Martha Nussbaum’s “influential capabilities approach” offers us a powerful, universal standard of justice. The approach builds off of pioneering work by Amartya Sen in economic development. Much of the contemporary interest in the capabilities approach has focused upon how we might spell out a list of precisely which capabilities must be made universally available and protected, a list that Sen has not provided himself. Nussbaum’s list of capabilities is arguably the most successful attempt at defining these capabilities. In this paper, I will argue for a new problem with the approach that raises new questions about the capabilities approach more generally.

This article employs Gerald Dworkin’s analysis in “Is More Choice Better Than Less” (1982) in order to understand the challenges and consequences of having enlarged the scope of military options to include precision guided munitions (PGM) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capabilities.1 Following Dworkin, we argue that having more strategic choices are not always better than less for a number of specific reasons. Unlike many philosophical discussions of the use of these military technologies, ours is an account of the prudential challenges and consequences of having widened military options, and the analysis self-consciously avoids making moral or legal claims concerning their use. It is simply an examination of the claim that widening the range of tactical options, to include these new weapon systems, is necessarily better. We will follow the outline of Dworkin’s argument in describing the current politico-military affairs. Our intent is to expose the practical costs associated with having tactical choices that include the use of these technologies. To be clear, the argument does not bear directly on the use of these technologies, but rather on the challenges associated with merely having the choice to use these weapon systems. Faced with the challenges associated with the option of having PGM or UAV capabilities, it may be judicious for countries to freely limit the military choices that they have at their disposal. This is not self-evident since the weapon technologies in question are not the sort that poses a clear and present danger to a large number of citizens, as was the case with nuclear weapons limited in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) of the 1970s or 1980s. Therefore a more detailed philosophical argument is warranted. A final caveat needs to be stated: The argument is to be taken as a whole since no single aspect of Dworkin’s analysis is definitive in regard to the question of whether more choice is indeed better than less. Each aspect does, however, contribute to a deeper understanding of what enlarging the set of tactical means for modern militaries.

Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on music, when brought together and then related to his similarly scattered remarks on culture, show a deep and abiding concern with music as a repository and conveyer of meaning in human life. Yet the conception of meaning at work in these remarks is not of a kind that is amenable to brief or concise articulation. This paper explores that conception, considering in turn (a) the relational networks within which musical meaning emerges, (b) what he calls a discernible “kinship” between composers and styles, (c) the embodied character of musical content, (d) the close and too-little-appreciated intricate connections between our capacity to make sense in music and in language (and the frequent dependence of the former on the latter) and the interaction of the musical theme with spoken language, and (e) music as a culturally-embedded phenomenon that is, as he said of language, possible only in what he evocatively, if too briefly, called “the stream of life.”

This paper discusses the philosophical view proposed by Gregory Mankiw in his recent article “Defending the One Percent” (JEP 27-3, 2013): the just deserts view in application to income distribution. Mankiw’s view suffers from three unsolved problems: the Criteria Problem, the Measurement Problem, and the Problem of the Missing Desert Function. The overall conclusion is that Mankiw’s normative “Defense of the One Percent” fails quite drastically.

In this essay I record some thoughts about my book An Essay on Free Will, its reception, and the way analytical philosophers have thought about the free-will problem since its publication 30 years ago. I do not summarize the book, nor am I concerned to defend its arguments—or at least not in any very systematic way. Instead I present some thoughts on three topics: (1) The question ‘If I were to revise the book today, if I were to produce a second edition, what changes would I make?’; (2) Aspects of the book I should like to call to the attention of readers (aspects that, in my view, readers of An Essay on Free Will, have been insufficiently attentive to); and (3) The course of the discussion of the problem of free will subsequent to the publication of the book.