Chris Bertram

From “an article on growing protectionism”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123388103125654861.html in the Wall Street Journal:

bq. The U.S. is planning retaliatory tariffs on Italian water and French cheese to punish the EU for restricting imports of U.S. chicken and beef.

Well I guess Americans can just drink different water, and Europeans can eat their own beef and chicken. But the cheese thing, that’s just masochism.

Just back from seeing “Slumdog Millionaire”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1010048/ . Very good, I thought. No doubt those who know India and Mumbai would have a better critical perspective on the film’s portrayal of time and place, but as a piece of cinema it is superb. It isn’t a feel-good movie for the most part, though it is consistently funny when it isn’t being horrifying, and it does make you feel pretty good at the end. (I had tears in my eyes, but since that was also true of the closing scenes of Crocodile Dundee, you might not think that much of a test.) Of the three excellent films I’ve seen recently (the others being The Reader, good, and Baader-Meinhof Complex, terrific) this is the one I’d say that no-one should miss.

Chapter 2 of G.A. Cohen’s new _Rescuing Justice and Equality_ addresses an argument in favour of the difference principle put by Brian Barry (as a reconstruction of Rawls) in his _Theories of Justice_. The argument has two stages: in the first, an equal distribution is established as the only _prima facie_ just distribution; in the second, a move away from equality is licensed, so long as it is a move to a Pareto superior distribution. Barry’s argument for the first stage is essentially that there is no cause of an unequal distribution that would justify its inequality: so there is, at a fundamental (i.e. pre-institutional) level, no argument based on desert or entitlement that would provide a justifying explanation of an unequal distribution. Such inequalities, are therefore, so this argument claims, _morally arbitrary_. The argument for the second stage is consequentialist: it would be irrational to insist on an equal distribution if it were possible to move from it to a distribution where some people were better off and none were worse off. (Insisting on equality in these circumstances looks like a levelling-down.)

From the point of view of Cohen’s engagement with Rawls, it is hard (for me) to see that this chapter adds much to the previous one. Cohen invites us to imagine an initially equal distribution D1 and a Pareto superior distribution D2. It looks as if we should prefer D2 to D1, because some people do better and no-one does worse. But, he says, let’s imagine another equal distribution, D3 which is Pareto superior to D1. Why couldn’t we move from D1 to D3 (rather than D2)? He canvasses various explanations, but the central point, as before is that the naturally-talented are only willing to put the additional (worst-off improving) effort in under conditions of inequality (D2) rather than under the equal net reward available under D3. There isn’t, therefore, an objective barrier to the feasibility of equality at the D3 level, just a justice-denying choice on the part of the already talented.

The real interest of the chapter lies, I think, elsewhere and is hinted at by Cohen in his reference to Nozick at p.90 fn. 11. It is the assumption, which Barry clearly shares, that the removal of the morally arbitrary causes of the holdings that people have ought to privilege equality as the just initial distribution. Why isn’t equality just as morally arbitrary as an initial starting-point as inequality? This, of course, is the point pressed by my late colleague Susan Hurley in her _Justice, Luck and Knowledge_ (esp. ch. 6). The right response to that worry is to provide a positive argument for equality as a morally privileged starting-point rather than relying on it being some default position after the removal of morally unequalizing arbitrary factors.

[Remember the rules: no commenting unless you’ve read the book.]

As promised, this is the first in a series of weekly postings on G.A. Cohen’s new _Rescuing Justice and Equality_. I say “new”, but much of the book isn’t all that new at all and consists of the republication of older material with which the political philosophy community is already familiar. I should also mention that there’s a conference on the book in Oxford on Friday and Saturday, which I’ll be attending, so my contribution in future weeks will, no doubt, be enriched by that. But for now it has not been.

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A month ago I proposed an online reading group for G.A. Cohen’s _Rescuing Justice and Equality_. (“US Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674030761/junius-20 , “UK Amazon”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674030761/junius-21 ) It is time to get started. I’ll kick-off a week from today with a post covering the introduction and chapter 1, “Rescuing Equality from ….The Incentives Argument”. We’ll then cover a chapter a week (plus the general appendix) with, I hope, other people sometimes taking the lead. Remember the rules: a condition of commenting is that you’ve actually read the text under discussion (violators will be deleted).

“An excellent column by Jo Wolff in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jan/06/wolff-philosophy-academicsworking-habits . Personally, I have two methods of getting things written. The first was prompted by reading an obituary of Anthony Burgess which revealed that he used to write 1000 words every day and then retire to a cafe for a martini. Though I skip the martini part, this works well as a way of making progress on a project over a longish period during which there are other demands on time. Sometimes, though, deadlines loom and you just have to get something written fast. For this, 45 minutes interspersed with 15 minute breaks is the way, totting up the virtual football matches I’ve thereby accumulated. I keep my trousers on. Usually,

Much of the blogospheric chatter about “proportionality” in warfare has been characterized by disinformation of a rather systematic kind. That was the case in the recent Lebanon war, and it is happening again during the current Israeli operation in Gaza. At Opinio Juris, Kevin Jon Heller does an excellent job of explaining the legal issues by way of what it would be absurdly ironic (in this context) to call a thorough “Fisking” of Alan Dershowitz. As Brian Leiter (via whom) points out, the moral issues are also significant.

Update: I found “this BBC article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7811386.stm about who is legally entitled the benefit of the principle of noncombatant immunity quite useful.

via “Andrew Sullivan”:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/ .

Samuel Freeman “has replied in comments to my post about his response to cosmopolitan critics of Rawls”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/10/language-requires-what/#comment-260984 . It is a genuinely helpful and clarifying response, for which I’m grateful. I could quibble about the semantics of “invariably”, but I won’t. Rather, I’d highlight just two points in Freeman’s remarks. The first concerns the non-identity of “state” with “people” and “society”. Of course, I agree with Freeman that they on sensible construals of either term they would be non-identical, but I’d argue that Rawlsian fastidiousness in this respect merely highlights something rather evasive about their view. For what is it that picks out a Rawlsian “people” as distinct from other “peoples”, as a distinctive cooperative unit? Usually, it is their legal and institutional unity. In fact, this is normally the only thing, since state boundaries are rarely congruent with ethnic, religious or linguistic boundaries. Rawlsians may want, given the morally dubious history of nationalisms, to promote this as a feature rather than a bug. But it is questionable, then, whether Rawlsian peoples are really distinct from the states that organize them as such. (And, somewhat counterintuitively, lots of peoples fail to be “peoples” – the Kurds, for example.) (I hereby promise a proper post about Rawlsian “peoples” soon: Rawlsians want to be neither “statist” nor “nationalist”, but I’m sceptical about the existence of the middle ground.)

The second concerns Freeman’s concession (though “concession” is unfair of me) that what is key to the notion of social-cooperation is not coercive enforcement, but rather the inescapability, for individuals, of compliance with social rules. This seems to me to open up two difficulties for Freeman. The first, which I won’t develop here, is the blurring of the distinction between a society’s “basic structure” and its “ethos”, a distinction that Freeman needs be sharper for another dispute (that with G.A. Cohen). The second is brought out by the following statement:

bq. compliance with the rules of basic social institutions, even if generally voluntary, is unavoidable for the members of a society, since these rules are inescapable and structure their daily lives in innumerable ways (unlike members of other societies, whose lives are structured by their own system of basic institutions).

Perhaps something special is meant here by “structured”, since if it means that people’s lives are shaped in systematic ways that open some opportunites and deny others, then it can hardly be denied that, for example, Malian cotton producers are subject to a good deal of structuring by the US government. And, of course, one can make a similar point with respect to the lives of would-be economic migrants from poor countries to rich ones. Systematic structuring, then, doesn’t do the job of dividing insiders from outsiders in the way Freeman needs it to.

Via “The Online Photographer”:http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html , Laurie Hill’s film about the things people request from the Hulton Archive:

From “an otherwise serious article”:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-official-men-really-are-the-weaker-sex-1055688.html about the effects of pollution on males of all species:

bq. … a study at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.

Samuel Freeman’s _Rawls_ has received considerable praise on this blog. Indeed Harry “described it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/10/rawls-by-samuel-freeman/#more-6491 exactly a year ago as “A brilliantly careful, utterly transparent, account of Rawls’s thought and an admirable presentation of the state of the debates around Rawls’s work.” Well Harry may well be right about the book as a whole, but I’m afraid I found the pages where Freeman states his and Rawls’s objections to “liberal cosmopolitanism” somewhat objectionably arresting. Details are below the fold, but I was taken aback by the linked claims that “language itself” would not be possible without “social co-operation” which, in turn, would not be possible without the enforcement of social rules by a coercive power. From which it follows, of course, that language itself is not possible in the absence of such a coercive power. That just seems rather obviously historically and ethnographically false unless Freeman intends by “social cooperation” and “coercive power” rather looser arrangements for coooperation and constraint than he needs for the conclusion he wants to reach, namely, that there is a qualitative difference between the domestic order and the international one, such as would justify restricting strong distributive justice duties to co-members of societies. Given that he has to reject, then, a looser conception of those terms, it looks like he’s committed to the claim that “language itself” would not be possible without the state. Which is nuts.
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My son Alex, who plays under the name Alexander Thomas (“myspace page”:http://www.myspace.com/alexanderthomasmusic) , plays the “theremin”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin (and then puts the output through various electronic boxes). As well as playing various gigs round the country, he’s also just had “a session on BBC Radio Bristol’s BBC Bristol Introducing programme”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001mhrq . He plays three pieces as well as talking a little bit about the instrument (the first is just after 30 minutes in). The session should be available for the next seven days.

“Philosophy professor forgets to attend his own sell-out lecture on duty”:http://www.richmondandtwickenhamtimes.co.uk/news/3938645.Professor_forgets_/ .