Illustrating egalitarianism

Karl Marx, the IRS, a sinister man in a ski-mask and another sinister hooded and bearded man

Sounds like a chunk of the CT lineup.

Well, at least it wasn’t Karl Marx in a ski mask brandishing a pistol, with Robin Hood in sunglasses laughing manically while processing IRS returns. I mean, they could have gone whole hog. And what are the anti-egalitarians unconsciously saying when they have the dollar bill’s George Washington serenely overlooking it all? Some hang-up with the government monopoly on printing money?

So that’s all you Crooked Timber guys could manage to do? Complain about an article’s illustration rather than engage with its substance.

A Socratic dialogue – with you lot?

So that’s all you Crooked Timber guys could manage to do? Complain about an article’s illustration rather than engage with its substance.

I’m no Crooked Timber guy, but I can’t figure out what is the substance there.

Kekes doesn’t seem to object to social spending on some level(namely, 20% of the income, though he says that it’s “more than enough”). What he does object to is full “equality of result”, except, like he himself demonstrates in the first half of the article, nobody wants that anyway.

What’s left is his claim that the media says something that’s not true, but I think he ought to at least cite one example for that claim to be interesting.

MG, perhaps you have a point – Kekes takes an ‘extreme’ egalitarian position and ridicules it, something like Hartley in his novel entitled ‘Facial Justice’, where the pretty girls have to have their faces uglified. Just because you’re a little bit in favour of redistribution doesn’t mean you want to go the whole hog.

And at the libertarian end of the spectrum, neither Hayek nor Friedman were entirely opposed to tax-funded anti-poverty measures. The problem is that, to my knowledge, there isn’t any egalitarian philosopher who convincingly argues where to draw the line.

A more compelling argument against egalitarianism is that it just doesn’t work – that it is counter-productive even on it own terms. In the long run, the welfare state creates the very misery it seeks to eliminate – for example, by promoting a population explosion on the part of the cognitively disadvantaged underclass. I’d suggest that both libertarians and egalitarians read their Malthus and Garrett Hardin again (or for the first time).

Try here:
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.html

And here:

http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/

the welfare state creates the very misery it seeks to eliminate – for example, by promoting a population explosion on the part of the cognitively disadvantaged underclass.

Hmmm, I hadn’t realised that the great European welfare states had the highest birthrates in the world. In fact I seem to recall several right-wingers arguing against the European model by appeal to Europe’s low birthrates

It’s good to know that either low birthrates in Europe or high birthrates in Europe will constitute empirical evidence that welfare states don’t work. Saves a bit of expense on the old research fund.

This is an even weaker version of a weak paper he published in Ethics 5 years ago (or so), which was soundly criticised by Dick Arneson if I remember rightly. It is so riddled with errors its hard to know where to start. BUT one bad piece does not make a bad philosopher, and, in fact, his *Against Liberalism* is the best attack I’ve read on the variant of liberalism I basically hold. So Cornell may be justified in publishing his stuff — just not this stuff!

Unfortunately, what seems to pass for philosophy these days in any argument based on broad generalizations, and unrelated to facts. I’m sure there are good writers out there who can support an anti-egalitarian position, but this paper looks to be the product of a high school philosophy class.

Then again, I’m only generalizing this paper, and I have no desire to break it down constructively, as such, I will merely insult him.

“In closing, after it has been proved how wrong any form of egalitarianism is, I would simply like to say that Ayn Rand is my Dominatrix Love Goddess, and I dream of her every night.”

“Hmmm, I hadn’t realised that the great European welfare states had the highest birthrates in the world. In fact I seem to recall several right-wingers arguing against the European model by appeal to Europe’s low birthrates”

By Crooked Timber standards (at least if today’s postings are representative) you’re a near-genius. OK, my use of the term ‘population explosion’ was perhaps misleading. The problem is more that European welfare states encourage high birth rates on the part of lower-class, low-IQ women – while intelligent females seem to have more or less stopped reproducing altogether. But you’re certainly right in criticising those right-wingers who blame the welfare state for everything. A welfare state in which women were to have on average 2.1 children could survive indefinitely, while a ‘libertarian’ state in which women were to have on average 1 child each would, of course, eventually end up with zero population.

I don’t know anyone who defends equality for equality’s sake. In any case this is just the problem with political philosophy as practiced these dyas. Take any such notion (social justice, freedom etc) and say it is the only thing worth having and you get wildly counter-intuitive results. I could write an article that does the same kind of analysis of freedom to knock down the anarcho-capitalists. Fat lot of point though.

The stupidity of his paper is that simply because equality cannot be shown to be good in-itself, he thinks it can be thrown out completely. I’ve yet to meet anyone who can show anything is good in-itself.

Drapeto,

The problem isn’t that of reducing fertility in general. It’s that of reducing fertility of the
uneducable and the uneducated — of what novelist Anna Quindlen has called the “fecund pack animals” of Afghanistan. The policy of a decent society should be to raise the birth rate of intelligent women (or couples), while ensuring that the disadvantaged are incentivised to practice birth control (e.g. via voluntary sterilization, as in post-war Czechoslovakia, where Roma women were given sterilisation bonuses). Another good example is the German Democratic Republic, where college girls were showered with child benefits.

Even the Commies didn’t get everything wrong all of the time, no matter how hard they tried.

“The policy of a decent society should be to raise the birth rate of intelligent women”

I beg your pardon??

I mean, I get the eugenic reasoning, but speaking as a woman, I can’t help being curious about what you mean by “raise the birth rate.” And if the implications of that trouble you at all – even granting your eugenic goals, do you think they might possibly be in tension with some other valuable goals?

Ophelia,

I mean that society is doomed if smart women stop having kids. Basically, I’m just plagiarising Spengler, so instead I’ll quote him at some length:

“Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence … now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of ‘mutual understanding’. It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who belongs to herself – they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.” (Decline of the West — one of the few readable passages)

And yes – of course having children conflicts with other values, such as having a good time and letting other people do the dirty work of reproducing the species.

“the welfare state creates the very misery it seeks to eliminate – for example, by promoting a population explosion on the part of the cognitively disadvantaged underclass.”

Hmmm, I hadn’t realised that the great European welfare states had the highest birthrates in the world. In fact I seem to recall several right-wingers arguing against the European model by appeal to Europe’s low birthrates

This strikes me as an incorrect retort. The accusation is roughly that, in a welfare state, the “underclass” will have a higher birthrate than the “overclass” (?). That is, it is claim about different birthrates within a society, not about cross-national comparisons. I could be wrong, but in Europe it is immigrant populations (= “underclass” ?) with the highest birthrate. I guess one could ask whether the difference in birthrates between the underclass and overclasses is substantially different between the U.S. and Europe, in order to detect the influence of a welfare state. Still, given there are so many influences, I doubt anything could be infered even if there were a substantial difference.

Anyway, what is obnoxious about the quote, as others have already pointed out, is its description of the “underclass” as “cognitively disadvantaged” and the implication that poorer people have less right to bear children than others.

CC

Yup, I know what you’re saying, I’ve already stipulated that. It’s not as if it’s a novel idea! Nor as if the responses to it will be unpredictable. But I’m not going to let that stop me. Because I forgot to have 15 children, irresponsible selfish lazy whimsical narcissistic slag that I am, so I have lots of spare time to reply to codswallop on blogs. (And edit a busy website, write books, etc.)

“And yes – of course having children conflicts with other values, such as having a good time and letting other people do the dirty work of reproducing the species.”

That’s right. Yup. You betcha. Yes indeedy. The only alternative to full-time breeding is, of course, having a good time. That’s all intelligent women do these days, I’ve noticed it myself. Go to any golf course and all you see are women – the men are all off slaving somewhere while the women, free of childbearing, play all day long. They go to the movies, they watch tv, they play hide and seek and poker, they eat ice cream. A bunch of hedonistic frivolous fun-loving shallow good-time tootsies as never was. I’m embarrassed for my sex. I think you’re absolutely right, it’s about time somebody cracked down and jolly well forced them to start breeding. Because of course they have not the smallest right in the world to decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives, no, they have to obey the imperative of their reproductive equipment on pain of being told they just want to have a good time by – well, by men, the people who won’t be subject to the new eugenic laws, so the very people whose disinterested opinion on the matter is so valuable.

Andrew writes:

“what is obnoxious about the quote, as others have already pointed out, is its description of the “underclass” as “cognitively disadvantaged” and the implication that poorer people have less right to bear children than others.”

I like the ‘obnoxious’ smear. What about the ‘racist’ smear, though – you forgot that? And what about the ‘argumentum ad Hitlerum’, just to terminate the discussion. Socratic dialogues are all very well but the time comes to start throwing dirt instead of arguing, doesn’t it?

I make no ‘implication’ that poor people are less entitled to bear children than others. My argument is simply that a well-ordered and decent society does require a minimum average level of cognitive competence on the part of its members. My point is that poor (i.e. less intelligent) people should at least not be encouraged to reproduce at a higher rate than wonderful humanitarian people like ourselves. Unless of course you prefer a White Trash society than a Crooked Timber one.

Kekes should write for the Onion because it pure satire he’s spewing. As early as the second paragraph he attaches to the Straw-man a reductio ad absurdum argument:

“Here is a consequence of egalitarianism. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, men’s life expectancy is on the average about 7 years less than women’s. There is thus an inequality between men and women. If egalitarians mean it when they say that “it would be a better state of affairs if everyone enjoyed the same level of social and economic benefits,” or that “how could it not be an evil that some people’s prospects at birth are radically inferior to others,” then they must find the inequality between the life expectancy of men and women unjust. As they say, “those who have been favored by nature … may gain from their good fortune only in terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.””

You gotta love this crank….

Charles Copeland, you are implying that people like me, who are poor, must be poor because they are stupid. I think that my mathematics tutor who was surprised that I was not going to do a PhD in mathematics, would disagree.

Have you ever heard of structural unemployment? Have you heard about the working poor in America who have to rely on soup kitchens? Did you ever think that there might just possibly be reasons for people to be poor other than lack of sheer goddamned intelligence, aptitude and grit?

Every new obnoxious statement that you come out with makes you sound more like a Nazi. Or a troll.

Oh now that just tops it off!

“One reason why the demand for immigrant labour is high is”

Er excuse me [i]just[/i] a minute? What the f*** has immigrant labour got to do with this discussion? Oh wait let me guess, those nasty subhuman niggers and towelheads have too many children, and anyway they should all clear off back to where they came from. That’s the implication of your offtopic mentions of immigrants. Yes, I knew it. You are, in fact, a fascist.

Not at all, CC. I recognize the authentic note under the trollery. That is, you are assiduously pulling everyone’s chain, but you also mean it.

“One reason why the demand for immigrant labour is high is, of course, that those ‘having it all’ smart women who are out there actualising themselves in office jobs”

How dare they, eh? God damn women. Thinking they actually have some right to decide for themselves what they are going to do with their lives, their time, their genitals, their reproductive equipment, instead of letting Charles Copeland tell them what to do. What on earth gets into women these days? I can never figure it out. They just can’t seem to get it into their heads, pretty little or otherwise, that men (like CC for example) don’t have to ask permission to decide how to live their lives, but women do. Obviously. Because they get pregnant, or can get pregnant, therefore they can never, ever, under any circumstances, belong to themselves, they have to belong to either a man, or men in general. For the good of the birth rate, and eugenics, and so on. But will they listen? They will not. They have the almighty nerve to think they are people even as men are people, and that once they are grown up they no longer have to ask permission or get approval for what they do with their lives. Well. That simply cannot be allowed, so let’s all get together and sneer at them (all together now) for wanting to [mimsy voice] “fulfill themselves” and “have it all” and – you know, actually be people, as opposed to infant-harvesting devices.

Here’s the quote from Anna Quindlen, apparently:
“It is possible in Afghanistan for women to be treated like little more than fecund pack animals precisely because gender fear and ignorance and hatred have been codified and permitted to hold sway. In this country, largely because of the concerted efforts of those allied with the women’s movement over a century of struggle, much of that bigotry has been beaten back, even buried.”
In other words, Quindlen wasn’t saying that Islamic women are uneducated and uneducable, as Copeland implies. Quite the opposite–they are educable, but have not been educated because of prejudice.
I think it’s well past time for that bigoted libelous motherfucking asshole Copeland to be driven off with a barrage of obscenties. Is Davies around?

Alongside ‘Against Liberalism’, I rather liked Kekes’ ‘The Morality of Pluralism’ – he’s a decidedly odd writer, but has his interesting moments in among the provocations.

None the less, I am wondering why TCS feels the need to run what’s basically a rehash of what is by now a very old paper, particularly one that received such a sound trashing at the time, as Harry points out upthread.

Why in the world is it so hard to accept that, while not everyone who’s poor is stupid, stupid people DO tend to end up poor? And even more so, stay poor if they start out that way. So they’re going to be over-represented among the poor. If the poor breed more than the wealthy, and if stupidity is at least partially genetic, we’re breeding for stupidity.

Evolution doesn’t care about your liberal sensibilities. So you’d better care about it.

Here’s the link to Arneson’s rebuttal of Kekes:

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/9803arne.html

Yo, CC –

I didn’t actually call you a MCP – I merely answered your initiating question on the matter.

You think we guys are male chauvinist pigs?

I never use the phrase myself, it’s stupid, banal and worn out. So nobody is lowering the tone by calling you that, since you’re the one who brought it up in the first place. Fight clean.

As for why I’m wasting energy – I did say, I did acknowledge that it’s a silly way to spend time. But I just feel like mocking the things he says about women. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because I think they’re a little bit stupider than he even intends? That he means them to be irritating but not idiotic? So it’s worth pointing out that they are in fact idiotic? That’s probably it.

I hesitate to enter here, since my experience is any time the comments hit more than 20 or so they are bound to be a waste of time. But, I’ll add my voice to those who say that, while this article is _very, very weak_ Kekes in general isn’t a dope and some of his stuff is quite good. Especially lately, though, he’s had an annoying tendency to argue against positions that no one clearly holds and to be immune to evidence against his claims. If he could show that the absurd positions he argues against were implications of positions people actually hold, that would be quite interesting and important. But, he doesn’t do that, because he now rarely actually bothers to engage w/ the actual positions of those who would call themselves egalitarians. That he’d associate w/ the TCS folks is pretty shameful, too. Personally he’s quite a decent guy, and one I’ve benefited from talking to, but this piece is an emberassment.

Charles writes: “That’s the tragedy — the smarter you lot are, the more likely you are to dislike changing diapers and soccer momming.” I don’t think this is true. Intelligence has very little to do with what one finds fulfilling. Intelligent people can like to raise children as much as posting to Crooked Timber, even more so. (I won’t claim to be intelligent but I do have four kids…)

Charles also writes: “My argument is simply that a well-ordered and decent society does require a minimum average level of cognitive competence on the part of its members. My point is that poor (i.e. less intelligent) people should at least not be encouraged to reproduce at a higher rate than wonderful humanitarian people like ourselves.” I would agree that they should not be encouraged, if you will agree that they should not be discouraged.

But I would also suggest that a well-ordered and decent society requires not just cognitive competence but people with humility, compassion, and moral decency. Indeed, cognitive competence allied with a lack of moral decency, is probably far more destructive to a well-ordered and decent society than the contrary. Not all rich people lack moral decency, of course, but a lack of moral decency may help to become rich.

Cross post again.

Okay, CC. An apology always makes me call off the dogs.

But surely you see what prompted the hyperbolic mockery. Women are not just out there having fun.

Ophelia,

Either you’ve got a poor sense of humour, or I’ve got an even poorer one. I am not ‘sneering’ at women, though I suppose I sometimes express myself in a way that could be misinterpreted as ‘sneering’. Leave me out of it and look at the arguments instead. Even if I were a member of the Nineteenth Hole fraternity, what difference would that make to my core argument as such – namely that if society is to survive, women have to most of the dirty work. It wasn’t my idea — don’t blame me for nature being the way it is. And I reckon it is tough to be an intelligent woman and to have to choose between career and motherhood. Some manage, most don’t — since men, other things being equal, will normally prefer a woman who lacks ambition to one who prefers making a career. At least, that’s what the feminists say.

my core argument as such – namely that if society is to survive, women have to most of the dirty work.

I’ll bet this argument didn’t convince Mom when she told you to pick your socks off the floor, either. Did it, Charles?

Yuval R.,

Thanks for posting the link to the Arneson piece. I remember reading it at the time and thinking it pretty much ate Kekes’ lunch, and I don’t see any reason to change that view after a brief revisit in the present.

gemma, go to Matthew Yglesias’ blog and look at the current LGF thread.

I meant worst thread I’ve read so far on CT.

No thanks, bryan, I have no interest in dipping my foot back into the cesspool that is the LGF comments section (or into Democratic Underground, for that matter).

Ugh.

Here is a good backgrounder on Tech Central Station, in case nobody mentioned it:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.confessore.html

Meet the Press
How James Glassman reinvented journalism–as lobbying.

On closer inspection, Tech Central Station looks less like a think-tank-cum-magazine than a kind of lobbying practice. Which makes sense: Four of the five co-owners of TCS are also the co-owners of the DCI Group, the Washington public affairs firm founded by Republican operative Thomas J. Synhorst. TCS’s fifth owner is Charles Francis, who is also a senior lobbyist at DCI and is listed on TCS’s phone directory. And as it happens, three of TCS’s sponsors–AT&T, General Motors, and PhRMA–have also retained DCI for their lobbying needs. (Both DCI’s spokeswoman and TCS’s chief executive officer declined to be interviewed for this article. However, after I requested comment, the Web site was changed. Where it formerly stated that “Tech Central Station is published by Tech Central Station, L.L.C.,” it now reads “Tech Central Station is published by DCI Group, L.L.C.”)

Sacha writes:

“As for attempting to confer different levels of intellect on racial groupings (which I find extremely distressing to even discuss) …”

Whatever about racial groupings, the scientific community doesn’t deny that mean IQ differs considerably from country to country and correlates closely with GDP (though it’s not easy to determine the relative role of nature and nurture in this connection). Here’s a World IQ Map you may find interesting to examine:

http://www.globalidiot.net/IQworldmap.html

“But one point I’d like to make, is that intelligence is largely considered non genetic, barring certain mental disablities.”

News to me, AND to the researchers who’ve done the twin studies. Intelligence certainly isn’t as simply inheritable as eye color, but the contribution is scarcely insignificant.

It seems to be very much like traits such as height; Really bad enviroments trump genes, but given a minimally decent enviroment, the genes dictate the result. To put it more bluntly, chew lead paint chips as a child, and it doesn’t matter if your father was Einstein, but all the Head Start in the world won’t get you into Harvard if don’t have the right genes.

ugh, another case of people discussing a philosophical position and philosophy without having the slightest notion of what technical philosophers have had to say (i.e., stuff that gets published in Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, etc).

First, every serious egalitarian (whether they are *real* egalitarians like Temkin and Cohen (and perhaps Dworkin) or Prioritarians like Parfit, Nagel, Crisp, and many others) is only interested in “inequalities that result from no fault or choice of the individuals disadvantaged”. That is, egalitarians only care about correcting for bad (brute) luck.

Second, any egalitarian with a brain in her head is a pluralist about value. No one seriously thinks that equality is the only ideal; egalitarians just hold that one way a situation can be better or worse is in virtue of inequality. Thus egalitarians are not committed to maiming the beautiful or burdening the strong.

Well, Ophelia, it would appear that if this post is to be taken at face value, you get your wish. Congrats.

Charles, next time you head over to B & W, take a look around and see who posts in the blog and authors much of the rest of the site.

nice troll, charles. i think you finally tipped your hand with that last bit o’ chum, though. (mixed metaphors, anyone?)

Sorry, should be “won’t be seeing a Nobel prize in their lifetime”.

Ophelia – a rapid Google check does reveal that you yourself have something to do with B&W – congratulations: worth a couple of dozen babes unborn, I suppose, even by my tragic-realist-secular-restorationist standards.

The ‘Fashionable Dictionary’ entry on Ayn Rand is brilliant — as is the one on Margaret Mead, so obviously you guys have read your David Freedman. The definition of the ‘Horst Wessel song’ as ‘rumoured to be the song some sociobiologists most like to sing’ is, however, a bit on the cheap side (unless I didn’t dig some form of recursive sarcasm).

Amazing how highly intelligent people can have blind spots, though — especially when you mention the term ‘self-actualisation’ in a skeptical context.

Did you check out KBJ at Analphilosopher, BTW?:
http://analphilosopher.blogspot.com/

KBJ is an ex-feminist who saw the light and now, inter alia, writes for TCS.

Anyway, here’s another little website present for you (though you’ve probably been there, done that, already), the Postmodernist Generator:

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

Bye for now — got to get back to the ironing or the lucky girl who married me will tear me to pieces.

P.S.: Alex, by ‘cognitively disadvantaged’ I meant ‘low IQ’, but I didn’t want to frighten the horses at Crooked Timber too much, so I used a euphemism instead. I’d love to answer your question in detail but this thread is going on far too long, so perhaps some other time the subject comes up …. cheers, Charles.

…sarcasm is my specialty, I’ve just co-written a whole book of the stuff.

Sure you have.

“sarcasm is my specialty, I’ve just co-written a whole book of the stuff”

well isn’t that ironic.