Political philosophy and the left

Superb indeed, not least to my mind for acknowledging in a very few words the fact that every conscious attempt to improve social existence is confronted at every stage with things that are not merely choices but dilemmas. One in the eye for the “Hah! let’s just make everyone the same!” brigade.

Well, that didn’t take long.

Couldn’t help but think of Harrison Bergeron while reading that…

And luck egalitarians would argue that you shouldn’t necessarily earn less just because you are incapable of original thought.

Well, this is going to go badly. Is “ruder” something that should be corrected for upwards or downwards?

Indeed, Metamorf. But some inequalities are more equal than others.

I needed a link.

The film version is a close adaptation of Vonnegut’s story. The main speech by Harrison Bergeron reflects the spirit of rebellion from the original story but differs in that the lead character doesn’t claim to be the “emperor of the world.”

At present people are interested in why the state is not used or cannot be used to stabilize the economy such that it provides everyone with an opportunity to work at wages that at the least would allow people to appear in society without shame. Unless one believes that unemployment results only from a failure to accept wages commensurate with marginal productivity and that it is just for one to paid exactly what one’s marginal productivity is–so I am leaving aside the question of whether that’s even a sensible concept–one cannot believe that American social and economic life is in any way just. U6 is over 15%, But the question is not to get philosophical clarity about what justice is, it is to understand why the state is not being used or cannot be used to stabilize the economy so that social institutions have any claim being just. And once it’s understood that the state can’t be used to make social life fair even in the most minimal sense, the sense of injustice will become a revolutionary ideological force. But the point is that this is the time for political philosophers to become more social scientific about the limits of Keynesian type interventions.

MM & MDLC, you should really take a look at the political philosophy debates about ‘equality of what?’ (For a stimulating, and very hostile, critique see Elizabeth Anderson’s essay ‘What is the point of equality?’) Since the 1980s there has been an academic mini-industry dedicated to addressing just the issues (inequalities in sexual attractiveness, for example) that your post says (probably correctly imo) ‘few folks are interested in’. The political ideal that White is popularising here (‘luck egalitarianism’) is its flagship product.

@hartal seems to describe a widely held belief about the content of the good life, but I was not aware that there was only one such definition. The idea of the good life, or eudaimonism, was introduced by Aristotle, and hartal’s definition meshes with Aristotle’s (or with one of Aristotle’s two definitions), but I’d thought other philosophers have modified that. Now that I think of it, I’d have to check, though the idea that all respectable philosophy that concerns itself with the good life had one and the same definition in mind seems bizarre to me.

Starting from hartal’s definition, though, I don’t know how many people would be persuaded by the idea that inequality and lack of leisure for the many are good things because only if a few people have inherited wealth, political power, and no home duties will anybody have time to devote to study with hired tutors, which is IIRC Aristotle’s own vision.

Chris, I am talking about economic shame, not the same of being from a persecuted ethnic or gender identity group, and I don’t think income has to be perfectly equalized for deep feelings of shame to dissipate. One can live with anger and resentment about those who make more for what may appear to be no go reason (you know, $900K/hr for running a hedge fund), without feeling overwhelmed by shame. That seems to me true, but perhaps I am wrong. I was just trying to indicate that those who would try to solve the unemployment problem by eliminating minimum wage laws would create such inequality as to put an unfair burden of shame on too large segments of the workforce for society to be considered just. Of course getting rid of minimum wage laws would likely not increase increase investment demand and therewith employment. So it seems that we are stuck with a society with a huge problem of structural unemployment and few could possibly think such a society just.

The rain it raineth every day.
Upon the just and unjust fella,
But more upon the just because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.

White’s definition and usage of negative liberty is somewhat confused. Negative rights give people the right not to be infringed upon, rather than give them the right to perform any given action as long as it does not infringe upon others. There is a difference.

In taking said train trip, a person would not be infringing on anyone’s negative rights, so there is no objection to taking the trip. However, just because taking such a trip would not infringe upon anyone’s negative rights does not mean you can claim your negative rights are being violated if for some other reason you are unable to do so. Negative rights are strictly “rule out” potential actions, they do not mandate that certain actions must be available to someone as an option. This is the entire point of the positive/negative dichotomy. What White is naming as a negative right is really a positive one, under his framework, the distinction becomes meaningless.

hartal@20: I am interested in hearing about other versions of the good life

William Morris, News from Nowhere; Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia

As an American, I tip the waitstaff in restaurants around 20% of the tab. This is a strange way to pay people. It would be more straightforward for the staff to be paid as well as any other worker and to have the benefits taken for granted in other states with comparable socioeconomic status, but it seems that we prefer to keep a substantial fraction of the working public dependent for their very subsistence on the whims of their clientele.

Not only are we not enraged by this system, we think it preferable to the alternative. The idea that certain jobs are servile and demeaning is deeply ingrained in our culture. Sure, any of us will do them when we’re young, but it’s a passing phase, there’s no dignity involved, it’s not a career (no benefits: no health insurance, no retirement).

We’ve also got racial minorities, some of whom are voluntary immigrants, who are often even eager to compete for such miserable opportunities.

Equality is not an American value. Jefferson and Lincoln gave it lip service, in the service of their respective causes, but neither of them and nearly none of us ever thought it necessary to put into practice.

“Well, that didn’t take long.”

Somebody’s got to point out the obvious. Just figure I got it out of the way.

I see a fundamental contradiction here: Leveling the outcomes resulting from inequalities of endowments requires unequal treatment of people, based on their endowments, which we’ve already determined have no moral significance, being essentially randomly distributed. (Not really true, of course, but they’re mostly not the result of deliberate choice.) But isn’t it unjust to treat somebody worse than somebody else, just because of some fact of nature they had no control over? How is IQ different from skin color in this respect? Except that somebody with better endowments getting a better outcome is usually the result of individual, rational interactions in a free society, while the “anti-meritocracy” contemplated here could only result from some third party intervention against the interests of the people acting.

Any moral theorizing is off to a bad start, if you begin by implicitly assuming other people are inert counters you’re entitled to rearrange more to your satisfaction, rather than autonomous individuals entitled to make their own decisions.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been interested in the comments thread that has appeared here. I just wanted to say that at New Left Project we’re interested in bringing political theory and philosophy together with the sort of analysis that is more common on the outlets of the left and radical left, and which is aimed to some extent at more of an activist community. So anyone who is interested in writing anything for such a project, please get in touch! (edwardnlewis@gmail.com)

Also, it’d be great to see some of the commenters here getting involved with the more limited discussion that there’s been on our site. Nonetheless, good that the interview has provoked some response. Part 2 coming soon

Shorter Brett Bellmore:

Smart people are entitled to take advantage of dumb people because dumb people are too stupid to recognize they’re being duped.

Stuart is making the different, and correct, point that protections of unequal holdings of private property involve restrictions of liberty where liberty is understood as something like “freedom from coercion by another person or persons”.

Presumably it’s much more than just protection of unequal holdings that involves a restriction of liberty on Cohen’s view. Protection of equal holdings would be a restriction of liberty also; so too, for that matter, would be (well-enforced) laws against personal assault and rape. Which makes me wonder – who fricking cares if something is a restriction of liberty on Cohen’s view?

I don’t think I buy this luck egalitarianism. People should not be penalized for being stupid, but they should for being lazy? Both stupidity and laziness are reflective of brain states produced by a not-fully-disentangled mixture of heredity and environment. Asserting that laziness is a choice in a way that stupidity is not would seem to suppose a stronger notion of free will than can be supported scientifically. And if we want to penalize laziness for the incentive, penalizing stupidity also provides incentives – people whose intelligence is anywhere near the normal range can learn, just some more efficiently than others.

Luck egalitarianism on this account doesn’t even get you where you want to be. The consequences of choosing the wrong lottery number can create too great an inequality, so the real problem is the inequality itself, not the rewarding of unequal natural endowments. The assertion is that to prevent domination of some by others, inequality must be bounded: that was the problem being jimmying for differences in talent and is still the problem after. If the premise is that the social power differential caused by a high wealth differential is too unjust, limit the differential, but don’t worry specifically about correcting for differences in talent. After all, talent in a useful form requires work to develop as well as natural ability, and there could usefully be incentives for that. If you are indifferent in incentives, then you should have no problem with rewarding the lazy either.

Accidents of birth and innate qualities are not matters of luck. Who is lucky?

Somebody naturally predisposed to laziness can be made to work incredibly hard, somebody with a low IQ cannot be made a whole lot more intelligent.

Some evidence for that claim would be nice. I’ve seen plenty of evidence against it, starting at age 11 when two fearsome members of a religious order told me and my classmates that we were going to win scholarships for secondary school, no matter how much suffering they might have to inflict on us to ensure that outcome. Resistance was futile. I don’t condone their methods but they got results, year after year for decades.

41:If you don’t think #2 has been worked on, theory and practice, for like 150 years I can direct you some Trotskyist, Neo-Gramscian, or other political theory sites.

staying at Stage 1 of the Model seems to do them just fine as a lifestyle choice, soaking up the internalised kudos of Stage 3, while nothing actually happens.

Utopianism, eschatology, or religion have also been around awhile. Contempt for the hoping and dreaming of the oppressed isn’t really constructive, since redirection is part of the toolkit. Part of current theory is that a loss of aspiration is a large part of the problem.

Harry@43:

I’m not sure about that. I’ve almost always heard “smart” used in a way that clearly showed it to be a synonym for what the Brits call “clever.” You could certainly use it to mean someone who understands the way the world works, but it seems to me it would be closer to “wise” and would be confusing.

Umm, I’m actually a little unclear. Is it Dialectical? Is Hegemony maybe the antithesis of Evil? So then is Socialism kind of the synthesis of Evil and Hegemony? Or maybe Evil just sort of merges into Hegemony which merges into Socialism? Are the steps going up or down? (I’m not a college senior, admittedly.)

Harry, that’s a very good point with regards to IQ. I’ve actually listened to guys throwing out numbers like 136 vs 129 as if this means something (days of sf). A much better scoring would just be one, two or three, as in one standard deviation, two standard deviations, etc.

“Shorter Brett Bellmore:”

My own personal rule is, if you have to replace what somebody actually said, with something completely different, in order to think you won the argument, you lost it. Substituting a different argument for the one somebody actually made is an admission you had no response to what they really said.

Try looking up the events of 1789 (France) and 1917 (Russia); perhaps that will help you out.

Been there, done that, no help. I didn’t think France was Socialist, for one thing.

Even looked up the events of 1991 (Soviet Union, Russia) — there you had Evil and Hegemony all right, but mushed together in one step, and still no Socialism!?! Are you sure these are the right steps?

Substituting a different argument for the one somebody actually made is an admission you had no response to what they really said.

[Double-checks who brought up Harrison Bergeron almost immediately]

True, but what does that have to do with your argument? Since you assert that equality of rights is an American value, the “less intelligent” must have the same freedom and opportunities as the “more intelligent,” so obviously the “less intelligent” deserve whatever outcomes result from the actions of their intellectual superiors. Could you be more specific on the ways in which “Smart people are entitled to take advantage of dumb people because dumb people are too stupid to recognize they’re being duped” is not your view? Because replacing the latter part with “because dumb people forfeited their right not to be duped by failing to become smart enough” isn’t actually completely different.

I think people are misinterpreting the laziness/intelligence thing. The primary point isn’t incentives (although incentives of course matter in the execution) but that people should be generally free to make leisure/stuff tradeoffs. If Alice works 65 hours a week doing unpleasant, physically demanding work and Bob works 35 hours a week doing pleasant, physically untaxing work, then it doesn’t seem unjust that Alice should have nicer living quarters, &c. than Bob. Both Alice and Bob could agree that this is fair, and that they’d rather be in their own position than the other.

Our present world is a little like this in that you can, in fact, make leisure/stuff tradeoffs, and indeed the most highly paid members of society – doctors, lawyers, CEOs – do tend to work very long (though not particularly physically taxing) hours. But 1) their pay is seems to be greater even “per pound of effort,” as can be easily seen by comparing their hourly pay to similarly (un)pleasant work and 2) there are quite a few people who work very long hours doing much less pleasant (to say nothing of prestigious) work who get very little beyond that necessary for their physical subsistence. (Then there is the additional matter of completely unearned income like profits, interest, inheritances, rents, and so on.) In a world where everyone had complete equality of opportunity, the free market would eliminate any income differentials not based on hours worked or compensating differentials – which is, in a sense, equality of outcome, if we accept that different people can be considered equally compensated with different bundles of goods (leisure, pleasantness or prestige of work, material possessions, &c.) so long as they don’t envy each other. Actually taking the American platitude of equality of opportunity seriously would entail radically egalitarian politics.

‘Actually taking the American platitude of equality of opportunity seriously would entail a radically egalitarian politics.’

Agreed. I just don’t think that it has anything much to do with socialism.

“No, apparently not. Try looking up the events of 1789 (France) and 1917 (Russia); perhaps that will help you out.”

Is this supposed to be a rebuttal or a confirmation of the idea that people here have trouble getting from step 1 to step 3 in the list of
1. Bitch about capitalism/racism/hierarchies/etc.
2. …
3. Socialism!?

I’m pretty sure that neither of those revolutions had particularly happy outcomes for the lower classes. At best those examples seem to show that if things get bad enough, you can get violent revolutions against the initial order that are immediately followed by even nastier oppression.

As I suspected, the people out there who don’t see the road to socialism as paved with dilemmas see it paved with blood

Yes, because pointing out what seems likely to happen is precisely the same as hoping it does.

@50:

Ya. But I just don’t bother to engage argumentatively with right libertarian piffle. It’s so irrealistic in its implicit premises and so abstracted in its institutional imagination, that the self-referential self-assurance in its supposed “reasonings” is in direct proportion to its lack of any context of application. So I suppose the rule of conversational implicature involved is: don’t argue with solipsists. There’s no point to it; nothing to be gained.

On the other hand, I don’t think academic “normative political philosophy” has much, if any real effect, and actual acuity in addressing political issues anyway. One of its effects, though, is to provide leeway for opposing libertarian arguments, in its abstraction from real political issues involving social structure, conflict and power, by which actual (i.e. limited and finite) social agents are conditioned and constrained.

MDS, you seem to be reducing all interactions to being duped, and duping. But when I, an engineer, get paid a decent sum for finding a way to accomplish something my employer values, who’s being duped? Me? My employer? I think neither of us.

Meanwhile, the guys out on the factory floor work under less comfortable conditions, for less. Is this because they got duped, or is it because my employer had to spend six months searching the country to find me, while all they have to do to get more people capable of doing the work on the floor is flip over the “not hiring” sign?

I suppose one could say it’s unfair, in that I don’t find my work particularly difficult, and even enjoy it. I’m not being paid for having a bad time, I’m being paid for having a relatively rare set of endowments. (Mostly not intelligence as such, but instead a way of thinking about problems.)

But those endowments, or rather the product of their application, are what my employer wants. Not being a sadist, he’s not paying me to suffer, but to accomplish things for him. I get paid well because there aren’t a lot of people who can accomplish them.

Suppose, in the interest of ‘fairness’, my pay were reduced to less than that of the factory workers, because I’m having a good time under comfortable conditions… I’m perfectly capable of working on the factory floor, too, my endowments don’t get in the way of that, and I’ve got a family to feed. But who’s going to replace me at the job I’m doing now?

Pay in this country isn’t dictated by a moral theory, it’s dictated, mostly, by need and scarcity. If everybody had “the knack”, and strong backs were rare, engineers would be badly compensated, and grunt laborers would be making out well. (Who am I kidding? We’d build robots with strong backs.)

Substitute a moral theory for that practical pricing, and we’ll all be poorer, because of the irrational usage of resources. And we’ll all be a hell of a lot less free, because you’d have to impose that moral theory by force.

And that latter reason is why I have contempt for distributional morality. It ignores that the distribution we have mostly resulted from free choices, and no distribution dictated by a theory could be realized without massive force. I am, in short, a Nozickian on this.

I think they didn’t elevate the mediocre chorus member because it would still be evident that she was mediocre, and thus the more talented one would still get the benefit of greater approval, and so higher self-esteem, etc. The point was to satirize the fond notion that if only we taxed and spent enough we could equalize — in the “near-absolute” (#59) sense — the opportunity differentials created by different capacities. The idea that taxation could in any way raise “the average” so that everyone was above it was I guess thought not even worth satirizing. In any case, the story is certainly an illustration of the sort of “radically egalitarian politics” that “Actually taking the American platitude of equality of opportunity seriously would entail” (#56).

Neither I, nor my co-workers, were recruited by press gangs. Suck on that unicorn poop.

Neither I, nor my co-workers, were recruited by press gangs.

But I assume they weren’t allowed to freely choose whether to sign on as janitor or as CEO, either. And while the latter may have freely chosen his own salary, the former did not. Etc.

Well, I’m a hit with my wife.

Am I really supposed to be able to pick my job and pay, in order to be free? How, then, could my employer be free?

Or just read Freedom and Money:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.howardism.org%2Fappendix%2FCohen.pdf&ei=dQhbTJueE8OD4QazivCeAg&usg=AFQjCNHic8Wx1mKq4DZ2SqpwO39QNInWjg

So your definition of “free choice” pretty much boils down to “not literally dragged into it by a goon squad.” You must be a real hit with the ladies.

We’ve done this one before with Brett, I think. Try this scenario on for size: A woman through no fault of her own is stranded in the desert a week’s walk away from any civilization and doomed to die a horrible death. Along comes a Good Samaritan, er, Libertarian, who offers her a ride back back for a price. He asks for $50,000, ten percent of her income for the next twenty years, and access to her favors, starting now in the back seat of his jeep.

Question: Is this woman being coerced? Or does she have a free choice. IIRC, at the time Brett said that the Libertarian was behaving immorally, but that the woman was not in fact being coerced and she was free to deny the contract.

I just remembered this one because of your “real hit with the ladies comment”.

@80:

Similarly, @79, the subject was actually whether people are being coerced if they can’t “freely choose” their own pay, which is certainly very similar to the situation of a woman stranded in the desert through no fault of her own, etc. , I know, but also sufficiently different that again I can understand you wanting to change the subject.

Well, no, you’d be wrong on that one. You see, there are a lot of libertarian types out there who say that as long as there is no physical force or the threat of physical force involve, by definition, there cannot be any coercion involved and so that it’s all “free choice”. Then these same libertarian types usually sneer about the whiner-babies who aren’t satisfied with the choices they have and how they want to the government to use force on right-thinking people to ameliorate their own situation for which they are personally responsible.

So, yes, the question does have a great deal of relevance. Speaking of which, I see you didn’t answer my question, Metamorf. Would you be so good as to answer it? Is the woman in the scenario I described being coerced? A simple yes or no will suffice.

And – I’m sorry I have to do this and I hope it’s not necessary, but – if you refuse to answer the question, in fact start ducking and weaving and doing anything but, I’m going to assume that in fact you do not think the woman is being coerced. At which point, I think most of us will realize that there’s not any reason to continue to talk to someone whose version of reality and ethics is so far skewed from the norm.

And – I’m sorry I have to do this and I hope it’s not necessary, but – if you refuse to answer the question, in fact start ducking and weaving and doing anything but,…

Wow — that’s a lot of ducking and weaving yourself, Scent. Let me save you from fretting any further, or having to issue more dire threats, and say, simply, sure, the woman is being coerced. But, even if you were to accept a more stringent definition that restricted the meaning of “coercion” to physical force or threats, that still wouldn’t make the behavior of the “libertarian” right, would it? I.e. there are other forms of bad behavior than coercion, some of which may be worse.

By the way, is your threat — speaking presumably as the appropriate spokesperson for “most of us” — not to talk to me any more unless I comply with your demands a form of coercion too? I mean I just feel so … so used….

Oh well.
@82: Thank you, Harry, for your first sentence. We can only hope that Scent and chris will comprehend it.

You know, from your writing so far, I didn’t think you were the kind of guy to cut other people a lot of slack, . . . but it just goes to show how wrong I am, and what a wonderful, tolerant individual you are ;-)

Well, thanks. But, you know, I actually doubt that most people would view someone who “won’t give a straight simple answer to a straight simple question” — like, say, a question about whether or not a threat to refuse to communicate with someone might be construed as a form of coercion — as “perfectly credible and not particularly apt to be dishonest or disingenuous”. But that’s “most people”, not tolerant ol’ me :-)

I take it that’s a no?

Metamorf, there’s a big difference between the worker who can’t choose his own pay and the woman stranded in the desert.

Is there? I thought the desert was a pretty good analogy for the ghetto, myself. Workers born into the ghetto aren’t affirmatively placed there by an evil agent (which may or may not be true for the woman in the desert), but they are nevertheless there and have to interact with others based on the limited options available to them in their situation. So if someone else (say, an employer) uses their lack of bargaining power to his advantage, how is that different from the desert example?

Maybe the difference is this: workers born into the ghetto aren’t literally miles from the food, drink, medicine, etc. they need to survive. They’ll just be denied access to it by law (i.e. force) if they don’t have enough money, so they can starve in the midst of plenty.