Dan Cole's Dubious Memorabilia

 

 Aurelian Craiutu, Mike McGinnis and I have just published in Critical Review  a new co-authored article entitled, "Embracing Liberalism's Complexity." Here is the abstract: Liberalism offers communities an eclectic set of core values and diverse institutions that may improve the chances that people with varying beliefs and life goals can live and work together in relative peace and prosperity. Yet liberal democracy is under threat, once again. Anti-liberal populists on the right and radicals on the left both dismiss core civil and political rights, but for different reasons: unrealistic expectations for moral consensus or equality of outcomes, respectively. Similarly, too many self-described liberals act illiberally, allowing their enthusiasm for a particular cause to justify sacrificing other core values. This essay has three purposes: (1) to counter recurring forecasts of the death of liberalism; (2) to clarify that liberalism’s normative, political, and institutional

I've been off social media (FB and I'gram) since August. I got tired of feeds containing more ads than posts. I've been planning for some time to get back to my dubious memorabilia for some time, but I've been busy teaching this semester and trying to finish a chapter of a book I've been working on for the past few years. More on that later. For now, I just want to announce my return to this blog, which no one reads (and that's the way I like it).

Congratulations to Sadia Kahn, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation today in Informatics. The topic of her dissertation was the threat posed by AI to individual autonomy. She described the risks and addressed too many policy proposals to count using multiple methods including Elinor Patrons Ostrom's IAD framework and Institutional Grammar (which explains my presence on her committee). Sadia is a great scholar and a terrific person and I learned a great deal from her.