Sunday/Free Will

[Foreign aid is] “an excellent method for transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.” ― Lord Peter Bauer

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There is a parliamentary investigation linking slavery opponent Edmund Burke to slavery through his Caribbean plantation-owning brother. Error used to be a fault. Now it's infective. Or genetic. Or geographic. But one thing is sure, it's not personal

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A subtler truth is that a lot of the cheating will be modest and marginal rather than blatant. Consider computer cheating in chess. If you find a way to consult the computer every move, you will win every game with near-perfect play. You will also be caught immediately. So you might cheat for only a few moves every game — enough to help but not so much to be detected. Given that both sides will employ countermeasures, and detect suspicious instances of clearly superior performance, a lot of cheating will be pretty mediocre, and deliberately so.

As decisive moments approach, games and competitions might become less honest — and tensions in the crowd will rise as people wonder whether they are watching the real thing or some AI-aided simulacrum. Brilliancies will forever be called into question. Dishonest players, in turn, will have to carefully consider when to exercise their de facto “cheating privileges.”

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Foucault argued that children could give sexual consent. In 1977, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and other intellectuals, Foucault signed a petition to the French parliament calling for the decriminalization of all "consensual" sexual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen, the age of consent in France.

Intellectuals.

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Sunday/Free Will

Eve's Question regarding free will in "Paradise Lost" is, "Can anyone unequal be free?" Her question is one that challenges hierarchy and appears on every page of Milton's epic. 

Milton, a Puritan, was asking if politics is moral.

Notions of freedom held by most classical liberals are generally regarded by modern political scientists as negative in that freedom was defined as the absence of coercion by individuals against one another. This is the freedom of Locke, Smith, Hayek, and Jefferson.

But in the 1800s, there was a profound, and influential, new approach.

The concept of freedom associated with what most people in Britain and America today call liberalism is often attributed by political scientists to the Hegelian philosopher T. H. Green (1836–1882). Appalled by abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and growing alcoholism among Britain’s industrial working class, Green challenged the classical-liberal concept of freedom in his speech “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract” (1881), wherein he coined the terms negative freedom and positive freedom and defined the latter as “a power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by his fellow-men, and which he, in turn, helps to secure for them.” 

So Green transformed liberty into a collective condition and thus created a semantic nexus between modern liberalism and socialism. As Hayek observed in Constitution of Liberty (1960), “This confusion of liberty as power with liberty in its original meaning inevitably leads to the identification of liberty with wealth; and this makes it possible to exploit all the appeal which the word ‘liberty’ carries in the support for a demand for the redistribution of wealth.”

So is individual freedom possible without material equality? And can material equality be created and enforced without restricting freedom? Milton wrote pamphlets justifying regicide and had great faith in the uninfluenced individual. But that was early in his life. He eventually lost faith in individual decision and supported government run by more and more concentrated elites.

The rigidly moral Milton came to believe it was better to serve on Earth, especially if he could rule.