Liberty Fund

Agnes Callard on Aspiration

Where do our deepest personal values come from? Can we choose those values? Philosopher and author Agnes Callard of the University of Chicago talks about her book, Aspiration, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Callard explores the challenge of aspiration–who we are versus who we would like to become. How does aspiration work? How can we […]

Winning the Court, Losing the Constitution

The circumstances surrounding the Supreme Court vacancy demonstrate that many have rejected "the immutable fairness of following the law."

Freedom for Associations

We have to balance between the interests of individuals, the state, and associations.

Imprisoning the Patriarchy

Gruber’s work may be interpreted as an example of a former radical who has modified her views in light of experience.

Liberalism and the Common Good

Post-liberal proposals tend to leave the term “common good” undefined or ambiguous, and we should consider why.

Ruth Scurr, "J.S. Mill & Life Writing" (August 2020)

Welcome to our August 2020 edition of Liberty Matters. In this essay and discussion forum Ruth Scurr, a fellow and director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge discusses JS Mill and the concept of what she calls “life writing,” According to Scurr life writing is an area of scholarship that involves biography, autobiography and memoir. Her essay focuses on Mill’s Autobiography and the approach that Mill took to crafting what he believed would become the main narrative of his life. Her essay, and the three splendid response essays from our other contributors, raise interesting questions about the outside forces that influence how we view historical figures as well as the caveats we should use while reading “life writing”. As liberalism is increasingly under attack in the modern world, discussing Mill, arguably the 19th century’s most famous English liberal, is particularly relevant.

A Key Characteristic of a Banana Republic

Over at The Money Illusion, fellow EconLog blogger Scott Sumner lays out 21 characteristics of a banana republic. He points out that it’s not a complete list. I agree.

In particular, there’s one characteristic missing, a characteristic that has been quite relevant in the United States and in major parts of the world since early April.

Who Owns Your Genes?

Doctor He Jiankui was sentenced to a three year prison term, fined 430,000, and fired from his academic position as Associate Professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. Did he engage in groping a patient? No. Poisoning a client? Again, no. According to the official Chinese Xinhua News Agency, Dr. He and two others, Zhang Renli and Qin Jinzhou, were convicted of gene editing fetuses.

His clients were a healthy mother and a father who was HIV positive. Dr. He engineered the genes of their twin girl babies so they would be resistant to HIV..

At the outset, this appears to be an agreement between consenting adults to engage in a capitalist act. The couple knew of the risks involved in this new medical technology. According to the defense, He did not hide these from the mother and father. They agreed to the procedure since they weighed the dangers of AIDS for their daughters more heavily than the perils of the new, unproven, technique.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Part VII, Section III, Chapter III

Of the Systems which make Sentiment the Principle of Approbation

An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726, 2004) (Francis Hutcheson)

A seminal text of the Scottish Enlightenment which was written as a critical response to the work of Bernard Mandeville and as a defense of the ideas of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury. It consists of two treatises exploring our aesthetic and our moral abilities.