I like this:
For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.
“Us” being us libertarians. This is in connection with some row at Harvard about reserving the gym for women, for a bit, or something. Being, like Ravikiran Rao, a libertarian, I can be easygoing about the details, although a link from Rao would have been good.
To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people’s religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.
Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases. There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!
Heh. Read the whole thing (which is not a lot longer) here. And while you’re there, wander around the rest of the blog, which is one of my favourites, aside from its regrettable habit of not supplying links, to such things as stories about Harvard gyms being reserved for women.
I particularly enjoyed an earlier posting that Ravikiran Rao wrote, some time last year I think, which I cannot now find (so no link to that from me – sorry), in which he blamed nuclear weapons for the miseries of the world. The argument went approximately like this. People are happy when progressing, and one of the easiest ways of making progress is to make the kind of progress involved in clearing up after a major war, by rebuilding buildings, baby booming, and so on and so forth. But, nuclear weapons have done away with major wars, progress has therefore become a lot more awkward, and people are consequently more miserable. I suspect that there may be quite a bit of truth to this surmise, but true or not, I enjoy the way that Rao’s argument arrives at a deeply respectable modern orthodoxy (nuclear weapons: bad!) via heresy (nuclear weapons have unleashed a serious modicum of world peace).
That last heresy is one that I agree with. I accept the orthodoxy about the niceness of world peace, and say: well done nuclear weapons. Seriously, I think that nuclear weapons have changed the world from a place in which major powers prepared for world war at all costs, to a place in which major powers avoid world wars at all cost.
I remember seeing this a while back. Here’s a link to the gym story.
Quite so.
If a private property owner (individual or institutional – such as with a church or university) wishes to have mixed gyms or single sex gyms on their property – that is up to them.
“But Harvard, and the students who go there, get a lot of taxpayers money”.
Then stop taking money from the taxpayers and giving it to the Harvard people – it really is that simple.
After all Harvard has greater financial assets than any other university on the planet – so it, and any students it wishes to attend, have no need of the government.
Such universities as Hillsdale do not get any tax money at all – and the students who go there get no tax financed “loans” or other government aid.
So there is no excuse for money to the Harvard people.
A libertarian analysis is I think insufficient here because it ignores the wider cultural context regarding the intent of Muslims to Islamise the west. It isn’t a question of whether Harvard has the right to make special rules for Muslims. It’s the question of what kind of idiots are prepared to make those rules and how long it’ll be before we have to form ourselves into mobs with blazing torches and burn the west’s academic institutions to the ground, so to speak.
So the libertarian answer is answering its own question, not the question that everybody else is thinking about.
Well said, Ian B.
Having been born during the 50’s, when the Soviet Union would have destroyed the U.S. had it been able to do so, I literally owe my life to American nuclear weapons and the men who were prepared to use them.
Yeah, being free to make a bad choice doesn’t excuse, say, Harvard from censure for its new pro-segregation policy.
Communist China and its neo-Soviet ally seem to have an idea of avoiding world wars at all costs that is quite different from Brian’s.
I have nothing against Harvard’s idiotic segregation policy – that is: the policy is idiotic, but they are within their rights as there are no laws against idiotism.
But, we are correct in telling them “We told you so”. In the 1960s they were the shrill avant-guard in pushing for anti segregation laws. Libertarians yelled that private rights were abused. They said: private rights don’t exist and don’t matter.
Now, suddenly, they adopt a libertarian position and say their property rights trump anti-segragation laws.
I would, for once, bend my libertarian principles and try to force them to obey their anti-segregation laws. I can’t stand the temptation.
It is and it isn’t. As you are fond of noting, given the choice we would not start from here. Alas, ‘here’ is where we all happen to be at the moment.
Cutting Harvard off from the taxpayer dole would pretty much end any business that the state would have forcing anti-segregation laws on them. (Moral right. Legal is a little different, as we all know.) However, the right to be stupid does not carry with it freedom from condemnation for stupidity, as I frequently am reminded when I exercise my right to be stupid.
And shutting down an entire gym to half of the student body during 5-6 hours of high-traffic time each week, in order to accommodate six people who ended up never going, is stupid. It merely encourages those six and their backers to make more and more foolish and encroaching demands.
Paying Danegeld is inconsistent with getting rid of Danes.[1] Counterproductive, even.
A properly-run school would have told them that if they wanted to work out without men around they could join Curves. If they wanted to go to school without men, they could transfer to one of the Seven Sisters colleges.
[1] I don’t know why the creator of the expression hated Danes so much. Between all of the hiding Jews from Nazis, sticking up for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, brewing Carlsberg, and putting the motoons in the paper, they seemed okay to me.
Who says I am in favour of “anti segregation” statutes Sunfish?
If Harvard wishes to say “no people with the family name of Marks need apply” (and they did have an anti Jewish quota for many years) that is up to them – as long as they are not getting taxpayers money (either directly, or indirectly via the student subsidies).
By the way, in modern “law” you are mistaken:
As I suspect you know – under the 1964 “Civil Rights” Act the government can attack a private organization that does not take a Dollar of subsidy from the Federal taxpayers.
That was one of the reasons that Senator Barry Goldwater voted against the Act.
Never trust anyone who says “I am against quotas – I want to get back to the great Civil Right Act of 1964” 0 for quotas (and all the rest of it) are the direct consequence of the 1964 Act.
As for Muslims:
If Muslims want to set up univeristies were (for example) women have to dress in tents – that is up to them.
As long as no one is forced to go to these universities and no taxpayers money gets to them.
On Harvard:
Many of the same people who denounce its various demented activities then donate to the place.
Ayn Rand’s “Sanction of the Victim” still seems to have not sunk in to the American “business community”.
To complain that a place is very leftwing (or daft in some other way) and then give money to the place is……..
Well I think people can fill in the blank.
Probably something to do with their old habit of demanding protection money (Danegeld) for not stealing what was left of your country… But I am sure you know that.
I’ve always thought it was odd that Carlsberg seems to be endorsed as the official beer of the England football team at every major tournament. Why not something English?
I suspect that either I wrote too fast or you read too fast. I did not claim that you favored such laws. Also, if you’ll re-read what I actually did write:
What I said was, if you take away Harvard’s reach into the public treasury, then you eliminate any moral right of the state to force Harvard to comply with laws on segregation. Then, I said “Legal is a little different…”
I apologize if I was unclear, but I don’t think I was.
I apologize for misreading you Sundfish.