Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Experimental cancer drugs: Laetrile [Business Ethics Cases series]

My video lecture on the experimental cancer drug Laetrile, part of the Business Ethics Cases series.

Contents:
1. Context and defining the issue.
2. The argument for legalizing Laetrile.
3. The argument for banning Laetrile.
4. Comparing the arguments for and against Laetrile.

The entire lecture (65 minutes total):

Supplements:
Tom Beauchamp, “Manufacture and Regulation of Laetrile” [pdf].
Summary of context: Identifying the issue and parties involved.
Summary: Flowchart of the pro and con arguments.

Go to the Business Ethics Cases series. Full playlists at YouTube.
Go to the Philosophy of Education lecture series.
Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.

Interview with Robert Salvino

Robert Salvino (Economics, Coastal Carolina University) spoke at Rockford College on “Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.” In this follow-up interview, Salvino and I discuss entrepreneurial success traits, the institutional framework within which entrepreneurship best flourishes, the relative success of market-friendly versus government-chosen entrepreneurship policies (including examples such as Google, Apple, Solyndra, etc), the effect of employer-provided healthcare on self-employment rates, Salvino’s suggested general entrepreneurship-friendly public policies, and China’s success in lifting 600 million people out of poverty over the last generation.

The talk was sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship.

The Climate of Collectivism [EP audiobook]

This is the fourth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]

From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics [mp3] [YouTube]
The argument of the next three chapters [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence [mp3] [YouTube]
Back to Rousseau [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau and the French Revolution [mp3] [YouTube]
Counter-Enlightenment politics: Right and Left collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant on collectivism and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Herder on multicultural relativism [mp3] [YouTube]
Fichte on education as socialization [mp3] [YouTube]
Hegel on worshipping the state [mp3] [YouTube]
From Hegel to the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
Right versus Left collectivism in the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the real socialists? [mp3] [YouTube]

Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]

Forthcoming:
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]

Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.

What philosophers believe today

Philosophers David Bourget & David J. Chalmers have a paper forthcoming in Philosophical Studies that presents the results of a survey of 1,972 contemporary philosophers, most of them in the Anglo-American world. The survey’s main results on thirty issues:

1. A priori knowledge: yes 71.1%; no 18.4%; other 10.5%.
2. Abstract objects: Platonism 39.3%; nominalism 37.7%; other 23.0%.
3. Aesthetic value: objective 41.0%; subjective 34.5%; other 24.5%.
4. Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes 64.9%; no 27.1%; other 8.1%.
5. Epistemic justification: externalism 42.7%; internalism 26.4%; other 30.8%.
6. External world: non-skeptical realism 81.6%; skepticism 4.8%; idealism 4.3%; other 9.2%.
7. Free will: compatibilism 59.1%; libertarianism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; other 14.9%.
8. God: atheism 72.8%; theism 14.6%; other 12.6%.
9. Knowledge claims: contextualism 40.1%; invariantism 31.1%; relativism 2.9%; other 25.9%.
10. Knowledge: empiricism 35.0%; rationalism 27.8%; other 37.2%.
11. Laws of nature: non-Humean 57.1%; Humean 24.7%; other 18.2%.
12. Logic: classical 51.6%; non-classical 15.4%; other 33.1%.
13. Mental content: externalism 51.1%; internalism 20.0%; other 28.9%.
14. Meta-ethics: moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%; other 15.9%.
15. Metaphilosophy: naturalism 49.8%; non-naturalism 25.9%; other 24.3%.
16. Mind: physicalism 56.5%; non-physicalism 27.1%; other 16.4%.
17. Moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0%; other 17.3%.
18. Moral motivation: internalism 34.9%; externalism 29.8%; other 35.3%.
19. Newcomb’s problem: two boxes 31.4%; one box 21.3%; other 47.4%.
20. Normative ethics: deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%; other 32.3%.
21. Perceptual experience: representationalism 31.5%; qualia theory 12.2%; disjunctivism 11.0%; sense-datum theory 3.1%; other 42.2%.
22. Personal identity: psychological view 33.6%; biological view 16.9%; further-fact view 12.2%; other 37.3%.
23. Politics: egalitarianism 34.8%; communitarianism 14.3%; libertarianism 9.9%; other 41.0%.
24. Proper names: Millian 34.5%; Fregean 28.7%; other 36.8%.
25. Science: scientific realism 75.1%; scientific anti-realism 11.6%; other 13.3%.
26. Teletransporter: survival 36.2%; death 31.1%; other 32.7%.
27. Time: B-theory 26.3%; A-theory 15.5%; other 58.2%.
28. Trolley problem: switch 68.2%; don’t switch 7.6%; other 24.2%.
29. Truth: correspondence 50.8%; deflationary 24.8%; epistemic 6.9%; other 17.5%.
30. Zombies: conceivable but not metaphysically possible 35.6%; metaphysically possible 23.3%; inconceivable 16.0%; other 25.1%.

I’m in the minority on 16 of the issues, the majority on 10, and on four issues I don’t have an informed view.

Minimum wages [Business Ethics Cases series]

My video lecture on minimum wages, part of the Business Ethics Cases series.

Contents:
1. The standard employer/employee relationship.
2. The argument for minimum wages.
3. Contrasting the initial arguments’ claims about economics, ethics, and politics.
4. The economic argument against minimum wages.
5. Minimum wages: ethics and politics.

The entire video (53 minutes total):

Supplements:
Linda Gorman on “Minimum Wages” (at the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics).
Summary flowchart of the arguments for and against minimum wages.

Go to the Business Ethics Cases series. Full playlists at YouTube.
Go to the Philosophy of Education lecture series.
Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.

More on Marx and violent revolution

In an earlier post on Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, I offered two explanations for why the 1848 Marx held that communism could only come about by violent revolution.

In response to that post, Tibor Machan pointed me to this passage from an 1872 speech Marx gave in Amsterdam:

“We are aware of the importance that must be accorded to the institutions, customs, and traditions of different countries; and we do not deny that there are countries like America, England (and, if I knew your institutions better, I would add Holland), where the workers can achieve their aims by peaceful means. However true that may be, we ought to recognize that, in most of the countries on the Continent, it is force that must be the lever of our revolutions.”[1]

Interesting exceptions. America, England, and Holland are, arguably, the countries in which capitalism had achieved the most development. Machan’s explanation is that Marx came to believe that in such advanced countries workers’ advancement could come about by gradualist methods: “Bit by bit, step by step, at municipal, county, state, and the federal levels of government, socialism can be instituted by democratic process.”[2]

(And adding up the bits, according to my math Marx was right and we’re over 50% there.[3])

Sources:
[1] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, second edition. Edited by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 643.
[2] Tibor Machan, Revisiting Marxism: A Bourgeois Reassessment (Hamilton Books, 2006), p. 156.
[3] “Marx’s 10-point plan 50% realized in USA.”
[4] And just to be clear: “Am I really a Marxist revolutionary?”

The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [EP audiobook]

This is the third chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]

Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition [mp3] [YouTube]
Setting aside reason and logic [mp3] [YouTube]
Emotions as revelatory [mp3] [YouTube]
Heidegger and postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Positivism and Analytic philosophy: from Europe to America [mp3] [YouTube]
From Positivism to Analysis [mp3] [YouTube]
Recasting philosophy’s function [mp3] [YouTube]
Perception, concepts, and logic [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of Logical Positivism to Kuhn and Rorty [mp3] [YouTube]
Summary: A vacuum for postmodernism to fill [mp3] [YouTube]
First thesis: Postmodernism as the end result of Kantian epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]

Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]

Forthcoming:
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]

Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.

Tragedy of the Commons [Business Ethics Cases series]

My video lecture on the Tragedy of the Commons, part of the Business Ethics Cases series.

Contents:
1. What the tragedy is.
2. The free-market solution.
3. The socialist solution.
4. Comparing the two solutions.

The entire video (43 minutes total):

Supplements:
Garrett Hardin on “The Tragedy of the Commons” (at the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics).
Summary flowchart of the arguments.
Elinor Ostrom on “Ending the Tragedy of the Commons.” The Nobel-prize winning economist explains how, with proper governance, humans are capable of finding peaceful solutions to the problem of resource scarcity.

Go to the Business Ethics Cases series. Full playlists at YouTube.
Go to the Philosophy of Education lecture series.
Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.