SDBP

How do you think a stateless society would attempt to handle the kinds of pollution externalities that don't seem to be easily covered by the Coase theorem? The sorts of scenarios I had in mind are (a) types of pollution contributing to global warming, or (b) harmful microbeads in soaps that contribute to the pollution of lakes and rivers, when used by too many people.

EDIT: ALSO, what is your favorite class in WoW, and how do you think the most recent expansion compares to the others?

Does this mean you think people cannot voluntarily organize and pool funds to release an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary before an election? Do you think people who do this (or an equivalent action) should be labeled as criminals or their works censored until after the election?

(I ask this because that's literally what Citizen's United was about. "Hillary: The Movie is a 2008 political documentary about United States Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. It was produced by Citizens United. The film was scheduled to be offered as video-on-demand on cable TV right before the Democratic primaries in January 2008, but the federal government blocked it.")

I always thought your book (Machinery) and Huemer's (Problem of Political Authority) complemented each other extraordinarily well. A lot of the stuff in yours fits in nicely to his general method of argumentation, particularly when it comes to the second part of his book.

I read a criticism you had of Michael Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism, and it involved "evolutionary debunking" in the sense that evolution is supposed to provide us a good undercutting defeater for belief in objective morality. I think you had an email conversation with Huemer about this, and you came away still convinced it was a problem.

Two questions on this.

• (1) Would you be able to reveal any of the details of the general form this conversation took? It's main points?
• (2) Have you read Huemer's (recent?) paper relating to this topic (called "A Liberal Realist Answer to Debunking Skepticism: The Empirical Case for Realism")? If so, what did you think? (Also, have you read Russ Shafer-Landau's paper on the subject, called "Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism, and Moral Knowledge"?)

It is also known as Ethical Intuitionism or Moral Non-Naturalism. (Note: the "non-naturalism" isn't referring to supernaturalism).

Basically: Goodness and badness are real properties in the world. These properties aren't reducible to non-evaluative properties (in other words, that moral properties are more than the sum of their parts, and cannot be described merely by talking about the parts or the sum of the parts). At least some of these properties are knowable through intuition (or 'initial intellectual appearances.') Philosopher Michael Huemer (who is Bryan Caplan's friend) has written a book on the subject called Ethical Intuitionism. (Huemer has also written a book on libertarianism, called the Problem of Political Authority. I mention it because Caplan is also a libertarian.)