Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Let us return to as subject broached last week, the US Supreme Court's decision in MACQUARIE INFRASTRUCTURE v. MOAB PARTNERS.  As I noted, the case involves the private (tort) use of an SEC rule, 10b-5, and it says that the omission of material facts by the issuer of securities will NOT present a cause of action in tort by a buyer of the securities unless the omission is such as to render statements that actually WERE made by the company misleading.   Today I'd like to say something about the specific underlying issue. Some of Macquarrie's most valuable assets are terminals for the storage of fuel oil. Its terminals are designed to accommodate high-sulfur fuel oil.  What Macquarrie neglected to say, setting up Moab's ire and this lawsuit, is that under the influence of a United Nations rule relating to climate change, high sulfur fuels are getting phased out around the world. That's a good thing.  But it is a very bad thing for the value of the Macquarrie assets t

In the final book of the famous series of political novels that began with ADVISE AND CONSENT, we get a (relatively) happy ending called THE PROMISE OF JOY, in which Drury's idealized hero, Orrin Knox, finally becomes President. His inaugural speech is recorded in some detail. This one paragraph -- which does not really arise out of anything else in the plot, jumps out at me. "Agriculture will continue to receive the same close attention from my administration that it has received from others. The price gap between producer and consumer is still too low for the producer, too high for the consumer, too close to profiteering for the middleman. We will seek ways to close that gap."   What on earth does that mean? As I say, it is from Drury's hero. We should not lightly write it off as meaningless political blather.  The gap between producer and consumer? Presumably this refers to the gap between what the farmer gets selling wheat and what the consumers put out buying the

  Macquarie Infrastructure v. Moab Partners -- a unanimous decision came down from our Supreme Court last week.  The opinion, written by Justice Sotomayor, says in essence that securities fraud, regarded as an actionable private tort, is a tort of malfeasance, not of nonfeasance.   Let us abstract from the particular facts a bit. Consider any case in which a plaintiff believes that he was sold stock by the issuing corporation at an unrealistically high price. He has sued. Asked why he bought it at such a price, the plaintiff might say, "They didn't tell me about X, a fact known to them and one that soon thereafter eliminated the value of the securities at issue." This decision tells that plaintiff: that isn't enough.  You're going to have to plead, and in due course prove, that they made materially false statements, not simply that they failed to make certain true ones. The decision is a matter of interpreting the text of an SEC rule,  10b–5(b), which makes it

To start off today's discussion, I refer the reader to my post in November discussing what "effective altruism" is and why I think we must judge that somewhere in its reasoning this philosophy goes horribly wrong.  Effective Altruism: The short course (jamesian58.blogspot.com) I won't re-tread that ground but I will observe that the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews site has a review of a new book on the subject. The book is THE RULES OF RESCUE by Theron Pummer. The reviewer is Violetta Igneski . Pummer argues (in Igneski's paraphrase) that "we are not always required to provide the most help possible," that is, maximally effective altruism. He does not reject EA, but wants to reconcile it with a non-consequentialist account of both moral constraints and moral permissions.  The constraints are things that you must NOT do, regardless of your utilitarian calculations, and the permissions are things that you CAN rightly do that are in some respect unhelpfu

  One day last week I was in my home office, typing away on work related matters, and (since the door was open) I half heard a news report about OJ Simpson. People in my line of work love doing resonant "anniversary" stories so, after a little thought, I believed that I knew what the story was: we must have reached the 30th anniversary of the killings or the trial verdict or something.  Well, that wasn't it. Simpson had died. [Of natural causes.] I have nothing to say about this, so I'll just leave you with some links.  Well, I guess I do have SOMEthing to say, at least at a meta level. The fourth of the below links is an oddity. Someone thought it sensible to publish the reaction of ... Caitlyn Jenner. Why? Well, Caitlyn used to be Bruce Jenner and Bruce Jenner was the husband of the ex-wife of Robert Kardassian, one of the attorneys for Simpson, the man credited with putting together the "dream team." So of course we all want to know what Caitlyn has to sa

Many were despairing of such an event. But jury selection is now underway. The former President, Donald Trump, is now being tried in a court whose judgment is not subject to any presidential pardon. He is not being tried for insurrection. He is being tried for falsifying business records. But he is on trial -- his odd de facto immunity from any such proceedings is at an end.  Nothing even remotely like this has happened in our country since 1807, when Aaron Burr went on trial.  Burr was not a former President, of course. Burr was a former Vice President. Another difference: Burr was tried by a federal court. He could presumably have pardoned himself had he been convicted there and had somehow thereafter been elected President. So ... not an exact likeness to the current situation.   But let's talk a bit about Burr. He was the guy who inspired the 12th amendment, changing the way vice presidents are selected, largely so that Jefferson could replace him with George Clinton. Dramatic