Freeman replies

by Chris Bertram on December 16, 2008

Samuel Freeman “has replied in comments to my post about his response to cosmopolitan critics of Rawls”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/10/language-requires-what/#comment-260984 . It is a genuinely helpful and clarifying response, for which I’m grateful. I could quibble about the semantics of “invariably”, but I won’t. Rather, I’d highlight just two points in Freeman’s remarks. The first concerns the non-identity of “state” with “people” and “society”. Of course, I agree with Freeman that they on sensible construals of either term they would be non-identical, but I’d argue that Rawlsian fastidiousness in this respect merely highlights something rather evasive about their view. For what is it that picks out a Rawlsian “people” as distinct from other “peoples”, as a distinctive cooperative unit? Usually, it is their legal and institutional unity. In fact, this is normally the only thing, since state boundaries are rarely congruent with ethnic, religious or linguistic boundaries. Rawlsians may want, given the morally dubious history of nationalisms, to promote this as a feature rather than a bug. But it is questionable, then, whether Rawlsian peoples are really distinct from the states that organize them as such. (And, somewhat counterintuitively, lots of peoples fail to be “peoples” – the Kurds, for example.) (I hereby promise a proper post about Rawlsian “peoples” soon: Rawlsians want to be neither “statist” nor “nationalist”, but I’m sceptical about the existence of the middle ground.)

The second concerns Freeman’s concession (though “concession” is unfair of me) that what is key to the notion of social-cooperation is not coercive enforcement, but rather the inescapability, for individuals, of compliance with social rules. This seems to me to open up two difficulties for Freeman. The first, which I won’t develop here, is the blurring of the distinction between a society’s “basic structure” and its “ethos”, a distinction that Freeman needs be sharper for another dispute (that with G.A. Cohen). The second is brought out by the following statement:

bq. compliance with the rules of basic social institutions, even if generally voluntary, is unavoidable for the members of a society, since these rules are inescapable and structure their daily lives in innumerable ways (unlike members of other societies, whose lives are structured by their own system of basic institutions).

Perhaps something special is meant here by “structured”, since if it means that people’s lives are shaped in systematic ways that open some opportunites and deny others, then it can hardly be denied that, for example, Malian cotton producers are subject to a good deal of structuring by the US government. And, of course, one can make a similar point with respect to the lives of would-be economic migrants from poor countries to rich ones. Systematic structuring, then, doesn’t do the job of dividing insiders from outsiders in the way Freeman needs it to.

{ 48 comments }

1

Matt 12.16.08 at 12:30 pm

Chris, I think you’ll need to distinguish between “influence” and “structure”. (I think we had this debate some time ago on CT, in fact.) It’s not enough to say that one’s actions _influence_ another. No one denies that. But, the influence has to be of a certain sort. Not all sorts of influence on or impact on another generates rights. (If one gas station cuts its price by 5 cents a gallon it surely influences and impacts the others nearby, perhaps to their detriment, but it would be odd, at best, to say that this gives the other gas stations any rights against the first, at least so far.) But all you’ve got in your cases is impact or influence and you’ll need to say a lot more about why that’s sufficient or sufficiently like the sort of systematic structuring that goes on in a modern society if your argument is going to get off the ground. It seems to me that the cases are different enough, and that the difference is clear enough, that the burden ought to be on you here to show why the cases ought to be treated the same rather than treated differently.

As for states/peoples/societies, you’d get a clearer picture of what Rawls and Rawlsians are up to if you went back to the text again. One feature that you leave out as to why Rawls doesn’t use “states” is that he rejects many of the traditional features of states- near absolute internal sovereignty, the right to go to war to protect or promote state interest other than self defense, etc. “Peoples” (I do think “societies” is better since it helps avoid the common notion that “peoples” are “nations” in, say, David Miller’s sense) have a moral nature, but this is determined by their political nature- this is one of the important ways in which the Law of Peoples follows from Political Liberalism, something usually missed by critics. But, as noted above, in most cases political cooperation is not the same at all as influence or impact, and fairly straight-forwardly so. (This sort of thing is clear in all aspects of life.) So, if you want to argue that political cooperation isn’t the right ground but influence or impact is, you’ll need a different method. One way to do this might be to go in for a strong luck egalitarianism, but once you’ve done this you’ve already moved pretty far from Rawls (that may be fine, depending on your view) and in to a view I, at least, find pretty implausible.

2

Chris Bertram 12.16.08 at 1:16 pm

Matt, on state/society, as I promised, I’m going to write something more extended on that in due course,

On influence v. structuring, though, I find what you say very odd indeed. I think for two reasons:

First, your example of one gas station outcompeting another really isn’t very close to what is happening when US cotton producers are given subsidies which push Malian producers out of the market. Rather than one supplier outcompeting another by producing more efficiently, we’re seeing the more efficient producer pushed out of business by the use of state power! (I’m no economist, so if my grasp of the international cotton industry is shaky, someone please provide a better example.) In my book an influence or impact that is predictable and long-term ought to count as a structuring.

Second, since you mention rights, there’s a long tradition of thinking that property rights ought to be constrained by the impact they have on others. I’m thinking Lockean proviso here. Property isn’t territory exactly, but the claim to jurisdiction over a space with the aim of securing certain goods (principally, justice) surely ought to be circumscribed by the (systematic) impact that exclusion has on others (with respect to similar goods)?

The Rawlsian claim that co-citizens have strong distributive justice duties to one another (within their little bubble) but only duties of assistance to impoverished outsiders, might be (at least superficially) plausible, if all that was going on was that the outsiders were left to get on as well they might. If the well-ordered society produced some goods more cheaply than the outsiders could, then we might just say “let the chips fall where they may.” But the actual world is one where wealthy states/societies regularly act so as to _worsen_ the access of outsiders to the very goods that citizens of wealthy countries enjoy. That’s not a matter of accidental impact.

(Just to anticipate, a little, the state-society post, I think there’s something very distorting in the the Rawlsian way of approaching some of these issues. First we have (for methodological reasons) our little autarkic set-up, which we then bring into relations with other similarly autarkic setups …. That frames the discussion in a certain way. Of course, it may be “natural” for Americans to think like this, of their society entire unto itself, but lots of societies (the Hanseatic League?) could never have thought of themselves this way, even as a fantasy.)

3

Matthew Kuzma 12.16.08 at 3:00 pm

I can think of several examples of inescapable social rules that are a part of our social “structure” but are not the result of any legal enforcement, and I can even imagine similar rules predating language in such a way as to help give rise to it, or at least to make that possibility non-absurd. For example, it’s rude to be late in some cultures and not in others, or at least lateness may be defined differently. If you are late, you are rude. You can’t escape that cultural rule. You can be on either side of it, but you’re still subject to it. There are literally thousands of these rules making up the culture of a region in a way that could be called a structure and could have predated language.

4

lemuel pitkin 12.16.08 at 4:35 pm

what is it that picks out a Rawlsian “people” as distinct from other “peoples”, as a distinctive cooperative unit? Usually, it is their legal and institutional unity. In fact, this is normally the only thing, since state boundaries are rarely congruent with ethnic, religious or linguistic boundaries. Rawlsians may want, given the morally dubious history of nationalisms, to promote this as a feature rather than a bug. But it is questionable, then, whether Rawlsian peoples are really distinct from the states that organize them as such.

This is a good point. But it’s a problem not just for Rawlsians, but for any liberal political theory — which means for almost all of us.

On the one hand, we say that government derives its legitimate authority from the consent of the governed. But consent isn’t given individually, but collectively, so it would seem that the nation or people must exist prior to the state that represents it. This solution works as long as we conceive of antions as organic wholes joined by history, language, religion, etc., but modern liberal states explicitly rejects this basis (with the obvious, highly contested exceptions). So you’re left with the state deriving its authority from the people, and the people being those under the authority of the same state — a circularity that works breaks down as soon as you’re faced with serious challenges/alternatives to the status quo.

The main solution to this dilemma seems to be to abandon democracy as a basis of legitimacy for state power and base it instead on conformity with a set of objective rules. We’ve seen this to date mostly in the real of economic policy — where liberals like Alan Blinder explicitly say that the political authority should be transferred from elected representatives to unelected bodies of credentialed experts, i.e. should not be based on representation at all — and “human rights”. This is the program — call it undemocratic liberalism — that follows from criticism of “illiberal democracy” by people like Fareed Zakaria. Peter Mair is very good on this; obviously it was the subject of Empire. This seems to be where CT’s political philosophers come down, too, given that the right to secession is based not on any inherent right of a people to self-government, but on whether the existing government has violated some objective standard of justice. But who gets to rule on that?

So it’s not clear that the relationship between states and peoples is a bigger problem for Rawlsians than for anyone else. There may not be a solution — once we dispense with organic peoples prior to politics, what is the consistent legitimate basis for state authority short of humanity as a whole?

5

novakant 12.16.08 at 11:36 pm

Isn’t one important point that cultural and social rules are arbitrary, while the rules of the state that Kant and Rawls envision apply to everybody in the same way, are codified within a legal system and that there exists a formalized procedure for filing suit or challenging them?

6

Matt 12.17.08 at 4:21 am

A couple of brief thoughts- the cotton subsidy argument would work better if you had anyone (in this argument) supporting the current situation, but no one involved here is, so it’s a bit of a straw-man. (One gets this sort of thing from Thomas Pogge a lot but it’s very annoying since no one involved in this conversation supports the current global order- certainly Rawls, despite what Pogge sometimes suggest, and what seems to be implied by your above comment, does not. (Reading Pogge is often a very good idea to not get clear on what Rawls thought, I think.) If you actually go back and read LP, for example, you’ll see that while Rawls doesn’t say very much about trade relations he’s quite critical of the ones that currently exist and thinks that his approach properly condemns them. So, maybe you could show that it does not, but you can’t just assume (as many critics do) that it does not.

On a more specific level, I think that most, if not all, subsidies, when given by the developed world, are usually going to be bad ideas. There might be some exceptions, but they will be few. But, it doesn’t seem that societies have a duty of justice to buy things from other societies if they don’t want to. They do have a duty to help every society achieve a minimum acceptable level of well-being. We might think that societies can do their share in a number of ways. It would be extraordinary, though, if duties of justice said something about where a particular country must buy its cotton. Now, the US (and nearly every, perhaps every, country) does not now do their part. And trade rules in place often make easier paths harder or serve no good purpose. But it seems to me that we’ll never get clear on the real issues if you frame the case the way you do above.

7

Chris Bertram 12.17.08 at 7:57 am

Matt, the issue is not about which policies people support, but whether their theory has certain implications. AFAICS, the Rawlsian view gives well-ordered states a permission to favour their domestic producers over much less well off foreigners, and a permission to prevent their own citizens hiring impoverished economic migrants rather than domestic labour. So not a straw man.

The broader issue is that the Rawlsian want to say that relations in one space trigger strong distributive justice duties but that relations in another do not. You need a principled answer that explains why the relations that do are of a basically different character to those that don’t and (also) what it is about the difference that is morally explanatory. The answers that I’ve heard strike me as rather desperately ad hoc.

_They do have a duty to help every society achieve a minimum acceptable level of well-being._

And that’s all? Suppose I’ve imposed trade relations on you that keep you poor but just above the acceptable threshold, and trade continues to grow, and I get richer and richer. Do you suppose I do you no injustice so long as I keep you at that barely acceptable level? Or has there been a failiure of … reciprocity?

8

Chris Armstrong 12.17.08 at 10:50 am

I’ve got a paper pressing the Rawlsian case on just this point coming out in Social Theory and Practice (it’s also on SSRN, and called ‘Defending the Duty of Assistance?’). You could extend your question further, Chris. What matters, for Rawls, is that we help other peoples achieve well-ordered institutions (rather than targeting well-being directly, as Matt implies). But many of the inequalities of the contemporary world make it more difficult or expensive for societies to maintain well-ordered institutions. Look at the flows of healthcare workers from Europe to Africa, which makes the continued running of hospitals in some African countries very difficult indeed (but not impossible). Matt is right, contra Pogge, that Rawls need not endorse these facts about the contemporary world – but the question remains how, on his account in the Law of Peoples, we might object to them? It is at best unclear, on his account, what the basis of our objection is to (legal) practices which do not threaten the autonomy or well-orderedness of other peoples, but do make it very much more difficult or onerous than it might be if we acted otherwise. They do not touch on his grudging acceptance that we might object to global inequalities if they undermined political equality or self-respect, for instance. And remember that Rawls professed that it might be better, all round, if peoples reconciled themselves to a life of relatively poor well-orderedness in any case. Perhaps to object to these practices we need to smuggle in criteria from distributive justice theory 0r, as Chris B suggests, some account of reciprocity?

9

dsquared 12.17.08 at 12:10 pm

Matt: I think you’re straying close to the argumentum ad Dershowitz there – the assumption that the combination of a theory which endorses X Y and Z, plus a strongly worded disavowal of X, equals a theory which implies Y and Z.

10

Matt 12.17.08 at 12:21 pm

Dsquared- if there was any evidence that you knew what you were talking about on this issue I’d be more worried here. Have you even read the relevant texts? Recently? With any care? Please be honest in your reply. You’re a really smart guy whose opinion I respect on many things. (One reason why I say that I’m not sure subsidies are always bad, for example, was your argument about how the agricultural subsidies of the EU might actually be good for Africa. I don’t know if it’s true but it might be and that’s enough to make me less sure of what I thought before.) But, I don’t see any evidence that you know what you’re taking about here (i.e., what Rawls’s position is or what’s entailed by it) so unless you can show some you shouldn’t go on.

I largely agree with what Chris Armstrong says. Rawls’s remarks in LP on trade and the like are very few and there’s a danger of treating him like an oracle that should be avoided. But, a charitable interpretation, one that fits together all of what he says, gives a much more plausible picture than the one Pogge, or Chris B, suggests. And Chris, again, if you bother to go back to the text of LP you’ll see that the case you mention is addressed, if briefly, there. You might not be happy with the answer- there is a lot one might object to- but the case is addressed, even if briefly, and it would be better for you to go back and look at that and see what you think than for me to give a rehashing of the text here, especially since I know you’ve read it. Acting as if the case isn’t addressed in LP isn’t very helpful and tends towards the sort of dishonest approach one gets from Pogge, one that should be avoided.

11

dsquared 12.17.08 at 12:32 pm

Matt, the relevant text here is your post #6, which I have read (in fact, I just went back and read it a third time), in which you certainly do appear to be using “Rawls doesn’t approve of currently existing trade relations and thinks his approach properly condemns them” as evidence that “Rawls’ approach actually does provide a solid ground for criticising currently existing trade relations”.

12

Dave 12.17.08 at 12:32 pm

This is fascinating, particularly for the way people seem to assume that what they are talking about has real-world relevance. As if proving that people ought to behave one way or another is ever going to make them behave that way; as if you could prove such a thing in the first place…

So how’d UK-based academic contributors do in the RAE today? Anyone likely to be made redundant as a result of catastrophic underperformance? Now there’s a real-world relevance.

13

Matt 12.17.08 at 1:04 pm

Dsquared- again, I think to have a clear view on the issue you’d need to know more about the relevant texts than you do, and since you don’t you shouldn’t take part so confidently. More directly, my position was a conjunction of three claims, all of which seem plausible to me. 1) Something can be a bad policy without being unjust. 2) Something that’s not in principle unjust might be unjust under certain circumstances. 3) Justice doesn’t require maximizing utility. All seem plausible to me, and allow for just what I’ve said. I don’t have time to give a tutorial on Rawls. If you want to know what he said I suggest you read him yourself. Report back when you do.

Otherwise, I’ll say that 1) it would be nice if Jon Mandle would join more of these conversation! 2) If you want a good idea of what a Rawlsian account of global justice, worked out in a way thta’s much clearer than Rawls’s own, would look like you’d do well to read Jon’s book, one of the best on the subject to be found. I’m now off to work so must avoid further posting until much later.

14

Chris Bertram 12.17.08 at 1:33 pm

_And Chris, again, if you bother to go back to the text of LP you’ll see that the case you mention is addressed, if briefly, there._

Is the passage you mean the one on p. 115? Rawls there writes:

“In addition … the parties will agree standards for fairness of trade as well as to certain provisions for mutual assistance. Should these cooperative organizations have unjustified distributive effects, these would have to be corrected in the basic structure of the Society of Peoples.”

It isn’t clear to me that this passage addresses the worry I had at #7 above, since ‘unjustified distributive effects’ might just mean effects pushing societies below the threshold.

15

Jon Mandle 12.17.08 at 4:07 pm

Chris alludes to the subsidies that US cotton producers receive that “push Malian producers out of the market.” According to Wikipedia, “Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world. The average worker’s annual salary is approximately US$1,500…. Mali’s health and development indicators rank among the worst in the world.” There is a difficult question for Rawlsians (such as myself) about how to set the threshold below which there is a duty of assistance, but Mali pretty clearly falls below it.

Chris also asks, “Suppose I’ve imposed trade relations on you that keep you poor but just above the acceptable threshold, and trade continues to grow, and I get richer and richer. Do you suppose I do you no injustice so long as I keep you at that barely acceptable level?” The answer – for my part – is: I don’t know. It depends in part on what those trade relations are and how you managed to “impose” them. If, for example, you did it by managing to produce more efficiently, it’s not obvious to me that there is an injustice even if inequalities grow dramatically. On the other hand, if you did it by threatening military action, or less draconianly, some other kind of political or social exclusion, that’s a different story.

What about the case of massive domestic subsidies? Again, I’m not sure. I can imagine some reasons that would be perfectly legitimate, while others would be more problematic. Perhaps if it is part of a temporary restructuring effort in my economy, it might be acceptable. If it is part of an effort to establish a long-term monopoly, perhaps not. But again, I think that the details matter even in these types of examples. No doubt most actual cases will be subject to various conflicting interpretations. And the implication of this is that it is important to have international institutional mechanisms that can do two things: first, establish which reasons count as legitimate and which not, and second, allow for a relatively impartial judgment in particular cases concerning whether a country acted for legitimate reasons or not. It’s hard for me to see how this could be anything other than something like a WTO with some kind of adjudication mechanism. Otherwise, we are left with countries – that is, the rich and powerful countries – judging for themselves whether their actions are reasonable.

I’ll hold off on posting anything about “coercion” and distributive justice for now. I’m sure this will come up again next month in our discussion of G. A. Cohen’s new book. But let me just say that in the book that Matt mentions, I point to the connection between distributive justice and coercion. However, the case that I had in mind – and I think the only one that I discuss – is the coercion associated with a legitimate political and legal order. The emphasis on coercion was misleading. The connection that I think is important is the one between distributive justice and a political/legal order.

16

Chris Bertram 12.17.08 at 6:02 pm

_It depends in part on what those trade relations are and how you managed to “impose” them. If, for example, you did it by managing to produce more efficiently, it’s not obvious to me that there is an injustice even if inequalities grow dramatically. On the other hand, if you did it by threatening military action, or less draconianly, some other kind of political or social exclusion, that’s a different story._

Ok so here’s a story. Richland and Poorland trade, with Poorland producing widgets more cheaply than Richland. In fact Poorland only produces widgets and Richland is the only market for them. After many decades of being a “burdened society”, Poorland crosses the threshold which permits it to function as a poor but well-ordered liberal society. Let’s score that deveolpmental point at a per capita resource level of 10 with Richland contemporaneously enjoying a level of 500. After lobbying from domestic widget producers, Richland then imposes import quotas on widgets. These allow Poorland widgets into the country to a level just sufficient to maintain Poorland at the 10 level. As the decades pass, the relative wealth of the two countries moves from 10:500, to 10:1000, to 10:2000, and so on.

Is Richland acting unjustly towards Poorland?

17

Jon Mandle 12.17.08 at 9:00 pm

When additional details are filled in there may be injustice, but I don’t think there necessarily is in the case as described so far.

When Richland imposes a quota on Poorland, the cost of widgets – that only they consume – goes up. They are willing to pay that higher price to protect their domestic producers. But they still enjoy a robust rate of economic growth. This is not because of their trade relations with Poorland. Perhaps we can imagine that if there had been greater trade in widgets, the economy of Poorland would not have stagnated quite as badly as it did (10 … 15 … 20.) However, the rate of growth in Richland would likely have been even greater (they wouldn’t have spent as much on those expensive widgets) and the gap in wealth would likely have been even larger. Of course, all that is speculation and might be wrong in specific cases. But if it is wrong, we need the details. (I’m genuinely not trying to be snarky – the details may make a difference to my assessment of the case.)

Second, why does Poorland only produces widgets? Why after decades of economic stagnation do they continue to produce exclusively for a single artificially restricted market? I say again: no snark – the answer matters. Perhaps living at the edge of being a burdened society, they are unable to afford the economic adjustments needed adapt or diversify. I think a just global order should have some kind of mechanism to assist poor countries in making these kinds of adjustments. Richland – being rich – may have an obligation to be part of this system, but this is not because they are importing an insufficient number of widgets. After all, their neighbor Wealthyland isn’t importing any widgets at all. On your view, Chris, is Wealthyland (which is just as rich as Richland but where there is no demand for widgets) acting unjustly toward Poorland?

Third, are Poorland and Richland members of an idealized WTO? Are there rules about quotas in widgets? Perhaps they – or their production – have special cultural significance to the members of Richland, and the members of the organization recognize this importance. Or maybe not – maybe widgets are ordinary consumer goods with no special significance and they fall under general terms of trade that all members have agreed to and the quotas violate these agreements.

So my point is that I cannot tell whether there is an injustice in the case as you described it – that is, there is no enough information for me to conclude that it is unjust. As details are filled in, I don’t rule out the possibility of there being injustice. But the broader point is that I think the discussion needs to be shifted from focusing narrowly on the levels of per capita resources to the design of the global institutions – the idealized WTO and the perhaps all-but-unrecognizably-idealized World Bank in my examples.

18

Chris Bertram 12.17.08 at 10:55 pm

Jon,

Maybe there’s some deep issue about philosophical method here. When I wrote that Poorland produces only widgets, I did so to keep things simple (just as economists have economies with only corn, or deer and beavers). I did that in the interests of getting clear on what the principled commitments of my interlocutors are. So I’m not sure that I accept that your demands for more detail and complexity are ones I ought to respond to. Rather, I’m inclined to strip things down further, to a world where there are only two societies: Richland and Poorland, with other relations and facts as described. In such a world, then, does Richland act unjustly?

19

Matt 12.18.08 at 12:09 am

I’m going to more or less agree with Jon on everything here. To Chris, I’d say that the problem is that you can’t say, in your example, whether Richland is being unjust or not unless you go into the details. That’s what I was (perhaps inartfully) trying to get at in some of my comments above. The details make a huge difference here. Even if your two society case they make a difference. Again, to ask Jon’s question, why does Poorland only make widgets? That matters, no? Maybe it’s unjust and maybe it’s not, but we can’t tell from your example, unless you assume some pretty strong conclusions about egalitarianism of a certain highly controversial sort. You might want to assume them, but then you’ll have to move back a step and argue for those claims.

20

Matt 12.18.08 at 3:40 am

Another point. On the question of Rawls interpretation (as opposed to what I think may or may not be right independently of that) I think that Chris’s account isn’t right on the issue of trade. Rawls says pretty clearly that the evaluation of institutions such as an idealized WTO (not, contra what Pogge often suggest, the current one!) is done by representatives of societies behind a veil of ignorance. The agreement must be “reasonable” as well as rational- it would have to exhibit the appropriate degree of reciprocity and respect for societies, for example. Now, given this, it seems likely that societies, not knowing if they’d be rich or poor, would not agree to the sort of harmful restrictions or subsidies found in Chris’s example. Societies, Rawls says, would seek to “preserve the independence of their own society and its equality in relations to others.” Insofar as we think the simple example Chris gives makes sense (and I’m not sure it does, for reasons Jon makes nicely clear) it seems that this motive would give parties behind the veil of ignorance reason to reject a global trading system that allowed for the sort of subsidies and trade restrictions suggested above. This doesn’t mean that all subsidies would be illegal- those done to protect “infant industries” in developing countries would probably be okay, and perhaps even some subsidies such as the French agriculture subsidies could, within certain bounds (and assuming the difference is made up in other ways), be acceptable. But, subsidies to create an artificial comparative advantage or to bankrupt a weaker country (US Cotton subsidies probably fall in the former) or restrictions that are otherwise quite harmful and serve primarily to protect powerful corporate interests (such as at least some of the IP restrictions pushed by the US and EU in many recent trade agreements) would, it seems, fail the requirement of being acceptable to reasonable and rational parties representing societies behind a veil of ignorance in a way that’s pretty straight-forward on Rawls’s account. So, I think that the example in 7 above, and elaborated below, doesn’t really hit Rawls very squarely, or for that matter, fit with his text. (I think that Pogge has done a lot of damage on this front with his really quite inaccurate accounts of what Rawls says. Whatever his other virtues may be he’s an unreliable guide to Rawls.) Anyway, I think this is the right way to understand Rawls’s position, especially after having discussed this a bit with Samuel Freeman. I’m not completely sure it’s what I’d say as to what I think the right answer is but I think it’s at least the more plausible account of what Rawls’s view is.

21

Chris Bertram 12.18.08 at 7:34 am

Matt, three points:

1. _, why does Poorland only make widgets? _

It is just a methodological stipulation that they do. You (and Jon) really shouldn’t make the “we can’t say, we need further details” move. That’s because you yourself also make some highly unrealistic assumptions in your theorizing. I mean, come on, suppose I asked you of a certain stage in the Rawlsian project

“How come people only enter this society by birth and leave by death, what’s the explanation, the back-story here?”

I think you’d shrug and think the question absurd.

2. You refer to Rawls’s text on trade and I asked you whether the passage I identified was the one you meant. You need to answer that.

3. The reason I set up the example as I did was because I think it tests the locally egalitarian/globally sufficientarian commitments that you and Rawls have. I’m actually quite sympathetic to your conclusions but find this kind of case worrying. (In fact I discuss something similar in my paper you referred to in the earlier thread: it bothered me then.) I don’t think that you can assume (as you appear to do) that Rawls would have agreed that keeping one side just above the sufficiency threshold whilst allowing the other to get richer and richer amounts to an “unjustified distributive effect”. Notice that other sufficientarians (I’m thinking Elizabeth Anderson here for the domestic case) don’t have a problem with leaving the poorest lingering just above the capability-for-citizenship threshold whilst the rich get richer. If Poorland can function as a poor-but-viable liberal “people”, what, exactly would Rawls’s complaint about the import quotas be?

And sorry, a fourth point …..

4. _unless you assume some pretty strong conclusions about egalitarianism of a certain highly controversial sort. You might want to assume them, but then you’ll have to move back a step and argue for those claims._

Strong egalitarian commitments (not “conclusions”) might not be the kind of thing there can be arguments for, so your point here may well rest on a mistake. The point of the Richland-Poorland example is to describe a situation which ought to be OK according to your (or Rawls’s commitments) but where I think you (or Rawls) are going to react “Hang on, that’s not right!” One explanation for such a reaction might be that a person is actually more committed to egalitarianism than they thought they were. Another response might be to feel the egalitarian twinge in yourself, but bite the sufficientarian bullet anyway. I’m not getting either of these from you. Instead you’ve demanded “more detail” and asserted (without adequate explanation) that parties behind a VoI would ban trading behaviour such as I described. But why, exactly, would they, since I’ve stipulated that the core Rawlsian interests of peoples are respected?

22

dsquared 12.18.08 at 10:19 am

restrictions that are otherwise quite harmful and serve primarily to protect powerful corporate interests (such as at least some of the IP restrictions pushed by the US and EU in many recent trade agreements)

Ahhh, what luck, a subject upon which I have done vast amounts of work and read all the relevant texts!

This is a perfect example of the argumentum ad Dershowitz I was complaining about above; the temptation to simply state by fiat that one’s theory doesn’t have a politically unpalatable conclusion. The first TRIPS proposal was highly inegalitarian in a global sense, but it’s really quite glib to just write off the whole issue of the international context of pharmaceuticals patents as “harmful and serving primarily to protect powerful corporate interests”. I think that the issue of whether Brazil (clearly a much richer country than Mali) had the right to override retroviral patents actually raises some really quite difficult issues for the Rawlsians in this context.

Adapting Chris’s example to model the Brazilian generic AZT case:

Richland and Poorland have whatever history they have, and as a result of this, Richland has a national income of 10,000 and Poorland of 150 (the “sufficient” subsistence level is 100).

Both Richland and Poorland are plagued by the disease of bellyitis, which was previously incurable. However, after making a substantial investment in research (financed by loans from the Bank of Richland), Richland Pharma invents a wonder drug, Havitall, which cures bellyitis.

Having made the fixed cost investment, Richland Pharma can produce Havitall for 1 per dose. If Poorland could buy Havitall for 1 per dose, then it could buy Havitall for its 10 bellyitis sufferers, and the country of Poorland would then get by on 140. Suppose that bellyitis is so nasty that there’s a Rawlsian obligation for curing bellyitis sufferers to be given absolute priority, domestically.

On the other hand, in order to pay back its loans to the Bank of Richland, RichPharm needs to sell Havitall for 5 to citizens of Richland. It therefore has to set the price at 5, and it can’t sell for Poorland for 1 because it’s worried about parallel imports. Richland is a country where financial obligations are taken very seriously indeed, and has a massive part of its cultural identity tied up in being “the land of shareholders” (NB: large corporations are actually a pretty important part of the US and EU political and economic system, they can’t just be blown off as “obviously we don’t support that nasty stuff”).

So the Poorlanders are going to have to buy Havitall at 5 per dose, leaving them with 100 of national income, just at the sufficient level. Richland could actually just buy ten doses of Havitall and give them to Poorland, and it would hardly notice the cost (it would still have 9950). But why should they?

23

dsquared 12.18.08 at 11:32 am

Note: in the example above, Havitall could not have been invented without the initial capital, which would not have been provided other than in the anticipation of a profit. Both Richland and Poorland benefit from Havitall being invented (I can stipulate that bellyitis is so nasty that Poorland would still rather have 100 and Havitall than 150 and no Havitall), and both countries would have agreed under a veil of ignorance that there should be an international intellectual property apparatus which made it economically viable to produce pharmaceuticals for profit, wouldn’t they?

24

Matt 12.18.08 at 12:53 pm

One quick point on the methodological point: it’s obviously not that I’m opposed to simplifications as such. But, I don’t think just any work, either. Often they obscure more than they make clear and I think that’s the case w/ Chris’s examples. He compares them to the 2-country, 2 product examples from economics. Leaving aside the problems with those, the big difference is that for those we know what we are doing- we set this up and ask, “what should the countries do to maximize utility/wealth/welfare?” And, we’ve set it up so that there’s a clear answer w/in the model. That’s just not the case in the example Chris has set up, where the question is “is this situation just?” The model doesn’t provide us an answer. So, the two cases are really not comparable.

As for Dsquared’s example- I’m not sure I disagree with him. If he’d bother to not take points out of context (both in the larger set of comments and in the context of discussion it would be easier to deal with him. Since he’s usually more interested in scoring zinger points he’s less benefit to us than he might be. That’s too bad since he’s very clever. Still, if you take my qualifications, such as that I don’t know if certain types of subisdies would be rejected or not, and that you can’t tell this sort of thing just from doing philosophy, then I don’t see why I need to disagree.

25

dsquared 12.18.08 at 1:18 pm

Talking about people in the third person looks really passive-aggressive, you know Matt.

26

salient 12.18.08 at 1:48 pm

Talking about people in the third person looks really passive-aggressive, you know Matt.

A few moments ago Matt was telling everyone to RTFM, and in his most recent comment asserts that “you can’t tell this sort of thing just from doing philosophy” (i.e., by
reading the f—ing manuals’ and thinking about them). Perhaps his copy is printed on tea-leaves.

27

dsquared 12.18.08 at 1:54 pm

This does actually trouble me – if the theory can’t be applied to simplified stylised cases like Chris’s, and can’t be used to make concrete decisions about real world cases like the Brazil retrovirals one (btw, I’m specifically choosing Brazil here because it’s a middle-income country that probably could actually buy retrovirals at US prices, albeit at totally unreasonable fiscal cost, as opposed to African states which couldn’t), then what can it be used for?

My guess is that the answer is that in fact you can get answers to real world cases from applying the relevant theory, but I have an increasing suspicion that the answers you get aren’t necessarily the ones you want.

28

Jon Mandle 12.18.08 at 2:56 pm

Chris – there might be a deep issue of method here, but I don’t see it yet. There seems to be an ordinary disagreement about distributive justice. I’m not playing a debater’s game of not answering until I first elicit some kind of embarrassing confession from you. Nor am I opposed to abstract models. I said as clearly as I could – twice in 17 – that as I think about injustice, I don’t see it in the scenario as you’ve described it. But you are right, I do feel an egalitarian impulse, and that is the basis for my request for more details. My hypothesis is that as the details get filled in, the source of injustice will become clearer or the details of the case will dissolve the egalitarian impulse. I tried to give a few examples of how that might happen. The gross inequalities are enough to get us to investigate further, but for me they don’t decide the case.

But in the same spirit of trying to clarify the source of the injustice that you see, I’ll ask you again to answer my question. Wealthyland is just as rich as Richland, but doesn’t consume widgets, hence doesn’t trade with Poorland at all. Over the decades the relative wealth of Poorland and Wealthyland has gone from 10:500, to 10:1000, to 10:2000. Is Wealthyland acting unjustly toward Poorland (by not buying any widgets)? Or better: is Wealthyland acting more or less unjustly than Richland is toward Poorland? You might think that it is even more unjust, since at least Richland is engaging in some trade with Poorland and this is essential to keeping Poorland afloat. Or you might think that they are equally unjust. In either of these cases, the trade in widgets is not the source of the injustice. It is simply the gross inequality that matters – in other words, you included too many details in your example! Alternatively, you might think that trade is a source of the egalitarian duties of justice. Richland has special egalitarian duties of justice toward Poorland because they engage in trade, but Wealthyland avoids these duties because there is no economic interaction between them. But if this is the case, this generates a massive incentive for Richland to completely eliminate trade with Poorland. If they cut off all trade, they have relieved their egalitarian duties of justice, but have made Poorland even worse off.

Dsquared – on intellectual property, I may be missing the point, but I don’t see that the Havitall case yet involves IP. So far it’s just a case of trade in a (very important) widget – doses of Havitall. It becomes an IP case when we ask what happens when Poorland wants to start producing generic Havitall and infringing on Richland Pharma’s patent. And now the question, I take it, is whether Poorland would be unjust toward Richland in doing so. My answer is that as described – in the absence of some kind of agreement on IP – Richland Pharma’s patent has no standing in Poorland – there’s no injustice here and Poorland can do what it likes.

On the other hand, producing generic Havitall might trigger trade retaliation from Richland and a trade war would be bad for everyone. It might also discourage Richland Pharma from making further research investments. So it might make sense for everyone to agree to some kind of IP regime. This was my point in suggesting that we shift focus to the design of global institutions. At this point, we hit the limits of my untutored intuitions (and I don’t see that what I’ve said so far commits me to any particular IP regime). It’s just not clear to me what IP regime would be just – for exactly the reasons mentioned at 23. It seems to me that this makes a hard case for everyone, not only Rawlsians. But one thing I don’t understand – why, dsquared, do you stipulate that RichPharma “has to set the price at 5, and it can’t sell to Poorland for 1 because it’s worried about parallel imports”? In the absence of an IP regime this may be a real concern, but isn’t a prohibition on parallel imports exactly the kind of thing that is up for grabs in designing a just IP regime?

29

Matt 12.18.08 at 3:11 pm

Dsquared- I was simply trying to keep clear as to who I was addressing, as more than one person was involved in the conversation. I didn’t realize you were such a tender flower. Also, I don’t know if you’re just being thick in your last reply or if this is one of those cases where it’s become clear that blogs are a pretty poor way to do philosophy because people talk past each other too much. (I’m often not as clear as I’d like to be in comments, for example, and it’s hard to clarify as I’d like to and would in other formats.) Anyway, I think that’s pretty silly reading of what Jon and I have said and I’ll leave it at that.

Anyway, while it’s getting toward evening in the UK it’s business hours in the US and I think I’ve added as much to this as can be done via blog comment. There’s a lot to discuss on these issues but more than anything these things convince me that blogs are a bad way to do philosophy, despite their other virtues.

Salient- you’re being dumb. If the claim is about what, say, Rawls’s though is, it’s important to go back to see what he says. But only a moron thinks that political philosophy tells us how to deal with most of the individual decisions we make day to day. (That’s why I said, long ago, it would be extraordinary if political philosophy told us where to buy cotton.) It can provide a framework for making general decisions but I doubt that even someone like Cohen, who tends to think that the demands of justice apply to personal decisions more than do many others, thinks that considerations of justice provide all the answers as to what policies to choose. That was my point.

30

dsquared 12.18.08 at 3:45 pm

Jon – while the design of institutions to make parallel imports illegal is up for grabs, preventing them is more or less impossible; in lots of real life cases, companies find that it’s more profitable to simply refuse to supply certain markets. Let’s assume that we can set it up such that Havitall is such a case.

If we do that, I think the problem is that RichPharm just has to be made to earn less profits than it otherwise could. Which wouldn’t be a problem if it was being forced to do so for the benefit of the worst-off Richlanders (because of the domestic justice standard), but is a problem because as I understand it, the whole point of the law of nations concept in this case is that although it’s OK to coerce Richland and expropriate its shareholders for the benefits of fellow citizens, it’s not OK to do so for foreigners unless they’re living at less than the bad level. This isn’t a problem for anyone with a theory under which it’s OK to carry out this sort of mild redistribution on behalf of foreigners as well as domestics, and it’s not a problem for Rawlsians who think that the approach of the first Seattle TRIPS round was basically OK. It’s just a problem for people who want to hold a theory of justice under which there aren’t obligations of this sort to foreigners, but who also want to find some basis for redistributing a few of Pfizer’s profits to Brazilians.

I think the real objection here is that it’s always going to be possible for me and Chris to create examples like this, because the whole point here is to create a theory of justice which doesn’t require some sorts of international distribution, so if we’re allowed to gerrymander and draw our targets round the bulletholes, we’re always going to be able to create a case in which a redistribution wouldn’t be made in a way that looks really unjust. Surely the underlying Rawlsian response here is to say “basically, them’s the breaks, the law of nations in fact does imply that Brazilian AIDS patients don’t have the right to any of Pfizer’s profits, maybe as a Pfizer shareholder and US citizen I might want our pharma companies to play the nice guy here, but it’s not a demand of justice”. (Which is what I think you actually do say in the Wealthyland example).

31

dsquared 12.18.08 at 3:52 pm

and an easy way to adapt Chris’s Richland example to reply to the Wealthyland point would be to simply stipulate that the reason why Poorland remains poor is that its entire capital stock is owned by Richlanders (and, to avoid questions of the justice or otherwise of nationalisation/expropriation, stipulate that a crucial stage in widget production involves a special machine that can only be operated by a Richland-trained professional, so the Poorlanders can’t produce widgets on their own without the Richland owners), who repatriate all the profits for reinvestment domestically in Richland. In other words (and this would be modelled on the banana republics), assume that the trade relations are intimately and causally involved in Poorland’s poverty. I don’t think that a set of institutions negotiated behind a veil of ignorance would forbid overseas investment or prevent repatriation of profits (real world attempts to require domestic reinvestment never seem to work).

32

Chris Bertram 12.18.08 at 3:56 pm

Jon,

I’m a bit puzzled by part of your response, which suggests to me that I didn’t make myself sufficiently clear. I was indeed thinking that it was the fact of continued trade rather than simple differences in wealth that was important in the example, but not quite in the way you imagined.

You wrote

_But if this is the case, this generates a massive incentive for Richland to completely eliminate trade with Poorland. If they cut off all trade, they have relieved their egalitarian duties of justice, but have made Poorland even worse off._

I see the case you’re thinking of, but it isn’t mine. In my case (or as I meant to describe it) there are positive benefits from trade, but all of them flow to Richland as soon as Poorland has crossed the sufficiency threshold. So imagine the sequence thus

t1 (no trade) Poorland 7 Richland 450 (Poorland is below the threshold)
t2 (trade begins) P 10, R 500 (threshold crossed, P has sufficient)
t3 (later) P10, R 1000 (no-trade counterfactual P7, R < 1000) t4 (still later) P10, R 2000 (no-trade counterfactual P7, R < 2000) etc In this case there's no perverse egalitarian incentive to break off trading relations, just an imbalance in the way that then benefits of trade are distributed. In fact, it looks to me like a case of unjust _exploitation_. That doesn't make the case for egalitarianism, as such, and nor does it answer all the questions we'd want answers for re comparative shares. But it does, I think, establish that sufficientarianism isn't enough and that the way benefits above the threshold are distributed matters more than one reading of LoP might suggest.

33

Chris Bertram 12.18.08 at 5:13 pm

Matt

_There’s a lot to discuss on these issues but more than anything these things convince me that blogs are a bad way to do philosophy, despite their other virtues._

Perhaps a topic for another thread, but since we aren’t all going to be in a seminar-room together any time soon, I think that to have a forum where we can think aloud, argue, disagree, in a fairly informal way is rather a good thing. Of course, there’s the occasional interruption, but that’s life.

34

Jon Mandle 12.18.08 at 7:19 pm

Chris – the incentive to break off trade comes if you assume that justice requires an egalitarian distribution only when there are trading relations. Imagine that Richland sincerely wants to avoid treating Poorland unjustly. But they find themselves at t4. If they are convinced that they have egalitarian distributive duties only toward their trading partners, then they face a choice. They can continue to import widgets, but then send 995 units to Poorland, or end their trade relations (and then maybe send them 3 units to get them up to 10 – or less if there are other rich countries that would share a similar duty). Either of these would be equally just. It doesn’t seem realistic to me that they would continue to trade with such a massive transfer required. For that to be the case, the counterfactual at t4 would have to leave Poorland at 7 and Richland at 1008 (I think?). And I deny that it is realistic to suppose that trade in widgets will result in a gain of 3 to Poorland but 992 to Richland. So, under anything like realistic assumptions, if trade generates a requirement of egalitarian distribution, Richland will choose to comply by breaking off trade.

Dsquared – I confess I don’t fully follow the example. Tell me more about the first round of TRIPS. I will say that I don’t think Brazilians have a right to any of Pfizer’s profits – but I don’t think Americans have a right to them either. For that matter, I don’t think Pfizer shareholders have a right to them in the relevant sense. I think that property rights are political creations, so Pfizer shareholders only have a claim to those profits to the extent that US law says they are entitled to them because they have done various things to acquire them. This doesn’t mean that any legal system of property rights is okay. On the contrary, I think that’s exactly what the principles of justice apply to. But I do think that there are many different schemes that could be legitimate and different countries will legitimately choose different schemes. Philosophical questions about international trade are questions of how these different schemes should (or may) hook up to each other. Global economic institutions which tell us how to do this are therefore parasitic on legitimate domestic schemes of property.

I do want to explore your point about parallel imports a little more. You say that although making them illegal is one thing, “preventing them is more or less impossible.” I believe you that it may be expensive and that companies may find it more profitable simply to refuse to supply certain markets. I’ll have to think about this some more, but the right thing to say here may be that we simply have to rely on a second-best solution – one that indirectly approximates what would happen if a fully just IP agreement could be implemented. But now look at your stipulations to flesh out Chris’s example – you say that Poorland only produces widgets but that they can’t produce them – in other words, they can’t produce anything – without Richland-trained technicians. I already said that justice might require economic adjustment assistance, but more generally, this scenario seems objectionably unrealistic to me. If you can invoke leaky borders with respect to the re-importation of drugs, is there a reason I can’t invoke technology transfers and the spread of production information? Chris – there might be a deep issue of philosophical method lurking here and this is another point that is likely to come up in the discussion of Cohen: must principles of justice be applicable to all conceivable circumstances or can we invoke certain empirical assumptions about the circumstances in which they will be applied (i.e. what’s “realistic”)?

35

Chris Bertram 12.19.08 at 8:19 am

Jon,

Yes, but ….

1. I don’t think I need to commit here to the strong claim that fully egalitarian norms kick in with trading activity, just to the weaker one that we shouldn’t be indifferent between distributions that satisfy the sufficiency requirement. (i.e. sufficiency isn’t the whole story.) Your incentives claim, which I now understand, depends on a stronger claim than I need make here.

2. I think there’s a relevant moral difference between there being, contingently, no trading contact and a collective decision to ban or to break off trading. The first of these puts me in mind of Parfit’s divided world; the second does not. Obviously there’s much more to be said, but I doubt that a decision to cease trading gets you out of your distributive obligations as easily as you suggest.

36

Chris Bertram 12.19.08 at 8:31 am

_another point that is likely to come up in the discussion of Cohen: must principles of justice be applicable to all conceivable circumstances or can we invoke certain empirical assumptions about the circumstances in which they will be applied (i.e. what’s “realistic”)?_

But that isn’t quite the Cohen view, is it? The Cohen view is that a principle that obtains in circumstance C and not in circumstance not-C has to be governed by an ueber principle that explains why that’s so. Because the ultimate ueber principles take account of all possible states of the world, their nature isn’t determined by any particular state of the world obtaining. So his position isn’t that, say, the difference principle isn’t applicable only in particular circumstances, but, rather that its dependence on contingent facts means that the DP cannot be an _ultimate_ principle of justice.

37

dsquared 12.19.08 at 8:35 am

I already said that justice might require economic adjustment assistance, but more generally, this scenario seems objectionably unrealistic to me

But it’s the actual state of play in a lot of the world and for a lot of history. Most natural resources economies have historically been dependent on foreign mining technicians, for example. Coercive trade relations of the sort that Chris is talking about have been very important in the development stories of lots of countries.

But I think that the main point here is that as you say, lots of different arrangements are acceptable under the Rawlsian theory, and in particular an arrangement where OECD pharmaceutical companies are allowed to deprive middle-income/poor countries of medicine in order to keep the price up in the USA, is basically one of those distributions above the sufficiency level between which we’re allowed to be indifferent. As I say, the point of Rawls’ theory is to create some space for inegalitarian distributions internationally, so it’s not a surprise that it does in fact achieve this aim, but I don’t see any basis for Matt’s view that he can put himself on the politically more popular side of the TRIPS issue by stipulating that international legal arrangements which benefit corporations and harm ill people in poor countries can definitely be ruled out.

38

Matt 12.19.08 at 12:37 pm

Daniel, since I did not say that anything can “definitely” be ruled out, at least in the actual world, but at most said that it “seems” that way, I’m going to say that you’re making shit up here. “Seems” here means something like, “at first glance”, which of course leaves open the chance things might be the other way. Since I repeatedly qualified my statements about what we can say about trade agreements in the actual world in ways similarly to how Jon did, you’re getting pretty close to just telling a lie here. You should stop it. I should also say that, since you don’t know Rawls’s view very well at all, you shouldn’t speak so assuredly about what it implies or not. To find this out you’d have to not just imagine what you think is the case from what you’ve read in a few blog posts but do some work to try to see what might be possible given the framework and to provide some arguments for that. Jon has done a bit of that while you’ve just boldly asserted otherwise, despite really knowing little about the subject (what Rawls’s views are and what they imply) in question. I know that speaking strongly about things you know little about is an internet tradition and all but it makes you look silly, on top of looking dishonest here. Please, stop.

39

dsquared 12.19.08 at 12:58 pm

Matt, are you doing this to prove your credentials as a True Rawlsian, or as some sort of rhetorical strategy, or have I just witnessed an actual tantrum here? Have a word with yourself.

On the question whether I was “lying” or “making shit up” (accusations which I always take very seriously, by the way), a glance at post #20 reveals that the sentence in question was:

But, subsidies to create an artificial comparative advantage or to bankrupt a weaker country (US Cotton subsidies probably fall in the former) or restrictions that are otherwise quite harmful and serve primarily to protect powerful corporate interests (such as at least some of the IP restrictions pushed by the US and EU in many recent trade agreements) would, it seems, fail the requirement of being acceptable to reasonable and rational parties representing societies behind a veil of ignorance in a way that’s pretty straight-forward on Rawls’s account

“Pretty straightforward”? It looks to me as if you’re being pretty disingenuous yourself here, as well as very patronising. As far as I can see, you’re no longer defending the assertion that the IP restrictions suggested by the EU and US in Seattle in 1999 could be rejected “in a way that’s pretty straightforward on Rawls’s account”. So perhaps some recognition that I was right on this point and you were wrong would be a little bit more in order than just baldly asserting that I would know how stupid I was if only I had grasped the nuanced majesty that is Rawls. If you think there’s a relevant point I’ve missed, then either tell me what it is or alternatively, try keeping one of your frequently broken promises to stop talking to me. Your choice, but calm down and have a cup of tea before you make it.

40

Matt 12.19.08 at 1:04 pm

Daniel, you’re conveniently _not_ highlighting the _seems_ or the _some of the_ part, aren’t you? When someone makes a claim that has qualifications and you attribute to them a categorical one (i.e., “definitely”, and about a wide range of cases) you’re being dishonest. Do you disagree with that? If so, I’d love to hear why. That’s what you’ll need to explain here if you’re not to be making shit up. Please explain that.

41

dsquared 12.19.08 at 1:17 pm

“conveniently not highlighting”?

42

Matt 12.19.08 at 2:11 pm

you highlighted (bolded) a part that seemed to support you claim, but only if you don’t note the qualifications right before that. That’s the sort of thing that seems to me to be dishonest. If it were done to you I’d expect you’d think the same. Again, if you can explain how taking a qualified statement and claiming it’s a categorical one isn’t, at the very least, misleading, I’d be glad to hear it.

43

dsquared 12.19.08 at 3:01 pm

you highlighted (bolded) a part that seemed to support you claim, but only if you don’t note the qualifications right before that. That’s the sort of thing that seems to me to be dishonest. If it were done to you I’d expect you’d think the same.

Matt, it was done to me, by you; you kicked up a fuss about “it seems” (which really isn’t a magical qualifier that allows you to walk away from an assertion when it turns out to be incorrect) but didn’t even mention, still less highlight “pretty straight-forward”. And now you’re trying to call me dishonest, because I quoted your full sentence but didn’t change the font on two words which you’d already picked out? Listen to yourself.

I maintain my view that “stipulating that international legal arrangements which benefit corporations and harm ill people in poor countries can definitely be ruled out” is a fair paraphrase of the quoted sentence, and am content to allow anyone else who cares to make up their own mind on the subject. My original intention from post 39 onwards was simply to defend myself against a very serious accusation, but your claim that I’m dishonest or a liar now seems to have got so very silly and trivial that I think I can afford to let it slide. Apologies to Chris for the short threadjack.

44

Matt 12.19.08 at 3:21 pm

I’ll admit that “it seems to me that X” doesn’t seem to be adequately paraphrased by “definitely X” . If you think so, well, I guess there’s nothing to say about that. It’s either dishonest or, frankly, very, very, strange. Additionally, the specification you give as to the issue is also one that you came up with and not one that was in my remarks. So, I don’t see why I’m stuck with that, either. (In the case of the US I had in mind in particular some IP issues in the bilateral trade agreements with South and Central American countries, for example.) Whether other people think “seems to be X” is adequately paraphrased by “definitely X” I’ll leave to them, but I’ll say that this seems to me to be dishonest. That leaves open the possibility that you’re merely sloppy on the matter, since of course “seems” doesn’t mean “definitely” on any plausible account.

45

Chris Bertram 12.19.08 at 3:46 pm

It seems as if this thread has gone on longer than it should have.

46

dsquared 12.19.08 at 3:50 pm

“it seems to me that X”

No, Matt, look at your actual words, which I helpfully quoted above although apparently not in a font of your liking. Not “It seems to me that X”. Not “seems to be X”. What you said was “X, it seems, in a way that’s pretty straightforward”. Given that the context is you accusing me of dishonesty, I would have thought that you’d take particular care not to give the slightest appearance of an impression of a suspicion that you were trying to rewrite history for your own convenience.

The word you are looking for is “sorry”.

47

dsquared 12.19.08 at 3:51 pm

You’re right Chris; sorry.

48

Matt 12.19.08 at 3:54 pm

I’ll agree with Chris on this!

Comments on this entry are closed.