Marx and Equality (Was: Why Decry the Wealth Gap?)

DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com
Thu Jan 27 00:10:33 PST 2000


If this is a call for expressions of interest count me in. I had a post all fired up and ready to go, but then thought (uncharacteristically) that it might be polite to read more than ten pages of Jerry Cohen's book on the subject before shooting my mouth off.

Just one heads-up:


>Right, the NP is hard to make out beyond what one might call basic needs.
In
>a 1993 paper, from Libertarianism to Egalitarianism, Social Theory &
Practice
>1993, I distinguished between "use" needs and "harm" needs. IIn the sense
of
>use needs, I need anything I require to do something I might do, whether
it
>would harm me or or not and whether i want to do it or not. My example
there
>was that I need Agent Orange to defoliate my neighborhood, although I do
not
>want to do it and doing it would harm me. A less wacko use need is, say,
>Sammy Sosa's need for bats to hit home runs. He can't do it without a bat,
>although not doing it would not harm him. Then there are harm needs. These
>are needs for things without which I would be harmed. Food, shelter,
medical
>care, etc., are obvious examples.

I seem to remember a long, fruitless and only initially amusing discussion on this lists about whether toilet paper would be a basic need. It was a bit like my MBA, in that I don't remember anything about it other than I don't want to go through it again.


> first-come/first-served, whatever

third-post/that's all

dd

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