In My Day, Moral Philosophers Were For Shit

Yglesias is making almost no sense about the morality of deficits. He claims that there is no moral dimension to budget deficits. I was on board at first, but when he didn't go on to proclaim normativity's death, I got off the train before it reached its final destination of Crazytown.

The weird thing is that he doesn't really make a moral argument at all. He just tells us the following:

Think about an individual taking out a large loan for some reason or other -- a mortgage to buy a house, say. This may be a prudent investment, or it may be a foolish one. Whether or not the loan amounts to an "unfair financial burden" on future versions of yourself isn't an additional issue on top of the issue of how well your investment performs.

[me again] This is crazy. If I sign a contract obliging the future me to do a bunch of onerous work, that's not morally problematic. If I sign a contract obliging another person to do a bunch of onerous work, that is problematic. It seems unwise to extrapolate from one to the other as if they were equivalent. In fact, it seems downright crazy.

All of this comes after Matt divulges that he is "a moderately trained moral philosopher," which I guess constitutes more evidence that moral philosophy is a pile of shit.