Yeah, the author has committed to a stance without explaining why or how, beyond kind of provocatively suggesting that it's the only stance intellectually consi

Yeah, the author has committed to a stance without explaining why or how, beyond kind of provocatively suggesting that it's the only stance intellectually consistent with ruling out family punishment as a policy... as if he didn't outline his stance in several bullet points, and only 1 of those bullet points is sufficient to rule out family punishment. > How bizarre and ivory-tower. I agree in general, but knowing that the author is a professor of Economics at George Mason University, I am less surprised. My perception is that Econ department seems to have a lot of room for unusual ideas within the field and rather a lot of professors who hold forth or publish on topics that overlap to a variable degree with economics-- like how this post addresses questions of punishment and moral philosophy with what appear to be the tools of economics.