Chris Bertram

Simon Kuper has an “interesting piece in the FT”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059480107034&p=1012571727132 on the importance of the Islamic electorate in Europe. Though the piece is mainly about Europe, I was amused to read the following (which everyone else probably knows already):

bq. the Muslim bloc vote first appeared in the US, home of the ethnic lobby. A fortnight before the 2000 election, the American Muslim Political Co-ordinating Council, a political action group, endorsed George W. Bush for president. The council said he had shown “elevated concern” about the US government’s profiling of Arab-Americans at airports, and about its use of secret evidence against Arab and Muslim immigrants. (Bush had mentioned this issue in a debate with Al Gore.). Bizarre as it now sounds, Bush’s concern for the civil rights of suspected Islamic terrorists possibly won him the election. It is estimated that more than 70 per cent of American Muslims voted for him, and that in the crucial Florida election he polled at least 60,000 more Muslim votes than Gore.

As an further antidote to the Paul Johnson rant, I thought I’d link to euro-cheerleader Philippe Legrain’s “hymn to European dynamism in Prospect”:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=12246 . There are one or two moments when Legrain has to turn up the volume in the hope that people won’t notice weaknesses here and there, but it is a pretty gutsy response to a certain widely-received view of Europe and America:

bq. over the past three years, living standards, as measured by GDP per capita, have risen by 5.9 per cent in the EU but by only 1 per cent in the US. So says the IMF, an institution hardly biased against the US. An unfair comparison, perhaps, given America’s recent recession? Then look at how the EU and the US size up since 1995, a period that includes America’s late 1990s boom. While living standards in the US have risen by a healthy 16.1 per cent over the past eight years, they are up by 18.3 per cent in the EU. This is not a sleight of hand. Pick any year between 1995 and 2000 as your starting point, and the conclusion is the same: Europe’s economy has outperformed America’s.

bq. It is true that the US economy has grown by an average of 3.2 per cent a year since 1995, whereas Europe’s economy has swelled by only 2.3 per cent. These headline figures transfix pundits and policymakers. But this apparent success is deceptive. Not only are US growth figures inflated because American statisticians have done more than their European counterparts to take into account improvements in the quality of goods and services, but the US population is also growing much faster than Europe’s. It has increased by nearly one tenth in the past eight years, whereas Europe’s population has scarcely grown at all. So although the US pie is growing faster than Europe’s, so too is the number of mouths it has to feed. Most people care about higher living standards, not higher economic growth.

I’m embarrassed pleased to report that I’m the first victim subject of a “Normblog profile”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_09_21_normangeras_archive.html#106457158565367983 .

Edward Said “is dead”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/obituaries/25WIRE-SAID.html .

I was thinking over some of the responses to my discussion of “sufficientarianism” below, and noticing how common is a certain type of right-wing response to facts about the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our societies. To whit:

bq. It isn’t true.

or

bq. It may be true, but it doesn’t matter.

or

bq. It’s true, and it matters, but doing something about it would (a) have the perverse effect of making that thing worse, or (b) make something else worse. etc etc.

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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”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/opinion/21SUN3.html?ex=1064721600&en=64f9933e4a7be38d&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE :

bq. 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.

bq. 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.

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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.

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Roger Scruton has a “piece on Donald Davidson’s importance”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003-09-20&id=3523 in the latest _Spectator_ .

UPDATE: Scruton’s piece is sort of OK, but I wouldn’t have bothered linking had I come across “this fascinating interview of Davidson”:http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/interview.html by Ernest LePore first (via “Brian Leiter’s site”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/).

I’ve spent rather more time than I’d like over the past couple of weeks wrangling with Amazon over their stocking of my book. For some reason they’d listed it as “hard to obtain” and therefore subject to a £1.99 surcharge. When I questioned this, I received an email from their customer service people in India saying “yes, we’ve looked at the website and that is the case.” When I pointed out that I too could look at the website but that it was what was said there that was the problem, they replied “yes, we’ve looked at the website and that is the case.” [DO … LOOP] . Anyway, I’m pleased to be able to say, that the surcharge is now gone.

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:

bq. 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).

A new Labour (but definitely _not_ New Labour) ginger group has been launched, by the name of Compass. It looks interesting and some good people are involved.

Musing further on whether technological development has helped or hindered thinking, and especially philosophical thinking, it occurs to me that the ideas of which I’m (rightly or wrongly) most proud have generally started not when I’ve been trying to do philosophy, but when I’ve been daydreaming about it whilst doing something else: travelling on a train, riding a bicycle, swimming or whatever. Purely mechanical and repetitive activities can been good for this too, though it is for good reason that there are a whole range of philosophical stories in which philosophers let cooking pots boil over, poison people or run them down whilst in the middle of their reveries.

Then there’s the business of writing, of trying to turn ideas into publishable prose. I’ve adopted two strategies for getting this done – both of which work very well, but eventually seem to run their course.

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Larry Solum “adds his thoughts to the philosophical immortality discussion”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_lsolum_archive.html#106355086488797710. His has lots of interest to say, and some extra thoughts on which legal theorists will survive, but I feel a bit sceptical about this:

bq. The twentieth-century was the first time in human history that literally tens of thousands of very smart people worked on philosophical problems for most of their waking hours–with all of the advantages of modern technology– _try writing a really big book with a quill pen or traveling four hundred miles by horse to consult a library_ . In the twentieth century, there was a lot of low hanging philosophical fruit. Much of it was plucked. History will remember.

Does technology really help? Sure, there’s been some philosophical progress but I’m not convinced it has much to do with the availability of typewriters, computers and motor vehicles. Philosophy is a funny business, sort of stuck half way between scientific research and creative writing or music. To the extent to which it is like scientific research then the good thoughts are dissociable from the person having them. But we can also think of a style of writing and thinking as being characteristic of a creative individual and not easily pulled apart from them. Some philosophers are closer to one pole than the other. It is at least arguable that music and literature did a lot better with the horse and the quill pen than they have in the electronic age. Maybe in 100 years we’ll think philosophy did too. Technology might help, but it might just get in the way.

The music industry claims the download pirates are killing music. So how bad would things be if the music industry died? “John Holbo paints a plausible picture”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/09/i_saw_this_tyle.html.