosophy, dealing with normative ordering of society. Most advocates of moral philosophy believe in some kind of moral realism. If you believe in moral realism you believe in universal and necessary moral truths. Universal and necessary truths are the domain of first philosophy—that is, metaphysics. Thus, it is the way (and some would say only way) to discover and ground the correct ordering of society. Such has been the tradition from Plato to Rawls (though Rawls is more influenced by epistemology as first philosophy).

>>16606062
My familiarity with the subject stems more from public choice theory and macro-econ i read some years ago. I (shamefully) actually haven't read any outright ancap works of political philosophy, but from some of the libertarian stuff i've read i imagine ancaps simply take these arguments to their logical conclusion. So, uh, take it all with a grain of salt. I'm not sure how relevant this is to actual ancap claims.
In a perfect market, every exchange is pareto optimal—that is, there is no exchange where both parties are not at their maximum marginal utility. There cannot be any exchange that reduces the marginal utility of anyone. This is because of the premises of the perfect market: actors are perfectly rational, taken to mean that they will always make decisions in the pursuit of maximising their utility; actors are perfectly knowledgeable, so they know all the relevant information regarding the respective value and bargaining position of each exchange; there no externalities, so all exchanges will only effect the individuals it involves, no costs will be incurred or passed onto third parties; all exchanges are voluntary, so no individual will be forced to make an exchange if they don't want to. Taken together, this results in an actor who will only make exchanges which objectively maximize their utility, and will never be affected by other's exchanges (directly, anyway). Further, it is a system where there is no free-riding or rent-seeking. So, necessarily, every exchange is pareto optimal because no rational actor would voluntarily conduct an exchange that was detrimental to them. This is how the free market is thought to be able to perfectly regulate behaviour in a peaceful and universally beneficial way. Now clearly there is no such thing as the perfect market as none of these conditions are likely to ever be met. When these aren't met, there occurs what is termed market failure: when market mechanisms do not produce pareto optimailty. This typically occurs when there are asymmetries in information, monopoly and monopsony pricing, externalities, and public goods. These prevent pareto optimal transactions from being reached, which undermines claims that under voluntary exchanges everyone is better off. It is typically held that governments are the solution to preventing/minimising market failure.
Externalities occur when there is a difference in the marginal social cost and the marginal private cost. A perfect example of an externality would be a chemical factory paying someone to dump their waste into a river. For the factory and the dumper this is an extremely cost efficient method of waste disposal as the chemicals are washed downstream and have no impact on either party. So for the factory and the dumper, there are almost no costs. However, the costs here don't simply disappear. Rather, they are transferred to a third-party—someone who isn't party to the transaction—down-stream.