interpreting Estlund

[Nat!!]

When discussing the general acceptability condition in "Why Not
Epistocracy", Estlund gives a few examples of objections which can be
uncontroversially categorized as either acceptable or unacceptable.
Bizarrely enough, he thinks that it cannot be a reasonable objection
to a political system that "it gives too much power to the fairies."
Now, I would have thought nearly everyone (human) would accept this as
a legitimate objection. I would have real qualms about being involved
in a political system which gave too much power to the fairies.
Potential paper topic?

[Peter Yong]

No. There is a catagory mistake you are missing. Fairy power can't be limited by legislation since it comes directly from Oberon (king of the fairies). Thus, it is unreasonable to raise the objection.

[Nat!!]

I see your point. I still have a couple of concerns, though.

A) I think it distorts the text to attribute this point to Estlund.
Norms of converstational implicature indicate that he is pretty
clearly attributing promotion of the general welfare to the extensive
use of fairy power.

B) Fairies don't exist. Perhaps this isn't the most telling point. But
one might worry that the person designing the proposed political
system were a paranoid schizophrenic.

On Feb 19, 11:59 pm, Peter Yong <pierre.luna...@gmail.com> wrote:
> No. There is a catagory mistake you are missing. Fairy power can't be
> limited by legislation since it comes directly from Oberon (king of the
> fairies). Thus, it is unreasonable to raise the objection.
>

[Peter Yong]

Granted, (B) is a side issue, but I'm surprised that you could have been doing philosophy so long and still claim that fairies don't exist. The following Quine style criterion of ontological commitment seems unobjectionable:

 

For any true sentence of the form Fa, the singular term "a" must have a referent.

 

So, for example, if it is true that Debussy is awesome, then "Debussy" cannot be a vacuous term.

 

But, we have true sentences of the form Fa whose singular terms purport to refer to fairies. For instance, "Puck is mischievous", "Oberon is a jerk", and "Ariel is a lacky" are all true sentences. We would accept them, while ruling out others such as "Puck is the Prince of Denmark" or "Oberon was the auther of Waverly."

 

But then, according to the criterion of ontological commitment, fairies exist. QED.