Utopia, you are standing in it!

Rawls, John. 1958. “Justice as Fairness.” The Philosophical Review 67 (2). [Duke University Press, Philosophical Review]: 164–94.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2182612.

Section I claims that the fundamental idea for the concept of justice is fairness.

Section II introduces the two principles of this conception.

Section III explains how these two principles are arrived at.

Section IV pre-empts possible criticisms against justice as fairness as developed in Sections II and III.

Section V sketches why fairness should be central to any concept of justice.

Section VI characterises the utilitarian conception of justice as one concerned with efficacy.

Section VII discusses why such utilitarianism fails as a conception of justice.

I

The fundamental idea in the concept of justice is fairness. The paper will try to justify this claim. It is this aspect of justice (as fairness) that classical utilitarianism fails to account for.

Three things should be kept in mind. First, justice is…

Below is my column in USA Today on the assertion of President Donald Trump that he can pardon himself.  Since such an act would be the most profoundly disgraceful moment in the history of the American presidency, it is chilling to have a president to even engage in such a public debate.  However, I believe that such a power does exist in the Constitution. It is a long and unresolved debate that turns on how you interpret silence.  Since the Constitution is silent on any bar against a president benefitting from this power, I believe that a self-pardon is indeed constitutional, even if distasteful. 

There is no shortage of stories on Italian institutional crises originated in the context of a parliamentary system with multi-party inclinations and a misfit electoral law. And Italy is not even an isolated case of hard processes of formation of government after troubled elections: the cases of the Netherlands and Belgium may be easily recalled. But this crisis was a particularly dark and stormy night. The role played by President Sergio Mattarella in vetoing the appointment of an Eurosceptic finance minister has left many commentators bewildered, including both those more inclined to recognise the presidential power to influence political decisions and those less willing to support a government of parties with a clear populist rhetoric.

The bewilderment is justified by the absence of precedents, but the President’s conduct corresponds to his constitutional powers. In terms of political convenience and in light of recent developments, Mr. Mattarella’s choice was wise, even…

From Wikipedia

The Great War is a 26-episode documentary series from 1964 on the First World War. The documentary was a co-production of the Imperial War Museum, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The narrator was Michael Redgrave, with readings by Marius Goring, Ralph Richardson, Cyril Luckham, Sebastian Shaw and Emlyn Williams. Each episode is c.40 minutes long.

In August 1963, at the suggestion of Alasdair Milne, producer of the BBC’s current affairs programme Tonight, the BBC resolved to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War with a big television project. The series was the first to feature veterans, many of them still relatively fit men in their late sixties or early seventies, speaking of their experiences after a public appeal for veterans was published in…

An interview with Thomas Schelling and his role in the creation of one of my favorite movies, “Dr. Strangelove”. HKS reports,

Kubrick travelled to Cambridge to meet with Schelling and George. The three spent an afternoon wrestling with a considerable plot hole: when “Red Alert” was written in 1958, inter-continental ballistic missiles were not much of a consideration in a potential U.S.-Soviet showdown. But by 1962, ICBMs had made much of the book’s plot points impossible. The speed at which a missile strike could occur would offer no time for the plot to unfold. “We had a hard time getting a war started,” said Schelling.

Hence, the B52s?