Are humans too bad to act justly?

Gornick has written a review, marked by genuine curiosity, of Sandel’s new book, Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? The book tours through the philosophical history of justice from the ancients to Rawls and beyond. Gornick, though, admits that she is a newcomer to the subject, and considers a general puzzle: how does all this theory square with the imperfection of the real world? More precisely, Gornick observes that for all the attempts that religious leaders and scholars have made to codify the norms of justice, real people tend to break the rules consistently.  She has her finger on an important problem in political philosophy and ethics, and one that often widens the gap between the theory of justice and practical matters like living a just life and creating a just community. The problem is moral psychology.

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Obligations in Afghanistan

In the current issue of the Boston Review, Nir Rosen argues that the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan is misguided and likely to fail.  Several respondents have varying analyses of Rosen’s piece: some agree with his conclusion but thinks he misses a few points; others claim that he is too pessimistic. Aziz Hakimi thinks Rosen is right to doubt the success of an American-lead COIN operation in Afghanistan, but claims that Rosen is wrong in marking Karzai’s government as illegitimate—there is hope for politics in Afghanistan, says Hakimi, as long as the central government devolves power to local officials. Hakimi, however, is not clear about what responsibilities the United States has in Afghanistan, if any. This omission clouds the discussion of what the United States should expect to accomplish in Afghanistan.

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Do soldiers believe in counterinsurgency tactics?

In the second of his two recent contributions to the Boston Review, Nir Rosen describes his experiences following a team of marines in Afghanistan who trained and fought alongside a force of Afghans. For most of the article, Rosen sticks to the facts and avoids drawing many explicit conclusions. However, it is reasonably clear that Rosen is skeptical of the ability of the US to succeed in Afghanistan, and he suggests several views in the article: first, it is misguided to optimistically compare the counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Afghanistan’s to those in Iraq, second, the state of Afghanistan’s police and armed forces is very poor, and third, the military does not fully support COIN. This last suggestion is unfair.

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Free Books and One Laptop Per Child

Brewster Kahle recently announced at the Boston Bookfair that his organization, the Internet Archive, was collaborating with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation to provide the Internet Archive’s collection of 1.6 million e-books to users of the OLPC laptop at no cost. On May 15^th, 2008 the director of the OLPC announced that the organization would no longer only be using a distribution of the open-source operating system, Linux, but would instead be shipping some versions of the OLPC laptop with Windows as well. The decision prompted controversy within the organization, which had previously been committed to open-source software—that is, software whose code is available for public inspection, and which can be shared, altered, and re-distributed. Richard Stallman argued in the Boston Review’s 2008 Winter edition, that the inclusion of Windows constituted a violation of the organization’s commitment to open-source software. Read the rest of this entry »