March 09, 2005

When Whigs Attack!

Posted by John Holbo

I'm rereading Louis Hartz' 1955 classic, The Liberal Tradition in America, one of the first academic books that fired my brain when I got to college. (David Greenstone taught me. I should read his Lincoln book out of filial piety.)

Here's a bit on Hartz by Arthur Schlesinger: "The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists." Interesting shifts in usage since that was written. For a Democrat to stump for a 'mixed' economy today would be ballot box poison. But all Schlesinger is saying is: the New Deal. Which folks like.

Hartz' basic thesis is packed into his Tocqueville epigraph: "The great advantage of the Americans is, that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so."

As Matthew Yglesias put it the other day: "I'm not sure whether to think it's a good thing or a bad thing that the American tradition has turned out this way, as a vicious family squabble between what are really two strains of Whiggery rather than a grand ideological debate between Tories and socialists, but that's the way it goes."

As Hartz explains it, socialism never takes root in the US because socialism is what you get when a liberal gets exasperated, in a 'why won't you DIE?' way, conronted with some Feudal relic, and starts reaching for some serious levers of power to take care of this problem. (That's putting it a bit baldly, but that's the thesis.) America "lacks a genuine revolutionary tradition ... And this being the case, it lacks also a tradition of reaction ... and becomes as indifferent to the challenge of socialism in the later era as it was unfamiliar with the heritage of feudalism in the earlier one." As a result, there is also a sort of 'fish last to know it's in water' cluelessness about the ubiquity of our Lockean liberalism. The chief danger is 'tyranny of opinion', excess unanimity. "When a liberal community faces military and ideological pressure from without it transforms eccentricity into sin, and the irritating figure of the bourgeois gossip flowers into the frightening figure of an A. Mitchell Palmer or a Senator McCarthy." And, of course: "The American liberal community [during the Red Scares of the 1920's and 1950's] "contained far fewer radicals than any other Western society but the hysteria against them was much vaster than anywhere else." Ever was it so.

Hartz is capable of fine little turns: "There can be an appalling complexity to innocence, especially if your point of departure is guilt." (Think about it.)

And: "The task of the cultural analyst is not to discover simplicity, or even to discover unity, for simplicity and unity do not exist, but to drive a wedge of rationality through the pathetic indecisions of social thought." (Yes, I think there is deep socratic wisdom in that formulation.)

And another smart thing: "In politics men who make speeches do not go out of their way to explain how differently they would speak if the enemies they had were larger in size or different in character. On the contrary whatever enemies they fight they paint in satanic terms, so that a problem sufficiently difficult to begin with in a liberal society becomes complicated further by the inevitable perspectives of political battle."

This implies double cluelessness, through narcissism of small differences. When you get angry at your enemies - and you will - you need some sufficiently pungent philosophical vocabulary to function as vent and vehicle for your excess of affect. Unfortunately, your enemy shares your major Lockean premises. So you hallucinate it is otherwise. (To use Hartz' terms) whiggish liberals accuse democratic liberals of being socialists (or, latterly, communists; more lately, Islamofascists and traitors); democratic liberals accuse whiggish liberals of being aristocrats (or fascists.) Mark Schmitt had a post about this a few days ago: Andrew Sullivan reaching vainly for an point of righteous moral principle to separate himself from the other side regarding tax rates.

Of course - being a democrat, not a whig - I am most offended by the right's recent indulgence in kneejerk pee wee hermeneutics of suspicion: the Powerline 'the Democrats are traitors' line; Instapundit 'Ward Churchill is the authentic face of the left'; Nelson Ascher's Berlin Wall nonsense; Wretchard's 'the left is in a revenge plot with Islamofascism' line. Blah blah. It's a form of motivated irrationality - a tactical deployment of stupidity, shutting down inconvenient conversations; it has its psychic satisfactions, I'm sure. But just as the best laid plans that start with 'first I'll get falling down drunk' oft go astray, so tactical stupidity tends to turn strategic. Stupidity, like hope, is not a plan. (Like beer goggles: smear goggles. When you wear them, you can't tell the difference between Matthew Yglesias and a shoe bomber.)

David Horowitz of course wins this race to the bottom with his Network. Others have mocked it into the ground, and rightly.I whipped this up to amuse. I call it: the Nutwork. Or: When Whigs Attack!

You might object that Darkseid is not a whig. But that just goes to show you don't see, you don't see. 

You might object that Darkseid is non-existent, but that doesn't change the fact that we have feelings about him. Horowitz' defines the left as an Injustice League of America because this is emotionally satisfactory. (Adapting his own terms, he is an 'affective conservative': an entertainment figure "whose politics are emotionally rather than intellectually based".) Figures like Ward Churchill are foregrounded due to their emotion resonance. The Network is a pattern language of negative affect. There is no particular reason why the objects of this emotion need to exist.

The individual profile pages of my Vast Whig Conspiracy need to be filled in. I suggest you amuse yourselves by crafting suitable entries in the grand 'I can't retract my claws!' Horowitzian style; or a tut-tut 'more in sorrow than in anger' Instapundit tone. Or a brisk 'up is clearly down' Powerline voice. I think the game should be: keep it pseudo-analytic. Lots of broad hints at connections. That would be funniest. (Go ahead. Think of this as therapy. Get all the bad stuff out of your system so you can think straight once again.) Perhaps people can be shamed out of their illiberal nonsense. Really, it's un-American to denounce good liberals as un-American. [UPDATE: Come to think of it, by the terms of my own argument, nothing could be more American than to denounce good American liberals as un-American. My point is that it's our favorite rhetorical pastime, which is rather silly of us.]

Am I saying we can all just get along if we all just cut the nonsense and admit we are a nation of pragmatic liberals and Hartz was right? No, but I pretty much agree with what Timothy Burke says in this post. Count me in as a liberal sack of garbage.

March 03, 2005

Perry Anderson on Rawls

Posted by Chris

The latest New Left Review has a piece by Perry Anderson on the thinking of Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio on global order and justice. Since I’m busy teaching Rawls’s Law of Peoples at the moment, I thought I’d give it a read. The article has all the classic Anderson hallmarks — the arrogant pronouncement of judgement from on high, the frequent lapses into Latin, a will to the most unsympathetic reading possible. Typically, Anderson is incapable of reading his targets in any other way that as providing pragmatic cover for the American hegemon. On the one hand he seems to adopt the stance of high principle against the unwitting tools of US power whose every argument is accounted for in terms of their personal history and psychology, but on the other it seems hard to know where the critical principles can be coming from since it is hard to see how, on Anderson’s world-view, principles can ever be anything other than the residue of power politics as false consciousness.

The central charge against Rawls and Habermas is that of providing left philosophical cover for Western intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In Rawls’s case, this is because Rawls argues in general terms that “outlaw states” which violate human rights and threaten their neighbours cannot claim immunity from intervention from liberal states. Does Anderson advance a counter-argument to the effect that the state sovereignty of such regimes is inviolable, or that considerations such as those adduced by Rawls are insufficiently weighty to over-ride such considerations? No, of course not. Anderson wouldn’t stoop to construct such an argument: for him, all that counts is the interest of powers.

Two examples which especially annoyed me of Anderson misresepresenting Rawls to his readers are below the fold, no doubt others could be found.

Anderson summarizing Rawls:

The fire-bombing of Hamburg was justified in the Second World War, if not that of Dresden.

Rawls:

Were there times during World War II when Britain could properly have held that civilians’ strict status was suspended, and thus could have bombed Hamburg or Berlin? Possibly, but only if it was sure that the bombing would have done some substantial good: such action cannot be justified by a doubtful marginal gain. When Britain was alone and had no other means to break Germany’s superior power, the bombing of German cities was arguably justifiable. This period extended, at the least, from the fall of France in June 1940 until Russia had clearly beaten off the first German assault in the summer and fall of 1941 and showed that it would be about the fight Germany until the end. It could be argued that this period extended further until the summer and fall of 1942 or even through the Battle of Stalingrad. (LoP 98-9).

Operation Gomorrah — the firebombing of Hamburg — took place on the night of 27 July 1943. The Battle of Stalingrad ended in February 1943.

Anderson:

It had been an error of A Theory of Justice , he explained, to suggest that a capitalist welfare state could be a just social order.

Rawls in Justice as Fairness (p. 134):

One reason for discussing these difficult matters is to bring out the distinction between a property-owning democracy, which realizes all the main political values expressed by the two principles of justice, and a capitalist welfare state, which does not. [Rawls continued in a footnote: “This distinction is not sufficiently noted in Theory ….”]

January 29, 2005

Just deserts and the market

Posted by Henry

We’ve had a few discussions over CT’s life span where commenters have claimed that free markets produce just deserts; that is, that if markets are working correctly, people end up more or less where they deserve to be. Elizabeth Anderson has a great post over at Left2Right setting out Hayek’s argument that free markets can’t and shouldn’t lead to just deserts if they’re going to have the informational efficiencies that Hayekians see as essential. Key grafs:

Let’s consider first Hayek’s claim that prices in free market capitalism do not give people what they morally deserve. Hayek’s deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational. Free market prices send signals to producers as to where their products are most in demand (and to consumers as to the opportunity costs of their options). They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information, and then only in aggregate form. This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure: there is no way to collect individualized supply and demand information in a single mind or planning agency, to use as a basis for setting prices. Free markets alone can effectively respond to this information.

It’s a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking. They aim to reward people for virtuous conduct that they undertook in the past. Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now, not where the demand was when individual producers decided on their production plans. Capitalism is an inherently dynamic economic system. It responds rapidly to changes in tastes, to new sources of supply, to new substitutes for old products. This is one of capitalism’s great virtues. But this responsiveness leads to volatile prices. Consequently, capitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents. However virtuous they were, by whatever standard of virtue one can name, individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn’t to reward people for past good behavior. It’s to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past.

i.e. - you can’t have it both way folks. Via Brad DeLong

January 23, 2005

Durkheim and Desperate Housewives

Posted by Chris

The latest Prospect has a nice piece on Durkheim by Michael Prowse, arguing that we should take him seriously as a critic of free-market capitalism. I was, however, struck by this paragraph concerning Durkheim’s views on the advantages of marriage for men:

Durkheim used the example of marriage to illustrate the problem of anomie or inadequate social regulation. You might think that men would be happiest if able to pursue their sexual desires without restraint. But it is not so, Durkheim argued: all the evidence (including relative suicide rates) suggests that men do better when marriage closes their horizons. As bachelors they can chase every woman they find attractive but they are rarely contented because the potential objects of desires are so numerous. Nor do they enjoy any security because they may lose the woman they are currently involved with. By contrast, Durkheim argued, the married man is generally happier: he must now restrict himself to one woman (at least most of the time) but there is a quid pro quo. The marriage rules require the woman to give herself to him: hence his one permitted object of desire is guaranteed. Marriage thus promotes the long-term happiness of men (Durkheim was less certain that it helped women) because it imposes a sometimes irksome constraint on their passions.

No comment from me, except that it reminded me of a dialogue between Gabrielle and her boy-gardener lover during a recent episode of Desperate Housewives . It went something like this:

He: So why did you marry Carlos?

She: Because he promised to give me everything I desired.

He: And did he?

She: Yes.

He: So why aren’t you happy?

She: It turns out I desired the wrong things.

Cue Aristotle stage left?

January 21, 2005

Oliver Kamm, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the supreme emergency exception

Posted by Chris

Having recently read W.G. Sebald’s The History of Natural Destruction , I found myself referring to Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars and his discussion of the “supreme emergency exception”. I was slightly relieved by what I found there. Walzer doesn’t justify the bombings of Dresden (1945) or the firebombing of Hamburg (1943) but rather holds that Britain, with no other effective means of waging war against the appalling evil of Nazi Germany, and facing the threat of national annihilation, was only justified in the area bombing of German cities — in violation of the prohibition on attacking noncombatants — until early 1942. Nevertheless, what Walzer calls “the supreme emergency” exception is there, and the grounds for it are reasonably clear: necessity. The bombers were the only weapon available to leaders the continued independent existence of whose people was mortally jeopardized.

Surfing over to a blog post by Oliver Kamm , concerning our old friend Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, I find Walzer invoked as an authority against Qaradawi’s apologia for suicide bombing.

Kamm on Qaradawi:

During his visit to the UK, Qaradawi gave Channel 4 News his views on the suicide murder of Israeli civilians:
When we say that such operations are permissible, it is because they are the only means. They are necessary because, simply, the Palestinians do not have any other means of confronting their enemies.

As a descriptive statement this is nonsense –- plenty of opportunities exist for the campaign for Palestinian statehood, not least direct negotiation with Israel -– but it is also morally repugnant. The reason is one I have cited before with reference to the views of the political philosopher Michael Walzer. Walzer maintains that the type of rationalisation that sees suicide terrorism as a last resort born of desperation exploits and debases our notion of innocence. He summarises the spurious reasoning this way:

Of course, it is wrong to kill the innocent, but these victims aren’t entirely innocent. They are the beneficiaries of oppression; they enjoy its tainted fruits. And so, while their murder isn’t justifiable, it is … understandable. What else could they expect? Well, the children among them, and even the adults, have every right to expect a long life like anyone else who isn’t actively engaged in war or enslavement or ethnic cleansing or brutal political repression. This is called noncombatant immunity, the crucial principle not only of war but of any decent politics. Those who give it up for a moment of schadenfreude are not simply making excuses for terrorism; they have joined the ranks of terror’s supporters.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a supporter of terrorism and the murder of innocents. He is thus, by definition and without extenuation, an evil man. That is the reason –- not his reprehensible positions on gay rights and sexual equality, and certainly not his religion –- that he ought never to have been accorded the reception that Livingstone gave him, and why there can be no justification for allying with him on grounds even of the most amoral Realpolitik.

Now there’s a fair bit of rhetoric in the passage from Walzer that Kamm quotes here. The interesting part, I think, is that the quotation from Qaradawi has the cleric invoking similar grounds to those underlying the supreme emergency exception. He says, to repeat, ” When we say that such operations are permissible, it is because they are the only means. They are necessary because, simply, the Palestinians do not have any other means of confronting their enemies.” Now Kamm doesn’t simply challenge Qaradawi’s factual claim here (although he is right to do so), but he also insists that, even if Qaradawi were right about the fact and suicide bombings were indeed the only means (and presumably that Palestinian national survival were in danger), Qaradawi would still not be justified. “He is thus, by definition and without extenuation, an evil man.” But the thought naturally occurs of whether this conclusion about Qaradawi could be consistently reached by someone like Walzer who agrees that the principle of noncombatant immunity can be subject to the supreme emergency exception. (I have no way of knowing whether or not Kamm agrees with Walzer on the exception, so my remarks on consistency may or may not apply to him.)

The difficulty Walzer’s position on this raises with respect to terrorism is the topic of C.A.R. Coady’s paper Terrorism, Morality, and Supreme Emergency in Ethics (114:4 , July 2004). Coady there employs what he calls a “tactical definition” of terrorism:

the organized use of violence to attack noncombatants or innocents (in a special sense) or their property for political purposes.

Coady remarks that terrorism is morally wrong

Terrorism violates a central principle of the jus in bello, the principle of discrimination, that declares the immunity of noncombatants (“innocents”) from direct attack.

I agree. And I also agree with Coady in his use of a definition which doesn’t limit the use of the word “terrorist” to a particular type of actor: states can use terrorism just as much as non-state actors such as “national-liberation” movements can. The question then arises, of course, of the availability of the “supreme emergency exception”. Is there something special about states which entitles them to make use of this get-out clause whereas non-state actors cannot? As Coady points out, there are striking differences in the way in which Walzer writes about the decision-making of states and the way he discusses non-state forces. He seems comparatively indulgent, for example, in considering the burdens that uncertainty places on state decision-makers, whilst non-state actors contemplating acts that violate noncombatant immunity are allowed no such wiggle room.

Where to go? It seems like we have two possibilities. Either we allow everyone the option of invoking supreme emergency (including Hamas and the Iraqi “resistance”) or we close off that escape route to state and non-state actors alike. Of course the mere invocation of the excuse wouldn’t justify, it would have to be supported by argument and evidence. If someone claims that suicide bombing is the only (effective) means the Palestinians have, then that claim is obviously open to challenge (but in evaluating that claim, should we hold them to higher standards than we employ in evaluating similar claims by states?).

My own view — like Coady’s — is that the best resolution of this issue is to reject the supreme emergency exception and to say that terrorism is always wrong , for states and non-state actors alike. I don’t know whether Walzer (or Kamm if he agrees with Walzer) would find that resolution of his dilemma congenial.

A final note. Coady remarks of his own definition of terrorism that it

might be thought too restrictive in one direction since the threat to use such violence, even where the violence does not result, would be regarded by some as itself an instance of terrorism.

I don’t know what I think about that. But if we were to extend the definition so as to include such threats, that would pose a problem for Kamm. For Kamm is on record (here , for example) as supporting the policy of nuclear deterrence in the Cold War and, of course, deterrence involves exactly such a threat to attack noncombatants for political purposes in violation of their immunity.

January 20, 2005

Iraq: just about time to go

Posted by John Quiggin

The latest terrorist bombings in Iraq came closer than usual to home for Australia, with two soldiers suffering (reportedly) minor injuries in an attack on the Australian embassy1, while 20 more Iraqis were killed, adding to the tens of thousands already killed by both/all sides in this terrible war, which seems to get more brutal and criminal every day.

It’s pretty clear by now that Iraq is approaching full-scale civil war and that, as is usually the case in civil wars, the presence of foreign troops is only making things worse. But rather than arguing about this last point, it might be better to put it to the test. This NYT Op-ed piece by three researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests a referendum on US withdrawal to be held soon after the forthcoming elections. They make a pretty good case that it would be hard for the Baathists to justify disrupting such a referendum, though no doubt some would do so anyway. At least, this would be true if the main Shiite parties adhered to their previously stated position of favoring withdrawal.

I expect such a referendum would lead to a majority vote for withdrawal. But a majority the other way would probably be an improvement on the current situation. The only really bad outcome would be the case where the Kurds voted solidly for keeping US/UK troops, reversing a majority vote the other way among Arab Iraqis.

Of course, withdrawal of troops wouldn’t produce instant peace. But I can’t see any better alternative. If military force, ruthlessly applied, was going to end the war, the levelling of Fallujah and the expulsion of the population ought to have done the trick. On the other side, I think the resistance would lose their main recruiting tool if the Americans were gone.

1 Despite this event, Australia has suffered far less direct loss in Iraq than many nations who were far less deeply involved in the decision to start the war.

January 19, 2005

Global justice

Posted by Chris

I’m about to start teaching a new course on global justice. The course starts by looking at some general theoretical issues around justice and then moves on to look at some recent attempts to extend thinking about justice to the global sphere. I’m also going to accompany this with a blog which will basically be an opportunity to point to relevant stuff elsewhere on the web as well as being a course noticeboard. The reading list is here and the blog (currently empty) is here .

January 17, 2005

Autonomy

Posted by John Quiggin

Following a lead from Bill Gardner (and a tip from Henry) I’ve been reading The Status Syndrome : How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity by Michael Marmot1. The core of Marmot’s book, which is fascinating in itself is his empirical work showing that, as you move up any kind of hierarchy (Marmot looked at British civil servants) your health status improves. I’ve done a little bit of work myself relating to the links between health, education and life expectancy at the national level, and Marmot’s micro findings fit very neatly with mine.

What’s even more interesting though (to me and to Bill, I think) is the general idea of autonomy as a source of good health2. He debunks, for example, the long-discredited, but still widely-believed notion of executive stress and shows that the more control you have over your work environment and your life in general, the less likely you are to suffer the classic stress-related illnesses, such as heart disease.

It seems to me that autonomy, or something like it, is at the root of many of the concerns commonly seen as part of notions like freedom, security and democratic participation. I’m still struggling with this, but reading Marmot has crystallised some thoughts I’ve had for a long time. I’ve put some thoughts over the page - comments appreciated.

The points are clearest in relation to employment. Early on, Marmot debunks the Marxian notion of exploitation (capitalists taking surplus value from workers) and says that what matters in Marx is alienation3. He doesn’t develop this in detail, and the point is not new by any means, but he’s spot on here. It’s the fact that the boss is a boss, and not the fact that capitalists are extracting profit, that makes the employment relationship so troublesome. The more bossy the boss, the worse, as a rule is the job. This is why developments like managerialism, which celebrates the bossiness of bosses, have been met with such hostility.

So part of autonomy is not being bossed around. But like Berlin’s concept of ‘negative liberty’, this is only part of the story. Most of the time it’s better to be an employee with a boss than to sell your labour piecemeal on a market that fluctuates for reasons that are totally outside your control, understanding or prediction. This is where a concept of autonomy does better than liberty, negative or positive. To have autonomy, you must be operating in an environment that is reasonably predictable and amenable to your control.

Of course, the environment consists largely of other people. So one way of increasing your autonomy is by reducing that of other people, for example by moving up an existing hierarchy at their expense. But autonomy is not a zero-sum good. Some social structures give more people more autonomy than others.

In modern market societies, everyone but the very poor has quite a lot of autonomy in their role as consumers. There’s nothing much more autonomous than a supermarket where you can take a cart or trolley round shelves stocked with a vast variety of items, pick whatever you want and take it away, swiping a credit card on the way. On the other hand, Marx’s corresponding vision of a society where you might “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, write literary criticism after dinner just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” seems as hopelessly utopian today as it did 100 years ago. This is partly because of some unavoidable technical realities - someone who did all these things would probably not be very good at any of them - but much more so because of the social structures required to manage work. These can be changed, though not easily.

As Robert Shiller pointed out very effectively, one of the roots of the dotcom bubble was the way the Internet gave new users an incredible feeling of mastery (which might more properly be parsed as autonomy). I don’t think this was entirely illusory and I continue to believe that the Internet has genuine potential to generate the kind of social transformation that will enhance autonomy for everyone.

I’ve got a lot more to say about this, but that’s enough for now. Go ahead and pull it to pieces. After that, I’ll try to put it back together in something like working order.

1 In the same order, I bought “The Working Poor : Invisible in America” (DAVID K. SHIPLER), also well worth reading/

2 Marmot also talks about social participation and makes a lot of sense, but that’s a topic for another day.

3 This is, I think, reflected in the old joke. “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is exactly the reverse”.

December 23, 2004

A real life ticking bomb problem

Posted by John Quiggin

A while ago, I looked at the ticking bomb problem and concluded that, whatever the morality of using torture to extract life-saving information in emergencies, anyone who did this was morally obliged to turn themselves in and accept the resulting legal punishment. Reader Karl Heinz Ranitzsch has pointed me to a real-life case, reported by Mrs Tilton at Fistful of Euros. The case involved a threat of torture, rather than actual torture, and the deputy police commissioner involved was convicted and fined. Without detailed knowledge of the circumstances, I tend to agree with Mrs T that this was about the right outcome.

December 22, 2004

My article in The Economists' Voice

Posted by John Quiggin

My article The Unsustainability of U.S. Trade Deficits has just been published in The Economists’ Voice along with a piece on government deficits by Ronald McKinnon. Although relatively new and oriented to a general audience, EV looks like being a high-powered journal, having already published Stiglitz, Posner and Akerlof among others, so I’m pretty pleased to have made it into volume 1. Thanks to everyone here and on my blog who helped me to sharpen my arguments on this topic.

Update One point in my piece that I thought was at least modestly novel was my observation that the US government has been shortening the term of the Treasury securities (bonds, notes and bills) it issues. Now, via Brad DeLong, I see that Nouriel Roubini has just covered the same issue in a lot more detail, offering what he describes as “A Nightmare Hard Landing Scenario for the US $ and the US Bond Market..”. And you all thought I was bearish.

December 20, 2004

Conservationists and conservatives

Posted by John Quiggin

Don Arthur had an interesting response to my pieces on the precautionary principle and wars of choice1. Don correctly observes that this kind of argument can be used in opposition to reform, and is therefore inherently conservative. He mentions, as an instance, the possibility of making this kind of argument against gay marriage.

Don goes on to argue
The welfare state is another area conservatives might want to apply the precautionary principle. Just as environmentalists argue that we should withdraw genetically modified crops from sale until they are proved safe, conservatives could argue that welfare benefits to never-married single mothers should be withdrawn until they are proved non-hazardous to social functioning. After all, the widespread use of income support for alleviating poverty in families where a woman has had a child out of wedlock is relatively recent.
While there’s always room for dispute over what is meant by “relatively recent” here, I don’t think this argument works. The main institutions of the welfare state developed in the first half of last century, before most of us were born, and its extension to single mothers dates back to the 1960s. In this debate, the self-described advocates of welfare reform are those who want to do away with social institutions most of us have grown up with and try something radically new. The fact that reform may be sold as a return to an idealised and largely imaginary past, rather than a leap into the future, doesn’t change this. In fact, reformers of all stripes have used this characterisation of reform, sometimes validly and sometimes not, most obviously in the case of the Reformation2.

More generally, the set of ideas associated with terms like progressive and conservative are based on the assumption, clearly falsified over the last thirty years or so, that the movement of history is uniformly to the political left. The corollaries (also false, in my view) are that leftists and socialists should favor the removal of obstacles to rapid political change - bicameralism, federalism, separation of powers and so on - and that the the precautionary principle should be viewed with suspicion.

My reading of the 20th century as a whole is that, both in the democracies and elsewhere, it is the right who have made the most effective use of concentrated power. Given the power of the opposed interest, sustainable progress in the direction of socialism or social democracy can only be made on the basis of broadly-based popular support, sufficient to overcome constitutional obstacles. By contrast, a determined rightwing government like Thatcher’s can ram through its policies on the basis of 40 per cent support, given a plurality-based system of majority government.

Coming back to gay marriage, I think it’s true that a precautionary principle argument would lead one to favor a gradual, one-step-at-a-time shift in the rules, rather than a radical reform based on purely abstract arguments about equality3. In the current context where a wide range of legal disabilities for gays have been removed without obviously disastrous consequences, this would suggest that civil unions ought to be the next step.

1 I missed this at the time, and picked it up while visiting The View from Benambra where Don’s arguments are amplified, and the Burkean nature of the principle elaborated.

2 Raymond Williams in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is excellent on this, as on most things.

3 And, if I were to advocate a reform along these lines, it would be the removal of legal recognition for religious marriages and their replacement by civil unions for all, as is, I think, the case in France, though only for heterosexual unions.

December 17, 2004

More on the Status Syndrome

Posted by Harry

Bill Gardner has another, more lengthy, post on Michael Marmot’s The Status Syndrome. He quickly reviews the evidence for Marmot’s thesis that there is a social gradient in health. Marmot is pretty persuasive (to Bill and me anyway) that the social gradient in health is not explicable by appeal to the idea that healthier people move socially upward. What is more conjectural is Marmot’s claim that the explanation lies in the fact that people who find themselves lower down the social scale have less ‘autonomy’. Bill explores what autonomy might mean in this context.

I’m again disallowing comments, in an authoritarian manner, to force you to discuss it at Bill’s blog.

December 16, 2004

Free speech and hate speech

Posted by Chris

I’ve been wanting to post some observations on the British government’s proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. The issue may be now be moot, thanks to the departure of David Blunkett, but there were assumptions made in the standard blog critique (SBC) that I wasn’t happy with. There were also considerations omitted that I thought should have been given some weight. Let me stress that I don’t think that this bill should have passed. Nevertheless the arguments in the SBC were seriously defective and/or incomplete.

So what was wrong with the SBC?

(1) The SBC thinks of free speech on libertarian lines: there’s the little blogger (or journalist, or man in the pub) who wants to say something, and the nasty government which wants to stop them. Even though, the SBC sometimes concedes, what is said may provoke hatred against Muslims (for example), it would be very very dangerous to leave governments with discretion over what does or does not constitute hate speech. But I don’t accept that we should start by thinking about free speech on the model of individual rights versus nasty government. Rather, in a just state, we should assure people both of certain basic political freedoms and of the fair value of those freedoms. And that assurance of fair value means that we-the-people have to do some regulation in order to give everyone a fair opportunity to have their voice heard in the public forum.

What does this require? Well, most obviously it requires some regulation of media ownership, access to the airwaves and so on. States and societies where broadcasting is dominated by a few conglomerates or where the money people make film-makers tone down the anti-religious content of their films , are seriously defective from a free-speech point of view. It isn’t the intervention of the state that’s a problem here, it is its silence. (And cue suitable extension of the argument to money-in-politics generally).

But second, and most pertinent in this discussion, securing a fair opportunity of access to all may mean we have to get some people to shut up! Most obviously this restriction of speech for the sake of speech has a place in formal debates: people speak through the chair, they can’t exceed their allotted time, mustn’t interrupt others, etc. But beyond that special formal setting, it cannot be excluded (and certainly not a priori ) that restrictions are sometimes justified. One of the purposes of hate speech — and other forms of intimidation, such as private employers threatening to sack people — is to cow its targets (and their defenders) into submission, and to create a climate where only the very bravest are willing to express themselves. In my view, securing a fair opportunity for all to express reasoned argument in the public forum ought to trump any unrestricted right to “free expression”.

Note that this cuts all ways. The right of apostates to express their apostasy, of gay Muslims to express their views etc, is plausibly threatened by hate speech directed at them by the ultra-religious. I’m not suggesting “offensiveness” as a test, but fair access for all. And I’d like to enter a caveat: those putting the SBC are right about the untrustworthiness of the state in the real world, so I’m pragmatically averse to state-imposed speech restrictions. I’m just saying that guaranteeing a fair opportunity to put a point of view in a way that acknowledges the right of others also to put their point of view is fundamental, rather than individual right of free expression.

(2) Many advocates of the SBC write about religion being a matter of choice, or religion consisting of a body of doctrine which ought to be open to critique etc. I basically agree, though I think people sometimes overstate the chosenness of religion. But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious identity may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question, and I think it reasonable to suppose that strictly doctrinal differences play a limited role in the opinions of Glasgow Rangers supporters about Catholics, just as the “nationalist” skinheads who beat up a gay Muslim for being, among other things, a Muslim, are not that interesting in debating the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence. The lack of actual religious beliefs among many Bosnian Muslims, does not seem to have lessened the animosity of their Serb or Croat persecutors.

SBCers have asked why religion should get special protection. Well it shouldn’t. In particular circumstances the group whose members may be being denied a fair opportunity to participate in public life by hate speech may be those with a particular religious identity, gays, women, racial or ethnic groups, etc. If is is true that there is such exclusion, then there’s a prima facie justification for laws that address that, and a law that’s appropriate for postwar Bosnia, say, may not be appropriate for Illinois. And there’s the questions of whether such laws will do more harm than good, whether they will be effective, and so on.

Is it in fact true that Islamophobic hate speech is denying Muslims in the UK a fair opportunity to play their role as citizens of a democracy? No, I don’t think it is. (And, certainly, and pretty obviously, much of the speech that Muslims are offended by, such as The Satanic Verses has no such exclusionary effect.) But if Muslims were, actually, being denied fair access to the public realm by hate speech, that would, in principle, provide grounds for the limitation of such speech.

December 11, 2004

MODOK studies

Posted by John Holbo

Thanks for the many comments - many long comments - to my academic groupthink posts, particularly the second. Having dutifully read through, I'm too tired to respond point by point to any more points. I do feel that this exercise - which threatened to be a bit of the old same old/same old - did me much good, writing and reading. I hope those who followed along feel the same. Otherwise you must be seething.

One commenter requested - for the benefit of those with day jobs, or whose time is valuable - a dsquared-style shorter Holbo for all this.

So I thought to myself: how can I pithily muster proper disdain for the indulgent character of my highly characteristic blather? My tendency to roll and on without coming to a point or a halt. To repeat myself. To say the same thing with slight variations. A proper 'shorter Holbo' should make me feel pinned by some English term of abuse, like 'bloody pillock'; but I'm seldom more than approximately sure what proportions of idiocy + fatuousness such terms index. And maybe I need a certain sort of shirt or shoes? The English, being a sort of European people, are sophisticated. Also, class-conscious. To feel English and badly about myself I tried listening to Louder Than Bombs inside on a sunny day after sleeping too late. Probably Daniel Davies doesn't like The Smiths. Plus isn't he Irish or something? But it rained, then it stopped. Then I went swimming, with perked me up.

Belle read the posts and said: look, you know you think sections of the humanites are in a sort of bad way and this is connected to political narrowness of a sort. So why get all clever with the Millian fancy footwork, dancing around it rather than saying it?

But, honey, I always.

I guess I wanted to kill three birds with one stone. Which requires me to throw it several times. (Have you ever tried to hit a bird with a stone?)

1) I agree with Bauerlein's Millian analysis and say so.

2) The Millian questions about tolerance and diversity - although they may seem top-heavy in their construction relative to the case at hand - seem to me fine openers for cracking a general case: the mystery of what universities should be like, and what they should do. I have my eye on that big ball as well.

3) As I wrote in comments, I want conservatives to pay a toll of personal philosophical improvement if they want to earn the right to criticize the academy. If they want to tut-tut on Millian grounds, they must turn Millian. In general, if they want to say there is something wrong, they have to be able to articulate what it is. Conservatives think it is quite easy for them to do this. I think it is actually extremely difficult. Either they give reasons no one else has any reason to accept (since they are private and mysterious or simply partisan); or reasons that are not clearly academically suitable (since they are anti-intellectual or irrationalist); or they say things that are hypocritical, at any rate deeply inconsistent with other things they believe.

So the fancy footwork was needed to shuttle me back and forth between 2) and 3), which required taking up perspectives not my own, to see how things look from there.

I won't go through the argument(s) to 3) again. I have failed to convince quite a number of you. If I try again, I'll try to do better.

One final point, since there's nothing I love more than a good MODOK joke.

Sebastian Holsclaw surprised me by commenting to my second post: "Here and elsewhere you dismiss the question of the lefty who thinks that the conservative is smart, and nevertheless chooses not to hire him. Do you think that case is highly unlikely?" I said that I do indeed find it quite unlikely - so much so that, it's true, I completely neglected to talk about it. (Michael Bérubé is making fun of the very notion, and I think his post is kinda funny.) I take the standard problem case to be one in which the lefty sincerely takes the candidate righty to be intellectually incompetent, due to his political beliefs. So the decision not to hire or promote is, in a sense, made in clean conscience. The decision is felt by the maker to be made on just the sort of grounds you would want: intellectual achievement.

On reflection, it could be that I am wrong about the rarity of the type of case Sebastian raises. (I don't want to say it never happens, obviously. I'm not a total idiot.) One reason I don't really want to consider these case is that - hey, I only know what I read in the papers. I read lit studies journals. I'm no fly on the wall in their hiring committee meetings. So I'm not going to go making wild accusations. It's impolite. (Not that I'm polite, but sometimes I am.) But it just so happens that just today prof. Bainbridge is hopping mad about the case of Jack Goldsmith, a law prof at Harvard whose liberal colleagues are apparently ... oh, just go read the Boston Globe article. Basically the concern, in some quarters, is that the man is brainy enough but of low moral character.

Now Bainbridge, as per the tail end of my first post, seems to me a picture perfect example of a conservative intellectual who will have hopeless difficulty explaining what is wrong here, by his lights. His attachment to Russell Kirk will be extremely awkward. And it will only get worse. Bainbridge is officially a fusionist. Social conservative + libertarianism. But every confusion is a form of fusion if you just ... oh, never mind. We won't go there just right now. Let's look at one corner of the problem only. Consider Bainbridge's allegation that the case is one not just of instutitional bias but of manifest 'actual bias'. No one thinks Goldsmith is intellectually inadequate, or insufficiently credentialed and published. Ergo, it must be bias.

But it seems fair to assume that the faculty who oppose Goldsmith's appointment are sincere in their suspicion that he holds wrong moral values (by their lights). It isn't really right to say they are biased against the views he is thought to have. They oppose them, on principle. Having values doesn't = bad bias.They are saying that a man of such low moral character should not be promoted by a school like Harvard.

Of course, there is a perfectly good liberal response: ''I so much like the idea of somebody who thinks differently than I do, who is smart and open-minded," [vice dean] Alford said of Goldsmith. ''You can have debates about ideas, and that's what this place is supposed to be about."

But why should a conservative think that it is wrong to insist on good moral character, in a teacher? I should think this is one of the most standard conservative positions there is: mere intellectual brilliance - especially brilliance on behalf of unorthodox ideas - is essentially a shallow, unsustaining virtue. Yes, the man has scribbled many books. But look what they contain! Dangerous ideas! Ideas that would overturn our traditional moral notions! Character and proper moral outlook are the true foundation on which one builds. We must look to those in all we do. We have the young to think of. What poison might this man pour into their ears, let loose in the classroom!

Isn't this the Kirkian-Burkean view (perhaps I'm stating it a bit too strongly, but haven't I got the outlines right)? So why call this view 'bias'? Are all conservative arguments of this form biased? (Have we quietly dropped conservative arguments of this form? If so, there are consequences for conservatism.)

I take it Bainbridge's answer is: look, I'm a libertarian about this stuff. I'm a Kirkian when it is a matter of me imposing my elite moral views on others. I'm obviously not going to stand for others - liberal elites - imposing their moral views on me. That would be intolerable. This is wise fusionism.

Bainbridge writes (see link above): "The American people want their laws to reflect their morals and values." Isn't it likely that those faculty opposing Goldsmith sincerely believe that they are upholding American morals and values? Bainbridge: "Conservatives thus agree with Edmund Burke's argument that "Man's rights exist only when man obeys God's law," towards which we admittedly grope feebly and imperfectly. Hence, conservatives believe our laws should reflect the moral norms embodied in the natural law." Isn't it likely that the faculty opposing Goldsmith sincerely believe that - however feebly and gropingly - they are doing so on behalf of moral imperatives that go deeper than the law?

How is Bainbridge sure they are 'biased' rather than Burkean? Burke speaks of the wisdom of 'prejudice'. What is prejudice but bias? Again, obviously the answer is that Bainbridge will say he is libertarian about this stuff. But why should anyone take his opportunistic slides back and forth - Mill or Kirk as suits his partisan convenience - remotely seriously?

I think Goldsmith should probably get to keep his job for all the standard reasons the vice-dean gives (unless there's something truly horrible going on, of course.) But I'm a liberal Millian. And I promised you a MODOK joke.

I told Sebastian that I don't think people get refused academic jobs because the hiring committees think they are smart but intolerably evil. But everyone has their limit, surely. MODOK is a Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing by the brilliant scientists of A.I.M. You can just see the hiring committee discussion. "But he's brilliant! Look at the size of his head! And he killed the interviewers with beams of pure thought! On the other hand, we have also to consider the uses to which a being designed only for killing might put its great intellect." So let's say that you have reached your MODOK point when you see a candidate whose intellect has clearly been Designed Only for Something Really Bad. It's narrow and sinister. No, really. There is a serious and a genuine problem deciding what role character should play in the hiring process. I think righties will tend to be more worried about character than liberals, except in the academy, where maybe liberals will be more worried about it than righties.

I think this falls properly under the 'constituent service' rubric I outlined in my first post. Universities should look like America, and profs should not viciously assault ordinary Americans - certainly not Captain America - with their minds. I don't see America with a cubic head zipping around in a floating chair. Ergo, we may refuse MODOK the professorship.

This is not a trivial admission, since it may commit me to some sort of fusionism. But I hope I don't get too badly fused. (This post is dedicated to Jacob Levy. Libertarian and fanboy.)

November 25, 2004

Voting dogs

Posted by Chris

Via Butterflies & Wheels I came across the following ludicrous and offensive argument against gay marriage from Keith Burgess-Jackson, the self-styled AnalPhilosopher :

I have said in this blog many times that the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent, which is why I put the word “marriage” in quotation marks. I do the same for dog “voting.” If we took our dogs to the polls and got them to push levers with their paws, they would not be voting. They would be going through the motions of voting. It would be a charade. Voting is not made for dogs. They lack the capacity to participate in the institution. The same is true of homosexuals and marriage.

Richard Chappell at Philosophy etc says nearly all that needs to be said about Burgess-Jackson’s “argument”, so I wouldn’t even have bothered mentioning it if I hadn’t been in conversation on Tuesday with the LSE’s Christian List whose article “Democracy in Animal Groups: A Political Science Perspective” is forthcoming in Trends in Ecology and Evolution . List draws on Condorcet’s jury theorem (previously discussed on CT here ) to shed more light on research by Conradt and Roper in their paper Group decision-making in animals , from Nature 421 (155—8) in 2003. Conradt and Roper have this to say about animal voting:

Many authors have assumed despotism without testing, because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans. However, empirical examples of ‘voting’ behaviours include the use of specific body postures, ritualized movements, and specific vocalizations, whereas ‘counting of votes’ includes adding-up to a majority of cast votes, integration of voting signals until an intensity threshold is reached, and averaging over all votes. Thus, democracy may exist in a range of taxa and does not require advanced cognitive capacity.

[Tiresome, humourless and literal-minded quasi-Wittgensteinian comments, putting inverted commas around “voting” etc. are hereby pre-emptively banned from the comments thread.]

October 24, 2004

Compassionate Conservatism

Posted by Henry

Scott McLemee has an astute review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “The Road to Modernity” in tomorrow’s New York Times. I’ll leave her claim that one can distinguish between a ‘good’ Enlightenment (English theorists of moral sentiments) and a ‘bad’ one (nasty French rationalist universalists) to more qualified commentators. What I liked was McLemee’s little sting at the end, which nicely illustrates certain of the limits of Himmelfarb’s brand of conservatism, and indeed “compassionate conservatism” more generally.

When Himmelfarb’s attention turns to colonial America and the early United States the results are less persuasive, and indeed reveal far more than she may intend about the limits of moral sentiment she extols. ”For economic if for no other reasons,” she writes, ”the displacement of the Indians was the precondition for the very existence of the settlers.” As for slavery, Himmelfarb acknowledges it as an evil, but is curiously silent about its cumulative effect, over 400 years, on the nation’s stock of moral capital.

I was reminded of something the ”elitist” Diderot wrote, in a moment of bitter hatred for the slave trade: the Africans ”are tyrannized, mutilated, burnt and put to death, and yet we listen to these accounts coolly and without emotion. The torments of a people to whom we owe our luxuries are never able to reach our hearts.” A more robust sociology of virtue might begin with the realization that the power of moral sentiment so often fails us. Yet when it does, our moral obligations remain. Meeting them is, arguably, one function of the state. But in the eyes of the neocons, I suppose, such thoughts smack of John Rawls — or even, worse, Le Monde.

This seems to me from my limited reading in the literature to be one of the key problems of conservatism - coming up with a coherent and convincing argument about those moral and ethical obligations that don’t spring ‘naturally’ from our pre-rational loyalties to family and friends. I suppose if you were a conservative, you could retort that obligations that aren’t natural are by virtue of that fact not obligations. But this leaves conservatives in a rather awkward position, given that many of the loyalties that conservatives prize (such as patriotism) are clearly artificial in nature (nation states are relatively recent social constructs). Others, such as the belief that slavery is morally repugnant, have changed dramatically over time. I suspect that there has to be a conservative literature out there that tries to grapple with some of these problems - can anyone point me in the right direction?

October 13, 2004

Rawls trivia: new edition of Political Liberalism

Posted by Micah

It looks like Columbia University Press is bringing out a new edition of Political Liberalism. All things considered, I wish they wouldn’t. For the Rawls obsessed, more below the line.

First, it has a terrible cover. Why the darkness? Second, the book doesn’t need a foreword by Martha Nussbaum—or anyone else for that matter. (I suppose Rawls could have requested that she do it? Has anyone seen the foreword? That’s the only reason I can think of that might justify it.) Otherwise, the introduction to the paperback edition does the job. Last point: the new edition apparently includes “The Ideal of Public Reason Revisited.” I do seem to remember Rawls writing something about wanting to republish PL with that essay included. So maybe Columbia is following through on his wishes. And that would be noble of them. But that essay is already published in no less than three other locations: the University of Chicago Law Review, The Law of Peoples, and, most appropriately, in Rawls’s Collected Papers. Do we really a need another version of PL just to bring the two together? On the principle of “if it ain’t broke,” I think the publisher should leave the book well enough alone.

But—and this is the only reason (or excuse) I can think of for bringing out a new edition—the current version is broken. Or at least, the book has a tendency to fall apart after the first reading or so. I used to think that maybe I was just hard on PL. But after consulting with others, I’m convinced Columbia just produced a terribly bound volume. (Is this true of other Columbia books?) It cracks easily, the glue comes apart, pages fall out. I’ve been through at least three copies of the book—one hard bound, two paper, and none of them survived very long. And it’s not that I’m treating this book more harshly than others. I’m sure my copies of TJ, Anarchy State, Spheres of Justice, Sandel and the other usual suspects get just as much wear. PL is justy a poorly manufactured book. Whatever you think of the book’s contents, surely the publisher could do better. So there is a good reason for a new version, although not, I think, for a new edition.

Does anyone know why Rawls published the book with Columbia? I’ve wondered about that in the past. TJ was published with Harvard, and so were the Collected Papers, if I’m not mistaken. Just another question of Rawls trivia.

October 04, 2004

RIP Lectures

Posted by Chris

The Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture series for 2004—5 has just been announced and includes several people whose work we’ve discussed on CT (Jonathan Wolff, Mike Otsuka, G.A.Cohen and John Kekes, to name but four).

September 29, 2004

M-O-O-N. That spells moon. Laws, yes.

Posted by John Holbo

Eugene Volokh is too reasonable. Maybe. Regarding Republican mailers alleging liberals are hot for an old timey Bible banning:

Whether the usage is actually misleading depends on how people are likely to perceive it. If the literal meaning is clearly extremely implausible (such as that the liberals would actually criminalize private possession and distribution of Bibles), then people are more likely to recognize the alternative meaning. And this is especially so if the usage is in a medium that’s known for hyperbole (such as political mailers), then I suspect that people will discount it in some measure. This is why, having read both the cover separately and the cover and the insides together, it seems to me that the flyer is likely to be understood as making a plausible allegation — that liberals are seeking to ban the Bible from public schools (at least in most contexts) and from government-run displays — rather than a wildly implausible one (that they’re seeking a total outlawing of the Bible).

A very popular fiction genre in the United States is (what’s a good name?) tribulit. Christian tribulation/persecution fantasy. Unkinder critical terms - raptureporn and such - have been applied. I don’t read the stuff; I’ll bet Volokh doesn’t either. The snippets I’ve seen are stand-out dreadful. But never mind the literary criticism. Jerry Jenkins (of LaHaye and Jenkins Left Behind fame) has a recent novel, Silenced, the plot of which involves - well, I’ll let you read the news today oh, boy: Silenced Times (PDF). [And you really might want to click the Silenced link. It goes to the book site, which is dramatic. Not safe for work if there is any sort of no-cymbals policy in your work place. Or just turn it down. Site needs a fast connection.]

Does the audience for this book realize it is just fantasy? Total fantasy? That worrying about secular, left-wing conspiracies to ban the Bible is like worrying that Kerry is really The Walkin Dude? Matthew Yglesias on the two epistemologies problem: “you talk with rightwingers and you see that you basically share the same vague normative goals, but disagree about what’s happening in the universe.”

When Democrats find it funny to wear Republicans for Voldemort baby-tees, they don’t literally think Republicans are for Voldemort. Maybe Republicans readers of Silenced are also capable of discerning the point where fiction stops and political reality begins - namely, political reality would be the stuff outside of the covers of these sorts of book. (I’m not sure to what extent these books draw theological lines that are implied to be mappable onto partisan lines, left and right, to be honest.) The devil is in the details of the real world reception of this stuff. When I visit the Amazon page for LaHaye and Jenkins The Mark: The Beast Rules the World, the book info appears under a banner ad for the Paris Hilton Collection. That’s sort of funny. Maybe Left Behind literature just expresses allegorically (or however you want to categorize it) revulsion with - alienation from - perceived decadence of American culture.

Speaking of false consciousness studies, Michael Bérubé had a series of pretty interesting posts last week about Thomas Frank’s What’s Wrong With Kansas??

Full disclosure: Mr. Frank himself wrote me a nice little letter to accompany my publisher’s copy—what, you think maybe I buy my books? – in which he said that he knows that it’s not “fashionable” to speak of false consciousness but that someone’s got to point out just how much damage the right has done, or something like that. The proper reply, I think (aside from “hey, thanks for the free book!”), is to point out that “fashion” isn’t the problem here. The reason that lots of cultural-studies people stopped talking about “false consciousness” at some point between Raymond Williams’s 1973 essay “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” and Stuart Hall’s 1986 essays “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity” and “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees” wasn’t that it became “unfashionable.” Rather, it was because it began to look as if, in trying to understand why the dominated classes participated so eagerly in their own domination, left cultural theory was simply inventing the same wheel over and over again, and worse, it was a weird kind of triangular wheel that didn’t actually work on the road.

HAVING SAID THAT, though, I should get to the damn point. I don’t think, in the end, that What’s the Matter with Kansas? relies wholeheartedly on a theory of false consciousness. There are moments when it sounds otherwise – say, when Frank speaks of Kansas conservatives as “deranged” (and conservatives in the media were, for some reason, quick to pick up on this) – but I actually don’t mind these moments: it seems pretty clear to me that Frank is addressing this book to other liberals and progressives rather than to the Kansas Cons themselves, and you know what, I too think some of the Kansas Cons’ political senses are just deranged. (Ordinary economic libertarianism combined with cultural conservatism I can understand; people appointing themselves Pope or conducting searches for the bodies of all the people Bill Clinton killed with his own hands I do not understand.)

So yeah, there are times when the book sounds as if it’s always the economy, stupid – as when Frank insists that for the New Right, “cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements – not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars – that are the movement’s greatest monuments” (6). But his own work shows that for many heartland conservatives, it really is about the cultural anger; it’s a cultural anger that is marshaled to cultural ends, and they don’t mind being impoverished by the economic agenda of Bush’s crony klepto-capitalism. On the contrary, for them, their immiseration is but another sign of their Election: they understand that they must live in poverty and tribulation on this earth, because they are serving a higher calling … That isn’t false consciousness, folks. It’s true consciousness – the true consciousness of a theocratic right wing in which people really do think that their “fundamental interests” lie in prosecuting those never-ending culture wars.

Getting back to Volokh’s point: “Whether the usage is actually misleading depends on how people are likely to perceive it.” What do you think?

I admit the joke will be on me if it turns out Kerry is The Walkin Dude, after all. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with Kansas. That’s where the good people went to take refuge from The Walkin Dude, after all. Abigail Freemantle? She was in Kansas, wasn’t she?

Oh, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve been making jokes about Amazon Associates on our other blog. I think you should know: if you buy anything from the Paris Hilton collection through the link above, I get my cut. That’s only fair. This whole secular decadence thing ought to turn a decent profit.

UPDATE: everyone should go read Belle’s post if they haven’t yet. It’s more important than this nonsense.

September 27, 2004

Rational voting

Posted by Chris

Jim Holt in the New York Times raises the old question of whether it is rational to vote . The issue is this (for those who don’t know): the rational voter decides what to do by weighing the expected cost and benefits of actions. Suppose I value the victory of Party X at $1000. In working out the expected benefit of voting, I also have to take account of the probability of my vote making a difference, a probability which is extremely low (say 1/100,000). Assigning, therefore an expected benefit to voting of 1c, I see that going to the polling booth involves an expenditure of time, shoe leather and incurs the opportunity cost of missing a few minutes of my favourite soap opera. Since these costs will certainly by incurred if I vote, and dwarf the expected benefit of voting, the expected net benefit is always negative, and so, rationally, I shouldn’t vote.

What’s wrong with this argument? Well, one thought, which I remember hearing first from my friend Alan Carling, is this: the argument involves inconsistent assumptions about rationality. The assignment of a low probability to my vote making a difference assumes what the conclusion of the argument denies, namely, that rational persons would vote. But the argument says they wouldn’t. Well if they wouldn’t then I would be the only voter (a dictator, in effect). In which case I would certainly be rational to vote since I can count the full expected benefit of $1000 in favour of doing so. But if that’s the case, and I should vote, then so should everyone else … in which case I shouldn’t … in which case nor should they … in which case I should ….

September 24, 2004

Song of the Schmibertarians

Posted by Kieran
I agree with Matt. Jacob Levy’s defense of the possibility of Libertarian Hawkishness is coherent and even forceful in the context of the Afghanistan war, but Belle backed down too soon. It’s just not plausible to construe libertarianism as really being about massive, state-sponsored,1 centrally-planned,2 militarily-administered3 efforts to invade and reconstruct another country — let alone to imply that libertarians are by temperament the kind of people who are confident that enterprises like this usually succeed as planned. So, I think Schmibertarians could adopt as their anthem a slightly modified version of Randy Newman’s song The World Isn’t Fair. It’s about Karl Marx, which doesn’t seem promising for Schmibertarians with aggressive foreign policies.4 But consider:
Oh Karl the world isn’t fair
It isn’t and never will be.
They tried out your plan
It brought misery instead,
If you’d seen how they worked it
You’d be glad you were dead.
Just like I’m glad I’m living in the land of the free,
Where the rich just get richer
And the poor you don’t ever have to see —
It would depress us, Karl.
Because we care
That the world still isn’t fair.

Just replace ‘Karl’ with ‘Bob’ and “they” with “we” and you’re set. Sure, Iraq was run by a wholly evil despot before. But so what? After all, who if not libertarians can we depend on to remind us that the world isn’t fair, your plan brought misery instead, and that you’re just wasting your time — and probably making things worse — by initiating some Grand State Scheme to control unemployment, the market for rental accommodation, civilian air traffic or infant polio. This argument scales up to things like the forcible invasion, occupation and political reconstruction of faraway countries. Given that the country posed no credible threat to the U.S., Libertarians ought to have opposed the war and especially the subsequent occupation in Iraq. And indeed many of them did.

1 That is, botched.

2 That is, botched.

3 That is, botched.

4 Note that we’re talking about the Schmibertarians of Samizdata here, not Jacob Levy of the University of Chicago.

September 23, 2004

Shmibertarianism

Posted by Belle Waring

Jacob Levy, whose absence is deeply felt in the blogosphere, sent me an email containing the following, totally correct rebuke:

Libertarianism is incompatible with invading other countries and overthrowing their governments iff: 1) States are fundamental rights-bearers who cannot be aggressed against — which is a really weird thing for libertarians to think.
2) Libertarianism is incompatible with any use of force, e.g. it is a variant of pacifism. Some people think this, but I deny that only they count as libertarians.
3) Libertarianism is incompatible with any state action, e.g. it is a variant of anarchism. Lots of libertarians think this, but I also deny that only they count as libertarians.

I hang my flippant, snarky head in shame. Clearly, libertarians can support or not support foreign wars of choice depending on the ostensible goals of the war, empirical questions about the various options available, differing beliefs about international law, etc. etc. My vague sense that there is something…odd…about libertarians who are full-throated supporters of wars to export democratic government by force doesn’t amount to a reasoned critique of libertarianism. Nonetheless, I stand firm on my original “those Samizdatistas are kinda nuts” claim.

September 20, 2004

More on Positional Goods

Posted by Harry

The posts on positional goods give me a lame excuse to link to a paper Adam Swift and I have recently posted on the Equality Exchange. The paper tries to think through the significance of positional goods for distributive principles. Here’s the abstract, in case you want to look any further. Comments welcome (though I don’t promise to respond on the thread, and if comments are really substantive you might want just to email me or Adam).

The paper discusses the significance of positional goods for debate about egalitarian and prioritarian principles of distribution. Defining positional goods as those whose absolute value, to their possessors, depends on those possessors’ place in the distribution of the good, and noting that such goods fuse concerns with absolutes and relativities, it explores the ramifications of that fusion. It argues that levelling down with respect to positional goods may improve the absolute position of some people with respect to other goods, and perhaps all things considered, and may also be justified by appeal to the value of fair competition. It identifies three kinds of positional goods, suggesting that such goods are more pervasive than is commonly recognised. It then considers challenges to the case for levelling down with respect to positional goods, noting that some goods have both positional and non-positional value and that unequal distributions, or unfair competitions, may leave some people worse off with respect to particular goods while also making them better off all things considered. It ends with discussion of considerations that might lead us to condemn the personal motivations that constitute the circumstances that require us to choose between fairness and the all-things-considered well-being of the worst off. Those motivations are especially problematic where the goods in question are positional.

September 17, 2004

Status syndrome

Posted by Chris

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the latest in a series of conferences under the name Priority in Practice , which Jo Wolff has organized at UCL. I don’t think I’d be diminishing the contribution of the other speakers by saying that Michael Marmot was the real star of the show. He’s well known for the idea that status inequality is directly implicated in health outcomes, a thesis that he promotes in his most recent book Status Syndrome and which first came to the fore with his Whitehall Study which showed that more highly promoted civil servants live longer even when we control for matters like lifestyle, smoking etc. Even when people have enough, materially speaking, their position in a status hierarchy still impacts upon their longevity. One interesting other finding that he revealed was that being in control at home (as opposed to at work) was massively important in affecting women’s longevity, but didn’t really impact upon men. There’s an excellent interview of Marmot by Harry Kreisler of Berkeley in which he outlines his central claims.

September 13, 2004

Human Development and Capability Association

Posted by Chris

One interesting recent strand of research on justice and human well-being has been that inspired by Amartya Sen’s “capability” approach. There’s now an association dedicated to this, with Sen as its first President and Martha Nussbaum as President-elect. Details here .

August 18, 2004

Political equality and material inequality

Posted by Harry

In his reply to Chris B’s response to his article on desert Will Wilkinson expresses dismay that no-one has taken up a point he made in his original piece, viz,

Material inequality is one kind of inequality among many. Political
inequality is more troubling by far, for political power is the power to
push people around. Coercion is wrong on its face, and so the existence
of political inequality requires a specially strong and compelling
justification. However, if the luck argument cuts against moral
entitlement to material holdings, it cuts equally against any moral
entitlement to political power.

He goes on, in the original piece, to say that

The justification for political power is generally sought in the “consent” of the people through free, fair and open elections. Yet the fact that someone has gained power by a democratic ballot can be no more or less relevant than the fact that Warren Buffet gained his billions through a series of fair, voluntary transactions. John Edwards (who, by the way, is a mill worker’s son) didn’t deserve his luxuriant tresses and blinding grin. Reagan didn’t deserve movie-star name recognition. Bushes don’t deserve to be Bushes. Kennedys don’t deserve to be Kennedys. Kerry’s war medals? Please.
If the luck argument is any good, then democratic choice and the resulting distribution of coercive political power is also, as Yglesias says, “chance all the way down.” And if luck negates the moral right to keep and dispose of one’s stuff, it also negates the right to take and dispose of others’ stuff.

One possible reason that no-one went after this is that it is not clear what is going on. It is as obvious to me that no-one deserves political power as that no-one deserves their talents, or deserves to live in an environment in which those talents attract the contingent rewards that they happen to attract. (Steffi Graff’s income more than doubled in the year after Monica Seles was stabbed. Did she deserve to be in that environment? No. So in what sense did she deserve her increased income? Not any foundational moral sense, surely?) Is Wilkinson denying this? Politicians who win do not deserve to win at the very least because they do not deserve to live in systems which reward their particular talents (very few UK MPs would reach the top in the American political system, and very few American members of Congress would reach the top in the UK system; desert just doesn’t help out here). There are good, desert-free, reasons for designing a political system one way or another. I don’t see how desert could possibly come into it.

Is Wilkinson saying that there is an incoherence in the anti-desert people’s position? He seems to think that the anti-desert position is something like this: we do not have a right to the stuff we have because we don’t deserve it, but we do have a right to take and dispose of others’ stuff. I don’t see any contradiction within that position, though I would add that I’ve never heard of anyone holding it. It isn’t incoherent because the anti-desert position does not say that we have no right to do what we don’t deserve to do. It says that desert is not going to serve as the basis for property rights or any other kinds of political rights — something else must, then. So it is entirely possible that this other basis, while it does not generate a right to dispose of one’s ‘own’ property, does generate a right to redistribute property (though, probably, within strict guidelines). But he has also misdescribed the anti-desert egalitarian’s position. I don’t believe that in redistributing the wealth that Bill Gates holds we would be ‘taking and disposing of’ his stuff. It is, simply, not his, because he has no right to it, and other people do.

Wilkinson’s elevation of political equality over material equality is also confusing, given his (broadly libertarian) reasons for valuing political equality, because that is a value that supports taking measures to decrease existing levels of material inequality, or at least to take measures which insulate political processes against existing material inequality. Why should Warren Buffett, or George Soros, have a better chance of getting their way in politics (a better chance of being able to ‘push people around’) simply because they have more wealth than I do? Why should big corporations get more say simply because they are able to make credible threats that they will withdraw their investments from a country or a state? The insulation of the political process from private wealth is an imperative if you don’t want some people to be able to push others around who lack the reciprocal power. Admittedly the American political system, with its supine attitude toward large concentrations of private wealth, is unusually vulnerable to the rent-seeking activities of the rich. But the rich enjoy more political power than others in (almost) all liberal democracies. And, of course, there are other values at stake — the quality of political deliberation, distributive justice, etc. But a standard libertarian view is not to care much about those (I don’t mean that libertarians themselves refrain from providing high quality contributions to political debate, just that they don’t support quality-enhancing regulation of the fora for political debate). Anyway, my point is that trenchant advocacy of political equality is odd in a piece devoted to defending material inequality. They don’t go together.

August 13, 2004

Rawls against desert

Posted by Chris

Will Wilkinson has a column up at TechCentralStation on desert . This very fact is regrettable, since Wilkinson is smarter, saner, and more interesting that the average TCS columnist and hence will serve to cover-up — somewhat — the nakedness of this astroturf operation. Anyway, the real issue is what he says, which is aimed at Matthew Yglesias , Max Sawicky and others who attack the concepts of meritocracy. Wilkinson credits their argument — that we don’t really deserve anything — to John Rawls. The argument Wilkinson (mis)attributes to Rawls is, in a nutshell, that although, superficially, it may seem that we deserve praise or reward for our efforts, in some deeper sense we don’t, because the attributes that enabled us to strive (such as our genetic makeup and our upbringing) were not themselves deserved. Given the moral arbitrariness of of our natural endowments — including the capacity for hard work — those with more talent can be legitimately taxed, as necessary, to support those unfortunate enough to have less.

[I’m putting the rest of this below the fold as it gets into technical Rawlsiana]

There are no doubt one or two sentences in A Theory of Justice that encourage such an interpretation. But, as Wilkinson surely knows, the argument in which Rawls asserts that “no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society” (which Wilkinson cites, selectively, from the first edition of ToJ) concerns the choice of a co-operative scheme for a whole society.1 In the passage in question Rawls is not addressing the question of whether those who are better-endowed with natural assets or who have “superior character” ought to get more within a co-operative scheme, he’s writing about whether their better endowment ought to be reflected in the choice of scheme under which they co-operate with others.2 And his answer is, that no, the more talented have no special right to have their interests given greater weight than those others.

There are two basic Rawlsian objections to the idea that distribution should reflect moral desert or deservingness. First, that it seems impossible to establish a workable public standard of deservingness because of the fact of reasonable pluralism; second, that even if we could establish such a standard, it would be impossible to contrive an economic system to track it.3 (One might expect, given Wilkinson’s endorsement elsewhere of “political” libertarianism, that he would be at one with Rawls on this.) Given these objections, Rawls sets aside reward according to desert and proceeds to consider other options.

Rawls’s preferred option, democratic equality and the difference principle, doesn’t endorse or track any particular standard of desert or merit. But the point here is that neither does the economic system Wilkinson himself appears to favour: there’s no good reason to believe that a system of free-market and private property is anything close to a merit-based system. Some people work hard on worthy projects for their whole lives or take exceptional risks on society’s behalf and nevertheless remain comparatively poor; others, through being lucky or rich, get to be as rich as Croesus. Is Warren Buffet more morally deserving than the firefighters on 9/11? Of course not. He doesn’t think so, they don’t think so, we don’t think so, and Will Wilkinson doesn’t think so.4

There does seem to be a psychological need for those who have profited from the system to be comforted by the idea that they deserve what they have. (Maybe some of them even do deserve what they have!) It is nice to think that one’s good fortune is a function of one’s morally praiseworthy qualities, and that those who have done less well have, well, got their just deserts on account of their fecklessness and unwisdom. (Poor choices made by stupid people.) One of the functions of columns at TechCentralStation is to pander to the psychological needs of a certain stratum of society — gas-guzzling SUV? No need to feel guilty, global warming is a myth ! — but such pandering would be rather unseemly coming from a political philosopher of Wilkinson’s ability, and I’m sure it wasn’t what he intended.

1 The passage cited comes from sec 17. of ToJ (1st edn) on p. 104. In the second edition the passage reads: “We do not deserve our place in the distribution of native endowments, any more that we deserve our initial starting place in society.” (p.89).

2 See for clear accounts of this, Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls, ch. 2 section 6 and Jon Mandle, What’s Left of Liberalism , pp. 124—34.

3 See Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, p. 73.

4 One possibility that I ought not to neglect, is that Wilkinson takes Rawls to be denying that self-made men (and women) are ever truly deserving of what the have earned. I think the right answer to this thought is to say that, insofar as such as judgement issues from within any comprehensive moral doctrine, Rawls is committed to neither affirming nor denying its truth.

July 29, 2004

Quote for the day

Posted by Chris

Talking of extremism… There’s something I’ve been meaning to post on for some time in the light of the documented connections between Trotskyism and neoconservatives and the continued enthusiasm of some admirers of Trotsky for aspects of recent US foreign policy. Trotsky had a dictum, of which this passage from The Revolution Betrayed is just one example:

Foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals.

I don’t think that’s obviously a true generalization, but nor is it a thought devoid of interest. Discuss, with reference to the domestic and foreign policies of the Bush administration….

July 06, 2004

When is Assassination in Order?

Posted by Harry

On Parliamentary Questions the other day they played a clip of David Owen, recorded in 2003, admitting without embarrassment that when he was Foreign Secretary he seriously considered ordering the assassination of Idi Amin. There was no explanation of why the idea was rejected (it was a clip in a game show), but my immediate, and non-reflective, reaction was that it was the first good thing I had heard about Owen (whom I couldn’t stand when he was a real politician, even before reading Crewe and King’s fantastic biography of the SDP in which he emerges as a deeply unlikeable and destructive character). Without giving it a lot more thought, which I can’t do right now, I can make a very rough judgement that certain objectionable leaders are legitimate candidates for assassination (Hitler, Amin, both Duvaliers, Stalin) whereas others are not (Khomeni, Castro, Rawlings, Botha). I could tell a story about each, and probably be dissuaded on each of them (except Hitler). But I couldn’t give anything approaching necessary and sufficient conditions for candidacy. What makes a leader a legitimate target of an assassination attempt?

Clarification: as jdw says below we are talking about a government authorising the assassination of a foreign leader, rather than a citizen assassinating his/her own country’s leader, the assumption being that governments require more justification.

June 17, 2004

Philosophical movies

Posted by Chris

Thanks to Tyler Cowen, over at Volokh , I came across Jason Brennan’s list of movies with philosophical themes . It’s a good list , though a bit lacking in non-American content. Possible additions? There’s already been some blogospheric discussion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Christine Korsgaard’s claim that it illustrates Kant on revolutions (scroll down comments). Strictly Ballroom arguably deals with freedom, existentialism, and revolution. Rashomon is about the epistemology of testimony. Dr Strangelove covers the ethics of war and peace and some issues in game theory (remember the doomsday machine?). Suggestions?

UPDATE: I see Matthew Yglesias is also discussing this.

June 10, 2004

Caseo Abscondito

Posted by John Holbo

Another positive-negative rights-liberties post. Probably you’ve had enough of that, so I’ll tuck it away discreetly.

[UPDATE: hasty composition led to unduly supercilious tone - even by my elastic standards of proper eyebrow placement. Arch tone slightly lowered.]

The positive-negative rights vs. liberties controversy is resolved to my satisfaction at least - as least with regard to prof. Bainbridge - by Bainbridge’s latest post on the subject. In my previous post I puzzle over the fact that belief in the positive-negative rights distinction seems to rest entirely on an elementary category error - an illicit transfer of properties from a thing to one’s rights to the thing. Could it really be a simple as that? In Bainbridge’s case, I think so.

To repeat my illustration of the nature of the error: if you have a right to pizza, it does not follow that your ‘pizza right’ is itself covered in melted cheese. Likewise: if you have a right to negative liberty, it does not follow that enforcement of your ‘negative right’ is itself a matter of non-interference, i.e. a thing that obtains passively in virtue of everyone else not doing something. Generalizing this case, and honoring my recent Ween post, let’s call category errors of this type instances of the ‘Where’d the cheese go?’ fallacy. In Latin (honey, help me out here): caseo abscondito.

In his latest post, Bainbridge commits this fallacy. Called upon to defend the coherence of a negative-positive rights distinction, he cites two passages that articulate (or nearly) the negative-positive liberty distinction but say not a word about any negative-positive rights distinction. It is therefore possible to agree with the letter and spirit of everything Bainbridge says and cites in defense of his position without agreeing that Bainbridge’s position makes any sense - which, indeed, it appears not to.

Bainbridge seems to assume without argument that - since negative liberty is definitionally a matter of external non-interference, whereas positive liberty is not - enforcement of rights to negative liberty must involve less external interference than enforcement of rights to positive liberty. This is the burden of his TCS column. But it makes no sense. No more sense than thinking a right to pizza must be covered with cheese. Really.

I am frankly surprised that Bainbridge waves off as ‘hyper-technical’ Volokh’s blunt point that it is paradoxical to imply that the following could be a paradigm of passive non-interference by the government: police officers knocking down your front door to arrest you … so long as the arrest is for infringing someone else’s right to negatively free enjoyment of their private property, i.e. you are being arrested for theft.

Bainbridge tries to buttress his position by invoking a category of ‘public goods’ that includes police protection but does not include education. But this flagrantly begs the question until we are provided with a principle for deciding which goods are public and which are not. It seems clear this distinction is either going to be totally unclear, is not going to be the distinction Bainbridge wants, or is going to rest squarely on the alleged negative-positive rights distinction, in which case it can hardly be cited in support of that distinction.

[2ND UPDATE: see comments. Chris Bertram straightens me out somewhat on ‘negative rights’. So some of my criticisms of Bainbridge are, I now admit, exchanges of his brand of confusion for one of my own devising. Basically what I have learned is that the suggestive parallelism between negative/positive liberty and negative/positive rights is extremely misleading. It has muddled both Bainbridge and myself, in somewhat different ways. Maybe I’ll get around to posting yet again and trying to sort ot out. Or maybe I’ll spare you all.]

June 09, 2004

Positive and negative liberty and rights

Posted by John Holbo

Much good discussion - from our own Henry and Chris, for example - in the wake of Eugene Volokh’s critique of Steve Bainbridge’s TCS piece in praise of negative rights.

It seems to me clear that Eugene is quite correct in the points he makes. But I am left scratching my head, nonetheless, because I teach J.S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin every semester - for two semester’s now. So I think I’ve got my head tolerably wrapped around the whole negative vs. positive liberty thing. (I mean, they sort of turn into each other if you squint, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an important distinction to grapple with.) But it would never occur to me to talk about negative vs. positive rights. That seems to me like argle-bargle. But apparently there are grown-ups who talk this way, even write academic papers this way? (I guess these are the hazards of teaching intro political philosophy without being a specialist and actually reading the scholarly literature. I get blindsided by stuff other people are familiar with. But still. What’s this about, eh? If I’m totally wrong about everything that follows, someone take me to school, please.)

Bainbridge writes:

Saletan thinks Reagan was wrong:
“Liberty doesn’t necessarily contract as government expands. Sometimes, you need more government to get more liberty.”
Liberty is the wrong word, of course. Saletan is really talking about the difference between positive and negative rights.

No. ‘Liberty’ is the right word. ‘Rights’ is the wrong word, of course. Right?

Let’s take it from the top. I’ll more or less follow Berlin.

Negative liberty is freedom from coercion. It is, essentially, a state of an agent whose desires to act are not frustrated by external interference by another agent. Inherently, it is neither here nor there with respect to rights. It seems rather significant that the patron saint of negative freedom, Mill, didn’t really believe in rights, officially. It was all about the utility. You can talk long and hard about the nature and goodness of negative liberty without so much as breathing the word ‘rights’.

Of course, bestowing on people the right to negative liberty - or finding of such a right in nature, or reporting back to everyone that you found it - will probably seem like a good idea at some point. (And probably Mill was just trying to be nice to dad, holding out as long as he did.) Even so, we’ve clearly got two things: the liberty; the right to the liberty. So why should a right to negative liberty be a negative right, i.e. a right that itself has something ‘negativish’ about it? If I have a right to pizza, you could call that a ‘pizza right’, but if that usage started to fool you into thinking that the right to pizza was itself coated in melted cheese … well, that would probably be the point to drop the usage. The notion of ‘negative rights’ strikes me as a category error of this order of silliness, actually. (I’m probably wrong about that. People don’t usually write academic papers about things that silly. Then again, sometimes they do.)

Moving right along. Positive liberty. Near as I can figure, positive liberty is the state of getting to do not what you want, without external interference, but getting to do what the real you really wants to do, even if this involves considerable external interference. The trouble comes in trying to explain what the italics mean, of course. But the general outlines are not utterly baffling. If I am a drug addict, I want my fix. If someone forces me bodily into a dedox clinic and I clean up, it may be argued that the undeniable and regrettable curtailment of my negative liberty is favorably counterbalanced by an increase in my positive liberty - since the real me doesn’t really want drugs; the real me wanted to clean up all along; and now that real desire has been satisfied.

Berlin makes the point that Mill pretty much misses the concept of ‘positive liberty’ with it’s crucial component of true self-determination and true self-realization. There is a distinction between area of control and source of control, Berlin says. And it’s potentially crucial.

Liberty in this [negative Millian] sense is not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of self-government. Liberty in this sense is principally concerned with the area of control, not with its source. Just as a democracy may, in fact, deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have in some other form of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom. The despot who leaves his subjects a wide area of liberty may be unjust, or encourage the wildest inequalities, care little for order, or virtue, or knowledge; but provided he does not curb their liberty, or at least curbs it less than many other regimes, he meets with Mill’s specification.

Well, this is slightly confusing and, I fear, slightly confused. But we forge on boldly. Think about the Architect and the Matrix - the first Matrix; the perfect one everyone rejected because it was too perfect. (Smith to Morpheus: “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost.”)

This rejection, which causes the machines such dismay, can be turned into a good thought-experiment for distinguishing negative and positive liberty, because the perfect Matrix plausibly maximizes negative liberty. No sooner does a desire arise than it is fulfilled, presumably. No desires are ever frustrated. It’s perfect. On the other hand, this Matrix minimizes positive liberty (on a certain not unnatural view.) The desires we have in the Matrix - since we are basically duped into having them - are not our real desires. Our real desires are the ones we would have if we knew the truth about the Matrix, which we don’t. (Or if you want, you can disagree with me and agree with Cipher.)

As Berlin writes, and as the Matrix case nicely illustrates:

The answer to the question ‘Who governs me?’ is logically distinct from the question ‘How far does government interfere with me? [i.e. with my ability to do what I want]’ It is in this difference that the great contrast between the two concepts of negative and positive liberty, in the end consists. For the ‘positive’ sense of liberty comes to light if we try to answer the question, not ‘What am I free to do or be?’, but ‘By whom am I ruled?’ or ‘Who is to say what I am, and what I am not, to be or do?’

Anyway. That’s positive liberty: true self-determination. I don’t see that a positive right to anything of the sort would be any more positive, in any sense, than a positive right to negative liberty. (This is basically Eugene Volokh’s point, plus the diagnostic speculation that people are apparently sloppily or superstitiously transferring properties from the liberty to the right to the liberty. I disapprove.)

Of course there are any number of reasons for thinking that the sort of liberty political institutions should strive to secure for citizens is negative. Governments are bad at determining what I really want (even though I don’t think I want it.) Abuses loom. Berlin:

This monstrous impersonation, which consists in equating what X would choose if he were something he is not, or at least not yet, with what X actually seeks and chooses, is at the heart of all political theories of self-realization. It is one thing to say that I may be coerced for my own good, which I am too blind to see; this may, for on occasion, be for my benefit; indeed, it may enlarge the scope of my liberty. It is another to say that if it is my good, then I am not being coerced, for I have willed it, whether I know this or not, and am free (or ‘truly’ free) even while my poor earthly body and foolish mind bitterly reject it, and struggle with the greatest desperation against those who seek, however benevolently, to impose it.

Well, I could go on. I don’t pretend that the distinction between negative and positive liberty is quite clear, although I do think there is definitely something to it. The point for present purposes is that, since there is no internal, conceptual linkage between negative and positive freedom, qua phenomena, and any notion of rights, the negative-positive liberty axis does nothing whatsoever to invest ‘positive right’ vs. ‘negative right’ with any sense whatsoever. And I don’t see a lot of sense migrating in from any other direction. So I am inclined to go with what seems to be the majority opinion at the Volokh Conspiracy and CT today: it doesn’t make sense.

Positive rights

Posted by Chris

The debate going on between Eugene Volokh and others is worth checking out (as Henry notes), though some of the background assumptions are pretty odd, to my way of thinking. [1] But sticking to the central issue of positive and negative rights, the discussing sent me scurrying to look at Allen Buchanan’s seminal paper Justice and Charity (accessible if you’ve got JSTOR, otherwise, tough). In a small section of the paper, dealing with positive and negative rights, Buchanan points out that — as in this debate — those seeking to argue that all rights are negative attempt to show (or at least claim) that any positive rights will lead to “unacceptably frequent and severe disruptions of individuals’ activities as rational planners or to intrusions that are intuitively unjust.” But, as Buchanan argues, that’s a pretty implausible move to make.

A right to an equal share of income or a right to be aided in whatever a person wants by whoever happens to be available would undoubtedly result in many such unacceptable and disruptive intrusions. But, as Buchanan points out, more moderate redistributive policies, such as a minimum income funded by a well-established tax regime, are perfectly compatible with individuals being able to plan their lives, and to have a “stable framework of expectations.” Moreover, serious thinkers with libertarian sympathies (such as Hayek) have admitted as much.

The right to easy rescue also looks like a no-brainer for all but the most swivel-eyed ideologue: that’s to say the right to be saved from a situation of great potential harm by someone who can do so without unreasonable cost or risk to themselves. At this point, those with swivelly-eyes start making “who is to say what’s an unreasonable cost or risk” noises. But as Buchanan points out, we manage to apply reasonability tests perfectly well in other areas of the law. For example, a charge of homicide can be defended by invoking self-defence, but this involves a reasonablity test: one that libertarians seem perfectly happy with. (And we can mention similar reasonability tests for torts also.)

Finally, Buchanan observes that if (as is plausible) morality is most fundamentally concerned with avoiding states of affairs that are harmful for individuals, then the burden of proof is really squarely on the libertarian to demonstrate that people have a right not to be harmed but no right to the aid or assistance that will prevent them from being harmed. To be sure, again, the libertarian will argue that the incorporation of some such rights in law will lead to more harms than goods. But a much stronger argument is needed, one which claims that any such rights will always be more harmful than beneficial. And that looks wildly implausible.

1 The odd assumptions (tacit or explicit and none of them made by Volokh in his posts, but follow the links to Bainbridge and Galt) are: [a] that the law ought only to be concerned with threats to individual liberty from the state and not from private actors; [b] the conceptual claim that only the state can infringe on individual liberty (this is even more risible than [a]; © the categories of American constitutional law are so close to those of political morality that the settlement of US constitutional questions amounts to settling the questions of how things ought to be. I remember Jacob Levy remarking on how common this last assumption is both among US liberals and libertarians; [d] the claim that “positive liberty” is an invention of the 1960s and that usages of “liberty” that don’t correspond to libertarian principles are offences against the English language.

June 08, 2004

Rights and costs

Posted by Henry

Eugene Volokh has a nice short piece on the incoherence of the distinction between positive and negative liberty. His main argument - that even negative liberties entail government enforcement - is reminiscent of the basic claim of Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein’s The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes.1 It’s also a good reminder of why Volokh is a consistently interesting blogger and scholar - he’s willing to follow ideas where they lead him, even if they point in (for him) politically awkward directions.

1 See here for a short review by Cosma Shalizi.

May 17, 2004

Best political philosophy/theory papers

Posted by Chris

I know that a largish number of political theorists and philosophers read Crooked Timber, and some of them even write for it! I’m interested in opinions about the most significant journal papers in the field over the past 10 years (we can start with 1994 to keep things simple. I’m especially interested to hear about papers that others consider fine, but which have not received the attention they deserve. Here are five suggestions from me to start us off, some well known, others less so (post other ideas in comments):

Thomas Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples”, Philosophy and Public Affairs (1994).
G.A. Cohen, “Where the Action Is” , Philosophy and Public Affairs (1997).
Michael Ridge, “Hobbesian Public Reason”, Ethics (1998).
Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the point of equality?” Ethics (1999).
David Schmidtz, “How to Deserve”, Political Theory (2002).

UPDATE: With the permission of my co-bloggers, I’m moving this post up to the top again in the hope of getting a few more submissions. On a related note, I’m happy to see that two of my own selections (Anderson and Cohen) and a different paper from another one of my chosen authors (Pogge) are included in Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (eds) Social Justice , my copy of which arrived in this morning’s post.

May 13, 2004

Alan Gewirth dies

Posted by Chris

The philosopher Alan Gewirth has died, according to Jacob Levy over at the Volokh conspiracy . Like Jacob, I’m astonished to learn that Gewirth was 90 years old. I’ll add obituaries to this post as they appear. Washington Post , University of Chigago Press Release .

May 12, 2004

The ticking bomb problem

Posted by John Quiggin
In response to the exposure of widespread torture prisoners in Iraq (on all sides) and elsewhere, it’s inevitable that the “ticking bomb” problem should be raised.
‘You hold a terrorist who knows the location of a defusable bomb which, if exploded, will kill x million people. Do you have the right to torture him/her to find the bomb?’
Various answers to this question have been offered, none of which seem entirely satisfactory.

Instead of offering an answer to this question, I’m going to look at a question that follows immediately, but doesn’t seem to have been asked. Suppose that someone has used torture to extract information from a prisoner in the belief (factually correct or not and morally sustainable or not) that doing so was justified by a “ticking bomb” situation. What should they do next?

My answer is that the torturer should immediately turn themselves in, and plead guilty to the relevant criminal charges. I think this answer can be defended from a wide variety of perspectives, but the intuition is simple. If the situation is grave enough to warrant resort to torture, it’s certainly grave enough to oblige someone to take actions that will result in losing their job and going to jail.

In consequentialist terms, it’s desirable in general that laws against torture should be obeyed. Since few people will want to follow such an example except in similarly extreme circumstances, immediate confession will undermine the law less than committing torture and getting away with it1. Other theories will, I think, give the same answer.

Turning from individual ethics to law and public policy what this means is that laws against torture should be enforced in all cases. A plea in mitigation might be considered in cases like the one described above - a proven urgent and immediate danger, followed by a voluntary confession - but even so, the torturer should be removed from their job and spend some time in prison. In any case where a confession is not made, no claims about mitigating circumstances should be admitted.

The frequency with which incidents of torture are isolated responses to extreme emergencies, followed by an immediate confession, is vanishingly small. So if you accept the answer I’ve given to the question posed above, the ticking bomb problem has no practical relevance.

Whether or not torture can be justified as a matter of individual morality in some extreme cases, it should be punished in all cases, and severely punished in nearly all cases, as a matter of public policy.

1 The hypothesis that one can get away with torture without anyone else knowing about it can be dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration. For a start, the suspect who has been tortured will know, unless they are silenced.

May 11, 2004

If the past is another country, how about a declaration of independence?

Posted by Chris

In a famous letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson set out the problem of intergenerational sovereignty :it is as unjust for the dead to impose their laws on the living as it is for one country to impose its laws on another. In both cases, those subject to the laws are being obliged to obey legislation that they had no hand in formulating and have limited opportunity to repeal. As Jefferson points out, later generations may be burdened in all kinds of similar ways by earlier ones. So, for example, they may be held liable for the borrowing of their ancestors. But why should they be any more responsible for the repayment of such debts that the inhabitants of one country are for the repayment of the debts of another?

Jefferson’s solution to the problem was to apply the mortality tables of his own day to estimate the time that would need to pass after the enactment of a statute before a majority of citizens would be subject to laws they had not enacted. He proposed that after such a period, laws would either have to be renewed by the living or would lapse. (Jefferson’s estimate was 19 years.)

It is surprising that Jefferson’s problem doesn’t receive more discussion. The US Constitution, for example, continues to bind people more than two centuries after its enactment. For all the rhetoric about “the wisdom of the framers” it is hard to see how the decisions of a bunch of dead white men — decisions that it is incredibly hard to repeal — should continue to be authoritative over the present-day inhabitants of the United States who include people who not only had no hand in those laws themselves but may be descended from people who were (in virtue of being slaves) excluded from any possibility of participating in the decisions. (That last point is just a rhetorical flourish, btw, the key point is that the dead shouldn’t bind the living, whoever the living were descended from.)

The problem, and its solution, occupies the final chapter of Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality . Otsuka rejects both consequentialist and communitarian attempts to solve the problem, and opts instead for one based in Lockean tacit consent. Future generations can be bound by earlier ones if and only if they tacitly consent so to be bound, which they can do by remaining within the territory governed by the laws. But as Otsuka is very well aware (and it formed the subject of earlier chapters in his book), tacit consent as Locke sets it out in the Second Treatise , isn’t really consensual at all. Given that people don’t really have a viable alternative to remaining within the state (as Hume famously points out in “Of the Original Contract”) it seems perverse to take their doing so as their consent to the laws. Otsuka’s key move, then, is to allow the problem of intergenerational sovereignty to give further weight to his own alternative to Lockean views on property.

I’ve discussed Otsuka’s conditions on tacit consent and on property acquistion before (here and here ). He’s how he expresses the connection to the problem of intergenerational sovereignty in the final lines of Libertarianism Without Inequality :

I have argued … that in order to ensure that tacit consent by residence is morally binding some fairly radical steps involving the egalitarian redistribution of worldly resources and the decentralization and pluralizing of political societies must be taken to ensure that such consent is freely given in circumstances of genuine equality. In the light of the fact that Jefferson’s own solution to the problem of intergenerational sovereignty cannot cover those who have just reached the age of majority … we can now see that we have good reason to move beyond the Jeffersonian proposal and toward the realization of those conditions of equality and plurality under which mere residence within the borders of society would constitute freely given, genuinely morally binding consent. The need to solve the problem of intergenerational sovereignty provides further grounds to realize the Lockean left-libertarian ideal of political society as a voluntary association.

Some thoughts:

(1) I’ve mentioned that Otsuka rejects consequentialist and communitarian replies to Jefferson’s problem. I’ve not gone into details here because I think such responses (which I have some sympathy with) are bound to surface in comments. So let them, and we can discuss the pros and cons.

(2) Jefferson’s problem arises (and arises especially sharply for Otsuka) because both Jefferson and Otsuka want to espouse a voluntarist account of legitimacy and obligation. But one reaction to both Jefferson’s puzzle and to the highly demanding conditions on tacit consent that Otsuka uses to resolve it withing the voluntarist paradigm is surely going to be to see all this as a reductio of voluntarism. If this is where voluntarism leads us, then perhaps we should start our accounts of legitimacy, authority, obligation and so on somewhere else. If so where?

(3) I’ve drafted and redrafted this post to try to find a satisfactory way of ending it and can’t. So I’ll just finish with two questions. Is Jefferson’s problem really a problem? If it is, then is tacit consent (under suitable conditions) the way to solve it?

[This is the concluding — and long overdue — post, reading and summarizing Libertarianism Without Inequality . Thanks to Mike Otsuka for his patience. Earlier posts contained my responses to chapters 1, 2 , 3 , 4, 5 and 6 . ]

May 08, 2004

Bad Arguments

Posted by Belle Waring

Currently appearing in the Straits Times is one of the least compelling arguments I’ve ever heard. Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing stooges are running candidates in the geographical constituencies in the next election, as well as in the “functional” constituencies, which are decided by a small group of hand-picked voters. As the Straits Times dryly notes, “Pro-democracy candidates tend to sweep directly elected Legco seats [i.e., the geographical constituencies] because they enjoy support from the population.” Oh, that. But Mr. James Tien, chairman of the pro-government Liberal Party, thinks that should change.

Mr Tien said: ‘If the central government sees a willingness among Hong Kong people to vote too for conservative businessmen, it will then have more confidence in the territory and might allow Hong Kong people universal suffrage earlier than is otherwise the case.’

And Mr. Ma Lik, of the reassuringly-named Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong (democratic in the “Democratic Republic of Congo” sense, it seems), agrees: ‘The central government would become more apprehensive about speeding up democratic development in Hong Kong if the democrats won a landslide victory.’

So, Beijing won’t let you vote, because they know you won’t vote the way they want. But, if you vote the way they want, maybe they’ll let you vote again later, and for more things, at which point you can…um…vote the way they want again, or risk the dreaded “instability”. If this is an advertisement for “one country, two systems”, then don’t expect to see Taiwan rushing to sign up.

April 27, 2004

How much is Google worth?

Posted by John Quiggin

According to this report, the widely-predicted Google IPO is likely to value the equity in Google at more than $20 billion - others suggest $25 billion. I immediately wondered whether Google was really worth $25 billion.

I started on a standard financial analysis. Although, as a private company, Google doesn’t have to publish annual reports, it’s been estimated that Google has annual revenues of $500 million and profits of $125 million so that the return on equity is about 0.5 per cent. We can expect that to grow reasonably fast in the next few years, but the scope for expansion in Google’s core business is far from limitless. Most people in the developed world are already online and most of the heavy users already use Google (Eszter might have more to say on this). Moreover, there’s no strong reason to suppose that Google will be around in, say, 20 years time. I find it hard to draw a plausible earnings path that would yield a present value of $25 billion at any reasonable discount rate.

That’s a problem for the investors, though. The Google example started me thinking about the more general problem of economic valuation in the Internet era. I started by looking at this piece by Simson Garfinkelhat tip - Tyler Cowen. As well as reporting potential competition from Akamai (relevant in considering Google’s longevity), Garfinkel estimates that Google operates a network of 100 000 servers, but that clever design allows the use of very cheap computers as servers. Let’s and suppose an average of $500 a piece. This implies that the main piece of capital equipment operated by Google is worth around $50 million1 - a hefty sum, but a tiny fraction of the estimated equity value (and presumably there’s some debt in there as well) .

Next, it’s of interest to look at capital-labour ratios. Google apparently has about 1000 employees, which would suggest a total labour cost of the order of $100 million per year - a little on the low side as a proportion of revenues of $500 million, but not implausible. On the other hand, the number of employees is minuscule in relation to the valuation above, which implies a capital stock of $25 million per worker. I feel sure that this kind of ratio would imply some pretty strange organizational policies.

Then there’s the question of how much Google is worth in economic terms. I would think the correct answer must be lot more than the present value of its revenues. I use Google all the time, but unless text ads have a subliminal effect for which Google is being paid, I’ve never contributed a penny to its revenues, and quite possibly never will.

The general problem is that, in an economy dominated by public goods, like that of the Internet, there’s no reason to expect any relationship between economic value and capacity to raise revenue. Things of immense social value (this blog, for example!) are given away because there’s no point doing anything else. On the other hand significant profits can be made by those who can find a suitable choke point, even if they haven’t actually contributed anything of value. Assuming for the moment that SCO prevails in its attempts to extract revenue from Linux users, it won’t be because SCO’s code was better than some free alternative but simply because it was widely distributed before anyone found out it was copyrighted.

If the Internet continues to grow in economic importance, the central role of public goods in its formation will pose big problems for capitalism, though not necessarily to the benefit of traditional forms of socialism.

1 Thanks to commentators danny yee and thijs for correcting parametric and arithmetic errors in the original version of the draft, and thereby greatly strengthening my point.

April 26, 2004

Referendums

Posted by John Quiggin

The problem with, and the virtue of, referendums is that, in the absence of armed guards at the ballot box, you can never be sure of the result. The curious politics of the European Union are such that referendums are of particular importance. The big news at present relates to the twin referendums just held in Cyprus, on the UN plan for reunification, and the commitment by Tony Blair to hold a referendum on the EU ‘constitution’.

The Cyprus outcome was the opposite of the result predicted (and feared) by many until quite recently. The Turkish Cypriots voted for reunification, rejecting the arguments of separatist leader Rauf Dentktash (until recently, an apparent permanent fixture). Meanwhile the voters in the internationally-recognised Greek Cypriot republic voted against, apparently on the basis that they could get a better deal after they are securely inside the EU.

Although disappointing, the result is not nearly as bad as the opposite possibility - continued support for separatism among the Turkish Cypriots, which would have represented a significant challenge to the whole international order and made the admission of Turkey to the EU most unlikely. The manoeuvrings of the Greek Cypriot politicians who undermined support for the deal are simply a standard example of shortsighted hardball politics. They want reunification but have made the judgement that they can extract a better deal once they are in the UN and the Turkish Cypriots are on the outside.

The question naturally arises as to how to react when a referendum goes the ‘wrong’ way. If the right to make choices in a referendum is taken seriously, the voters should not be punished for exercising their right to choose. On the other hand, choices have consequences. The obvious consequence of the choices made at the weekend is that there’s no reason for governments in the EU or outside it to trouble themselves any further with the sanctions that have been imposed on the Turkish Cypriots until now. It would be absurd to recognise the government they have just voted in favor of abolishing, but for all other purposes, the residents of the Turkish portion of Cyprus should be treated as normal members of the international community. As a necessary side effect, the removal of these disabilities will weaken the bargaining position of the Greek Cypriot government next time reunification is discussed, but that’s not the reason for removing them.

Presumably, the judgement made by the Greek Cypriot leaders is that the possession of a single vote in an EU where every member has a veto will be worth more than the sympathy of the international community, including fellow members of the EU. This leads naturally to the second referendum being discussed on the proposed ‘EU constitution’, which would, among other things reduce the scope of such vetos.

After staving it off as long as possible, Tony Blair has finally agreed to hold a referendum in the UK, and he was right to do so. The central problem with the EU is the lack of democratic accountability arising from a structure with a powerless parliament, under which all decisions are effectively made either by the unelected European Commission or by national governments in the Council of Ministers. The solution is either to keep the EU relatively weak and ineffectual, by maintaining national vetos over most issues, or to make the system more like a bicameral legislature, with some form of majority voting in both the Parliament and the Council. The expansion, by introducing lots of new members (including several that have already shown themselves willing to act irresponsibly) makes the first option less attractive, but not necessarily unworkable. The natural consequence of losing automatic national vetos will be to increase concern with the functioning of the Parliament, and this will ultimately promote democratic accountability.

It’s obvious, though, that democracy can’t be promoted by denying it, and it’s therefore highly desirable that the changes should be subject to referendums in any country where there is a strong body of opposition. The UK obviously fits this description.

There are several possible outcomes to such a process. First, somewhat improbably [1], all the referendums could pass, in which case there is no problem. Second, the proposal could be rejected in a few countries on the basis of more-or-less extraneous concerns, as happened with Ireland and the Treaty of Nice. In this case, the referendums can just be held again. Third, the proposal could be rejected in several countries, following a debate that was clearly focused on the main issues (the proposal itself and the general issue of European integration). In that case, it would be time to call a halt, and leave existing arrangements in place for a while. If they produced the predicted problems, voters might be willing to reconsider the issues in a few years time. Otherwise, it would be necessary to scale back the ambitions of the European Project to something more like a Free Trade Area and less like a United States of Europe.

The final case, and the one of most interest for Blair, is the possibility that only one country (the UK is the most likely candidate) rejects the referendum, and that this position is not amenable to change through the holding of a second referendum. In the short run, the probable consequence is a “two-speed” system, with the eurozone being the obvious basis for a core group within which further integration could take place.

In the long run, though, a federation (or, more accurately, a confederation) like the EU must include a mechanism for withdrawal and exclusion as well as for new admissions. If one member is permanently at odds with the others on fundamental issues, that member should be invited to leave. It’s therefore somewhat disingenuous of those advocating a “No” vote to claim that it isn’t a vote against British membership of the EU. Most of those advocating a “No” vote are not concerned with the details of the proposal, but would take the same position on almost any proposal to make a union of 25 countries functional. The ultimate consequence must be either British withdrawal or (if voters in other European countries take the same view) a substantial weakening of the EU.

1 This isn’t impossible. All but one (I think) of the new entrants held referendums, and all were successful. So if the stakes are high enough, the likelihood of frivolous or petulant “No” votes is greatly reduced.

April 24, 2004

Taxation and conscription

Posted by John Quiggin
A while ago, I made the observation that
since most libertarians envisage a minimal state with no real taxing powers but a continuing responsibility for defence, reliance on conscription would be almost inevitable. From the libertarian viewpoint, any form of taxation constitutes slavery1, and fairness is not a proper concern of policy, so there can be no particular objection to the press gang as opposed to, say, voluntary recruitment financed by involuntary income taxes.
I was speaking in the context of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, set during the Napoleonic Wars, but the issue has come up again in relation to contemporary debates about the draft. Julian Sanchez has a very good discussion of the issues from a libertarian viewpoint, rejecting Nozick and arguing that rights over property are derivative of, and potentially far more qualified than, rights over one’s own labour.

My own view is broadly similar to Julian’s. Conscription may be justified in the kind of total war situation that also requires “conscription of wealth”, but not as a cheap way of filling the military.

1 Nozick is clear on this, and a lot of other libertarians say much the same thing, though usually more foggily. As noted below, however, it’s always a mistake to refer to “the” libertarian viewpoint.

April 16, 2004

Against Equality of Opportunity, Part II

Posted by John Quiggin

When I first posted on Matt Cavanagh’s Against Equality of Opportunity, a lot of the discussion focussed on the way Cavanagh’s views on race and gender discrimination were being used by The Guardian as a stick with which to beat UK Home Secretary David Blunkett, who had recently hired Cavanagh. Unlike Chris, I wasn’t sufficiently closely attuned to UK politics to pick up on this, and, in any case was most interested in the general issue raised by the book’s title.

It took me a while to get hold of the book from our library, but I’ve finally been able to read it. Having done so, I agree with Chris and others that the Guardian story was a dreadful beat-up. Cavanagh’s views on anti-discrimination policy are unexceptionable, and his main concern is on working through the reasons why we might support laws prohibiting racial and gender-based discrimination while opposing a general principle of meritocracy.

On the other hand, I see no reason to change the (pre)judgement I made, based on the reviews I had read, that,
Cavanagh seems to take the naturalness of capitalist property relations as a given, and argue against equality from there, in the manner of Nozick, though not with the same commitment to pushing premises to their logical conclusions.
Given that he is dealing with issues that have been debated for well over a century, the extent to which Cavanagh’s analysis takes for granted assumptions that (on the left at least) have been widely accepted only in the past fifteen years or so, is truly striking. The main change I’d make is to substitute “employment relations” for “property relations”.

Almost throughout, Cavanagh takes it for granted that the problem setting is one where there is a person called an employer who has a right to allocate a job and the question is to what extent the state should interfere with that right. As I observed above, Cavanagh rejects extreme libertarian views, but he’s openly on the libertarian side of the argument on most issues. The kinds of questions one might expect from a left-wing analysis of the issues1, such as the justice of an allocation of ownership rights over capital that make some people employers and others (potential) employees, or the long-run implications of giving more rights to employers, are not even asked.

As I’ve said previously, if you accept inequality of outcomes (as Cavanagh explicitly does) and have liberal concerns about detailed and intrusive state intervention in people’s lives, the idea of equality of opportunity is essentially unsustainable. So my natural concern was with the arguments Cavanagh presents against equality in general, and the way he relates this to equality of opportunity.

I found this part of the book by far the weakest. Cavanagh certainly shows that many supporters of equality are confused in their views, and that there are counter-arguments to most of the standard arguments in favour of equality, but goes nowhere near demonstrating that its reasonable to abandon equality as an objective. Rather, he shows that, if you start with the usual market-liberal premises, and put a high burden of proof on your opponents to justify any shift, you’ll come up with market-liberal conclusions.

Since I favor a “diminishing claims” argument for equality, I’ll respond to Cavanagh on this ground, leaving supporters of Rawls and others to fight their own battles. The basis of the diminishing claims argument is most easily seen in relation to money, and the resources that it can buy. The benefit of additional resources is greater for a person who is initially poor than for one who is already rich. Hence, other things [such as incentive effects, etc] being equal, society is better off, on average, if resources are transferred from the rich to the poor. This was the kind of argument that converted many of the classical utilitarians (initially strong supporters of the free-market) to socialism.

Cavanagh has two counter-arguments. The first is that this isn’t the “right” sort of argument for equality, since it isn’t inherently about relative relationships between people. The second is that, in some contexts, it may not lead to decisions to equalise the distribution of resources. In health care triage problems, for example, it implies allocating health care resources to those who can gain most benefit from them, not to those whose health is initially worst.

Something like the first argument is also made by Rawls, in criticising the utilitarians. I didn’t find it convincing then, but at least Rawls was an egalitarian arguing that the utilitarian position was not egalitarian enough. For an opponent of egalitarianism to reject arguments because they don’t meet an arbitrary standard of egalitarian purity seems nonsensical to me.

Much the same comments apply on the second point. Perhaps the diminishing efficiency argument doesn’t always imply greater equality. Perhaps some other considerations may be relevant in the cases mentioned by Cavanagh. But regardless, Cavanagh has given no reason for disregarding diminishing claims arguments and no reason for supposing that, as far as employment issues are concerned, they won’t favour greater equality of both opportunities and outcomes.

I’ve seen plenty of critiques of the idea of equality starting from more or less the same premises as Cavanagh and reaching more or less the same conclusion. The main lesson is that capitalism and inequality are a package deal. The more capitalism you want, the more inequality (of both outcomes and opportunity) you have to accept along with it. Cavanagh sees this, and accepts it, while Blair and Blunkett do not.

1 I’m not trying to impose some sort of orthodoxy test here, but responding to the earlier discussion. Cavanagh’s viewpoint was specifically advertised as left-wing, for example, in the letter from Edward Lucas printed by the Guardian. I was led by this advertising to expect more from the book than it actually delivered.

April 12, 2004

Illustrating egalitarianism

Posted by Chris

TechCentralStation has a piece by anti-egalitarian political philosopher John Kekes today . Kekes probably isn’t responsible for the way the article is illustrated, but it warrants comment. Insofar as any egalitarian thinker can be identified in the text of Kekes’s article, it is semi-egalitarian liberal John Rawls. But the little photomontage that accompanies the piece associates Karl Marx, the IRS, a sinister man in a ski-mask and another sinister hooded and bearded man who is brandishing a pistol.

April 01, 2004

Carl Schmitt

Posted by Ted

Reader Ted Clayton brings an interesting article to my attention from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s about the fascist political philosopher Carl Schmitt. Just a sample:

Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas “all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.” Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule — even an ostensibly fair one — merely represents the victory of one political faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt’s ideas pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it… If Schmitt is right, conservatives win nearly all of their political battles with liberals because they are the only force in America that is truly political. From the 2000 presidential election to Congressional redistricting in Texas to the methods used to pass Medicare reform, conservatives like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove have indeed triumphed because they have left the impression that nothing will stop them. Liberals cannot do that. There is, for liberals, always something as important, if not more important, than victory, whether it be procedural integrity, historical precedent, or consequences for future generations.

I certainly don’t agree with this point of view; it’s a little too David Brooksish and a lot too black and white. Liberals are certainly capable of playing ugly, a good portion of movement conservatives are disgusted with naked power plays, and so on. But it’s a better whetstone for political argument than much of what I’ve read lately. Check it out.

CAN-SPAM

Posted by John Quiggin
Among the offerings in today’s special edition of TidBITS, the long-running online Macintosh magazine, I found this item particularly appealing.
Canned Spam Can Can Spam with CAN-SPAM — Hormel is expected to announce today their campaign to can spam using their canned Spam with the aid of the CAN-SPAM legislation. Starting today, Hormel will print the phone number, email addresses, and other information about unsolicited email senders on cans of Spam along the lines of the “Have you seen me?” photographs published on milk cartons. Canned Spam buyers who help to can spam by canning spammers can receive cans of Spam as a reward.
Other important news includes a report that the US Department of Homeland Security is responding to the threat of Windows-specific cyberterrorism, most notably through Trojans such as Phatbot by standardising on Macs.

March 31, 2004

Bunnies vs bilbies

Posted by John Quiggin

Following up Belle’s post, In Australia, as Easter approaches, the big question is: Bunny or Bilby? To give as fair and balanced a presentation as possible of the main issues, the rabbit is a voracious alien pest1 marketed in chocolate form by greedy multinationals, while the bilby is an appealing, and endangered, native marsupial made available for Easter celebration by public spirited Australians, helping to raise both awareness and much-needed funds. We report, you decide.

1 Matched only by the fox

March 30, 2004

Welcome to John and Belle

Posted by John Quiggin

I’m pleased to announce that John Holbo and Belle Waring have joined our group and will be posting regularly on Crooked Timber from now on. John and Belle are famous for the catchphrase “and a pony!”, but apart from that I’m not going to attempt to summarise them.

Like me, and some other members of the group, they’ll be maintaining their own excellent blog as well.

March 28, 2004

The Zarqawi scandal

Posted by John Quiggin

As Richard Clarke’s unsurprising revelations continue to receive blanket coverage around the blogosphere and elsewhere, I’ve been increasingly puzzled by the failure of the Zarqawi scandal to make a bigger stir. As far as I can determine, the following facts are undisputed

  • Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of the group Ansar al-Islam is one of the most dangerous Islamist terrorists currently active. He is the prime suspect for both the Karbala and Madrid atrocities and the alleged author of a letter setting out al Qaeda’s strategy for jihad in Iraq. Although he has become increasingly prominent in the past year, he has been well-known as a terrorist for many years
  • For some years, until March 2003, Ansar al-Islam was based primarily at Kirma in Northern Iraq, in part of the region of Iraq generally controlled by the Kurds and included in the no-fly zone enforced by the US and UK. In other words, the group was an easy target for either a US air attack, a land attack by some special forces and/or Kurdish militia or a combination of the two
  • Nothing was done until the invasion of Iraq proper, by which time the group had fled

These facts alone would indicate a failure comparable in every way to the missed opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden before S11. But the reality appears to be far worse.

According to the MSNBC report that broke the story, three plans were drawn up for attacks on Zarqawi and all were killed by the National Security Council
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

There are various hypotheses about the precise grounds, all highly discreditable, but the most plausible is that a watertight plan would have required co-operation between US air forces, and Kurdish ground forces. This would have been most unpalatable to the Turkish government, which was being courted, up to the last minute, as a partner for the Iraq war. So nothing was done, and by the time the camp was attacked at the beginning of the war, Zarqawi and most of his followers were gone.

An alternative, equally discreditable, explanation is that the Administration wanted to keep Zarqawi’s group in existence as a count in the indictment of Saddam, relying on the claim that Zarqawi had received treatment in a Baghdad hospital as ‘proof’ of Saddam’s links to terrorism, a claim that was unlikely to stand up to the kind of close examination that would follow an attack on the group.

Although it’s a peripheral point, there were also credible reports that Ansar al-Islam was engaged in the manufacture of ricin, a poison used in assassination. Ricin is scarcely a weapon of mass destruction but, if the Administration had applied the same criteria to Zarqawi as to Saddam, it would certainly have provided sufficient justification for a pre-emptive strike. It is, however, a peripheral point. The justification for attempting to kill Zarqawi and eliminate his group is and was the fact that he is a terrorist, not a legalistic quibble about his choice of killing technology. Similar attacks have been made in a number of countries under both Bush and Clinton, most notably including Clinton’s attempt on Osama.

When the story first broke about a month ago1, it was widely covered by critics of the war, at least some of whom pointed out the seriousness of the implications. Brad de Long, for example, argued that it constituted grounds for impeachment of Bush and other members of the Administration. (There was some dispute about the legal feasibility of this, but none about the morality).

On the other hand, the warbloggers have been almost uniformly silent. The few who have mentioned the issue have mostly made the ludicrous claim that Zarqawi’s activities, undertaken in an effectively US-controlled part of Iraq, constituted proof that ‘Iraq really did have WMD’s’. I have found the single honorable exception of Andrew Sullivan, and I expect there are some others, but not many.

And there it rests. As far as I can tell, there’s been no follow-up story and no action on the political front. A failure that would appear to be, at best, a disastrous blunder and, at worst, a deliberate betrayal of the struggle against terrorism has simply been ignored while Washington plays the familiar game of “He Said, She Said”.

1 Even before the war, Dan Drezner wondered why the group had not been attacked.

March 22, 2004

Sweet liberty

Posted by John Quiggin

I’ve been reading the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian and was struck by an episode in Post Captain . The hero, Jack Aubrey has been given command of a ship but is being pursued by his creditors and faces indefinite imprisonment for debt if they catch him. Reaching Portsmouth and his crew, he turns on the bailiffs who have been pursuing him and routs them. Several are knocked down and, in a marvellous twist, Aubrey presses them into service on his ship.

It struck me on reading O’Brian that this kind of thing would happen routinely in a libertarian utopia. On the one hand, bankruptcy and limited liability, the first great pieces of government interference with freedom of contract would be abolished, and imprisonment for debt presumably reintroduced. On the other hand, since most libertarians envisage a minimal state with no real taxing powers but a continuing responsibility for defence, reliance on conscription would be almost inevitable. From the libertarian viewpoint, any form of taxation constitutes slavery, and fairness is not a proper concern of policy, so there can be no particular objection to the press gang as opposed to, say, voluntary recruitment financed by involuntary income taxes.

March 20, 2004

Against equality of opportunity?

Posted by John Quiggin

Since I’ve argued previously that there’s a lot of confusion in discussions about equality of opportunities and of outcomes, I was interested by this story that UK Home Secretary David Blunkett has hired as special advisor on race someone named Matt Cavanagh, most notable for writing a book called Against Equality of Opportunity which says that employers should be permitted to engage in racial discrimination.

This interview with Cavanagh in The Guardian does not seem very promising - he comes across as the worst kind of contrarian1 - but is not really enough to go on. So I was hoping someone with a subscription to the London Review of Books might send me a copy of Jeremy Waldron’s apparently favorable review. In case you’re worried about the sanctity of intellectual property, I am a subscriber but I’ve never registered with the website and don’t have the required address slip to hand.

Meanwhile, I’m confident that lots of readers (and probably other CT members) will be well ahead of me, so I’d welcome comments, particularly setting me straight if I have misunderstood Cavanagh (or Waldron).

1 That is, one who makes great play with contradictions in the conventional wisdom, does not put forward a coherent alternative, but nonetheless makes authoritative-sounding pronouncements on public policy.

March 19, 2004

Multiculturalism and animal cruelty

Posted by Chris

I’ve been meaning to blog for the past week about a topic which caused some lively debate over Sunday lunch with some friends last week, prompted by political philosopher Paula Casal’s article “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals?” (Journal of Political Philosophy 11/1 2003). Muslims and orthodox Jews are only allowed to eat meat slaughtered according to Halal or Kosher procedures. These procedures are typically worse from the animal’s point of view that the “humane” methods required for slaughtering cattle normally (at least in the UK). Now as far as I know there’s no religious requirement on Muslims or Jews to eat meat slaughtered by these methods: that’s to say Muslims and Jews can be vegetarians if they want to be. The religious requirement is simply that IF they eat meat, these slaughtering methods must be used. The question that then arises is this: should adherents of these religions (and other similar ones if there are any) be given an exemption from standard animal cruelty regulations to permit them to continue to use these methods?

Some points:

I may be wrong that there are no circumstances where Muslims or Jews are required to eat meat. If so, we can still run the argument of principle by counterfactually assuming that some religion X both requires unusually cruel slaughtering methods for any meat that is consumed and doesn’t prohibit strict vegetarianism.

It can’t plausibly be maintained that banning Halal or Kosher slaughtering methods is a violation of religious freedom because meat consumption isn’t required by the religions in question. True, the ban does make life tougher for religious believers since they can no longer both be religious and perform a particular class of actions. But that’s true of a whole range of religious prohibitions: they make life more difficult in certain respects (whoever said religious belief was without costs to the believer?).

So the issue seems to come down to how we weigh the animal’s interest in not suffering (to that degree) against the believer’s interest in not having his or her lifestyle choices constrained.

Should we grant an exemption from animal cruelty laws in such cases?

Elections and the general will

Posted by John Quiggin

Looking back at the debate over the Spanish election outcome, it struck me that many of the contributions to this debate suffered from a confusion between electoral outcomes and notions akin to Rousseau’s “general will”. My own contributions weren’t entirely free of this fallacious reasoning.

To clarify my point, suppose purely hypothetically that it could be shown beyond doubt that, in the absence of the terrorist attacks, the PP would have won, and that those who changed their votes did so in the hope that this would appease terrorists and induce them to direct their attacks elsewhere. Much of the debate has taken it as self-evident that, if this were true, then it could justly be said that the Spanish people had displayed cowardice, given in to Al Qaeda and so on. But even in this hypothetical case, this would not be true. It would only be true that the 5 per cent or so of Spaniards who changed their votes had done this. (I’d better emphasise again that I don’t believe the hypothesis to be true, and am using it only as an analytical device).

To take a marginally less controversial example, one way of interpreting the results of the most recent presidential election in the US is that the voters couldn’t make up their minds between Gore and Bush and decided, instead, to leave the choice up to the Supreme Court. Stated baldly, the claim seems evidently silly, at least to me, but when I checked, it wasn’t hard to find exactly this analysis being offered by Time Magazine

Writing in December 2000, for Time, Eric Pooley said
The voters couldn’t decide between Bush and Gore, and Congress is split between Republicans and Democrats, but as we groped for a solution to the election mess, we couldn’t help looking to the courts for a wisdom that rises above the nation’s two angry political camps.
which is pretty much the formulation I came to when I looked for a reductio ad absurdam of the ‘general will’ idea.

The correct interpretation is of course that (almost) no-one wanted the election to be decided by the Supreme Court. It just happened that the numbers of people who voted for the two candidates, as weighed by the vagaries of the electoral college system, were almost exactly equal. This could have happened in a bitterly partisan electorate, or one where most people were largely indifferent, or any combination of the two.

The function of elections is not to express the (non-existent) general will but to choose a government (or a legislature). If the process is working well, the decisions made by governments will either be acceptable to the majority of voters or will produce a change of government. Where the process works badly enough, long enough, some sort of structural change usually ensues. For example, after a succession of New Zealand governments implemented unpopular neoliberal policies, the voters threw out the constituency-based plurality system that had produced strong one-party governments and replaced it with a proportional system that virtually guaranteed coalition governments.

March 15, 2004

Philosophy not for sale!

Posted by Chris

As a non-American I find it annoying enough when discussion of important matters in the blogosphere is held hostage to the pragmatics of American political debate and electoral campaigning : “You shouldn’t say X because it might give comfort to the baddies….”, but I don’t expect to see such considerations deployed in an (indeed the) top international journal in political philosophy. But how else to interpret the final sentences of Barbara H. Fried’s (Law, Stanford) review of Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner’s two edited collections The Origins of Left-Libertarianism and Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics ? Fried writes in Philosophy and Public Affairs (Jan 2004):

There is, of course, a long tradition of the left’s coopting natural rights talk to its own political ends. In the same spirit, left-libertarians may hope that, by coopting self-ownership to egalitarian ends, they can reclaim the moral high ground from right-libertarians. But in conceding that the libertarian notion of self-ownership is the moral high ground to begin with, they may well give up more than they bargain for in the public relations battle for the hearts and minds of those in the murky center of American politics, who harbor instincts of both liberty and equality (of the decent social minimum sort) that could be played to. At the very least, left-libertarians would do well to keep in mind the old adage: If you eat with the devil, bring a long spoon.

Philosophers, in discussing the fundamental principles of distributive justice should have an ear to the “public relations battle” for the “murky center of American politics”?1 For shame!

UPDATE: A version of Fried’s review is downloadable from SSRN .

1 Of course the very idea that what is in these Vallentyne and Steiner collections might affect that battle is, anyway, pretty far-fetched for reasons largely unrelated to their content.

March 14, 2004

Using reasons you don't believe

Posted by Micah

Nate Oman thinks there’s something wrong with using religious reasons that one doesn’t believe to convince people who do believe them to change their political views. Here’s what Oman says:

Consider, for example gay marriage activists who quote the New Testament at opponents of same sex marriage. In other parts of the world, Christians are frequently aligned with left-wing causes, and secular conservatives will quote passages about rendering unto Ceasar what is Caesar’s and getting out of politics. For that matter, consider the attempts of westerners to persuade Muslims that Islam, properly understood, is not really inconsistent with modern liberal democracy.

I find all of these arguments slightly off putting. After thinking about, here is why I believe that I have this uneasiness. There is something manipulative about using religious arguments that you do not yourself to subscribe to. Rather than invoking the truth (as you understand it), you are simply grasping at whatever will get the other person to act the way that you want them to act. It is not quite the same as lying to get someone to do something, but it seems similar.

This thought has been developed at length by Robert Audi. He calls the practice of arguing from premises you don’t believe “leveraging by reasons,” since the non-believer is alledgedly using reasons as a form of leverage rather than as part of a rational argument.

I think Audi and Oman are both wrong about this. Take this stripped down example: A argues with B for the purpose of getting B to see that some political principle X is justified. Assume A believes X is justified because of belief P, and B believes X is not justified because of belief Q. Suppose, though, that all of B’s other (relevant?) beliefs should lead him to reject Q and accept P. Suppose further that A rejects B’s other beliefs. Why is it manipulative for A to say to B: “Look, I reject all your other beliefs. But, if you’re going to persist in holding them, you’re at least committed to P, and therefore to political principle X”? Provided that A makes public the nature of his or her argument, I don’t see anything manipulative about it at all.

In fact, you might think that a willingness to argue from what other people believe is a sign of respect. A says to B: “I don’t agree with your background views, but I can see how a reasonable person could hold them. Still, even if you think those things, your beliefs give you reasons to agree with me about X.”

What’s manipulative about that sort of argument? Oman says: “I can’t help but feeling that most invocations of religion by non-believers are shallow, manipulative, condecending, and in some sense dishonest.” I think that “shallow” and “condescending” are doing most of the work here. The problem isn’t the nature of the argument, or the fact that the speaker doesn’t believe the premises. The problem is with the way that such arguments are sometimes made, or with the crassness and duplicity of some of the people who make them.

One more point. Larry Solum has chimed in on this, saying:

In order to avoid deception, the nonbeliever would need to either disavow belief in the argument or make the argument condition[al], with clauses like if all persons were created equal, before delivering the punch line of the argument. On the other hand, though, respect for others requires that we give our fellow citizens reasons which are accessible to them. It would be awfully strange to begin an argument addressed at a believer, with something like, “My first premise is that religion is false.”

There is a way out of the dilemma. We can offer our fellow citizens what the philosopher John Rawls called “public reasons,” i.e. reasons that both believers and nonbelievers can endorse—albeit they may well have different deep foundations for these public reasons.

I agree that giving others sincere public reasons—that is, public reasons we believe—is one way of solving this problem. But it’s not the only way. Consider an example similar to the one above, where A believes X based on P. Confronted with other people B, C, D, E, and F who each disagree with X, A might try to give them reasons that match up with their respective viewpoints. So A might argue that B should believe X because he is committed to reason R, and C because of reason S, and D because of reason T, and so on. A might be able to accomplish this more easily if A engaged in this form of argument deceptively by claiming to believe in the various reasons given to others. But nothing in principle prevents A from saying to each person, “I don’t believe in the reasons I’ve given to you, or in the reasons I’ve given to C, D, E . . . but you believe these reasons, and that’s sufficient for the purpose of reaching agreement on X.”

There are probably good reasons to reject this model of generating convergence on X in favor of a consensus based on public reasons. But I’m not sure the values of sincerity and respect are sufficient to justify preferring the latter. We also need arguments about the stability of normative agreements, and the impossibility of reaching such agreements without shared reasons.

March 10, 2004

Irony alerts in the 14th and 21st centuries

Posted by John Quiggin
‘Truly this is the sweetest of theologies’, William said, with perfect humility, and I thought he was using that insidious figure of speech that rhetors call irony, which must always be prefaced by the pronunciato, representing its signal and its justification - something that William never did. For which reason the abbot, more inclined to the use of figures of speech, took William literally …
Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose

Having run afoul of irony in both directions lately (having my own ironic post on Lent taken literally, then taking literally an ironic comment by Chris), I’ve come to the conclusion that HTML needs its own version of the pronunciato.

Here’s my proposal: Text meant to be taken ironically would be surrounded by <irony > tags. Such text would render normally, but would have a hover property such that, when the mouse hovered over ironic text, it would flicker through a range of suitably ironic colors. Not perfect, but a lot more appealing than a smiley :-).

March 09, 2004

Optional preferential dominates approval voting

Posted by John Quiggin

I thought I’d said my last word on voting systems, but it’s a topic that’s hard to exhaust. The comments thread to Brian’s latest post raised the notion of Approval voting in which you cast a vote for all candidates of whom you approve, the candidate with the largest number of votes being elected. I suggested that “the appeal of approval voting is mainly to people who can see the inadequacies of plurality (first past the post) but are worried about the supposed complexity of preferential” and the site linked above, with its frequent references to simplicity, supports this view.

I now want to make a stronger point. Approval voting is, for nearly all purposes, dominated by the “optional preferential” system, in which voters can list in order all the candidates whom they wish to give any support, leaving the remaining candidates unranked. In effect, optional preferential is an approval voting version of the single transferable vote system, with the desirable property that voters don’t have to give any support to candidates they dislike. Given the data from on optional preferential ballot, it would always be possible to implement approval voting by disregarding the rankings given by voters, but its hard to see when this could ever be desirable.

The “instant runoff” interpretation of the single transferable vote favors optional preferential voting. In a real runoff, it’s always possible for voters to abstain if all the candidates they support have been eliminated1, and the optional preferential system mimics this.

As with nearly all voting systems, the optional preferential system has been tried out in Australia. In fact, it prevails in my home state of Queensland. It would be nice to report that this was the result of an extensive study by expert political theorists who came up with the best possible voting system. However, no-one who knows anything about Queensland politics would believe this. In fact, Queensland has two conservative parties, Liberal and National, which often run against each other, and some of whose supporters are mutually antagonistic. Under optional preferential voting, some National supporters will not allocate a second preference to Liberal and vice versaThis is to the benefit of the Labor Party, which was quick to introduce optional preferential voting when it got a majority a decade or so ago, after many years in opposition.

The situation in Australian national politics is truly bizarre. Although the full instant runoff system is in force, it is possible to gain the effect of optional preferential by ranking all the undesired candidates equal last. Should your preferences be counted to this point, the vote will be declared informal and discarded, which is exactly the same outcome as under optional preferential. However it is a criminal offence to advocate such a vote, owing to a disgraceful piece of legislation passed with the intention, and effect, of silencing electoral reform campaigner Albert Langer2.

Just to cover myself, let me say that whether or not I would cast a “Langer vote” I would never advocate such a vote, at least while current law prevails. On the other hand, I am free to point out that Senator Nick Bolkus, who introduced the relevant legislation is, in this respect at least, an enemy of free speech and democracy.

1 in principle, it’s possible to abstain in one round and re-enter in a, but it’s hard to see when this would be sensible.
fn2. In an earlier life, Langer was a famous Maoist agitator. I much prefer his later incarnation.

March 08, 2004

Trapped ?

Posted by John Quiggin
Brad de Long picks up my post on opportunities and outcomes (see also this crossposting with further discussion), in which I argued that the achievement of meaningful equality of opportunity in a society with highly unequal outcomes would require extensive government intervention to prevent the development of inherited inequality, and says that I’m falling into Irving Kristol’s trap, which he describes, accurately enough, as
an ideological police action designed to erase the distinction between Arthur Okun and Mao Zedong, and delegitimize the American left.
I agree that many people, particularly critics of social democracy like Kristol ,use the outcome/opportunity distinction in a dishonest way. This is particularly true in the American context, since anyone honestly concerned with the issue would have to begin with the observation that the United States performs just as badly on equality of opportunity (as measured by things like social mobility) as it does on equality of outcome (see the book by Goodin et al, reviewed here for one of many demonstrations of this). So if Kristol were genuinely concerned about equality of opportunity he’d be calling for at least as much intervention as the liberals and progressives he’s criticising.

On the other hand, there is a genuine debate within the social democratic/socialist movement1 which I was addressing. On the basis of fairly limited knowledge, I identified Blair and Brown as proponents of equality of opportunity and outcomes respectively. In a long comments thread, no-one picked me up on this point, so maybe my judgement on this was accurate. My comments were addressed to the fairly large group of social democrats who genuinely think that, as long as you equalise opportunity, for example by providing good-quality schools for all, it’s not a problem if income inequality increases. To restate my point, that might be true for one generation, but in the second generation the rich parents will be looking to buy a headstart for their less-able children, for example by sending them to private schools where they will be coached in examination skills and equipped with an old school tie. Given highly unequal outcomes in the previous generation, it’s much harder to prevent the inheritance of inequality, and the achievement of equality of opportunity requires more, and more drastic, intervention rather than less.

In the real world, no-one advocates either perfect equality of outcomes or perfect equality of opportunity. My point is that, in the same real world, these two are complements, not substitutes. The more progress you make on equalising outcomes in one generation, the easier it is to equalise opportunities in the next. I don’t expect Irving Kristol to embrace this insight with hosannas, but then it’s a long time since I expected anything positive from Irving Kristol.

1 I’ll post more on this distinction soon, I hope.

March 07, 2004

Dad's Nuke

Posted by Henry

Building from Belle’s post on end-state anarcho-libertarianism, a question for the floor. Everyone’s favorite libertarian SF author, Vernor Vinge, makes the case for private ownership of nuclear weapons as an important bulwark of liberty in his short story, “The Ungoverned” (it can be found in his recent Collected Stories). If you’re a serious anarcho-libertarian, do you agree that individuals should be able to have their very own nukes? If you disagree, on what grounds do you justify your disagreement? Discuss.

March 06, 2004

...and a pony too

Posted by Chris

Belle Waring has a brilliant lampoon of utopian libertarian discourse .

February 29, 2004

Nietzsche and Gibson, Locke and Pasolini

Posted by Chris

I recently read Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent Nietzsche on Morality . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can never recover (He sent his only son, and we killed Him):

…. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)

I haven’t seen Gibson’s film yet (since it doesn’t open in the UK for another month) but it is clear from the reviews that it is precisely this aspect of the Christian story that Gibson accentuates through his relentless focus on the torture and suffering of Jesus. (And see the email of the day on Andrew Sullivan for evidence that some believers are taking the movie in exactly this way.)

Contrast this with, say, Pasolini’s treatment of the story in his The Gospel According to St. Matthew , where another aspect of the Christian message is emphasised: that we all belong to a common humanity, that each person has moral worth and should be recognised as such, and that compassion is an appropriate attitude to the suffering of our fellow humans (a vision powerfully expressed, also, in Joan Osborne’s song “One of Us”). Nietzsche doesn’t like this aspect of Christianity either, of course, but for me at least, it is the most attractive feature of the religion. Not just attractive, of course, but morally and politically important and influential: the basic equality of humans posited by both Locke and Kant is strongly rooted in this Christian tradition (which poses an unresolved problem, I think, for those of us who want to hang onto that moral idea whilst rejecting religion - c.f Jeremy Waldron’s recent God, Locke and Equality ).

One of the reasons I can’t bring myself to share the antipathy to religion that is expressed by someone like our esteemed regular commenter Ophelia Benson , is that, at its best, religion succeeds in a symbolic articulation of universal moral concern that secular morality finds it hard to match up to (motivationally, I mean). Secular morality is a thin gruel compared to the notion that, as children of God, we are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. It sounds as if Gibson’s film is a reminder not of religion at its best, but at its very worst: cruel and sadistic and aiming to provoke a mixture of guilt, worthlessness and rage in believers. I’m keeping an open mind about whether the film is specifically anti-semitic, but it sounds very much as if the film draws on and inflames the very reactive attitudes that have inspired much religious violence and persecution (not to speak of personal unhappiness) in the past.

February 23, 2004

Channels of Dissent

Posted by Henry

The New York Times has an article on Dissent Magazine, which is about to hit its 50th anniversary. It’s a publication which is a little to my right, and to the right of some other CT-ites, but has published some really good pieces over the years. The Times refers to Dissent’s continuing financial difficulties - the journal has always been a labour of love, more aimed at getting ideas into circulation than at breaking even. This leads to an interesting question. There’s always been a lot of guff in the blogosphere about how blogs represent a fundamental threat to traditional media. It’s mostly nonsense - Atrios and Glenn Reynolds aren’t about to eat the NYT’s lunch any time soon, let alone Crooked Timber. Still, the one section of the media that faces a real challenge to adapt is the small opinion journal. There are things that these journals can do that bloggers are bad at - run long and detailed articles for one. But blogs - at least the more successful ones - are arguably starting to catch up (and in certain areas of debate to dominate). And they’re a lot cheaper. Dissent has a circulation of 8-10,000 and loses over $100,000 a year. It costs a few hundred dollars a year to run a blog with the same daily readership.

I don’t think that these magazines are going to disappear - I certainly hope not. According to Chris, Imprints, another small journal, seems to have no trouble in covering its costs. However, if blogs continue to feed directly and indirectly into public debate, it’ll be hard for small journals to resist taking advantage of the possibilities (and cost savings) that they offer. I imagine that we’ll see various forms of symbiosis continuing to emerge, from opinion-blogs like Talking Point Memo, through blog-journal hybrids like the TAP and Reason websites, to niche print journals that get smarter about using bloggers to get the word out about good pieces. All sounds good to me.

[via politicaltheory.info]

February 22, 2004

APSA Political Theory

Posted by Micah

Nice to see the APSA Foundations of Political Theory website has been revised and extended (link via Political Theory Daily Review). Lots of very useful links for anyone interested in the field.

February 21, 2004

Prophecy

Posted by Chris

Yesterday, a colleague pointed out to me the following passage in the late Jean Hampton’s Political Philosophy . Professor Hampton, who died in 1996, must have thought it inconceivable that a certain person would achieve high political office:

Now while it is undeniable that some people are smarter or more virtuous or stronger than other people, these differences by themselves do not seem relevant to establishing political domination. Think, for example, of all the ways in which people are different from one another, physically, mentally and temperamentally. If someone has greater muscle strength than another, does that mean that he gets to rule the other? No: Arnold Schwarzenegger is not considered, by virtue of his physical prowess, a political authority. (p. 19)

February 19, 2004

Kant and Iraq

Posted by Chris

According to conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, Immanuel Kant would have been a supporter of the Iraq war . I’m posting this as a curiosity, really, since it seems unlikely to me that Kant, who didn’t allow peoples the right to overthrow despots (however much he might rejoice at the consequences) would have allowed the legitimacy of one people overthrowing another people’s regime (however despotic).

February 17, 2004

Political theory and molecular biology

Posted by John Quiggin

While we're on the subject of anniversaries, I just got an invitation to a conference on the 300th anniversary of the death of John Locke (Southern Hemisphere readers can email j.jones@griffith.edu.au, there are also events at Yale and Oxford.

I was first introduced to Locke through his demolition of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarchia in which the divine right of kings is derived from the supposed natural rights of fathers, beginning with Adam. Locke has great fun with this, pointing out that if Filmer is right, there is a single rightful monarch for the entire planet, namely the man most directly descended from Adam under the rules of primogeniture - by implication, all existing monarchs (except perhaps one) are usurpers who can justly be overthrown.

I was very disappointed then, to discover that Locke's own analysis of property rights was no better than Filmer's theory of divine right; in fact worse. Rights to property are supposed to be obtained by the first productive user and then passed on by inheritance and voluntary transfer. So, if we could locate the Garden of Eden, where Adam delved, his lineal descendent, if not king of the world, would be the rightful owner of Eden. To determine a rightful allocation of property, we would need to repeat the same exercise for every hectare on the planet. The Domesday Book wouldn't even get you started on this task.

That was thirty years ago or so, and science has advanced a lot since then, to the point where we can award victory to (a modified version of) Filmer. By careful analysis of DNA, we can now postulate a mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam from whom we are all descended (of course, there's no reason to suppose the two were contemporaneous). Suppose, following the practice of various hereditary monarchies, we identify the rightful heir of Y-chromosomal Adam as the man with the smallest number of accumulated mutations (defects from the point of view of a strongly hereditary principle). In principle, this man could be identified uniquely. In practice, I imagine it would be possible to identify the ethnic group to which this man belongs, probably somewhere in Africa, and crown some prominent member of that group. A feminist version, with descent on matriarchal lines, is equally reasonable and, on the current state of scientific knowledge, a litte more practical.

Of course, for those of us who don't buy patriarchal/matriarchal arguments in the first place, this isn't at all compelling. But I don't find Locke's theory of property any more compelling and, unlike Filmer, his theory is no closer to implementability than it was 300 years ago.
[Posted with ecto]

February 14, 2004

Libertarian flash

Posted by Chris

A friend emails with details of a Flash presentation (full screen version here ) explaining why libertarianism is the most appropriate political philosophy for matchstick people who have swallowed a collection of bizarre objects and like listening to Tubular Bells (TB on smaller version only).

February 03, 2004

Conservatives and Gay Marriage

Posted by Harry

I just came across the following interesting quote from Harvey Mansfield:

Procreation is considered to be part of a perfect or complete human life

He is quoted in the course of Stephen Macedo’s absolute blinder of an essay, “Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind” (Georgetown Law Journal, 1995, no internet access, I’m afraid). Although Mansfield distances himself from the view (‘is considered to be’), its fair to assume that he is committing himself to it, given that he is using it to oppose homosexuality in general and gay marriage in particular. Macedo deals well — no, brilliantly — with Mansfield and his ilk, but part of the brilliance of his essay is that he concedes so much to the conservatives, yet still comes up with homosexuality defended as morally innocent, and homosexual marriage defended as a positive good. So part of his strategy is to concede the vital importance of procreation to human flourishing.

An alternative strategy, common among liberals, would be to deny the relevance of the claim to formulating policy.

What business is it of the state to make assumptions about what makes for a complete and perfect human life? The state should, according to this view, remain neutral about what constitutes the good life; so should not comment on the value or otherwise of procreation (with the qualification that it may provide incentives for procreation insofar as children constitute a public good that would otherwise be undersupplied).

Neither strategy appeals to me. Rather to my surprise, reflecting on issues about the family has made me think that the state should make some, limited, assumptions about what constitutes a flourishing human life, and that conservatives are right to assert the value of one aspect of procreation, even if they do so in entirely the wrong way. Neither Macedo nor Mansfield distinguish between child bearing and child-rearing. I assume that procreation is supposed to include both. Think first about childbearing. This is just obviously not necessary for a perfect or complete human life: no (biological) men can do it, so if it is possible for a man to live a perfect life, childbearing is not necessary for it. If no man can live a perfect human life anyway, then the impossibility of childrearing is irrelevant to the case against (male) homosexuality and homosexual marriage.

But, child-rearing is different: I think it is a necessary part of a fully flourishing life for many, if not most, human beings. But child-rearing can be done by homosexual couples, if society allows it. So, there’s no problem with homosexuality on this front. Mansfield might dispute this, by saying that it is vital for the parent to have a biological connection to the child reared. But, this just seems wrong: the lives of adoptive parents are no less perfect than those of natural parents by virtue of their children being adopted. So even if gay parents could not have genetically connected children (which they can) their lives would be no less perfect as long as society would allow them to adopt. (An aside: Jennifer Roback Morse’s intemperate rant against gay marriage got a lot of play in the blogosphere in December; but her sensitive, if odd and uncomfortably self-revealing, follow-up essay about adoptive parenting got less play than it should have.)

Finally, note Mansfield’s neglect of the fact of human diversity. Sure, many, probably most, and possibly almost all human beings need to raise children to flourish fully. But not all. Some people will live fuller and better lives without rearing children than with. If I dare say it, rearing children is like sex, in one respect. Some people really, really, have no inclination to do it, and will flourish as well or better without it than with it. Their lives, at least, will not be made more perfect by rearing children. Even if we thought, as seems utterly implausible to me, that there was some particular way of life that could be designated the most perfect, why should that fact have any bearing on how we treat people who are constitutionally incapable of achieving that perfection? (Just to emphasize I am not conceding the premis, and even if I did concede the premis, I’ve denied that homosexuality has any bearing on that putative constitutional imperfection). Conservatives are right to emphasize the importance of childrearing for the flourishing of the parent. They are wrong to assume that anything follows from this about the moral quality of homosexuality or the morality of gay marriage; and they are also myopic in their failure to see that the diversity of human constitutions means that what contributes to the flourishing of many or most people does not thereby contribute to the flourishing of all.

January 20, 2004

Public policy and philosophy

Posted by Chris

The Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy at University College London’s School of Public Policy looks very interesting this spring, with papers from Frances Kamm, G. A. Cohen, Jo Wolff, Cass Sunstein and others. (And the papers are downloadable too). First up is Frances Kamm (NYU) on ‘Failures of Just War Theory and Terrorism’.

January 16, 2004

Norberto Bobbio

Posted by Henry

Via A Fistful of Euros, I see that Norberto Bobbio has died at the age of 94. Like all the best Italian intellectuals, he played an important role in public life; unlike some of them, his contribution to political debate was marked by an extraordinary level of personal integrity and decency. His approach to political theory was difficult to categorize in the usual terms - while he drew both on liberal and social democratic ideas, there was a more radical and subversive tinge to his thought than is usually associated with either of those schools. The Guardian obit has it about right; “to his credit, he founded no school, while influencing many.” He’ll be missed.

January 14, 2004

An important distinction

Posted by Chris

I quoted from the now notorious Benny Morris interview yesterday. Norman Geras has now posted some of his thoughts on the matters raised by the interview.

January 12, 2004

Brooke at a Fistful of Euros

Posted by Chris

I see that Chris Brooke is guest-blogging over at a Fistful of Euros. He’s sure to say much of interest at what is becoming one of the best blogs around. His first post there alerted me to something I’d missed, namely Scott Martens’s excellent exposition of Marx’s On The Jewish Question (in comments - you have to scroll down), which connects with some of the issues discussed in my post below about Clermont-Tonnerre and the 1789 debates about the rights of man in the French National Assembly.

January 10, 2004

France and the Jews

Posted by Chris

Norman Geras has a post on anti-semitism in France which documents some awful recent attacks on Jews. But he then goes on to cite another article by Serge Klarsfeld which alleges that France has been a “consistent adversary of the Jewish nation” and cites a 1789 speech to the National Assembly by Clermont-Tonnerre, one of the deputies. I was curious about this and googled for it, and the whole speech is available on-line . The speech actually concerns the various groups who were excluded from various legal rights before the revolution, including members of “questionable professions” (such as actors and executioners) and religious minorities including Protestants and Jews. Clermont-Tonnerre is arguing for the extension of legal rights to all citizens, regardless of their religious opinion, and that no-one should have a special and distinct legal status because of the religious or ethnic identity: all individuals should be equal as citizens before the law. He attacks the idea that the Jews should be allowed to have their own judges and to exact their own punishments on lawbreakers. But it is clear that the point he is making is the same as a liberal would make now if it were proposed that Muslims should be allowed to establish Sharia courts with the power to enact punishments within France or Britain today. Maybe there is an argument supporting the thesis of a persistent anti-Jewish bias by the French state since the revolution, but the broadly liberal sentiments expressed by Clermont-Tonnerre in the National Assembly are no evidence for this.

January 08, 2004

Youth Voice and Power

Posted by Harry

The latest issue of the Arizona Law Review is available online, seemingly with no subscription needed. It’s an interdisciplinary issue on Youth, Voice and Power, with several interesting papers, all pretty accessible. Despite the liberationist-sounding title, most of the papers are pretty soberly paternalistic. They’re all worth reading, but the two I learned most from are by Tamar Schapiro and Robert Emery.

Schapiro’s paper is a careful and immensely clever account of why it is that children should not be treated as full moral persons. She treats childhood as a predicament, and children as beings whose wills are unformed and therefore to whom actions are not attributable. She argues that this, Kant-inspired, defense of paternalism toward children is superior to the defense based on a developmental account of childhood, which she thinks is pretty easily countered by the liberationist. Switching gears completely, Emery’s paper is about the role of children’s voices in divorce proceedings. He explains, drawing on a wealth of clinical experience, many of the pitfalls of asking children what they think and what they want in contested divorce, and argues that even many older children are ill-served by courts which look for their input.
Incidentally, my own paper is, I suspect and hope, the only paper in the history of American Law Reviews with a quote from Richmal Crompton. I hope that’s not the only thing distinctive about it (but it may be).

Rousseau in Palestine

Posted by Chris

Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian intellectual and former PLO representative — whose book Traditions of War reclaims a central place for Jean-Jacques Rousseau in thinking about the ethics and law of war and conflict — writes today in the Guardian about Rousseau, the Geneva accords and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Her piece points up a central problem in the politics of the Israeli—Palestinian conflict: for all the neoconservative rhetoric about the centrality of democracy to progress in the Middle East, the sort of Palestinian leaders with whom Bush and Sharon want to deal are very different from those who would emerge from democratized Palestinian institutions.

January 07, 2004

Oxford Political Thought Conference

Posted by Chris

I’m off to the Oxford Political Thought Conference (programme here in Word format ) tomorrow. I’ve never been before, but I’m very much looking forward to it. Jonathan Israel, author of the monumental Radical Enlightenment is speaking, as is Michael Otsuka whose Libertarianism Without Inequality I’ve been discussing on Crooked Timber. I’m also hoping to meet up with Chris Brooke of the Virtual Stoa , who has recently blogged about both Jonathan Israel and about Sankar Muthu’s new Enlightenment Against Empire (of which I’ve read a chapter and a half and may comment on soonish).

January 05, 2004

Rawls round-up

Posted by Micah

There’s been no shortage of Rawls talk in the blogosphere over the last week or so.

Warning: lots of Rawls-related (but otherwise un-related?) stuff to follow.

(i) Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Lexicon discusses the Rule of Law and offers a schematic Rawlsian view of it. (Solum has done students of legal and political philosophy a great service by posting an index to his Legal Theory Lexicon entries here.)

(ii) Will Wilkinson and Matt Yglesias seem to agree that Rawls didn’t really save us from the death of political philosophy at the hands of positivism because he didn’t resolve any of the foundational, or metaethical, concerns that bothered positivists in the first place. This line from Wilkinson’s post struck me as rather strange:

And Rawls is not concerned with the veracity of the elements of moral conceptions. He is simply concerned to tease out the structure of various moral conceptions—that’s the work of “moral theory” as opposed to a comprehensive moral philosophy—and to analyze various formal properties of moral conceptions once their implicit logic is refined through a process of reflective equilabration. (italics added)

It’s the “simply” that really gets me. Even if Wilkinson’s right that this is all Rawls was doing—that is, even if his only purpose was to lay out two moral conceptions (i.e., utilitarianism and justice as fairness)—he would have succeeded in reviving political philosophy. The systematic articulation of justice as fairness alone would have been sufficient for that purpose. Of course, systematic description of moral conceptions was not Rawls’s only purpose. The point of doing systematic work in moral theory is to provide the proper materials for comparing and choosing a superior theory. And A Theory of Justice is loaded with arguments recommending one conception over another.

(This reminds me of an amusing line from the introduction of Brian Barry’s book on TJ:

In the final paragraph [of TJ] (on page 587) we find Rawls still firing arguments at us in a last attempt to remove any lingering doubts we may still be harbouring. ‘Finally, we we may remind ourselves that the hypothetical nature of the original position invites the question: why should we take any interest in it, moral or otherwise? Recall the answer . . .’ and then bang, bang, bang for the last time.)

It’s hard to recognize Rawls’ constructive (and critical) ambitions in Wilkinson’s “post positivist” description of him. The argument seems to be that you can’t really be doing substantive moral or political philosophy unless you have an objective (read: correspondence theory) of moral truth to support it. Now, Rawls was explicit about his view that moral and political philosophy should proceed independently of a true account of right and wrong. He thought if we waited for someone to prove an objective theory of moral truth, we’d be waiting a really long time. Better to get on with the business of working out our moral views with the only materials presently available to us—our most confident and settled moral beliefs and our ability to work out their implications more systematically, even if that means radically revising our moral and political views. But I don’t see why this method of doing political philosophy is somehow less “substantive” than the (unstated?) methods Wilkinson and Yglesias seem to prefer. Maybe it would help to know more about what they mean by “substance” in this context, and why they think it’s important.

(iii) Stemming from discussion about the opening of this faith-based prison, there’s been an intra-blog debate of sorts about the merits of public reason over at Punishment Theory, with Kyron Huigens roughly pro and Rick Garnett against, and with Solum weighing in here. In what I think might be the most interesting contribution to this discussion, John Gardner comments (scroll down) that:

The principle of public justification central to the liberal tradition is the principle that government should not rely on reasons that it cannot or will not make public . . . If governments should not rely on reasons of respect for God, that is only because there are no such reasons. For governments, like the rest of us, should only rely on reasons that actually exist. The liberal tradition is a humanist tradition according to which there is no God and there therefore cannot be reasons for respecting Him. Anyone who acts out of a respect for God acts not for a (real) reason but only for what they mistakenly take to be a reason.

Gardner’s view is only sustainable if you date the “liberal tradition” roughly from Bentham (“On Publicity”) and J.S. Mill forward to . . . Raz? Maybe this is Bright Liberalism? But it sure isn’t the liberalism that starts with seventeenth-century lessons about religious toleration—the liberalism that still thinks it’s worth reading Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. That liberalism, the one that inspires Rawls’ project, starts with the basic idea that governments should not only make their reasons public, but that those reasons should be acceptable to those governed by them. Arguably, the conception of public justification most central to the liberal tradition is one that requires governments to rely only on reasons that are, in principle, acceptable to their citizens. Of course, there’s a world of trouble lurking in the phrase “in principle,” but the fact that it’s troublesome doesn’t make the contractarian conception of public justification any less central to the liberal tradition.

I think a liberal conception of public justification has two aspects. First, political justifications should be made (actually) public, except where there is sufficient reason to keep certain classes of decisions secret; and, second, they should be public in the sense of being publicly acceptable. Gardner might disagree with the second part of this conception of public justification, but it is recognizably liberal and draws on a tradition of political thought going back at least as far as Locke. (Jeremy Waldron wasn’t just making it up in his essay on the “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism,” where he argues that the fundamental liberal thesis is that political legitimacy is “rooted” in the consent of the governed. In what sense it is “rooted” is part of the trouble. But that really isn’t the point here.) It’s one thing to disagree with this contractarian (and possibly religious) strain of liberal thought, quite another to read it out of the tradition altogether.

January 04, 2004

Till death us do part

Posted by Chris

An issue arises from comments and discussion on Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality that I’d like to take out of that context and discuss as a free-standing matter. It concerns the freedom people ought to have to make binding agreements, and specifically such agreements as marriage. Currently, marriage as an institution is a creature of law and, whatever the promises the parties make — for richer, for poorer, etc — there exist mechanisms such as divorce to terminate the relationship. But surely this ought to bother libertarians? Why shouldn’t people be free to enter into unions that are permanent and from which there is no possibility of exit? Why shouldn’t people simply define the terms of “marriage” as they like?

Liberals have an answer to this one, which is roughly that given the core interests we take people to have, we ought to describe and circumscribe those rights in ways that further and protect those interests. We know that marriages go wrong but also that people being people are likely to deceive themselves about that possibility in their own case. So we seek to protect people against their own decisions, irrationality and lack of foresight and to provide them with ways to salvage their lives if things go wrong. But it is hard to see how libertarians can be that paternalistic. Suggestions?

January 02, 2004

Libertarianism without inequality (6)

Posted by Chris

Readers with long memories will recall that I commented on chapter 5 of Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality nearly a month ago. Chapter 6 is very much a continuation of the theme of that earlier chapter, and addresses a central liberal-egalitarian objection to the conception of legitimate state authority that Otsuka advanced there. Below the fold are some reactions to Chapter 6: feel free to comment if you have read or are reading the book.

Otsuka defended the view that a necessary and sufficient condition of legitimate political authority is that those subject to it have given their free and informed consent. But liberal egalitarians are going to argue that some forms of government can never be legitimate just in virtue of their internally oppressive form. As I mentioned last time I posted, they are going to argue some regimes — such as a theocratic republic, complete with Inquisition and torture chamber — would be illegitimate even if people had the option of leaving as a practical alternative to submission.

In chapter 6 Otsuka applies pressure to these liberal egalitarian commitments, suggesting that if viable exit options did exist or if individuals had voluntarily agreed to be bound by oppressive or hierarchical laws, then a proper respect for the choices of individuals would mandate acceptance of such societies as legitimate. Note that this is a philosophical move. Otsuka is not engaged in apologetics for any actually existing hierarchical or repressive regime: he is using thought experiments to press what our deepest convictions are on these matters.

He invites us to imagine that the background to individuals’ choice to remaing in or leave particular societies is something like this:

an enormous archipelago that consists of a superfluity of highly habitable islands of various shapes and sizes. Rapid and inexpensive travel between any two points on this archipelago is possible. It was and remains possible for any group of individuals to stake a claim to an island for the purpose of founding and sustaining a political society while still leaving ‘enough and as good’ for everyone else—either on her own or in society with others—to improve her situation to the same degree as these founders. An unsettled island is therefore available for anybody who chooses not to join a political society to go off on her own and found a monity[a little self-governing statelet]. (p. 115)

Against this background, individuals may voluntarily come to be citizens or subjects of oppressive or hierarchical regimes. So, for example, if a legitimate owner of a territory invites others to join him in founding a new society on that territory modelled on the court at Versailles, subject to the condition that they enter a fair lottery to determine whether they are to occupy the role of Duc d’Orleans or cap-doffing peasant, those who enter such a lottery under free and fair terms and against a background of reasonable alternatives are bound to accept the result. And the ensuing society counts as a legitimate one. Similarly, a society of Sunni fundamentalists applying Sharia is fully legitimate just so long as those who form it had viable exit options.

(Otsuka has to say a few things here about the condition of children who grow up in such societies as a consequence of their parents’ choices and the duty those parents have to guarantee and preserve the possibility of autonomous choice and exit for the children.)

But is Otsuka right to say that voluntary choice is sufficient to incur such lifetime commitments? The model he invokes is that of individuals entering into binding contracts. But we actually place limits on the consequences for individuals of the promises and contracts they undertake. So, for example, there are bankruptcy laws which enable individuals to retrieve themselves from a hopeless indebtedness. And we have divorce laws that enable people to escape from ill-chosen romantic attachments.

Similarly, I have to say that I’m not convinced by Otsuka’s suggestion that just because it might be rational for a person to gamble their freedom away (perhaps in the hope of gaining more freedom), then we should take the person who has so gambled to have signed away their freedom for life. Suppose I do voluntarily associate with others to form a theocracy but later repent of my decision and come to see it as the rash choice of an inexperienced youth — on Otsuka’s view that is just too bad. I am now bound by the laws of the new state and am subject to legitimate punishment for breaking them. There being no reason why I could not consent to a regime that included apostasy among its laws, when I renounce my religion I am legitimately punished.

Against this, the liberal egalitarian will want to insist that there are certain core interests (including, for instance, interests in religious freedom) that no state may rightly violate. And the presence of such features within a state illegitimates that state notwithstanding the procedurally pristine sources of its authority.

December 23, 2003

Four quotations bearing on choice and responsibility

Posted by Chris

Jackie D from Au Currant has a quote of the day picked up from Norman Geras who gets it from some columnist in the Jerusalem Post :

[I]t’s about time we all stop treating Iraqis, and Arabs generally, as anything but what they are: Human beings, capable of making rational choices, who, like the rest of us [emphasis added CB], are accountable for their own successes, their own failures, and their own fates.

On a plausible reading “like the rest of us” looks like a weasel phrase here: on the one hand appearing to stretch out the hand of a common humanity but with a wave of that same hand dismissing the very different conditions under which that human life gets lived. I wish I had a view about responsiblity, agency, choice, blame and so on that I was satisfied with. I don’t. But that view would have to satisfy at least two conditions: first, it would have to treat our fellow humans has having the capacity for free choice and second it would have to take a realistic view about the obstacles to their actualizing, developing, and exercising that capacity. If I lived (as I do) under conditions that are relatively propitious for that actualization, development and exercise, then I would hesitate before using phrases such as “like the rest of us” about those who have grown up under dictatorships and in much tougher material circumstances than I have.

The Jerusalem post quotation put me in mind of three others:

First, from Karl Marx:

Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. ( The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte )

We might add, that sometimes they make their history under circumstances that others have chosen for them.

Next from John Rawls, discussing, especially, the responsiblity of Japanese and German civilians and soldiers for the conduct of their governments:

In the conduct of war, well-ordered peoples must carefully distinguish three groups: the outlaw state’s leaders and officials, its soldiers, and its civilian population. The reason why a well-ordered people must distinguish between an outlaw state’s leaders and its civilan population is as follows: since the outlaw state is not well-ordered, the civilian members of the society cannot be those who organized and brought on the war. This was done by the leaders and officials, assisted by other elites who control and staff the state apparatus. They are responsible; they willed the war; and, for doing that, they are criminals. But the civilian population, often kept in ignorance and swayed by state propaganda, is not responsible. This is so even if some civilians knew better yet were enthusiastic for the war…..As for soldiers of the outlaw state, leaving aside the upper ranks of the officer class, they, like civilians, are not responsible for their state’s war. For soldiers are often conscripted and in other ways forced into war; they are coercively indoctrinated in martial virtues; and their patriotism is often cruelly exploited. ( The Law of Peoples , pp. 94—5)

And finally from Jon Elster, qualifying the view that citizens of democracies should be held responsible for their material condition:

In any society there will be individuals who for idiosyncratic reasons are deaf to incentives and, in more serious cases, have to be supported by the state. In a society with fair background conditions the support would, however, not be offered as compensation; and the supported individuals would, like the mentally ill, be more or less randomly distributed across all social groups. Most contemporary societies do not approach this condition. They contain large groups whose members are systematically prevented, by poverty, and lack of employment opportunities, from developing the mental attitude of holding themselves responsible for their actions. To treat them as if the background conditions were just, telling them that they have only themselves to blame for their failure, would be a massive piece of bad faith. ( Solomonic Judgements , p. 212)

December 22, 2003

Le foulard islamique

Posted by Chris

Those following recent French debates about the proposal that the ostentatious display of religious symbols in schools should be banned, may find this article from Le Nouvel Observateur by sociologists Jocelyne Césari et Jean Baubérot enlightening. As they point out, French law is actually rather close to the liberal view of these matters. But there is a mismatch between what French law requires — as reflected in successive decisions of the Conseil D’Etat — and a commonly held view of the principle of secularism which charges the state with the aggressive promotion of Enlightenment rationalism. It all seems a little odd from this side of the English Channel. I had a conversation with a French researcher last year who declared herself shocked to have seen a newsreader on the BBC wearing a small crucifix round her neck. I had to say that I’d never noticed such a thing, wouldn’t have cared if I had, and that I’m sure that most British people wouldn’t notice: in a country with an established church hardly anyone cares about religion.

One oddity of the French media’s representation of this issue: the controversy centres on the common Islamic practice of women covering their hair with a headscarf. Of course, in some Islamic societies rather more is covered: women are veiled or enclosed in outfits like the burqua. The French secularists object to schoolgirls wearing headscarves that cover their hair — and the word “foulard” is appropriate here — but often the press reports refer to the “voile” and sometimes this is absurd. So the the caption to photograph accompanying this article (again from the Nouvel Obs) reads “Lors de la manifestation des femmes voilées” but the women in the picture are not veiled.

December 17, 2003

Famine in Ireland

Posted by Chris

I’ve just reached Amartya Sen’s chapter “Famines and Other Crises” in Development as Freedom . He has some discussion of the great famines that depopulated Ireland from 1845 onwards. The potato blight had destroyed the crop but the Irish peasantry lacked the resources to buy alternative foodstuffs which continued to be exported:

ship after ship — laden with wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter — sailed down the Shannon bound for well-fed England from famine-stricken Ireland. (p.172)

Sen argues that cultural alienation (or even hostility) meant that

very little help was provided by the government of the United Kingdom to alleviate to destitution and starvation of the Irish through the period of the famine. (p. 173)

Interesting, because Natalie Solent , who has been writing about famines recently links to an essay in the National Review Online by the awful John Derbyshire on the subject. Derbyshire asks why the

British government did not organize adequate relief, or prevent the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while Irish people were starving.

and answers

it was not within the nature, philosophy or resources of Anglo-Saxon governments to do such things in the 1840s.

Contrast Sen, who knows the facts:

… by the 1840s, when the Irish famine occurred, an extensive system of poverty relief was fairly well established in Britain, as far as Britain itself was concerned. England too had its share of the poor, and even the life of the employed English worker was far from prosperous …. But there was still some political commitment to prevent open starvation withing England. A similar commitment did not apply to the Empire — not even to Ireland. Even the Poor Laws gave the English destitute substantially more rights than the Irish destitute got from the more anemic Poor Laws that were instituted for Ireland.

So contra Derbyshire, who is probably just making it up as he goes along (but then gets quoted and circulated around the network of misinformation that is the blogosphere) it was “in the nature” of Anglo-Saxon governments, even in the 1840s to do “such things”. Just not for the Irish or the Indians.

Sen also provides us with this striking portrait of Edward Trevelyan

the head of the Treasury during the Irish famines, who saw not much wrong with British economic policy in Ireland (of which he was in charge), point[ing] to Irish habits as part of the explanation of the famines. Chief among the habitual failures was the tendency of the Irish poor to eat only potatoes, which made them dependent on one crop. Indeed, Trevelyan’s view of the causation of the Irish famines permitted him to link them with his analysis of Irish cooking: “There is scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceeds the boiling of a potato.” The remark is of interest not just because it is rather rare for an Englishman to find a suitable occasion for making international criticism of culinary art. Rather, the pointing of an accusing finger at the meagreness of the diet of the Irish poor well illustrates the tendency to blame the victim. The victims, in his view, had helped themselves to a disaster, despite the best efforts of the administration in London to prevent it. (p. 175)

Blaming the victim, bad choices, poor diet — I’ve heard those explanations before somewhere. And cultural alienation from those suffering from acute poverty? Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose .

New books in political philosophy

Posted by Chris

A few new books in political philosophy have crossed my desk today either in the form of physical copies or publishers’ announcements. First among them is a new collection called Social Justice edited by Matthew Clayton (Warwick) and Andrew Williams (Reading) which contains an excellent selection of readings for an undergraduate course (and I’ll be recommending it to my charges). Second, my former PhD student Colin Farrelly (Waterloo, Canada) has a textbook — An Introduction to Contemporary Political Theory — and an accompanying reader: Contemporary Political Theory: A Reader . Finally, my friend Axel Gosseries (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) has a new book out on intergenerational justice: Penser la justice entre les générations which addresses some of the topics we’ve been discussing on CT recently including pensions and demography.

Nozick and taxes

Posted by John Quiggin

My post on equality of outcomes and opportunity produced a huge comments thread, much of which focused on the question of the original acquisition of rights, a big problem for Locke and Nozick. Rather than dive into the thread, I thought I’d point to an argument I put forward a few months ago, and repost a bit of it:

Nozick claims that libertarianism is right not because it produces good outcomes (he doesn’t argue one way of the other on this) but because a requirement for just process implies that property rights should be inviolable. Nozick’s position has been criticized in various ways, often focusing on the fact that he never specifies a just starting point. I want to present a different argument: that given any plausible starting point, Nozick’s approach leads to the conclusion that the status quo, including taxes, regulations and other government interventions is just. I illustrate this point with a story.

You can read the rest here

In essence my claim is that all existing property rights have been received from states which reserved rights of eminent domain and powers to tax when they granted the property rights. So someone who wants to claim that their property should be immune from redistribution is in the same position as a tenant who claims that, by virtue of their past tenure, they should be able to expropriate the landlord. There may be good consequentialist arguments for this claim, but they cannot be supported by arguments like those of Locke and Nozick.

When I first posted this piece, Brian Weatherson objected to the historical analysis arguing that revolutions constitute decisive breaks in the history of the relevant states. I disagree. Whether revolutionary governments expropriate existing rights and grant new ones, or honour pre-existing rights, the rights are still derived from the government, just as, to the extent that pre-existing debts are honoured, they are owed by the government.

I should clarify that the argument I’ve presented has no impact on consequentialist arguments for libertarianism and no implication that some past contract has closed off the libertarian option. If we are now convinced that we would be better off privatising public assets, scrapping taxes, removing restrictions on property rights and so on we can clearly do so, and (if you accept a Nozick argument) bind future generations not to reverse these policies without the consent of those affected. But nothing about current property rights obliges us to do this.

December 16, 2003

Opportunities and outcomes

Posted by John Quiggin

Among the many points raised in the discussion of Chris’s thread on Sen was the old distinction between equality of outcomes (like life expectancy) and equality of opportunity. This distinction has long been a staple of debates between market liberals and social democrats, and now defines a central point of distinction between supporters of a Third Way (such as Blair) and modernising social democrats (such as Gordon Brown), who may be indistinguishable on issues like privatisation that formerly acted as litmus tests.

A look at the evidence suggests that a position supporting equality of opportunity while accepting highly unequal outcomes is not sustainable. The most important observation is that, contrary to popular belief, there is less mobility between income classes in the United States than in European social democracies. A good, and fairly recent study in this is The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism by Goodin, Headey Muffels and Dirven, which I reviewed here, along with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.

There’s plenty of other evidence suggesting that high levels of inequality naturally perpetuate themselves, most obviously through unequal access to education, but also through more subtle channels like health status - Ehrenreich gives plenty on the plight of the uninsured working poor in the United States, but this isn’t only a US problem.

Turning to the theory, a good starting point is Richard Arneson’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As is appropriate for an encyclopedia, the Stanford encyclopedia generally seems to encapsulate the conventional wisdom, and its accessibility on the web makes it an ideal subject for blogging.

Arneson starts with what he calls ‘formal equality of opportunity’, which prohibits things like nepotism in the distribution of public office, and racial or gender-based discrimination. Arneson asserts that a market-based economy is a natural setting for formal equality of opportunity (though not the only possible one) but defines out of existence the central problems that arise in such an economy as a result of inequality of wealth. He wants to ignore, as a ‘private’ matter, nepotistic appointment practices by private businesses, while perhaps prohibiting racial or gender-based discrimination.

To summarise, in Arneson’s treatment “formal equality of opportunity” means, primarily, the absence of officially sanctioned discrimination on the basis of group membership . This is important, but it is not equality of opportunity.

The discussion here is blurring two different concepts. One is the notion that requirements for formal equality of opportunity apply only in relation to the state. The other is some sort of distinction between different types of legitimate and illegitimate discrimination. For example, nepotism is OK in the private sector but not in the public sector.

To sharpen up the analysis, consider the case when public offices are sold, with any qualified person being able to bid. This was the case, for example, with commissions in the British army in the 19th century. This is, I think, a breach of formal equality of opportunity. Suppose then that instead of filling the relevant offices by, say, competitive examination, the government privatised the appointment function, taking a lump sum cash payment from the buyer, who then acquired the rights to sell the offices as they saw fit (perhaps subject to rules about racial and gender discrimination). This would make no difference to the actual inequality of opportunity, but would, at least arguably, satisfy the requirements for formal equality of opportunity.

But the problem doesn’t arise only, or most severely, in employment. If places in schools or universities are available only, or preferentially, to those able to pay for them, equality of opportunity is clearly not present. The same is true if ownership of businesses is passed on by inheritance. The idea that these are not ‘formal’ violations of equality of opportunity makes sense only if market wealth inequality is taken as, in some sense, natural. Although never explicit, this assumption clearly underlies Arneson’s discussion.

An obvious implication is that the smaller the economic role of the state, the smaller is the scope of the notion of formal equality of opportunity. In a fully privatised state, everything that was formerly a public office or service would be the subject of private property rights, and therefore heritable, and yet formal equality of opportunity would apply by definition. This is essentially the ideal position favored by Nozick

The really interesting part of Arneson’s discussion relates to “substantive equality of opportunity” and particularly the notion of “equality of fair opportunity” due to Rawls, which is satisfied if “

any individuals who have the same native talent and the same ambition will have the same prospects of success in competitions that determine who gets positions that generate superior benefits for their occupants

This is the only definition considered in the article that seems to correspond to a reasonable notion of equal opportunity. However, as Arneson points out, achievement of substantive equality of opportunity appears to require substantial and intrusive government intervention to prevent parents passing on advantages to their children.

The crucial unstated assumption here is that social outcomes are substantially unequal. The more equality prevails among parents, the less intervention is required to ensure a substantive equality of opportunity among children.

The complementarity between equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes is particularly important when we move from ideal definitions to practical possibilities. It is, no doubt, impossible to achieve perfect equality on either definition. But,social-democratic states can get reasonably close, and have done so, though something close to full employment is needed. I have some ideas on this, but not for this post.

December 13, 2003

Another bit of Sen

Posted by Chris

One of the drawbacks of Development as Freedom is that it really is very repetitive and very similar points supported by the same examples and quotations recur less than 100 pages apart. In several places, though, he makes a good and important about markets and the freedom to transact:

In recent discussions, the focus in assessing the market mechanism has tended to be on results it ultimately generates, such as the incomes or utilities yielded by markets. This is not a negligible issue ….. But the more immediate case for the freedom of market transaction lies in the basic importance of that freedom itself. We have good reasons to buy and sell, to exchange, and to seek lives that can flourish on the basis of transactions. To deny that freedom in general would be in itself a major failing of society. This fundamental recognition is prior to any theorem we may or may not be able to prove … in showing what the culmination outcomes of markets are in terms of incomes, utilities and so on. (p. 112)

December 12, 2003

Sen's Development as Freedom

Posted by Chris

I’ve been reading Amartya Sen’s magnificent Development as Freedom this week. A more bloggable books would be hard to find: startling facts and insights jostle one another on every page. Even when you already know something, Sen is pretty good at reminding, underlining and making you think further about it. So this, for example on the life prospects of African Americans:

Even though the per capita income of African Americans in the United States is considerably lower than that of the white population, African Americans are very much richer in income terms than the people of China or Kerala (even after correcting for cost-of-living differences). In this context, the comparison of survival prospects of African Americans vis-a-vis those of the very much poorer Chinese or Indians in Kerala, is of particular interest. African Americans tend to do better in terms of survival at low age groups (especially in terms of infant mortality), but the picture changes over the years.

In fact, it turns out that men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups. Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to that of the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than then even poorer Indians in Kerala. So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from relative deprivation in terms of income per head vis-a-vis American whites, they are also absolutely more deprived than low-income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages.

Shocking, for the strongest economy on earth to create these outcomes (which, as Sen reminds us, are even worse for the black male populations of particular US cities).

UPDATE: Thanks to Noumenon for a link to this item . I closed the comments thread because I didn’t want to spend my weekend fighting trolls. But email suggests that there are some people who have worthwhile things to say so I’m opening it again (though I won’t be participating myself).

December 10, 2003

God gave philosophers the easy problems

Posted by Henry

In defending Noam Chomsky from his detractors, Brian Leiter makes a couple of rather extraordinary claims.

[D]o try to remember that Chomsky is a man of genuine intellectual accomplishment, having invented a real scholarly discipline in its modern form, and who participates at the highest level in theoretical debates in cognate fields. This might, at least, create a presumption that when he writes about subjects that make only modest intellectual demands—like foreign relations or politics—that he is unlikely to make gross mistakes, and that he may, in fact, have legitimate reasons for saying what he does.

As I read Leiter, he’s claiming that politics and foreign relations are trivia - they present no serious problems for someone like Chomsky, who has a really first rate intellect. Nor even for someone with a decent undergraduate education in a serious subject; Leiter has already informed us that “a BA in philosophy apparently puts you well ahead of a PhD in political science.”

Leiter isn’t noted for his belief in civil discourse, and I’ve no desire to start a flame-war. Nor do I want to tip-toe delicately around the fact that he’s talking complete smack. In his posts, Leiter gives us the (perhaps inadvertent) impression that there’s no problem in politics so vexing that a crack squad of linguists and philosophers couldn’t sort it out. Even if this isn’t what he’s trying to say, his claim that politics presents only modest intellectual demands is stuff and nonsense. Politics is complicated and messy; there aren’t any easy answers, and as a consequence it is an intellectually demanding subject matter. Perhaps too demanding; I’m the first to admit that scholars of politics haven’t provided good answers to most of the important questions. But I’m profoundly unconvinced that philosophers of Leiter’s particular bent are likely to do any better. Or linguists for that matter; Chomsky’s unwillingness to grapple with the complexities of politics is perhaps the reason why he’s a first rate linguistic theorist, a second rate polemicist, and a fifth rate political scientist. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and on the evidence to date, there ain’t much eating there.

Update: Looks like Leiter’s post has received a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Pejman Yousefzadeh seems to suggest that he too was a member of the Chomsky cult once upon a time. Whoda thunk it.

December 07, 2003

Punishment theory

Posted by Chris

Welcome to Punishment Theory , a new blog on philosophy and the criminal law featuring some eminent scholars.

December 06, 2003

Libertarianism without inequality (5)

Posted by Chris

Apologies to those of you who followed my first four posts on Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality (1, 2 , 3 , 4 ). For various reasons — mainly pressure of work — I’ve taken a while to get around to chapter 5 (though I’ve actually read the whole book now). Some comments on that chapter are below the fold. I’ll try to comment on the two remaining chapters over the next week. (Comments are welcome from those who have read or are reading the book).

Chapter 5 of Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality is an attempt to defend the thesis of political voluntarism, namely that a necessary and sufficient condition of legitimate political authority is that those subject to it have given their free and informed consent. This has looked an implausible thesis, since, as Otsuka informs us, it looks all to easy to evade authority simply by keeping quiet. But, as he also tells us, Locke’s theory of tacit consent is an attempt to remedy this problem.

But Locke’s tacit consent looks to generate legitimate authority claims all too easily and makes it too difficult to avoid being subject to it. If just hanging round, using the roads and so on is sufficient to count as tacit consent, then it is just too hard to avoid giving consent. There’s also a problem about the background against which tacit consent is obtained: we may be worried if people are held to have consented in cirucmstances of oppression and inequality.

The model that Otsuka takes from Locke is one where the state’s rights to interpret law and to punish offenders and to make law within its territory are merely rights that individuals have voluntarily agreed to transfer to the collective. Given the inconveniences of individuals judging in their own cases and the likely consequences of individuals enforcing the law of nature on their own behalf, Otsuka thinks that individuals have an obligation when they live closely intermingled with others to renounce their private rights to legislation and enforcement and to acknowledge the authority of a government.

The thought that individuals who live under such arrangements have tacitly consented to government authority is, however, usually thought of as pretty absurd. After all, as Hume objected, it is costly and difficult for individuals just to pack up their stuff and leave and so we shouldn’t understand their staying as constituting consent to anything.

To this Otsuka counters that while it is a strong objection to Locke’s particular version of tacit consent, it is less of an objection providing that individuals who wish to secede have an acceptable alternative available to them (so long as there is somewhere they can go consistent with having equal opportunity for welfare). So providing individuals have the possibility of withdrawing from life intermingled with others to some self-governed plot of land where they have similar opportunity for welfare to that available within intermingled communities with states, we can infer from their remaining within the boundary of a state that they tacitly consent to its government.

Actually, he sees that is isn’t quite right. After all, many people have strong family ties, are not rugged individualists, and generally couldn’t bear the option of exile to an isolated plot. So another exit option recommends itself: just so long as there is a range of possible states for people to live in which offer them acceptable opportunities, then we can infer from the fact that they remain in the one they remain in that they tacitly consent to the authority of the local government and its laws, accept its right to punish and so on.

(Now I’m simplifying here and Otsuka actually looks more carefully at a range of exit options and at whether we can sometimes infer consent even in the absence of such options. But I think it is fair to say that his basic claim is that we can infer tacit consent and hence legitimate authority just in case people have a sufficiently appetizing menu of exit options available to them.)

What to think about all of this?

1. Many people are going to be sceptical about whether having such exit options is really sufficient to ground legitimate authority. Even with such options, many people will think that some forms of government can never be legitimate just in virtue of their internally oppressive form. A theocratic republic, complete with Inquisition and torture chamber would, many people think, be illegitimate even if people had the option of leaving as a practical alternative to submission. Otsuka is willing to bite the bullet on this one in the following chapter (6), so I’m just going to mention this thought here.

2. Otsuka, by using an “if and only if” clause in setting out the relationship between consent and legitimate authority according to political voluntarism implies such consent in necessary to political authority. But actually, later in the chapter, he concedes some authority to supranational bodies to adjudicate disputes between political entities. Since such bodies gain their legitimate authority from their practical necessity alone without requiring the consent of those subject to that authority, it is clear that, strictly speaking, consent is not necessary to such authority. Otsuka’s espousal of political voluntarism at the level of individual-state relations seems to be based on the following thought: that providing consent is possible, the need to obtain or infer consent may not be overridden by practical necessity. That seems to be something like an empirical claim, but I’m not sure how we’d go about evaluating it.

3. It does lead on, though, to a worry about legitimate authority and existing states. Since, in real life, the exit conditions Otsuka advocates as conditions for the inferral of tacit consent don’t obtain, we might want to draw the conclusion from his discussion that no actual state has legitimate authority over its citizens. But if we take what Otsuka says about the authority of the supranational adjudicating bodies on board, and we also believe both that some co-ordinating function by states and laws is necessary and that implementing the conditions for inferring consent is impractical, then it looks like we are entitled to override political voluntarism and ascribe authority to many actual states as a matter of practical necessity. I doubt, though, that Otsuka would endorse such a conclusion.

4. Finally, I found myself wondering whether this Lockean approach to authority isn’t just misguided. On a different view of things — perhaps one influenced by Joseph Raz — my being subject to authority doesn’t rest on my consent in the sense of some agreement to be bound by laws or directives, but rather in the more tentative and conditional thought that I’m likely better to comply with the reasons that apply to me, to co-ordinate my actions with others, and so on, if I acknowledge the claims of laws to pre-empt my own evaluation of what I have reason to do. Whether a person is actually subject to an authority, on this view, depends on an evaluation of whether, as a matter of fact, they will generally act better by acknowledging that authority or not. That gives us a sort of acknowledgment of authority that is much weaker that states have wanted or that the law has claimed for itself — but it may be the best we can get.

December 03, 2003

Leiter on Marx

Posted by Chris

Check out Brian Leiter’s take on what is living (and dead) in Marx’s philosophy. I seem to remember Ernest Gellner writing of Marx somewhere, that even where Marx gives the wrong answers he often asks the right questions, chief among which is “cui bono?”

Between consenting adults

Posted by Chris

I see that the German internet cannibalism trial has started. For those who don’t know, the defendant advertised for a willing victim on the internet, cut off his penis (which they consumed together) and then stabbed his victim and dismembered him. Nasty stuff, but philosophically untroubling for those of us who are sufficiently paternalistic to think the law ought to place limits on what adults may consent to have done to them. Our libertarian friends , on the other hand, may find it more difficult to come up with principled objections.

December 01, 2003

Skinner on liberty

Posted by Chris

The Columbia website has “Three Concepts of Liberty ” , the Contemporary Civilization Coursewide Lecture, Fall 2003 by Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. I’ve watched about the first 20 minutes so far and it is admirably clear and consistently interesting. When he got to Mill, Marx and Habermas I started yelling “What about Rousseau?!!” at the screen (but I often do that). (To watch you need RealPlayer installed).

UPDATE: I’m less impressed after 48 minutes than I was after the first 25 or so. He still didn’t talk about Rousseau which was all the more unforgivable because his third concept of liberty — freedom as non-dependence on the will of others — is so important for Rousseau’s own account. But I shouldn’t just snark on about my own obsessions. What I thought was absurd was his insistence at the end that it somehow followed from the alleged incommensurability of the three concepts that we have to choose amongst them. Why? Why can’t I value (in some measure) absence of constraint, self-realization and non-dependence on the will of others? He doesn’t explain and he makes some silly (and disingenuous) remarks about being a historian rather than a philosopher to absolve himself from having to. None of which should discourage people from listening to what is a characteristically elegant and interesting presentation.

November 26, 2003

More on free speech at Toronto

Posted by Henry

Jacob Levy has a long and thoughtful response to my post yesterday, which does an excellent job of getting at the underlying issues. I’m not sure if the controversy is quite as unconnected to controversies over free speech as Jacob argues that it is. But his analysis, and solution, offers a good, intellectual foundation for the common-sense solution that U of T adopted even if the issue is (as Jacob acknowledges) messy around the edges.

November 25, 2003

My book released in North America

Posted by Chris

At long last my book Rousseau and the Social Contract is now available from Amazon in North America. (Readers in the UK can order it from amazon.co.uk.)

November 17, 2003

Terror and civil liberties

Posted by Chris

The Constitutions, Democracy and the Rule of Law symposium is online at Columbia. I’ve only listened to some of the October 17th proceedings: specifically Jerry Cohen’s “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Blame the Terrorists?” which argues that those who put terrorists in the position that they can only use morally unacceptable means thereby disqualify themselves from complaining about the the morally unacceptable acts terrorists then perform. (Thanks to Lwandile Sisilana for email about this.)

[Since my purspose here is merely to link to an interesting item and not to comment myself or to start a debate on CT, I‘m going to disable comments — a policy I intend to use in similar link-only items on a selective basis.]

November 14, 2003

Tinfoil hat time

Posted by Daniel

Robin Ramsay, editor of the excellent Lobster magazine, and co-author of an equally excellent book about Harold WIlson, makes a useful distinction between “Conspiracy Theory” and “Conspiracy Research”. According to Ramsay, the difference is that conspiracy theories are simple, interesting and leave you thinking that you understand it all, while consipracy research is difficult, boring and leaves you thinking you understand less than you did before you started. Given this, it is hardly surprising that the theoretical side of the academic discipline of Parapolitics is both far more popular than the empirical, and largely worthless.

However, the pollution of the well of parapolitical research by the theorists is pretty unfortunate, as means that the “loony” label tends to stick to a few dedicated journalists who often ask questions that really desperately need to be asked. The final stage in the disgraceful attempt to smear Gary Webb for uncovering documented evidence of Nicaraguan Contras with good political connections being given carte blanche to smuggle cocaine into Southern California, for example, was to paint him as a “consipracy theorist”. The attempt to rebrand conspiracy research as “parapolitics” (the study of those parts of the political process in democracies which involve illegal or covert activity) is probably a dead duck as with most rebrands, but men of good sense and good intention can do their bit to help by not making things worse.

Which is why I have a bit of a problem with this post from Daniel Drezner’s site.

Fair do’s to the bloke; it’s a real feather in his cap to have been invited along by the British American Project; they have an enviable record of selecting the best and brightest. But there are legitimate critiques to be made of the way that the BAP and the various groups associated with it (Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and indeed yes, the Bilderberg Group) go about their business.

The issue is that of the “democratic deficit”. The ideal of a democracy is (arguably) to allow as much and as equal opportunity as possible for any citizen to participate in the political process. This ideal is always going to be beset by compromises for all manner of reasons (not least, the need for someone to actually go out and work for a living), but a not inconsiderable obstacle to widespread participation is that the political class inevitably ends up becoming something of a clique. If the people in charge of industry, government, education, media and the military all know each other (and they do), then there is a lot of scope for them to trade off favours between each other, and to have their discussions and debates in private. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, and it does not necessarily lead to corruption or even inefficiency - that’s where the conspiracy theorists go wrong. But it is, by definition, a political process in which it is impossible for the public at large to take part. It also means that the public debate on an issue is not necessarily the debate which matters, to the detriment both of the quality of policy decisions and general trust in institutions.

It’s a genuine problem of governance in a democracy, and laughing at it doesn’t make it go away. It’s actually the chief reason why I’m opposed to the UK entering any monetary union; having a fair degree of familiarity with central bankers, I simply don’t like the idea of important isssues being decided by them out of sight of the public, in an unaccountable institution. And the British American Project is an institution dedicated to making it worse. It’s an organisation that throws promising young people together (the full title was “British American Project For The Successor Generation”), encourages them to keep in touch, prints a private newsletter detailing their career achievements, and generally promotes networking among them. It’s in many ways the political elite’s equivalent of my old business school alumni network, except that the business world doesn’t claim to be part of the democratic process.

Obviously, there are plenty of advantages in having good understanding and relationships of personal trust between the leaders of the US and the UK, and the BAP does good work in this direction. But equally obviously, there is a cost in terms of democratic deficit, and my personal assessment is that the BAP handles this deficit pretty badly; better than the Bilderbergers but still pretty badly. A lot of good could be done by opening up the process and publicising who the BAP Fellows are (without making it absurdly difficult and leaving it to parapolitical researchers) and what they’re talking about at any one time. A small, but avoidable amount of harm is done by having sarcastic asides in their FAQ, and by self-styled libertarians asking us to believe that it is absolutely ridiculous to suppose that when politically involved thirtysomethings get together, even for merriment and diversion, they might possibly be up to something which the rest of us would like to know about.

November 12, 2003

Sex selection banned in the UK

Posted by Chris

The Guardian reports that

Selecting the sex of a child is to be banned in the UK after a consultation exercise found the public outraged by the idea.

This is a recommendation from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to the British government and admits of some exceptions to cover families with sex-specific genetic disorders. The HFEA chairwoman, Suzi Leather expressed the body’s reasoning:

We are mindful of their far-reaching nature. Nevertheless, it is clear that there is a substantial public consensus against sex selection for social reasons. We are not persuaded that the likely benefits of permitting sex selection for social reasons are strong enough to sustain a policy to which the vast majority are overwhelmingly opposed.

I don’t know whether there are other, good reasons, for banning sex selection, but I do believe that the reasons as stated are outrageous. The HFEA is arguing (and the Secretary of State is agreeing) that acts should be prohibited where a majority opposes them unless permitting those acts would have definite benefits for society at large. But this is to get the burden of proof completely the wrong way round. Whatever majorities think about some aspect of individual conduct, in a liberal society it has to be clearly demonstrable that an action would be harmful if prohibition is to be justified. No such justification has been produced.

Greatest Marxists redux

Posted by Chris

Norman Geras has some further thoughts on the “greatest Marxists” question discussed below. Norm’s list set off a train of thinking last night as I noticed how many of the books he lists in his latest post are “meta-” studies: books agonizing about the Marxist method or about the history of Marxism by Marxists. Surely it can’t be right that the best examples of Marxist thought are not attempts to think about the world using the resources of Marxism, but rather Marxist books about Marxist thinking? Norm’s cricketing interests led him to mention C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary , but the book by James that I most value is his study of the slave revolt in Haiti, The Black Jacobins — a work of history. So where are all the historians on our lists? E.P. Thompson, Albert Soboul, Christopher Hill et al? A striking and unwarranted omission by all of us.

November 11, 2003

Libertarianism without inequality (4)

Posted by Chris

Below the fold are some more (and slightly belated) reflections on Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality . Today’s offering concerns chapter four. (Earlier posts concerned one , two and three .) As then, comments are welcome from those who are reading or who have read the book.

Chapter Four of Mike Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality concerns the right to kill the innocent in self-defence. That probably seems an odd thing to write about, so some clarification is in order. Otsuka takes it that we have a natural right of self-defence which extends to the right to kill others who deliberately set out to kill or injure us. This chapter is concerned to define some of the boundaries of that right. It is one thing to kill an aggressor in self-defence, but here Otsuka wants to clarify how far the right to self-defence might give a
person the right to kill others, such as bystanders, persons he calls “innocent threats” and others he calls “innocent aggressors”.

First, then, some clarification of terms:

“Bystanders” are individuals who are not involved in the chain of events in which another person is a threat to my life.

“Innocent threats” are people who threaten my life, but only do so qua physical object and not because they have formed an intention to do me harm. A person falling out of a building who is about to land on me and crush me to death would be an example.

“Innocent aggressors” are persons who have formed designs against my person, but who cannot be held morally responsible for those designs or the consequent actions. So a person subject to mind control, or whose drink has been spiked with a powerful drug, may form the intention of killing me, but that is not an intention for which we can hold them responsible.

Otsuka argues that none of these people can permissibly be killed by someone in self-defence. That’s a surprising and, I think, counterintuitive, claim. To support it, Otsuka’s strategy is to build outwards from the - as he sees it - uncontroversial case of the bystander, arguing step by step that there are no morally relevant differences between the bystander case, the innocent
threat case and the innocent aggressor case and that therefore we ought to retain the same commitments in the “deeper” cases as in the more straightforward one.

Otsuka’s method is basically casustical: he moves backwards and forwards between examples and principles trying to get a good fit between our intuitions and the general principles we ought to support. I don’t have a problem with that, although it worries me that our intutions in some cases seem to have a privileged status compared to our intuitions in others.

The paradigm of killing a bystander in self-defence would be where a person grabs hold of another and uses them as a shield against an oncoming missile (p. 68). This case or a case where one averts a threat to oneself by initiating a sequence of events that kills and innocent stranger are distinguished by Otsuka from other instances (see. p. 68 n. 7) where one ducks out of the way of an
oncoming threat and someone standing behind you is killed as a consequence. Otsuka therefore defends a strong and clear-cut distinction between doing or making and allowing, where prohibitions attach to the former but less often and less stringently to the latter (and this may trouble some readers).

What is going to bother most readers, I suspect, is Otsuka’s claim that Innocent Threats are morally on a par with Bystanders. The thought here seems to be that neither Innocent Threats nor bystanders are acting with your death as their goal. When a person acts with your death as their objective, they are doing a great moral wrong and violating (or trying to violate) your right not to
be killed. That intentional action seems to be what gives you a permission to kill them, or, to put it another way, removes the prohibition on killing another to save your own life. Innocent Theats are not, ex hypothesi acting in a way that justifies removal of that prohibition.

The extension of this idea to Innocent Aggressors is straightforward enough. True, they are acting with the intent of ending your life. But the conditions surrounding their actions are such that they cannot be reasonably held morally responsible for those very actions. Otsuka distinguished between those who have permanently lost the capacity for moral agency and those who have not. Those who have permanently lost the capacity may indeed be killed. But this is ok because they now have a lower moral status such that preserving my life at their expense does not constitute an impermissible making use of them. Those who are suffering merely temporary loss of moral personhood are, though, in principle, morally equal to myself and may not therefore be treated by me as appropriate objects of killing (even to save my own life).

Otsuka considers the following objection to his view, viz

I have employed the intuition that it is impermissible to kill a Bystander as a fulcrum by means of which to dislodge the intuition that it is permissible to kill a Threat. Reversing this line of argument, one who endorses the oral-equivalence thesis might try to employ the intuition that it is permissible to kill a Threat as a fulcrum by means of which to dislodge the intuition regarding the impermissiblility of killing a Bystander. (p. 79)

But the point in his argument where Otsuka raises this “reversal” possiblility is not the point where it is posed most sharply. The Innocent Aggressor case that he discusses is one where the Aggressor is drugged, but it is easy to imagine other case where the Aggressor lacks moral responsibility but where our intuitions may be different. Consider the case of a child trained from birth as an assassin, or more generally of people who have not grown up in circumstances that have been propitious for their moral developement (perhaps they have been bombarded with anti-semitic propaganda all their lives). When such people come after their victims, gun in hand, Otsuka’s view seem to say that those victims may not kill their attackers in self-defence. That will seem crazy to many people and it is hard to see that their intuitions about such cases are less secure starting points for reflection than their intuitions about Bystander cases.

I’m not sure what to think here, because I want to resist both the temptation to slide back to revise my view on Bystanders and the conclusions of the moral equivalence thesis. There’s a slightly Sorites-like feel to Otsuka’s arguments here, the suggestion that we ought to accept an extension of a moral prohibition to a new class of cases because they are not really significantly different, and then to a further class of cases …

November 10, 2003

Slippery slopes

Posted by Henry

David Bernstein responds to Matthew Yglesias’ suggestion that righties have an “unhealthy obsession” with oddball groups on university camps, and in so doing, jumps off the rhetorical deep end. It turns out that the takeover of the universities are just “a step in the authoritarian radical Left’s broader agenda.” And that agenda? Government-enforced authoritarianism, just like they’re successfully introducing in Canada. Yes, that’s right. Canada. Bernstein bolsters his argument with a quote from a professor in Western Ontario, who describes Canada as a “totalitarian theocracy” ruled by the “secular state religion” of political correctness.

Now I’m all for occasional doses of overheated language to enliven our political discourse, but Bernstein’s rhetoric verges on the bizarre. Canada has adopted some (relatively moderate) free speech restrictions in its Charter, but by most reasonable definitions of the word, it isn’t an authoritarian society. Nor is it likely to become one anytime soon. There’s a rhetorical slippage in Bernstein’s argument, between government-enforced restrictions on free speech and political authoritarianism/totalitarianism. They’re rather different things. States can have some restriction on free speech and remain democratic. France and Germany have done it for fifty-odd years.

Bernstein’s hyperbole gets in the way of his argument, which is perfectly defensible. It’s not unreasonable to oppose government restrictions on free speech. However, lurid denunciations of these restrictions as creeping totalitarianism, or as initial steps toward implementation of the radical left’s master plan are … odd. I don’t think David Bernstein is a candidate for the tinfoil hat brigade. I don’t agree with most of what he has to say, but he seems fairly rational, and occasionally indeed thoughtful. Which is all that any of us can aspire to being. But this time, he’s gone over the top.

Update: David Bernstein responds with a comeback that he seems to think is a gotcha, but which (a) rests on a rather strained interpretation of Canadian law, and (b) doesn’t really address my criticism. I’m not asking whether or not Canada’s legislation on free speech is a good idea; I’m questioning whether it’s appropriate to describe it as theocratic totalitarianism. And so far I’m not seeing anything to convince me that he’s right.

November 09, 2003

Greatest Marxists poll

Posted by Chris

Chris Brooke (the target of my comments in the post immediately below) has been blogging much of interest recently. He’s noticed Josh Cherniss’s Greatest Marxists poll and gives his opinion :

I went for Gramsci, Luxemburg, Benjamin, Adorno and Habermas, raising a querymark over whether the last one was allowed, and worrying over whether this list was a little too full of the Frankfurt School.

All in all, a pretty rum set of choices if you ask me. The only one of them who would make my list is Rosa Luxemburg. Gramsci has always struck me as (a) unreadable and (b) uninteresting and — as Chris admits — Habermas wasn’t a Marxist (but then nor were Adorno and Benjamin). Whatever his faults, there’s no question that Leon Trosky should top the poll.

Trotsky should get the award for the creative adaptation of classical Marxism to new and unforseen political and social circumstances on at least three separate occasions (1) the dynamics of revolution in underdeveloped societies and the connection between those events and the world revolution (the theory of permanent revolution) (2) the analysis of the the degeneration and corruption of the Soviet state and (3) the rise of fascism in Germany. In writing of these events he managed a level of analysis coupled with reportage reminiscent of some of Marx’s own best work such as the Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire .

As for the other four: Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky and Georg Lukacs get my vote (the last named for History and Class Consciousness rather than for anything later).

[None of these commendations, I should note, implies any kind of moral or political endorsement. But if asked about who the greatest Marxists after Marx were, one should, in my opinion, name those who most creatively developed and applied Marx’s own methods of social analysis. Literary scribblers and misplaced German romantics just don’t cut the mustard.]

November 07, 2003

Rawls and the Law at Fordham

Posted by Micah

Larry Solum has everything you might want to know about the conference being held at Fordham, starting here. Solum’s converage includes a nice introduction to the basic terms of the Rawls literature. Wish I could be at the conference myself. Maybe Fordham is planning a symposium publication? It’d be nice to read what many of the panelists have to say.

UPDATE: Solum is giving terrific coverage of the conference. Go here and scroll up.

UPDATE II: Solum has completed his remarkable coverage of the Rawls conference. Weighing in at more than twelve thousand words in two days, I think it’s the most impressive blogging performance I’ve seen since the early war coverage. And for those of us who couldn’t be at the conference, we couldn’t have asked for a better, or more knowledgeable, correspondent. Kudos, and many thanks, to Solum.

October 31, 2003

Libertarianism without inequality (3)

Posted by Chris

Below the fold are some reactions to chapter 3 of Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism without Inequality (previous installments 1 and 2 ). Mike is giving a paper — “Skepticsm about saving the greater number” — in my department this afternoon , so I wanted to get some thoughts down independently before they became contaminated by conversation with him. As always, comments are welcome from anyone who is either reading or has read the book.

Chapter 3 of Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality concerns the right to punish. Since the state’s right to punish — so important to the concerns of the previous chapter — is derived from the natural right that individuals have to punish, it is going to be important that Otsuka establishes this.

Otsuka’s strategy is to derive this right to punish (which he regards as controversial) from the right individuals have to self-protection (which he sees as unproblematic). His starting point here is an argument of Warren Quinn’s that establishes that we have a right make it the case that those who would aggress against us will be harmed if they do so, and this is “very close to a right of punishment.” What we can’t do, though, according to Quinn is to punish one person in order to deter another person. For Quinn, punishment has to contribute towards the deterrence of the person punished. I think that Otsuka succeeds in showing that Quinn’s position is too restrictive.

I was a bit surprised that this chapter focused so much on consequentialist justifications for the right to punish and that Otsuka didn’t say more about retributivist view that might be thought to sit more easily with his rights-based approach. My main quibble, though, concerns one of his footnotes where he cites Locke on the extent of the right of individual punishment in a state of nature. Otsuka writes:

The individual does not have carte blanche to specify whatever penalty he thinks fit. Such punishment must be ‘proportionate to [the criminal’s] transgression, which is so much as may serve for reparation and restraint’ (II.8). [LWR 58n4}

I was surprised not to see more commentary on this passage from Locke, given the arguments of the previous chapter. There, the extent of just punishment was guided (within very very wide limits) by the need to raise revenue from the unjust to support the disabled. Clearly, or so I think, that could well exceed what is needed for ” reparation and restraint “. The justification for the right to punishment that Otsuka offers us in chapter 3 is based in the need to deter aggressors. It left me uneasy that the justification for the right of punishment and the justification for the extent punishment applied are so apparently dissociated from one another.

October 25, 2003

Libertarianism without inequality (2)

Posted by Chris

This is the second installment in a series of postings to accompany a reading group around Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality (first installment here ). I’ll put the meat of the posting below the fold. Comments are again welcome from others who are reading or who have read the book.

Otsuka’s second chapter asks what can be done about those persons who can only be supported via a distribution of resources which requires encroaching on the robust right of self-ownership he defended in chapter one. That’s to say, assume there are some people whose basic needs can only be met if some (able-bodied) people are forced to work for their benefit - how are we to square this with libertarian commitments? He puts forward the unusual suggestion that libertarians and liberal egalitarians can both agree that it would be permissible to raise the funds required by taxing those who have been convicted of crimes. (The conviction has to be sound, and the crime has to be something that is justifiably criminal.)

I have to say that this chapter has a slightly odd feel to it. I wasn’t sure why this apparatus was being introduced at this stage in the book and I can only presume that it is because Otsuka wants to make use of this conclusion later on. Often I found that Otsuka’s intuitions about cases (such as conscript armies or the comparative duties of siblings towards elderly parents) just didn’t mesh closely enough with my own. But perhaps I need to wait and see.

Otsuka, still pursuing his goal of reconciling libertarians and egalitarian liberals puts different arguments to each camp at this point in the book. He recognizes the attachment of egalitarians to universal taxation, but invites us to compare various alternatives to it including universal giving, non-universal giving and taxation of the unjust as means to raise funds to support a welfare state. Otsuka’s strategy here is to start from universal giving as the best way of providing for the disabled on the grounds that it is both egalitarian and non-coercive. But if such a method were to fail — as well it might — then how are we to compare the merits of the fallback options of non-universal giving
and universal taxation. One is less coercive than the other, the second is more egalitarian than the first.

Here the argument is, to my mind, somewhat weak. Otsuka proceeds by analogy with liberal egalitarian reactions to another case: military defence. Here, faced with a choice between universal conscription and having a volunteer army, liberals seem happy with the latter. In other words, or so he suggests, they prefer non-coercion over universal burden-sharing. But the case of voluntary donors and that of volunteer soldiers seems significantly disanalogous. Volunteer soldiers aren’t best thought of as altruistic givers: their motives for volunteering may include a hankering for the romance of military life and overseas travel. And, also, they get paid for their efforts.

Having muddied the waters a little to suggest that the egalitarian might hesitate between universal taxation and non-universal giving, Otsuka then proceeds to argue that taxation of the unjust is rather like non-universal giving. Following Hart, he suggests that the criminal who is taxed in this way (or otherwise punished) is merely paying the previously announced price for their course of behaviour.

I have to say, I find this model of what punishment is rather unconvincing. In a passage Otsuka cites from Hart, Hart even suggests that this way of looking at things, where criminals elect to act in the light of the tarrif for the crime they are contemplating, thereby maximizes individual freedom. But many of us will feel uncomfortable with this. Surely, when a criminal commits a crime after contemplating that the punishment is a price worth paying, that very calculating attitude to the authority of the law suggest to us that additional punishment is merited.

The case Otsuka makes for libertariana taxing the unjust is rather more straightforward. Since the libertarian already accepts that those who transgress others rights should be punished and should have no special objection to that punishment taking the form of a fine or forced labour (and we can again wheel in the Hart tarrif model to suggest free choice of the penalty by the convict), the only real worry the libertarian needs have concerns the justifiable extent of punishment. Here Otsuka seems almost alarmingly cavalier in his willingness to contemplate (almost) however harsh a sanction is necessary on the unjust to generate the necessary surplus to provide for the disabled. I found my concerns about proportionality of punishment to crime had not gone away after reading his account.

A slightly elusive and unsatisfying chapter, then. But perhaps it won’t seem that way in the light of the ones to come.

October 20, 2003

Straussiana

Posted by Chris

OpenDemocracy has an interview with anti-Straussian Shadia Drury . Drury’s obsession with Strauss seems to have been about as damaging to her good sense and judgement as that of the pro-Straussians has been to theirs. Hence the following absurd rheorical question:

How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat?

How could an intelligent person of any political persuasion not admire Plato and Nietzsche?

October 17, 2003

Libertarianism without inequality

Posted by Chris

I’ve just started, as part of a reading group, Michael Otsuka’s Libertarianism Without Inequality . Otsuka is a political philosopher at University College, London, and well published in journals like Philosophy and Public Affairs , so I’m expecting this to be an important contribution to the literature on self-ownership and justice. We’ve covered chapter one so far, in which Otsuka outlines his claim that robust self-ownership is compatible with equality, understood along the lines of Richard Arneson’s equal opportunity for welfare rather than Dworkinian equality of resources. What I say here is therefore highly provisional, probably involves misunderstandings, and probably gets an adequate answer from Otsuka later in the book. But anyone else who has either read the book, or is reading it should feel free to post comments (we’re doing about a chapter a week and I hope to post some remarks on each chapter as we read).

Otsuka’s claim is that contra-Robert Nozick self-ownership, understood as a right of control over your own body, carries no implications in itself for further ownership rights over external objects. Nevertheless, he want to permit individual appropriation, but to subject it to a proviso. Nozick’s own proviso, in Anarchy, State and Utopia , is notoriously weak and permits individuals to grab parts of the world just so long as they leave other individuals no worse off than they would have been had no process of appropriation ever taken place (in other words, leave others no worse off than, say neolithic hunter-gatherers). Otsuka rightly seeks a more robust limitation, but the egalitarian proviso that he endorses, namely, that acts of appropriation should only be permitted if they leave others with an equal opportunity for welfare just looks far too strong to me. Certainly, it is going to be too strong for most people approaching the issue from a libertarian direction (even a left-libertarian one).

The dialectic, coming from that direction, looks to me to be like this. Self-ownership on its own is just too weak to give people the kind of control of themselves that they ought to have. There may be fun things that we can do with our own (and, with their permission, other people’s) unclothed bodies, but we also need access to land, resources (apples, acorns, ambergriese) and so on. And we don’t want to depend on everyone else giving their permission before we lay our hands on that stuff, because that leaves us at the mercy both of their possibly capricious wills and of the difficulty of getting them all to agree. So, we should permit appropriation (and, moreover, permissionless appropriation) just so long as such appropriation doesn’t worsen the situation of others.

If we make this proviso too weak, we end up permitting propertyless proletarians, and so there are people who, despite being self-owners, depend on others in order to live. Their freedom then, as embodied merely in their self ownership, isn’t worth having. (Note that the libertarian has tacitly conceded this point earlier, by urging that mere self-ownership without the possibility of appropriation isn’t enough to give people the effective control over themselves we value.) Now the natural way to go at this point is to insist on a more robust proviso, with a tougher notion of what no-worsening requires. But Otsuka’s egalitarian proviso, being comparative in nature, doesn’t appear to me to be quite what we’re looking for.

Presumably, from a libertarian point of view, we want appropriation to be possible without getting the prior permission of others. But Otsuka’s proviso would need us to check whether our act of appropriation would have the effect of giving us greater (and others a less) opportunity for welfare than fairness requires. Surely, an alternative notion of worsening, more robust than Nozick’s but weaker than Otsuka’s could get us what we want (viz: freedom to appropriate coupled with a guarantee for everyone of sufficient independence from the will of others). Why not, for example, say that appropriations should be permitted just so long as they permit others to enjoy the capability to achieve a range of valuable functionings (on Sen-Nussbaum lines)? That’s an absolute standard and one which is far less epistemically demanding on the would-be appropriator and allows them to go about appropriating, using, trading etc etc, without getting the permission of others (which is what the libertarian wants).

Against this, we might want to say that if equal opportunity for welfare (or a related egalitarian principle) is what justice demands on independent grounds, then there is good reason to have the proviso incorporate this principle as soon as we have established that self-ownership itself carries no particular presumption about the proper distribution of objects in the world. But then it looks very much as if liberal egalitarians get just about everything they want out of this “reconciliation” of egalitarianism and self-ownership and libertarians get just about nothing. (To be continued).

October 16, 2003

Jean-Jacques, antithesis of the metrosexual

Posted by Chris

I’m always on the lookout for media references to Rousseau, even if they usually perpetuate the “noble savage” myth. For some reason, I especially liked this write-up of US tv show Tarzan :

In his 1755 “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men,” French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated, “Man in his natural state was born essentially good and free of all prejudices.”

In a summer when Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” has attempted to tweeze, wax, massage, redecorate and redress man in his natural state in the hopes of making something more civilized out of him, Rousseau’s “noble savage” seems in danger of being replaced by the urbane metrosexual.

October 15, 2003

Neal Wood has died

Posted by Chris

I just heard that Neal Wood, Marxist historian of political thought and author of at least a couple of books on Locke has died. The Guardian carried an obit .

October 14, 2003

Cruelty to animals

Posted by Chris

There was a particularly nasty court case in my home town of Bristol recently. I forget all the details, but the essence was that a stable-owner was fined for maiming and neglecting her horses and was banned from keeping horses for life. That seems to me to be entirely reasonable. In fact a great deal of animal-cruelty legislation, such as bans on dog and cock-fighting and on bear-baiting, is something that I’d want to support. Leaving aside controversial matters like fox-hunting (on which I have a pretty libertarian view), and just taking those most extreme cases of wanton cruelty, it seems to me that there’s a problem for both libertarians and liberals. Such legislation can’t be justified either in terms of protecting the rights of (human) individuals or without appealing to some controversial conception of what gives value to life that we can’t presume is universally shared. I’d welcome thoughts on how we might adapt or extend liberal or libertarian theories to cope with these cases.

October 13, 2003

Responsibility, crime and terrorism

Posted by Chris

Those interminable debates about whether criminals are to blame for their crimes or whether we should look to their circumstances are now repackaged as a standoff between those who want to hold terrorists responsible for their atrocities and those who look to root causes. The right answer, of course, is “both”. But here’s a simple and plausible model, entirely a priori , to help us to think about things.

Imagine a population who vary in their susceptibility to pressure. We can call the property in which they vary “virtue”. Some are so virtuous that no matter what the pressure, they never perform an evil act. Some are so vicious that even if the pressure is negative, they do vile things just for the hell of it. Most people are in between (since virtue is normally distributed). As pressure — caused by poverty, social dislocation, military occupation, whatever — rises, more and more of the population switch, given their underlying propensities, from virtuous to vicious actions.

When they perform those vicious actions, whatever the pressure, they should be held responsible. But we also want to say something about politicians (and others) who increase or decrease the pressure. Deliberately increasing the pressure — perhaps so as to attract political support from fearful voters — should also be something that gives rise to an ascription of responsibility.

Now it might seem odd to say that both the pressure increaser and the perpetrator are morally responsible for a vicious action. Or it might seem exculpatory to make that move since it might seem to reduce the perpetrator’s responsibility to the extent to which it accepts the pressurizer’s. But, happily, the mathematics of moral responsibility isn’t like that: two people can both be 100 per cent responsible for the same crime.

If you doubt that, consider the case of the drowning child whom ten swimmers — of which you are one — are well-placed to save. If the child drowns through your inaction are you only 1/10th responsible? If there had been 10 more would-be rescuers, would your responsibility have decreased proportionately? Clearly not: you are, in each case, completely responsible for the child’s death (and so is each of your fellow bystanders).

Obviously, there can be degrees of responsibility for crimes or acts of terrorism. The crucial point is, I think, that those degrees needn’t sum to 1 or to any other particular figure. And in blaming the perpetrators we needn’t be afraid to assign however much responsibility is due to those who produce the circumstances in which they perpetrate.

October 09, 2003

Dworkin on the "war on terror"

Posted by Chris

Via Larry Solum , I see Ronald Dworkin’s Rights and Terror (pdf). Dworkin provides both a useful catalogue of the Bush administration’s restrictions on the rights of both citizens and non-citizens of the US since September 11th. He concedes that many of those detained fail to fit into the models provided either by the traditional laws of war or the criminal law. It is incumbent on us, therefore, to think through what justice requires in this new situation. The Bush administration, though, has not done so.

The Bush administration and their supporters say that a new structure, which they call a new balance, is necessary. But they propose not a new structure but none at all: they assume the privileges of both models and the constraints of neither.

Compassion

Posted by Chris

Some sort of mad puritanism seems to be afflicting parts of the blogosphere. Oliver Kamm (in comments to Harry Hatchet , then Natalie Solent and Stephen Pollard have been dogmatically asserting that government should limit itself to the provision of public goods, the assurance of basic rights and to treating citizens justly (though they disagree on what that means). Compassion, according to them, is a virtue (if it is a virtue) that should be exercised by individuals in a private capacity and not by government. But that just looks far too austere.

If “government” here is taken to mean all public officials acting in their public capacity (as it should be), then I’m pretty sure most people, including, I hope, the writers I just mentioned, believe that justice should be tempered by mercy. Now the relationship between mercy and compassion is a little bit obscure. Certainly, there can be instances of mercy where the merciful party isn’t acting from the motive of compassion. So when Caesar pardons the condemned in deference to the crowd’s wishes, it isn’t necessary that anyone is feeling compassionate. But I take it that, when judges, or tax inspectors, or social security officials use their discretion to exact lesser penalties than they might in the light of the human situation of the person in their power, compassion is often the relevant motive. Indeed, a person completely lacking in compassion for others would be a very bad candidate for any position of authority, within the state or elsewhere, because they would lack the capacity to judge when it would be right to act mercifully or would try to emulate that capacity in a clunky external kind of way by copying the behaviour of those who do have the disposition to be compassionate. I guess these writers are misled because they rightly reject the idea that a kind of gooey sentimentality could be the basis for social or welfare policy. But basing such policy on justice doesn’t exclude, and I think requires, a space for the virtue of compassion.

(There’s much more to be said, of a somewhat involved kind, in this area, about the relationship between compassion and the motive to justice, between compassion and the requirement of civility among citizens, and about compassion and positive duties of aid.)

October 03, 2003

Humourless political philosophers?

Posted by Chris

A Guardian profile of Al Franken , comedian author of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them has this

“Well, probably the people taken most seriously down the ages have not been satirists,” Franken concedes. “Marx - there wasn’t much funny in Marx, I don’t think. John Stuart Mill? Not a laugh. Hobbes? Humourless.

False, false, false, I’d say. (Actually, come to think of it false, true, false - though if anyone can find an intentionally funny passage in Mill, I’ll take that back.) Marx’s humour is mainly of the dry and sarcastic kind. His wit and erudition saturates just about every page of Capital - A good example would be the end of vol. 1, ch. 6 on “The sale and purchase of labour power” (but as Glenn Reynolds likes to say say — read the whole thing ). As for Hobbes, I’d recommend the side-splitting final pages of Leviathan ch. XLVII, “Of the BENEFIT that proceedeth from such Darknesse, and to whom it accreweth” where Hobbes compares the church of Rome to the Kingdome of Fairies.

What was Leo Strauss up to?

Posted by Henry

… ask Steven Lenzner and William Kristol in a recent Public Interest puff-piece. It’s a good question, even if it begs a rude answer. Which Lenzner and Kristol don’t provide, of course; according to them, Strauss revived the Western tradition of reading and philosophizing, more or less single-handed. They describe Strauss’s style of close reading as focusing on how classical authors employ

various types of meaningful silences, intentional ambiguity, dissimulation, the significance of centrally placed speeches, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, use or non-use of the first person singular, concealment of a work’s plan, and so forth.

All of which is legitimate, sez Strauss, because the Great Writers chose their words precisely and exactly, using ellipses and rhetorical evasions to convey hidden secrets to the wise, while concealing them from the rude and undiscriminating gaze of the grubbing multitudes. In short, the ancients were writing with a particular reader in mind, and that reader was Leo Strauss.

This allows Strauss to get away with some rather unique interpretations of classical texts. The alert reader will note the strong resemblances between Strauss’s reading technique and bog-standard postmodernist hackwork.1 If you throw a few evasions, meaningful silences, and perceived rhetorical tricks into the analytic mix, you can end up proving pretty well whatever you want to prove about authorial intentions. An observation which Strauss demonstrates ad nauseam in his work. Writers like Aristotle and Plato end up sounding an awful lot like Leo Strauss, once a few of their tactical silences have been fed through his literary meatgrinder and reassembled on the other end. Why Frederick Crews never did a Straussian Pooh I’ll never know.

Not only that - but Strauss’s interpretations are politically loaded. Plato, Aristotle and their ilk speak rather more directly to the hobby-horses of Cold War American conservatism than one might imagine was possible, given that they died two and a half millenia ago. Example: Strauss’s essa,y On Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and Athenians, which I’ve recently re-read for a Ph.D. course that I’m co-teaching. It’s a rather extraordinary piece. Strauss starts it by admitting, more or less, that Thucydides set out to criticize the Athenians, but ends by twisting Thucydides around to quite the opposite conclusion. Most interpreters of Thucydides see the History as a step-by-step dissection of Athenian arrogance; Strauss instead sees it as a celebration of Athens’ love for the noble and the beautiful. The disastrous Sicilian expedition, which appears to the undiscerning reader to be an demonstration of the costs of Athenian hubris, is to Strauss, an unfortunate bagatelle, which could have been avoided if its commanders hadn’t been so worried about disappointing the crowds back at home. This isn’t just reading Straussian prejudices into Thucydidean silences - it’s claiming that Thucydides is saying the opposite of what he appears to be saying.

Why does Strauss come up with such a strange and - I speak bluntly - tortured interpretation of Thucydides? I have my suspicions. I reckon that Strauss is trying to do two things. First, he’s trying to defang Thucydides, the most scathing contemporary chronicler of 5th century BC Athenian imperialism. And in so doing, he’s simultaneously trying to defend US Cold War policy - for Strauss and his followers, the US is the closest thing going in the modern world to the grandeur that was classical Athens. At one stage, Strauss launches into a defence of Athenian imperialism, claiming that Athens above all other cities deserved to rule an empire. It’s not hard to read from this claim - which receives no support whatsoever from Thucydides - to Strauss’s views about contemporary US foreign policy, and a few wee extra-domestic adventures that the US was then beginning to embark upon.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, Strauss is trying to rehabilitate Alcibiades. By so doing, he’s seeking to mitigate a very considerable embarrassment for Socrates-fanciers. Alcibiades was Socrates’ star pupil, but then turned out to be a textbook example of how philosopher-kings can go bad. He helped precipitate the disaster of the Sicilian expedition, and subsequently betrayed Athens for a variety of foreign powers. Thucydides documents Alcibiades’ bad behavior in some detail, but you wouldn’t know it from Strauss’s version. According to Strauss, the Athenians might have avoided disaster at Sicily if Alcibiades had been in charge; it was all the fault of Alcibiades’ co-general, Nikias (who Strauss says is really a Spartan in Athenian clothing - boo, hiss). Not only that: Strauss further implies that Nikias framed Alcibiades for the mutilation of the Hermae (a notorious incident in which someone went around Athens smashing up the goolies of religious statues, and Alcibiades got the blame). Strauss then concludes that Alcibiades had little choice but to betray Athens for Sparta, given how he’d been treated. It’s a whitewash - and a rather embarrassingly obvious one, if you’ve any familiarity at all with classical Greek history.

So then, what was Leo Strauss up to? Not much that’s worthwhile if you ask me. I’m profoundly unconvinced by the Straussian conspiracy theories that have been floating around recently,2 but I simply don’t see much that’s of positive value in his work. Dubious reading strategies, systematic distortions of original sources - nothing that adds up to a fruitful intellectual agenda.

1 Not that all postmodern literary criticism is hackwork, mind you - some of it I quite admire.

2 Although I note for the record that yer well known neo-con Straussians, insofar as they exist, are the not-quite-good-enoughs, the “men of silver” who weren’t considered up to the heavy duty responsibilities of serious philosophizing, and have thus been consigned to the mere study of foreign policy.

September 23, 2003

The genealogy of morals

Posted by Chris

There’s been much blogospherical and press comment about the recent report that capuchin monkeys have a built-in sense of fairness. In case anyone missed the story here’s Adam Cohen’s summary in the New York Times :

Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber slice, and she will eagerly trade a small pebble for it. But when a second monkey, in an adjoining cage, receives a more-desirable grape for the same pebble, it changes everything. The first monkey will then reject her cucumber, and sometimes throw it out of the cage. Monkeys rarely refuse food, but in this case they appear to be pursuing an even higher value than eating: fairness.

The capuchin monkey study, published last week in Nature, has generated a lot of interest for a scant three-page report buried in the journal’s letters section. There is, certainly, a risk of reading too much into the feeding habits of 10 research monkeys. But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the ropes — from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, which poor nations walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion — the capuchin monkeys offered a glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool.

Interesting, suggesting at least that monkeys on the receiving end of unfairness will would prefer to have nothing than be part of an unjust arrangement. It is a result that is consonant with lots of behavioural experiments involving humans, who will often walk away from a deal rather than maximizing their return. (See lots of places, but Skyrms’s Evolution of the Social Contract has some discussion.) But as Radley Balko points out , we’re a bit short of a true commitment to fairness here. If the monkeys were really into fairness, wouldn’t the one offered the grape spurn it rather than be party to such inequity?

Which brings me in touch with some of Henry’s Hobbesian speculations below, or at least to the subject of weapons. The poor monkey at the sharp end of unfairness in the wild is probably too weak to do much about it except feel grouchy and depressed. Not so, the human hunter gatherer, who, if he (and I’m afraid it is just he at this stage) feels aggrieved, can use language to form coalitions and spears to get his own back. Which provides a pretty good incentive to those with meat or other resources to share (or else). At least that’s the speculation contained in Christopher Boehm’s marvellous Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, which I’ve blogged about before. Principles of justice emerge as the weak use their language skills and weapons to conspire against the strong - a very Nietzschean thought.

It is an odd business, though, how so many people look to primates and hunter gatherers for a vindication of morality: that NYT piece even had the headline “What the Monkeys Can Teach Humans About Making America Fairer.” (Ernest Gellner has a funny, though otherwise misguided chapter lampooning such justificatory attempts in his Plough, Sword, and Book, entitled “Which way will the Stone Age vote swing?”) For whatever our ancestors or evolutionary relatives did or do, their behaviour can’t provide any kind of justification for principles. Still, I suppose there’s comfort to be had in the thought that we might be hard-wired to react against injustice. That fact — if it is a fact — may not justify principles of justice but it does give those of us who believe in them a tiny grain of confidence in the unjust getting their comeuppance … eventually.

The genealogy of morals

Posted by Chris

There’s been much blogospherical and press comment about the recent report that capuchin monkeys have a built-in sense of fairness. In case anyone missed the story here’s Adam Cohen’s summary in the New York Times :

Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber slice, and she will eagerly trade a small pebble for it. But when a second monkey, in an adjoining cage, receives a more-desirable grape for the same pebble, it changes everything. The first monkey will then reject her cucumber, and sometimes throw it out of the cage. Monkeys rarely refuse food, but in this case they appear to be pursuing an even higher value than eating: fairness.

The capuchin monkey study, published last week in Nature, has generated a lot of interest for a scant three-page report buried in the journal’s letters section. There is, certainly, a risk of reading too much into the feeding habits of 10 research monkeys. But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the ropes — from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, which poor nations walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion — the capuchin monkeys offered a glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool.

Interesting, suggesting at least that monkeys on the receiving end of unfairness will would prefer to have nothing than be part of an unjust arrangement. It is a result that is consonant with lots of behavioural experiments involving humans, who will often walk away from a deal rather than maximizing their return. (See lots of places, but Skyrms’s Evolution of the Social Contract has some discussion.) But as Radley Balko points out , we’re a bit short of a true commitment to fairness here. If the monkeys were really into fairness, wouldn’t the one offered the grape spurn it rather than be party to such inequity?

Which brings me in touch with some of Henry’s Hobbesian speculations below, or at least to the subject of weapons. The poor monkey at the sharp end of unfairness in the wild is probably too weak to do much about it except feel grouchy and depressed. Not so, the human hunter gatherer, who, if he (and I’m afraid it is just he at this stage) feels aggrieved, can use language to form coalitions and spears to get his own back. Which provides a pretty good incentive to those with meat or other resources to share (or else). At least that’s the speculation contained in Christopher Boehm’s marvellous Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, which I’ve blogged about before. Principles of justice emerge as the weak use their language skills and weapons to conspire against the strong - a very Nietzschean thought.

It is an odd business, though, how so many people look to primates and hunter gatherers for a vindication of morality: that NYT piece even had the headline “What the Monkeys Can Teach Humans About Making America Fairer.” (Ernest Gellner has a funny, though otherwise misguided chapter lampooning such justificatory attempts in his Plough, Sword, and Book, entitled “Which way will the Stone Age vote swing?”) For whatever our ancestors or evolutionary relatives did or do, their behaviour can’t provide any kind of justification for principles. Still, I suppose there’s comfort to be had in the thought that we might be hard-wired to react against injustice. That fact — if it is a fact — may not justify principles of justice but it does give those of us who believe in them a tiny grain of confidence in the unjust getting their comeuppance … eventually.

More Broadswords, Less Crime?

Posted by Henry

I mentioned Caroline Bradley and Michael Froomkin’s paper on law in MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role-playing games) earlier today. Its argument is straightforward - these online communities offer a nice way to test legal scholars’ (and social scientists’) arguments about how different rules will affect behaviour and exchange. By looking at how this or that rule in an online game affects how players behave online, we can (with plenty of provisos and cautionary footnotes) reach interesting conclusions about social behaviour more generally.

My tuppence worth: one theory has already been ‘tested’ in this way; the argument that easing restrictions on weapons and their use will lead to a drop in violent crime. If you grant the assumption that MMORPGs are analogous to everyday life (a whopping assumption to be granting, I’ll admit), then the evidence is unequivocal. A society where each can use weapons against each without restriction is likely to deteriorate into Hobbesian anarchy. People will positively beg for a Leviathan to come in and put an end to the Warre of All against All.

Evidence for this assertion comes from the grandaddy of MMORPGs, Ultima Online.1 From its beginnings, Ultima has been plagued by ‘player-killers,’ players who go around the realm of “Brittannia” killing other players for kicks and profit. Some people just find this more entertaining than beating up on the computer generated fauna. In the words of one player-killer;

Being a bad guy is loads of fun - there’s more to do, more options to explore. You still get to hang out with lots of great people and help them out, but you’re helping out other Dread Lords like yourself.

This made life especially difficult for new players, innocents who were liable to be lured out of the safe zones by player-killers, and then cruelly murdered. People complained. Most players wanted to live quiet lives, adopting various trades that involved repeating tasks over and over in order to gain brownie points. Perhaps they’d kill the odd computer-generated monster or two, but they certainly didn’t want to be victimized by other players on killing sprees.

Initially, the designers of the game took a hard line; they wanted the players of the game to take action themselves against player-killers. In the words of the game’s head honcho;

“Those who have truly learned the lessons of the Ultima games should cease their complaining, rise to the challenge, and make Britannia into the place they want it to be.”

Unfortunately, these admonitions didn’t work; efforts by players to organize themselves against player-killers didn’t come to very much. Game designers did their best to encourage self-help, creating reputation systems in order to identify wrong-doers. Player-killers soon found ways to game the system, so that reputational signals were very nearly useless.

Eventually, the game designers gave up on the notion of self-policing, splitting the game into different ‘facets.’

Britannia these days exists in two parallel versions, or “facets”—Felucca, where killing other players is O.K., and Trammel, where, except under very limited circumstances, it is not. Four-fifths of all players choose Trammel.

A very substantial majority of players seem to prefer that a Hobbesian Leviathan step in to prevent people from using their weapons against each other, so that they can carry out their trades in peace. They prefer a system in which the sovereign authority (in this case the game designers) rule out interpersonal violence by diktat, to the nasty anarchy which otherwise prevails. And I believe (I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong) that this is true to a greater or lesser extent of all MMORPGs; all of them have peaceful zones where inter-player violence is ruled out by fiat, so that people can just get on with their activities.

As I’ve hinted, I don’t think that this analogy can be pushed too far - the circumstances of online games don’t map very well onto real life. But it’s still suggestive. Experience from MMORPGs suggests that self-help only goes so far in answering the threat of violence. The threat of armed retaliation from individuals doesn’t necessarily work to deter violent crime (especially where the bad guys have the bigger guns). But perhaps I’m wrong: I’m half expecting John Lott to come up with figures proving that more broadswords (or crossbows or fireball scrolls or magic wands) do lead to less crime. Certainly, he’s shown a quite extraordinary flair for fantasy statistics in the past.

1 Note of caution - I’ve never played one of these games myself, so take my assertions with a grain of salt.

September 22, 2003

Inequality, sufficiency and health

Posted by Chris

I’ve been working for a while on a paper that argues for a “sufficientarian” criterion for the problem of global justice. Sufficientarianism (horrible word) is the notion that what matters, normatively speaking, is not the the pattern of distribution of whatever currency we think is important (welfare, resources, capabilities, whatever…) but that everyone gets beyond a certain threshold. Not that inequality of income, say, ceases to be important because once we focus on the dimension in which we want people to achieve sufficiency it often turns out that distributive patterns impact on their ability to meet the relevant threshold.

My focus so far, has been on the capacity to function as a citizen of a democratic polity. That requires adequate levels of health, nutrition, literacy, education and so forth. Within-state income and wealth inequality matters here (and much more than between state inequality) because of the tendency of such inequality to undermine the political equality necessary for democratic citizenship. If the super-rich control much of the mass media and provide the funding that is necessary to run effective political campaigns, then the capacity of others to achieve full citizen functioning is likely to be undermined.

One of the things I didn’t know about but learnt of at the “Priority in Practice” conference at the weekend was that there is research - by Richard Wilkinson and others - that shows that other capabilities (such as for health) have a similar relationship to income and wealth inequality. According to them, to be a poor person in a rich country is to be worse off (from a health perspective) than to be a typical individual with an absolutely lower level of income in a poor country. If true, that’s a pretty striking finding (and ought to worry those who think that to be concerned with income inequality is to focus on something inappropriate ).

One of Wilkinson’s collaborators, Michael Marmot, sets out some of the findings :

Life expectancy in China, Sri Lanka, and Kerala (a sizable state in southern India) exceeds 70 years, despite their having gross national products in 1994 of less than $1,000 per capita. Contrast this with Harlem, where there was a median family income in 1990 of $24,174 yet a probability of only 37 percent that a black man would survive from the age of 15 years to 65 (as compared with the U.S. average of 77 percent for white men ). Poor people in the United States are rich by world standards, but they have worse health than the average in some poor countries.

Marmot explores a variety of explanations of why relative (but not absolute) poverty might have these adverse health effects. I’m not going to jump in and endorse the findings or speculate too much, but this is interesting material and probably some of the more social scientific timberites know more than I do.

(Minor ideological health warning: to those in the know, I’m well aware of the problems with sufficientarianism - see this instructive BEARS symposium that bears on the issue, especially the Arneson paper - and don’t mean to suggest that I endorse it as a complete theory of social justice).

September 19, 2003

Contingent valuation

Posted by Chris

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the second of a series of conferences with the title “Priority in Practice” which seek to bring political philosophers in contact with more gritty policy questions. It was good fun, there were some good papers and I learnt a fair bit. One of the interesting papers was by John O’Neill from Lancaster who discussed the controversial question of “contingent valuation”, which is a method by which researchers engaged in cost-benefit analysis attempt to establish a shadow value for some (usually environmental) good for which there is no genuine market price, by asking people what they’d be prepared to pay for it (or alternatively, and eliciting a very different set of answers, what they’d need to compensate them for its loss).

Naturally, people often react with fury or distaste to the suggestion that they assign a monetary value to something like the preservation of an ecosystem. They think that just isn’t an appropriate question and that it involves a transgression of the boundaries between different spheres of justice or value. John had a nice quote to show that researchers have been asking just this sort of question (and getting similar tetchy responses) for rather a long time:

Darius, after he had got the kingdom, called into his presence certain Greeks who were at hand, and asked- “What he should pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers when they died?” To which they answered, that there was no sum that would tempt them to do such a thing. He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks stood by, and knew by the help of an interpreter all that was said - “What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers at their decease?” The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language. (Herodotus, Histories , III).

September 10, 2003

I Can't Be In Two Different Places At Once, You Know...

Posted by Tom

Distributive-Justice.com offers various quizzes which aim to tell you what your political position is and how it maps onto the work of various recent political philosophers. Have a go, you know you want to.

I turned out to be both a Communist and a follower of Ronald Dworkin. I’m somewhat puzzled but, I have to admit, rather pleased by this result.

(Found via the ever-readable MaxSpeak.)

Evidently Distributive-Justice.com was not a domain name for which there was fierce competition during the tech boom. I wonder why that was?

Update: Blush. Micah has already posted on this, I now see. Oh, the perils of group blogging. Assume I’ve just written myself an appropriately harsh memo about the importance of checking for duplication before sharing my, er, thoughts with the world.

Distributive Justice Game

Posted by Micah

This is a game everyone should play. And, if you like, try it in German or Italian.

Of the people who’ve played the “Discover your Distributive Profile” game (almost 4000 of them), Dworkinians are out in front. Right-libertarians aren’t well represented. Two weeks floating around the blogosphere, and I bet the numbers would change a lot. Just a hunch.

September 03, 2003

My Rousseau book

Posted by Chris

Speaking of Rousseau, I hope that my fellow-Timberites will forgive a little self-publicity. I now have copies of my new book Rousseau and The Social Contract in my hands, and a very nice feeling it is too. If you’d like to buy a copy (for only £9.99) you can click on the image below (which takes you to Amazon’s UK website). The publication date is tomorrow for the UK, but not until November for the US (I’ll post a link to the main Amazon site when it becomes available there).

cover

Clint Eastwood as Rousseau's lawgiver

Posted by Chris

Over at the Virtual Stoa, Chris Brooke has an highly entertaining post on the uses of the classic western in explaining Rousseau’s political philosophy:

One of the many valuable things I learned from Bonnie Honig when I was a graduate student was that the reasons why Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lawgiver must leave the city he helps to found in Book Two Chapter Seven of the Social Contract are the same as the reasons why the cowboy rides off into the sunset at the end of a Western….

August 28, 2003

Give children the right to vote?

Posted by Micah

I’m taking a course on election law, and the professor mentioned a proposal today that I hadn’t heard about before. He said there’s a movement in Germany to propose a constitutional amendment that would give children the right to vote from birth. I thought he was pulling our leg at first, but listen to this segment on NPR. The idea is that parents (or principal care givers) would act as proxies for children by voting on their behalf. According to proponents, this would have two benefits. First, it would give politicians greater reason to care about family and children’s issues. Second, in an effort to correct for Germany’s declining birth rate and rapidly aging population, it would give people greater incentive to have more children. (A quick search turns up some other proposals of this kind floating around, from the sophomoric to the more considered (by Gillian Thomas at Demos) to the academic manifesto (by Duncan Lindsey at UCLA.)

I think the population growth rationale is very bad. There are lots of ways to provide incentives for population growth without altering the voting system. Some form of subsidy for having children seems like an obvious mechanism. It would certainly be a lot easier to retract a subsidy when the target population level is reached. Retracting the suffrage is notoriously difficult—and usually for good reason. This rationale also assumes, of course, that increasing population in Germany (or elsewhere, for that matter) is a good thing. Since I don’t know anything about German demographics, I’ll leave it up to someone else to pursue that line.

More generally, what about the argument that children lack adequate representation? I think this is probably right, but the institutional problems with proxy-voting seem insurmountable. There are principal-agent problems, incentives for strategic voting, and the more basic question of whether it’s fair to allocate proxy-votes in the first place. Still, the proposal raises some interesting questions about institutional solutions for problems of intergenerational justice. Place yourself in the original position and ask: if I didn’t know how old I would be when the veil is lifted, what principles of political representation would I favor? One-(adult) person, one vote?

August 09, 2003

Beating the system

Posted by Henry

Jon blogs below about winning office with a mere plurality, which touches on issues that political scientists, and theorists of a certain bent, have thought a lot about. Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility theorem,” which I’ve blogged about before, indicates that if you make certain reasonable assumptions about people’s preferences, no possible voting system (or other means of social choice) can be expected to aggregate people’s preferences without distorting them. This suggests, according to the late William Riker, that democracy is bogus.

Riker argues that there’s no such thing as the “will of the people” - the result of any vote is as much a product of how choices are presented to people as the actual preferences of the electorate. The message is simple - there ain’t no such thing as a perfect electoral system. Let’s take two examples.

Example One: voters in the 1992 US Presidential election were presented with the choice of Bush, Perot, or Clinton. I’m not a US political scientist, so I’m simply going to go with the collective wisdom, which is that most Perot voters would have preferred to see Bush than Clinton become President. These voters might have preferred an electoral system like the French system, in which there are two rounds. First, there’s a free for-all vote in which all candidates participate. Then, if no candidate gets a majority, there’s a second round, in which all candidates are eliminated except for the two front runners. This would have allowed Perot voters to vote their conscience happily in the first round, and then, when Perot was eliminated, to vote for Bush (their second best candidate) rather than Clinton. In such a system, Bush might well have won. The same rationale applies to the Greens in 2000 - many Nader voters would have preferred a second round run-off too. After they’d scared the bejasus out of Gore, and perhaps pushed him a little to the left, they would be able to ensure that we did not get a Republican president - their worst possible outcome.

But a French style system has its problems too - just look at the last French presidential election. The two serious candidates were Jospin, for the Socialists, and Chirac, for the right. However, to everyone’s surprise, Jospin was eliminated in the first round - he ran a lacklustre campaign, and bled protest votes to various die-hard lefties, so that he came in third, behind notorious Hitler-fancier, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Thus, in the second round, Jospin supporters were faced with an unenviable choice between Chirac, a shady political hack, and Le Pen, who notoriously dismissed the Holocaust as a technicality. On the slogan ‘Vote for the Crook not the Nazi,’ they voted for Chirac. Jospin voters would very likely would have preferred a US style system, in which, indeed, Jospin might have won the election.

Riker’s adaptation of Arrow suggests that all electoral systems are going to have problems of this sort - the mechanisms of choice will sometimes have perverse consequences. Obviously, some systems of voting will be much worse than others - but all of them are going to have some sort of distortion.

So does this mean that democracy is a sham? That’s certainly the traditional interpretation. However, there’s also an alternative interpretation, which has recently started to generate some buzz among rational choice political scientists. On this interpretation, Riker’s critique points instead to the need to enhance democracy, by privileging deliberation - deep conversation and discussion, where people try to resolve political controversies through reasoned debate - rather than voting. At least in theory, deliberation isn’t vulnerable to the sorts of problems that Arrow and Riker identify.

The argument goes that even if deliberation is unwieldy as a primary form of political decision making - it’s awkward, messy and takes too long - it can work well as a form of “second order choice.” In other words, deliberation is a lousy way for people to take day-to-day political decisions, but it potentially allows people to decide over the different (imperfect) ways in which they can take these day-to-day decisions. For example, people might deliberate over, whether a particular voting system is the best way to make decisions in one area of social life, or whether a market based system is the best way to make decisions in another. This gives these choice mechanisms a sort of borrowed democratic legitimacy - even if they’re still flawed, people have decided democratically that they’re the best possible mechanism to use in a specific set of circumstances. Thus perhaps, people can at least have the option of real democratic choice over the various imperfect ways of making first order decisions that are on offer, which takes some of the sting out of Riker’s critique.

August 04, 2003

Michael Walzer interview in Imprints

Posted by Chris

A puff for one of my other collaborative projects: Imprints. The latest issue is now out and contains much of interest. The online content this time is an interview with Michael Walzer which ranges over many issues: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the morality of humanitarian intervention, Israel and Palestine, anti-Semitism, memories of Rawls and Nozick, the permissibility of torture, blocked exchanges and commodification, the narcissism of Ralph Nader, and much more. Read the whole thing - it is both enlightening and provocative.

August 01, 2003

Facts in political philosophy

Posted by Chris

Just musing on the whole facts and principles issue, I was reminded of a text which Jeremy Waldron brought up on the very first occasion I heard the Cohen thesis discussed. It isn’t really relevant to the whole fact-insensitive principle stuff at all, but it is a reminder of the kind of “facts” our great precursors helped themselves to! Normally when people are arguing for design in nature, they go for things like the structure of the eye, but Kant had other “evidence” in mind in this wonderful passage from Perpetual Peace :

It is in itself wonderful that moss can still grow in the cold wastes around the Arctic Ocean; the reindeer can scrape it out from beneath the snow, and can thus serve itself as nourishment or as a draft animal for the Ostiaks or Samoyeds. Similarly, the sandy salt deserts contain the camel, which seems as if it had been created for travelling over them in order that they might not be left unutilised. But evidence of design in nature emerges even more clearly when we realise that the shores of the Arctic Ocean are inhabited not only by fur-bearing animals, but also by seals, walrusses and whales, whose flesh provides food and whose fat provides warmth for the native inhabitants. Nature’s care also arouses admiration, however, by carrying driftwood to these treeless regions without anyone knowing exactly where it comes from. For if they did not have this material, the natives would not be able to construct either boats or weapons, on dwellings in which to live. ( Kant: Political Writings ed. Reiss p. 110)

July 31, 2003

Cohen on facts and principles

Posted by Chris

I’ve spent this morning puzzling through Jerry Cohen’s “Facts and Principles” from Philosophy and Public Affairs (31:3 Summer 2003). It is, as I and others have intimated already, an important article and I can’t be confident that I’ve “got” it yet. I do think, though, that I can say that his thesis is not quite the threat to naturalism that I took it to be, unless it is coupled with some further commitments (although, as it happens, those dangerous further commitments are ones I accept). The basic argument Cohen puts forward is a really simple one, claiming that where people seek to ground their moral commitments on principles, some of those principles must hold independently of the way the world happens to be (“the facts”).

Cohen argues for three premises:

P1 “…whenever a fact _F_ confers support on a principle _P_, there is an explanation why F supports _P_, that is, an explanation of how _F_ represents a reason to endorse _P_” (p. 217)

P2 “…the explanation whose existence is affirmed by the first premise invokes or implies a more ultimate principle, commitment to which would survive denial of _F_, a more ultimate principle that explains why F supports _P_….” (217-8)

P3 Where the grounding principle explaining why _F_ supports _P_ is itself fact-dependent, and further interrogation reveals yet deeper grounding principles, that iterative sequence of asking for supporting principles will not go on forever but will (pretty soon) come to rest on a grounding principle that is not itself fact-dependent.

Cohen claims that “it follows from the stated premises that every fact-sensitive principle reflects a fact insensitive principle: that is true both within the structure of the principled beliefs of a given person …. and …. within the structure of the objective truth about principles.” (218)

Much of Cohen’s paper consists of clarification of his view and a careful attempt to set out what he is not saying. So, for example, he says his thesis is neutral with respect to the main metaethical disputes (among realists, quasi-realists, emotivists etc etc etc), that it is not the same as Achilles and the tortoise, that it is not a view about how people actually come to acquire the principles that they hold (a process that will require engagement with the facts) and so on. Cohen’s view is, most basically, about the logical structure of people’s moral beliefs. It also presupposes that moral reasoning and judgement consists (at least in part) of the application of general principles to circumstances in the light of the facts, so Cohen’s view is of limited interest to moral particularists who believe that moral judgement isn’t about the application of such principles.

The principal target of Cohen’s article is Rawlsian constructivism. This is because Rawls believes that the way the world is (the facts) enter into the construction of the fundamental principles of justice (via, for instance, the general facts made available to the parties in Rawls’s original position). Cohen believes that Rawls is not altogether consistent here, in any case, since the design of Rawls’s constructivist procedure rests on general claims (that persons are to be considered as free and equal) that are either themselves fact-independent or rest on further principles that are. So, for Cohen at least, Rawls’s putatively fundamental principles of justice aren’t fundamental at all, but merely derivative or regulatory principles that actually derive from deeper fact-independent principles.

Is Cohen’s argument damaging to ethical naturalism? That of course is going to depend on what we mean by ethical naturalism and, as we’ve seen over the past few days, there’s plenty of room for debate and/or confusion about that. Cohen’s argument has nothing to say about what ethical principles amount to, and if all such principles amount to is the expression of attitudes then there’s no going to be not problem for most naturalisic views. On the other hand, if we have a commitment to moral objectivity, then it looks like we are committed to there being objective truths in ethics that are (logically) completely independent of the way the world happens to be (microphysically or otherwise). Whether that is a threat or not probably depends on the sort of objectivity we sign up for. If moral principles are a priori (and so on a par with, say truths of logic) they may not be. But, to be honest, I’m not confident in what I think about this.

In his post yesterday, Brian suggested that Cohen’s view might be correct but trivial. I think that it is probably a mistake to express the point thus. If we are, as Cohen thinks, committed to some ground-level, fact independent moral principles then those principles are likely to be quite substantive (e.g, of the order of the fact-independent principle “all beings with characteristics X have the right to equal concern and respect”).

Is Cohen’s argument damaging to Rawlsian constructivism? If Cohen is correct, Rawlsians might reasonably, though concessively, reply. They might argue that it is true that if we look at what the logical structure of people’s ethical beliefs ought to be, then fact-independent principles are at the bottom. It isn’t the case then, that what justifies and constitutes our most fundamental commitments is that they derive from a constructivist procedure. But (1), epistemically, such a procedure is the best method for getting at what those commitments are and (2) given “the facts”, the regulatory principles which we are practically most interested in are best seen as the product of a constructivist apparatus. Too concessive? I think most Rawlsians could live with it.

July 30, 2003

Ethical naturalism redux

Posted by Chris

In a comment to one of Brian’s earlier posts on ethical naturalism, I mentioned that Jerry Cohen’s argument that ethics must (ultimately) depend on fact-insensitive principles seemed to me to threaten the naturalist position (at least as Brian had formulated it). Larry Solum - who started this whole conversation - now has an extensive discussion of Cohen’s view (scroll down) as expressed in the latest Philosophy and Public Affairs. Larry thinks that even if Cohen is right, an Aristotelian naturalism might survive. I’m not sure what to think about that yet. One thing worth noticing about Cohen’s view is that even though most of the discussion is about ethics, it applies to normative principles quite generally. This being so, it ought to apply to such principles in other domains (including epistemology and the theory of rational action) and that if it threatens naturalism in ethics it also threatens naturalistic programmes in those areas.

July 29, 2003

Norman Geras

Posted by Chris

I see that Norman Geras has joined the blogging community. Norm was involved in some of the early discussions around Crooked Timber and even suggested the name. He’s the author of many books on subjects as wide-ranging as Rosa Luxemburg, the holocaust, and cricket and he’s also been a contributor to one of my other collaborative projects, Imprints, which featured an interview with him recently (the current issue has his take on Polanski’s The Pianist). I’m sure that Norman’s blog will be one of my regular visits and I already see plenty to argue with, including his inclusion of Jules et Jim in his list of 20 best films when, as any fule kno, Les 400 Coups is superior. (Norman goes straight into the academic part of our blogroll under political science/political theory).

Tacit knowledge

Posted by Henry

There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about a DARPA project which aims to predict terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups, through creating a futures market, in which traders can speculate on the possibility of attacks; the NYT picks up on it too. Most of the commentary is negative, but Josh Chafetz likes the idea, and invokes Hayek.

As I explained at length in a post on Hayek last year, complex systems function by finding ways to aggregate diffuse knowledge into simple indices, which then allow actors in the system to take advantage of knowledge that they don’t actually have (e.g., no one knows exactly what Americans’ breakfast cereal preference orderings are, but by watching the information-aggregating index that we call “price,” producers can generally ensure that, when you go to the supermarket, you’ll find the brand you want. Compare that to the shortages of some items and overproduction of others that centrally planned economies have produced). A futures market in terrorist attacks, while it sounds grisly, may help us to aggregate diffuse knowledge in a way that will prove superior to expert knowledge.

Seems to me though that Chafetz is wrong. As Chafetz suggests, Hayek makes some rather interesting arguments about the ability of markets to pick up on diffuse, tacit knowledge, and make it usable. And Hayek’s not the only one saying this; Michael Polanyi and GLS Shackle develop roughly similar ideas. But the key point is that Hayekian markets aggregate knowledge. They don’t create it. People tend to be tolerably well informed about their own tastes, and buying habits. Markets will do a good job of taking this diffuse knowledge and communicating it to producers. The general public is likely to be rather less well informed about the likelihood of coups, assassinations and general alarums, and thus the sum total of their tacit knowledge is likely to be an incoherent mess, or a product of shared cognitive biases, rather than a useful index of information. And indeed, DARPA’s “market” is aimed at the general public; it seems that random punters can sign up to participate on a first-come first-served basis. Whatever minimal amount of useful information is in there will almost certainly be drowned out by the noise.

This isn’t to say that information markets of this sort can’t be useful - but they need to involve people who have useful tacit knowledge to begin with. One of the problems with hierarchy is that valuable information sometimes doesn’t make it from the bottom of the organization to the top, because middle management blocks it, or because the boss doesn’t want to know. Anonymous information markets can potentially solve this problem. They might allow the people at the bottom of the ladder, who often have the best sense of what is actually going on, to share their information anonymously. Assuming that their decisions to buy and sell are kept confidential, management can’t punish them for not sticking to the corporate line. For example, one could create an information market that would allow anonymous CIA analysts to express their skepticism about Iraqi WMDs by shorting WMD “stocks” without fearing reprisal from on high. This would actually be a rather useful exercise. I wonder why DARPA isn’t funding it?

July 24, 2003

You can't con an honest man

Posted by Daniel

Since it’s “contrarian” silly ideas week on CT this week, here’s another one for fans of Tyler Cowen’s telemarketing argument (see below). It’s something that’s bugged me for a while. Various versions of the libertarian creed seemed to be based on allowing people to do anything they like as long as it doesn’t involve “force or fraud”. My question is; why have they got such a downer on fraud?

The prohibition on force is easy to understand. Force is nasty; it harms people directly and interferes with their liberty. But defrauding someone is just offering them an opportunity to harm themselves. Rather like selling them heroin, or persuading them to opt out of a defined benefit pension scheme, two activities that most of us would support people’s right to do, even though we might disapprove of the consequences. If we’re going to establish a strong principle of caveat emptor, as most libertarians seem to think that we should, why should we have a prohibition on that form of free speech known as “lying”? If someone wants to be fooled by a smooth-talking charmer, or decides rationally that they can’t be bothered verifying the accuracy of claims made to them, why should the govenrment step in and paternalistically demand that they be insulated from the consequences of their actions?

I can’t think of any Nozickian or other libertarian grounds on which one should be able to object to someone earning their living as a confidence trickster; it’s a non-productive activity, certainly, and it degrades the general institution of trust, but these are social objections, not available to a consistent libertarian. None of us ever signed a contract saying we wouldn’t lie to each other, so we needn’t feel bound by any social objections. So I suggest that “or fraud” be dropped from the slogans of the Libertarian Party, and we leave it to the free market to weed out the dishonest timeshare promoters, merchants of patent medicines, Nigerian advance fee scam artists etc.

Financing basic income

Posted by Chris

The new issue of Prospect includes a rather meandering piece by Samuel Brittan on baby bonds, basic income and asset redistribution. A central issue in this area is how to finance such proposals, and that’s something Brittan gets down to at the end of his article. He canvasses Henry George-style proposals for land taxation and also mentions inheritance taxes, but finally comes up with a somewhat odd suggestion:

… a very simple practical proposal, why not auction planning permission? Many local authorities have approached this piecemeal by making such permission conditional on the provision of local services such as leisure centres, approach roads and so on. But why not return this windfall to the taxpayer in the form of asset distribution and let citizens decide how to spend it?

An intruiging idea, certainly, but a great deal of UK planning law would need to change to implement it. For one thing, under the current system, more than one person or body can hold a valid permission to develop the same land. I can even apply for permission to demolish your house, though having planning permission to do so doesn’t entitle me to knock it down! Presumably, also, there would have to be some specific thing that was being auctioned: but planning permissions are specific to the purposes that the applicant intends. You want to build a cinema and I want to build a supermarket: you aren’t interested in my permission and I’m not interested in yours. And giving citizens assets as a result of such auctions doesn’t solve the problems that “planning gain” is usually used to address: your proposed superstore will generate more traffic, so we get you to pay to improve the roads, thereby covering costs which would otherwise fall to the local taxpayer. Still, there may be a workable idea here, but I can’t quite see it.

July 23, 2003

Siren songs

Posted by Henry

Tyler Cowen has a couple of posts suggesting that there is a serious libertarian argument against initiatives like the US government ‘do-not-call’ list for telemarketers. His argument is that government shouldn’t be in the business of restraining peoples’ spontaneity.

(warning: lengthy argument follows)

To quote the core of Cowen’s argument:

Take those people who have put themselves on the list. Do they really not want to be called? Maybe they are afraid that they really like being called. That they will buy things. That they will be impulsive. Arguably those people have a rational controlling self, and an impulsive buying self, to borrow some language from Thomas Schelling. Why should we assume that the rational controlling self is the only one who counts (do you really want a life devoid of spontaneity?)? Why should our government be in the business of altering this balance in one direction or the other? Isn’t the market a better mechanism for balancing the interests of the conflicting selves? How many of you out there will be consistent? How about a government list for people who do not want to be allowed into casinos? Do not want to be allowed to buy cigarettes at the local 7-11? Do not want to be allowed to order dessert?

Cowen seems to have gotten a lot of email from people who argue either _a_ that telemarketers are evil (which is self evidently true, but beside the point), or _b_ that they themselves never buy from telemarketers. But this doesn’t address Cowen’s two main claims. First, he suggests that the government shouldn’t favour our propensity for self control over our propensity for spontaneity. Second, he states that the market likely provides a better mechanism for balancing spontaneity and rationality than the government. Even if he’s advancing these arguments half in jest, they’re worth thinking about, as they involve some tricky questions for political theorists, philosophers, economists, and others who pontificate on such matters.

Turning to the first point. For starters, no libertarian I, but it seems to me that when Cowen (correctly) argues that people aren’t consistent in their preferences, he’s jumping up and down on some very thin ice for libertarians. Ideas about individual autonomy, and how it’s best expressed through free choice in certain political and economic contexts, usually rest on the implicit claim that there is an individual there, who knows more or less consistently what she wants. If you start positing different ‘selves’ within the individual, with different ideas of what they would like and how to get it, you’re coming dangerously close to saying that people don’t really know what they want. And this, in effect, is what Cowen is arguing. If we want to “balance” rationality and spontaneity, then we want to limit the circumstances under which we can make rational long term choices that constrain us, and prevent us from behaving spontaneously in the future. In short, some kinds of choice should (sometimes) not be open to individuals, even if those choices are likely to harm no-one but the individual herself (and, even then, these choices will only ‘harm’ one aspect of the individual, her spontaneous self as opposed to her rational, controlling self). This seems to me to be a rather tricky argument for a libertarian to make, and to sustain. In fact, it’s the reverse image of some of the arguments made against libertarians - for example that addictive drugs should be illegal, because once we start shooting up, we may not be able to stop. Anti-libertarian arguments of this sort appeal to our long term self-interest as opposed to our short term, ‘spontaneous’ interest in getting high. Cowen’s argument does the reverse, suggesting that our ability to make long term choices should be limited lest it constrain our spontaneity. But, as should be apparent, the two arguments aren’t that far off each other - they both state that we should ‘limit’ one form of choice, in order to facilitate the other. And I suspect that they’re both, in the end, antithetical to libertarianism.

Second, let’s look at the claim that governments provide an inferior means of balancing spontaneity and long term interests than markets. There seem to me to be two claims; one implicit and one explicit. The first doesn’t hold, as far as I can see, and Cowen doesn’t actually provide any evidence in support of the second.

The first more or less implicit claim, is that the do-not-call list is problematic because it’s the government that is organizing it. This seems to me to be a non-starter. The government isn’t constraining choice here, it’s enabling it. More precisely, it is offering a new choice to consumers which they previously didn’t have - of telling telemarketers not to call them. If the government is “altering the balance,” it is doing so by opening up choices rather than shutting them down - i.e. it isn’t restricting the kinds of liberties that libertarians get het up about. It’s not coercing consumers to sign up. The only people who are being coerced are the telemarketers, who are being coerced only to respect the right of others to choose not to be called by them. To put it another way; would libertarians find the scheme objectionable if it was being run entirely by private actors? Say, for example, if the Direct Marketing Association had put together a really workable do-not-call list (rather than the half-arsed effort that it had). I suspect that libertarians would see this as laudable evidence of market forces at work. But the effects on individual consumer choice would be precisely the same.

The second claim that Cowen makes is that markets are a better way of balancing our controlling selves and our spontaneous selves than governments. He doesn’t adduce any real arguments or evidence for thinking that this is likely to be so, and I suspect that he’d have trouble in finding them. 1 In order to evaluate the respective merits of different means to balancing, you’d really have to have some valid and convincing metric for “deciding” the appropriate balance between the different claims of long term enlightened self interest, and short term spontaneity. And damn me if I know of any way of doing this in an intellectually defensible way. I suspect that Cowen’s claim, if you look at it closely, boils down to something like the following. “Markets are more likely than not to favour spontaneity over long term rationality. By and large, I prefer free scope to be given to spontaneity, rather than careful long term planning, when the two come into conflict. Therefore I, and people like me, should prefer markets over government.” Which is all very well and good, but isn’t going to convince people with dissimilar preferences.

Now this is a rather lengthy response to a throwaway argument, but I think there are some interesting issues buried in here. How well does libertarian claims about social order work, if you assume that people are subject to certain kinds of inconsistency? My suspicion, as articulated above, is that they don’t work well at all. How do libertarians deal with individual forms of choice that are deliberately meant to foreclose future choices that the individual might make? Surely, some libertarian, somewhere, has dealt with this set of problems. The only person I know who has done serious work on this is erstwhile analytic Marxist, current day unclassifiable leftie, Jon Elster. Two of his books, Ulysses and the Sirens and Ulysses Unbound, show that these problems are endemic to many important forms of choice.

1 Broader efficiency claims for markets rest, of course, on assumptions about the consistency of preferences, which Cowen has junked at the beginning of his post.

Update: Ogged has further criticisms.

Addendum: Reading over Cowen’s post again, it strikes me that precisely the argument that he’s making over the do-not-call list can be made with regard to the sale of pension plans on the market. Pension providers, by giving us the choice of signing up to schemes where we put away a chunk of our disposable income every month, are altering the balance between our rational controlling selves and our spontaneous selves. As already noted, the actual nature of the provider (government in Cowen’s example; a private firm in mine) is a red herring - the important bit for the argument is how their provision of something affects individual choice.

Addendum II - David Glenn emails to point to this very interesting paper by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, which starts from similar arguments about limitations in human rationality and consistency, to argue on behalf of a “libertarian paternalism.” Good, thought-provoking stuff.

July 21, 2003

All for one and one for all

Posted by Chris

Daniel’s post about the morality of snitching got me thinking about an issue that is, I think, related. Namely, the question of solidarity: what is it and how does it impact on our practical reasoning. Take the following dialogue from a recent episode of ER where the nurses have got up a petition against Luka Kovac:


Haleh: It’s nothing personal, Abby. I like Dr. Kovac.
Abby: Really? It’s hard to tell.
Haleh: He’ll be back to work tomorrow. We have to do this every couple years to send a message.
Abby: Do you even know what happened?
Haleh: I don’t care what happened.
Abby: You cared enough to sign the petition.
Haleh: Another nurse asks for my support, I’ll give it, every time.
Abby: Whether she’s right or not.
Haleh: I’ve been doing this job for 17 years, honey, doctors come and go, but nurses make this place run. We don’t get much credit, or much pay, we see a lot of misery, a lot of dying, but we come back every day. I’ve given up on being appreciated, but I sure as hell won’t let any of us be taken for granted.

The way in which the solidaristic consideration impacts on Haleh’s reasoning is just the same as the way in which an authoritative command would. That’s to say that she sets aside her own estimation of the rights and wrongs (and even of the facts) of the particular case and treats someone else as entitled to decide what she ought to do. That person’s decision pre-empts her own estimation of what reason requires. The interesting difference with more standard authority claims (officer commanding soldier, state commanding subject via law) is that authority here is diffuse and any member of the relevant group can exercise it over any and all of the others. Of course, there’s a risk that individuals will exercise their right of command irresponsibly, and so there will often be an interest in routing things through some appropriate body (like a union committee). But that doesn’t seem essential to the nature of the case.

The more I’ve thought about this example, the more I think there’s potentially quite a lot to be written on this issue. Although Abby plainly sees Haleh’s attitude as irrational, I don’t think it is. Indeed, it may be required by her relationship to her fellow nurses. But if I’m right about solidarity giving rise to diffuse sources of authority, then there’s at least a tension with the current philosophical front runner for the justification of authority, Joseph Raz’s “normal justification thesis”. Raz states:

The normal and primary way to establish that a person should be acknowledged to have authority over another person involves showing that the alleged subject is likely better to comply with reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative directives) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding, and tries to follow them, than if he tries to follow the reasons which apply to him directly.

Often, following the person claiming authority will be rational because they have a special expertise or a fund of knowledge. But in the solidarity case, the person on whose authority I act may have less knowledge or expertise than I have (and we may all know this).

I’m note sure how to take this further at present. Obviously there are things to be said about reciprocity, solidarity as a convention, the balancing of long-term self-interest against short-term advantage and so on, as well as thoughts in a slightly different, more communitarian, register about the moral meaning of the relationship between those owing a duty of solidarity to on another.

July 09, 2003

Nozick and natural rights to property

Posted by Chris

Brian’s post on Nozick (immediately below) prompted a certain kind of reaction in me. I felt rather like the boy in the class who wants to interrupt with “But sir…, but, but …” The reason I have this reaction is, I think, not because I believe Nozick to be right (I don’t) but because I’ve always found Anarchy State and Utopia to be a challenging and stimulating book, and not one to be too lightly dismissed.

Nozick was certainly a great writer among philosophers, but also one with an eye to the good thought experiment which could discomfit his complacent leftie readers by taking their intuitions and working with them to produce unwelcome conclusions. The Wilt Chamberlain parable is one good example of this as are the immediately following paragraphs on the socialist entrepreneur. His use of the public entertaiment system example to undermine the Hart-Rawls principle of fair play (ASU 90-95) is another. To be sure, Nozick rarely has the kind of knock-down argument for his premises that we might like. But in the dialectical context, he doesn’t need to have, since he’s appealing to intuitions we already share (for whatever reason).

One big question which looms in the responses to Brian’s post is that of rights (especially to property). Are these just the creatures of the state and positive law, or are their rights (including to property) which exist independently of the state and which the state ought to respect? Leftist arguments against such original property rights are often based on the fact that property is a complex matter and that without a full legal specification of the so-called ‘incidents’ of property, claims to ownership are going to be hopelessly indeterminate. Property rights are then said to depend, in some sense, on the state. But I’m unpersuaded by that line of attack. For we can surely point to many instances where people confer and recognise rights extra-legally, where it is clear that the state has moral (rather than simply pragmatic) reason to be constrained by those rights.

Chapter 5 of Hernan de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital is instructive here, both historically and for the way in which our sympathies are engaged. Squatters in the United States, operated extra- (indeed contra-) legally established systems of rights over land. The government, acting according to the law, frequently evicted them from the lands they had settled. The government eventually compromised and found ways to incorporate the settlers’ property system within the formal system. I submit, though, that if you feel in your gut (even in one instance) that settlers being evicted by government agents were being deprived of what was rightfully theirs, then you’ve conceded the anti-positivist case for (some) property rights. And if you’ve done that, then a Lockean view (such as Nozick’s) begins to look more plausible. The trick, from thereon in, from an egalitarian perspective, is to insist on much stronger limits on acquisition and transfer than Nozick (or Locke) would admit. But that’s a whole research programme.

(An essay which has something to say about conflicting reactions to Nozick is G.A. Cohen’s “Marxism and contemporary political philosophy, or: why Nozick exercistes some Marxists more than he does any egalitarian liberals”, chapter 6 of Cohen’s extended engagement with Nozick, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality.)

July 08, 2003

a few good libertarians?

Posted by Brian

It seems like it is Nozick-bashing day Down Under. First Ken Parish links to his favourite online criticisms of Nozick. Then John Quiggin follows up with a different criticism. Quiggin’s argument is that given some plausible assumptions about history, we can justfy (heavy) taxation even by Nozick’s lights. Premise one is that Nozick agrees that if one person, say the king, or one group, say the parliament, owned all the land, then they could justly charge rents on all who inhabited that land. Whether we call these taxes or not doesn’t change the fact that they are justified. Justification does not turn on whether something is called a rent or a tax. Premise two is that at some stage the land was owned by some such person or group. Premise three is that current states can be construed as owning the land they govern because they traded for it with the previous owners. Conclusion, all taxes are justifiable rents.

Quiggin illustrates premise three with a little folksy history of property law in Britain. It goes something like this. Once upon a time there was a king called William who owned everything and leased some of it out under various conditions, including the right to sublet. Later his heirs agreed to not change the annual rents without the approval of a body corporate of the renters. Later heirs transferred ownership to the body corporate (which continued collecting rents from lease-holders) in exchange for some nice palaces and a comfy annual payment. The body corporate expanded its membership to include everyone. Thus the modern state.

Now this isn’t meant to be a justification for any kind of taxation. A good libertarian could take it to be a reductio of Nozick’s views. Or they could take it to be an argument for emigration to some country where there is no such Nozickian defence of taxation available to the government. Quiggin thinks their hopes will be disappointed. He thinks "that given any plausible starting point, Nozick’s approach leads to the conclusion that the status quo, including taxes, regulations and other government interventions is just". But it’s hard to see how we can defend a version of premise three for all countries, or even for most countries. Indeed, at the end of the just-so folk history, we get the following conclusion.

The general implication is that, in any society with a constitutional history, the only set of property rights that can be supported by a Nozickian analysis is the status quo, including state powers such as the power of eminent domain and the power to tax. (My emphasis)

But many countries don’t have constitutional histories in the relevant sense. The various revolutions of 1776, 1789 and 1989 constiute decisive breaks in the stories of the revolting countries, as did several of the 1848 revolutions. We might be able to provide a chain of ownership from William the Conqueror to the people of Britain for the lands of Britain (provided we squint a little around 1649) but a similar story for Poland will be hard to tell.

That’s not to say it isn’t a lot of fun tweaking various libertarians from time to time. And Quiggin may still have an argument against Nozick, just not the one he intended. If his principles allow for unfettered taxation in Britain but not in Poland, that’s probably absurd enough to overthrow the theory. (Which is not to say, as several commentators on Ken’s site noted, that libertarianism itself is damaged. Lots of good theories have bad defences.) The whole thing reminded me of my favourite passage from Locke.

140. It is true, governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit every one who enjoys his share of the protection, should pay out of his estate his proportion for the maintenance of it. But still it must be with his own consent, i.e. the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives chosen by them: for if any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people, by his own authority, and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government: for what property have I in that, which another may by right take, when he pleases, to himself? (My emphasis)

As my colleague Dave Estlund once remarked, in the highlighted section Locke goes from being Newt Gingrich to Teddy Kennedy without drawing breath. (I would have said John Hewson to Jim Cairns.) The point is not that Locke was abandoning his individualist principles here. The point rather is that once we allow for any kind of collective bargaining at all, even completely voluntary collective bargaining, the terms of the social contract could end up looking a lot like familiar states. Some might think this was a good reason for libertarians to not rest too much weight on Lockean arguments, or anything like them.