Source: Liberalism.org
by Michael C Munger
“British philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously mocked Descartes’s notion of mind/body dualism, dubbing it ‘the ghost in the machine.’ The mind is in the body, but it’s not of the body. The mind controls the body, independently, ‘everywhere yet nowhere.’ There is a related problem in identifying a ‘will’ in the state: is the state the sort of thing that can have an active, separate will? Or is the will of the state simply the aggregate of individual goals, actions, and votes? The branch of political theory I inhabit, public choice, holds that ghosts don’t exist, because a foundational assumption is methodological individualism. But many people have argued for a romantic, collectivist approach.” (07/13/26)