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I have more or less dropped for the time being my weekly podcast roundup. There are so many to listen to now, and they tend to cover so many topics that I have not worked out a way that I am happy with writing them up. I wouldn’t want just to give a list of links, and there is just too much ground to cover even to mention all the topics briefly. Once I work out a happy medium, I will resume the roundups.
I did want to share this podcast though since two of the questions that Yaron answered this week are ones that I submitted or are identical to those I sent. They are:
What is the moral status of advocating for boycotting an immoral business?
This question came out of a discussion I had some months ago about whether it was wrong for a public figure to advocate for a boycott. I came away with a sense I had the right answer, advocating for a boycott is moral, but I wasn’t able to articulate my reasoning for it. In brief, Yaron’s answer is that it is moral to do so as long as the boycott does not become rights violating. Yaron was careful to make the distinction between rights violations and immoral acts, pointing out that while all rights violations are immoral acts not all immoral acts are rights violations.
I also posed this same question over at Philosophy in Action and Dr. Diana Hsieh gave essentially the same answer, though she had much more discussion about the question, given the longer format of the podcast.
How should we think about normalizing relations with Cuba?
The short version of the question left out a lot of the context I had included, but Yaron’s answer covered it all. My concern with the question was how to start thinking about the proper way to deal with countries who aren’t an actual threat to us, but are totalitarian, unfriendly or both. In his answer, Yaron breaks things down into three basic types of countries: enemies (e.g. Iran and North Korea), friends and allies (e.g. Great Britain and Japan), and totalitarian/unfriendly countries which are not direct threats (e.g. Cuba and Venezuela). A proper foreign policy is in part determined by this classification.
The short version of Yaron’s answer, which I was pleased to see was pretty much in line with my own thoughts. For those countries that are our enemies, you do not have any dealings with them at all. There would be no embassies and trade would be prohibited. With our friends, it would be just the opposite. We would maintain embassies and freely trade with them. The final category, countries that aren’t outright enemies but also do not protect individual rights, we would not have diplomatic relationships. We would also not prohibit trade, but it would be made clear that these countries don’t respect rights so you would be trading at your own risk. (Sort of a “don’t come crying to us when they nationalize your oil wells” sort of thing.)
Yaron also answered questions on:
What is your view on Emmanuel Kant’s influence on the response of the West to environmentalism and radical Islam?
What will be the relative size of the financial sector in a free, private economy?
In the transfer from the mixed economy to capitalism, what would happen to the gold that the government has? Would it be distributed to people relative to the amount of taxes they paid?