Little Minds -- Julian has a good analysis of that ever-abused Emerson quote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...," which, as it is usually used, is the last resort of the incoherent. (Julian is complaining, again, of the NRO crowd.)

I really love the quote, properly understood. (Go see it.) It's about having the courage to assail your own convictions, and thus your own identity. It's a little mind that craves so badly to BE something, to BELIEVE a meaning-conferring doctrine, that it cannot countenance the prospect of admitting error or ignorance or limitation and thus cannot do justice to the world by admitting new facts and revising old opinions.

Folks seem to miss the crucial difference between doing one's best to be consistent at any given time, and being doggedly consistent OVER time, which is foolish. Inconsistency over time is required by the effort to be consistent at a given time. New information comes to light, and that has to be integrated with one's prior beliefs, and when it is, some of those old beliefs have to be jettisoned or revised to comport with the new information. Emerson is arguing FOR unfoolish synchronic consistency--for holding to what makes for the most coherent story NOW in light of one's ever-shifting context of evidence--and its incompatibilty with the sort of dogma that rules the little minds of the folks at NRO .

X-Men and the Circumstances of Justice -- There is a massive rash of philosophical comic geekdom breaking out in the blogosphere over the arrival of the new X-Men movie. See, for example Matthew Yglesias and Jacob Levy. As I am a philosophical geek who bought his first issue of X-Men almost 20 years ago for I think $.65 (It had the Juggernaut in it), I will do my part...

Among Hume's "circumstances of justice" is the requirement that there be no great asymmetries in power. "Moral standing" requires that a party to an agreement be able to contribute and gain roughly equally from cooperative agreements, and be roughly equally disposed to comply with those agreements. We are not in the circumstances of justice with young children and the severly handicapped, and this entails that for certain purposes they lack moral standing. Now, are homo sapiens and homo superior in the circumstances of justice with respect to one another, or do we mere humans lack moral standing relative to certain mutants with massive powers? Given a contractarian framework sensitive to the Humean requirements, is the moral message of the X-Men even intelligible? Does the massive asymmetries in power introduced by the story render the underlying analogy with the struggle for civil rights moot?

Discuss.

The Dissident -- Check out the great new campus publication produced by the Critical Review Foundation. 50,000 copies of the first issue has gone out to fancy schools, in an attempt to reach out to bright undergrads who rarely have a chance to hear ideas that fall anywhere outside of the center-left to radical-left range that dominates in the universities. The Dissident is the smartest campus think mag I've ever seen. Indeed, it's smarter than lots of think mags for adults. And I'm not saying that just because of my piece trashing the World Bank and the IMF is in it. Jeff Friedman's long piece is a great summary of his extremely provocative post-post libertarianism, and a good taste of what one gets at the Critical Review seminar (highly recommended for undergrads in poltical theory and thinky journalism.)