Spring is here, and meat is in the air!
From the monthly archives:
May 2006
I’m reacting a bit late to Brian’s post on thought experiments in ethics. Like some commenters, I’m unimpressed by such exercises. In too many cases the approach seems to be to postulate a totally counterintuitive situation (for example one in which pushing people onto railway tracks has good consequences) then claiming that people’s intuitions about such a situation tell us something useful.
Here’s another one quoted by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I’m reposting my response from a few years ago.
One common illustration is called Transplant. Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily (!), his tissue is compatible with the other five patients, and a specialist is available to transplant his organs into the other five. This operation would save their lives, while killing the “donor”. There is no other way to save any of the other five patients (Foot 1966, Thomson 1976; compare related cases in Carritt 1947 and McCloskey 1965).
We need to add that the organ recipients will emerge healthy, the source of the organs will remain secret, the doctor won’t be caught or punished for cutting up the “donor”, and the doctor knows all of this to a high degree of probability (despite the fact that many others will help in the operation). Still, with the right details filled in, it looks as if cutting up the “donor” will maximize utility, since five lives have more utility than one life. If so, then classical utilitarianism implies that it would not be morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant and even that it would be morally wrong for the doctor not to perform the transplant. Most people find this result abominable. They take this example to show how bad it can be when utilitarians overlook individual rights, such as the unwilling donor’s right to life.
I don’t know if it’s been pointed out before, but this example doesn’t work as claimed. The proposal of killing the test patient is dominated by the following alternative: With the agreement of the five needy recipients, draw lots. The unlucky one is cut up (but of course, they would have died anyway) and their healthy organs are transplanted into the others. The number of lives saved is the same as in the proposed case, no rights are violated, it’s a Pareto-improvement on the status quo ante and so on. We even save one transplant operation relative to the proposal.
Of course, you can impose some sort of ad hoc assumption to rule this out, but this just points up the other flaws of this example.
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I feel bad for _Star Wars_ fans, I really do. Most of them are in a kind of “abusive relationship”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/08/revenge-of-the-sith/ with George Lucas. I see “via John Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/may#thu-04-original_trilogy (a Vader-codependent himself) that, prior statements notwithstanding, Lucasfilm will “release the first three remastered Star Wars films unaltered”:http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/release/video/news20060503.html on DVD, together with the original theatrical release of each. This is the fake kiss-and-make-up period: now that everyone has bought the currently-available retroactively-reprocessed collection, and cried about that for a while, they can all go out and buy them again. “See.” they will say, “I _told_ you he was a good man!” Nine months from now he’ll announce an Ewoks/Gungans musical or something — “The Wizard of Endor,” maybe, or “My Fair Leia” — and the whole process will start over again.
Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters
[Update: Sue Gerhardt’s comment at 46 below answers a lot of questions people have had — I’ll quote some of it at the end of the post]
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I’m reading Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality
It seems to me that 50 SF films for $16.47
This collection of 100 cartoons
I know it seems terrible that I’m always flogging stuff from Amazon. But is it?
UPDATE: As is pointed out in comments, there is in fact a a whole series of 50-packs: mystery, horror, comedy, musical, drive-in, martial arts, historical, dark crimes, pastoral-comical, tragical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral, robot monsteral-pastoral, santal clausal-tragical, teenageral-historical and so forth.
Jury decides against execution. Seems like the right decision to me. Opportunist that he is, Moussaoui shouted “America, You Lost!” when being led from the courtroom, which is meaningless but may have its intended effect on those who wanted to see him executed. I’m sure he had an equally snappy alternative ready — perhaps something about martyrdom, or maybe just the same line, come to think of it — in case the decision had gone the other way.
In a desperate effort to stay afloat bold and forward-looking move, napster (which shares only a name with the program from the glory days of 2000 and 2001) has made (most of) its 2 million tunes available for free. The catches: 1. you need to register (or find a clever way around registration); 2. it pops up a flash player so you can’t download them (unless you’re much more clever about these things than I am); 3. there’s an occasional ad; 4. you can only play each tune 5 times (on each registration, I’m guessing); 5. it is relatively low quality.
It may not be as convenient as various internet radio stations (especially customizable ones like launchcast) that you can just leave on, but if you’re looking for a particular song – say, after soaking in Bruce Springsteen’s version of “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” you want to hear Ry Cooder’s version, or the original by Blind Alfred Reed (or the one by the Del Lords that I just found) – this is the place for you.
I wouldn’t normally just randomly link to stuff on the Guardian blog, but this one is quite important. The “ongoing genocide in Darfur” has been such a staple of Internet arguments over the morality of humanitarian intervention, the effectiveness of the United Nations, the unique moral awfulness of the European Unions etc etc, that it is easy to forget that this is actually a real place with a real war going on in it and that, as is surprisingly common in wars, the news does not stand still while you are writing your blog posts. The Sudanese government, who are villains right enough and who I am sure will face charges at the ICC in the future, are actually not the problem now; they are co-operating at the peace talks (peace talks? yes! and furthermore, they are being very capably supported by the USA! the USA? yes! apparently they do “the useless chit-chat of diplomacy” a lot better than they do wars!). At present, ill-informed comment in the developed world is potentially even worse than annoying; if it persuades the Darfurian rebel groups that the world is gearing up to decapitate the Khartoum regime, it’s actually dangerous.
Ow ow ow. Michael Bérubé uses his “web” “log” to bring the burninating. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page attempted to defend incoming White House Press Secretary Tony Snow from charges of racism stemming, in part, from one of Page’s own columns. Unfortunately, he also inadvertently let slip the secret of Tony Snow’s mutant power…the power to see the future! (It’s totally like in this one story from Anne McCaffrey’s To Ride Pegasus
Tony Snow is eminently qualified to serve as White House press secretary not only because he is a man of conscience who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations, but also because he can see the future. If you doubt it—or if you think, as an out-of-touch liberal elite critic who doesn’t understand physics, that this sensible blog has suddenly degenerated into trippy Fafblogisms—look again at Clarence Page’s “contextualization” of Snow’s remarks:
“Snow was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race. Snow wanted me to know that, just as those of us who attended Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March were not acting out of black supremacy or anti-Semitism, neither were all Duke voters moved by racism.”
That’s right: back in the fall of 1991, when David Duke had just won 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race, Tony Snow was able to compare David Duke’s white voters to black participants in a Farrakhan-led march that would not happen for another four years. That’s the kind of foresight and sagacity the White House needs now! Oh, how I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Tony Snow turned and said to Clarence Page, “You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists, Clarence. After all, four years from now, many of your people will take part in a march organized by a nutcase anti-Semite. And don’t even get me started on O. J. Simpson! It may be hard for you to see it now, but I have the very strong sense that something bad is going to happen with that man, and many white Americans are going to get extremely upset. David Duke is just proleptically channeling that future racial tension into a right-now campaign, and if mainstream politicians don’t listen to the frustrations of ordinary people and address them in some constructive way, the loony extremists inevitably will move in.”
Man, Trogdor would be proud.
I mentioned in posts or a comment a while ago that I was writing a survey piece on sociology and political philosophy, and several people expressed an interest in seeing it. Well, here’s a draft. I was invited to write it for the second edition of _A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy_, which is being edited by Bob Goodin, Philip Pettit and Thomas Pogge. Like the “first edition”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0631199519/ref=nosim/librarything-20, there will be chapters on the relationship between political philosophy and disciplines like political science, economics, law, and so on, together with essays on problems, ideologies and debates in the field itself. The disciplinary essays are supposed to strike a balance: not too boringly encyclopedic (it’s a Companion, not a Census), but still informative to those unfamiliar with the field. I guess it’s also not supposed to intrude too much on the substantive terrain of other essays, such as those on “Power” or “Trust” or “Feminism” or “Marxism” and what have you. I also wanted to convey what’s distinctive about sociology when compared to disciplines like political science or economics.
Meeting these requirements made for a paper that was quite difficult to write. I’d very much welcome any comments, especially from the prospective audience of political philosophers. Please bear in mind that I’m not a political philosopher myself, so try not to wince too much when you see me wander way out of my depth into exciting areas of interdisciplinary inquiry.
“Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008342.php talks about the hostility that many journalists have towards bloggers.
bq. It’s really astonishing the amount of self-pity and silliness one hears along these lines today. Not long ago, for instance, I sat down for an interview with a particularly disagreeable interviewer who seemed to want to catch me out and pin me down on every conceivably problematic point about blogs. At one point he suggested that the blogs were pulling away or threatening to pull away the ad revenue streams necessary to support the reportings staffs required for a quality news outlet. Agreed — I didn’t know quite what to make of that one either. I’m happy with my life. And my company is able to pay three salaries and benefits in addition to mine. But to say that we’re more than a financial fleck in the eye of even the smallest mainstream news organization is a really a grand understatement.
This reminded me of one of the weirder undercurrents at the National Press Club bloggers-meet-journalists “event”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/29/bloggers-and-journalists/ that I was at a couple of months ago. Halfway during the lunch, someone asked a question about the problems that newspapers face given budget cuts, lack of interest in funding investigative reporting etc etc, and the organizer (an ex-media type from the Shorenstein center) and other journalists jumped onto this, and made it the main topic of the second half of discussion, despite the fact that it was precisely irrelevant to the purported purpose of the lunch – a conversation about the relationship between blogging and journalism. This really struck me as something quite strange. My best interpretation of this was that journalists feel under threat on the one hand from the collapse in advertising revenues (which is about Craigslist and monster.com, not bloggers), and on the other hand from bloggers (who don’t threaten their revenues, but certainly threaten their professional prestige) and that they’ve got a tendency to blur these two quite different threats together into one because they’re both Internet phenomena. I don’t have much contact with journalists, so this impression may fly well wide of the mark – but given Marshall’s interviewer, it seems to me to be at least plausible as an explanation for the weird comments that some journalists have made about bloggers and blogging.
For the last decade or so, most of the English speaking countries have been running large and generally increasing trade deficits, and therefore running up increasing foreign debt. At the same time, until recently, both real and nominal world interest rates have been falling, which has made debt more affordable. This has produced a sense of security which is about to be reality-checked.
Short-term interest rates have been rising for the last couple of years, and now long-term rates are rising as well. The US 10-year bond rate is now 5.1 per cent, and has been rising fairly fast in recent weeks. The effect is to add a rising interest bill to a large and growing trade deficit. Brad Setser does the math for the US and it isn’t pretty.
If the average rate [on private and government debt] should rise to 6% — roughly the interest rate the US paid back in 2000 — the 2008 US interest bill would reach $420b. That is more than three times the 2005 interest bill.
Unless the trade deficit starts turning around fairly sharply, this would imply a current account deficit close to 10 per cent of GDP, which no country has ever sustained (please point out exceptions in comments).
The story for Australia is broadly similar, though the picture is complicated by the effects of commodity prices, which still seem to be generally rising. As long as that continues, our trade deficit should decline. But, high commodity prices have rarely been sustained for more than a few years at a stretch.
“Austan Goolsbee”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/technology/27scene.html?ex=1303790400&en=37d41d9406c1d512&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss writes in the _NYT_ that France’s efforts to make iTunes inter-operable with non-Apple music players is a bad idea.
bq. In iTunes War, France Has Met the Enemy. Perhaps It Is France.
bq. … The legislature paid no mind to such analysis and seems not to have considered innovation at all. Therein lies the danger. Apple largely created the online market for legal music. The record labels’ own attempts flopped embarrassingly. Until iTunes, virtually no one paid for online music. Since then, iTunes has sold more than one billion songs. Its success comes largely from two crucial innovations. First, Apple’s music store is simple and works extremely well with the iPod. Find the music. Click “Buy It.” Drag the files onto the iPod icon. That’s it. Experiences with other players and music stores are far more complicated. Further, iTunes keeps getting better. Apple has added video capability, celebrity play lists, exclusive music, the ability to convert home movies into iPod format, and many other features — all free. Second, iTunes has lots of music. Largely because of the innovative iTunes FairPlay copy protection and digital rights management software, Apple persuaded major record labels to let them sell much of their best content online. The combination of simplicity and variety proved a huge winner. … If the French gave away the codes, Apple would lose much of its rationale for improving iTunes. … Opening the codes threatens that link. Apple would need to pay for iTunes features with profits from iTunes itself. Prices would rise. Innovation would slow. Even worse, sharing the codes could make it easier for hackers to unravel Apple’s FairPlay software. Without strong copy protection, labels would not supply as much new music.
The issue is moot – it appears that the French proposal has been very substantially weakened – but I’m not convinced by Goolsbee’s underlying claims. There seem to be two elements to Goolsbee’s arguments. First he makes a claim about the need to protect Apple’s quasi-monopoly in order to protect innovation. There’s a reasonable argument to be made here, but as far as I’m aware, economists have very considerable difficulty in coming up with convincing arguments about the appropriate level of protection necessary to encourage innovation. Even if you buy the basic claim, it’s hard to come up with a convincing rationale for the claim that Apple’s protections are just right for encouraging innovation, and that a weakening of those protections mightn’t have salutary effects. Indeed, there’s a plausible economic case for skepticism about the value of intellectual property protection _tout court_: see the discussion in Benkler’s _Wealth of Networks_.
Second, Goolsbee claims that sharing codes would make it easier for hackers to break FairPlay. This seems to me to be even less convincing. As best as I can tell, the main reason why hackers aren’t interested in breaking FairPlay isn’t because it would be difficult, but because it’s unnecessary. There is a very well known security hole in Apple’s system – you can burn your music to an unprotected CD, and then make mp3s, Ogg Vorbis files or whatever to your heart’s content. Hence, I suspect, the abandonment of PyMusique and other efforts to circumvent Apple’s controls – there’s no point to them.
All this said, I think that there’s a plausible rationale to support Apple’s power, but it doesn’t flow from mainstream economics or from the purported virtues of DRM. It comes instead from Galbraith’s idea of countervailing powers. As the “FT”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/297eecc2-d934-11da-8b06-0000779e2340.html reported yesterday, Apple seems to have done what antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have failed dismally to do – to make it more difficult for record companies to collude in setting prices and reap the ensuing oligopoly profits. It’s forced the record labels to commoditize albums by selling them at a price which is considerably lower than the price that the record companies would prefer – given sagging sales of CDs, the labels have had little choice but to accede to Apple’s terms. None of this is to say that Apple may not abuse its position in the future – but for the moment at least, it appears to be having a valuable chastening effect.
The BBC currently has a discussion of famous thought experiments in ethics, including Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case, and a few variants on runaway trolley cars. As of this writing, over 12000 people had sent in their votes on the moral status of actions in the examples, and it is interesting to see what this (self-selected, non-random) sample of the folk think. I’ve got some comments on the results below the fold, but I’d rather everyone here went and voted before seeing the votes, so I’ve put them below the fold.
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