Chris Bertram

Though my natural sympathy for the underdog would normally lead me to favour a backward nation labouring under the burden of historical disadvantage, I’ll be “cheering for Ghana”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/4853408.stm this afternoon.

In “yesterday’s global justice thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/19/global-justice-taxing-inherited-social-resources/ , commenter Nicholas Weininger made the following comment, which raises a broader set of issues than were appropriate in that discussion, but which I think are worth responding to. Here’s Nicholas:

bq. Chris, I understand that you are framing your argument within the assumption that your arguers accept liberal egalitarianism, but it is still worth pointing out that some of us anti-egalitarians will see in your argument a rather nice slippery-slopish case for our side. To wit: once you start deciding that some things are “just luck” and that that implies it’s legitimate to forcibly redistribute them, there is nothing, however clearly it may be the product of choice and hard work, which is exempt from the depredations of the robbers with badges and good intentions. If liberal egalitarianism really does imply that “inherited social resources” should be taxed away, so much the worse for liberal egalitarianism!

It isn’t entirely clear to me what the central point of Nicholas’s objection is, but there seem to be three components (1) a complaint about “forcible redistribution”, (2) a worry about the indeterminacy of liberal egalitarian theories of distributive justice, and (3) a worry that literally everything might be up for redistribution if we press a radical line about what results from luck.

[click to continue…]

I want to flag an issue which I seem to have noticed in a variety of liberal egalitarian writings on global justice, namely the cut that philosophers and theorists often make between entitlement to land and natural resources on the one hand, and entitlement to socially created stuff on the other.[1] Liberal egalitarians usually reject any kind of libertarian finders-keepers principle with respect to the first category of goods. But in relation to the second, they often argue for the right of insiders to exclude outsiders from access to those goods that are the collective historical creation of the insiders’ political entity.[2] What follows is just a bit of thinking aloud: there are a lot of uncrossed ts and undotted is. I’d welcome both constructive comments and pointers to relevant papers.

This natural/social cut looks wrong and insufficiently motivated to me. With respect to natural resources and land, I guess the background thought might be that these resources come as manna from heaven, as it were, so that all of the worlds people and peoples have an original equal claim to them. We can then argue about the right way of progressing from that claim to operational property rights, but it is easy to see how arguments for (e.g.) something like a global resources dividend can go: those who actually use the resources need to compensate the others who share their original equal entitlement for that use.[3] The difficulty I see is this: that social resources also come as unequally distributed manna from heaven to each new generation. Those who inherit stable institutions, a culture conducive to economic growth etc., look to be just as arbitrarily lucky with respect to those resources as those (Norwegians for example) who are lucky with respect to the discovery of natural resources on their territory. So why not deal with the two kinds of resources in the same way: that is, initially posit an equal original right of all to ownership, and sanction transfers to those who have been comparatively unlucky in the initial distribution?

[click to continue…]

bq. I had been eyeing the cakes in the cafe for some time, but I decide sadly that to order one would be seen as a sign of moral weakness and that now is not the moment.

From Jackie Ashley’s “interview with Mel P”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,1798994,00.html , in the Guardian (via “Matt T”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/ ).

A link to “Harry Hutton”:http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/ , who writes one of the funniest sites on the interwebs, and has been “hilariously misidentified by Daily Kos”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/6/13/163821/037 as a Republican eliminationist stormtrooper. (Daily Kos also has Crooked Timber’s Daniel Davies down as a follower of Ann Coulter!)

One of the things that has most annoyed the so-called “decent” left has been the use of hyperbolic comparisons between the US “war on terror” and barbaric systems like the Gulag. “The Euston Manifesto”:http://tinyurl.com/nofn7 expresses outrage that

bq. officials speaking for Amnesty International, an organization which commands enormous, worldwide respect because of its invaluable work over several decades, can now make grotesque public comparison of Guantanamo with the Gulag.

Well I agree with the Eustonites that the Gulag was much much worse, partly because it extended over many decades, and partly because it involved the incarceration and deaths of an immensely greater number of human beings. But there’s another way to think about the comparison, and that’s to ask about how the daily life of a typical Guantanamo inmate compares with the life of the average “zek” as depicted by Solzhenitsyn. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that one life is similarly awful to the other. This conclusion, though, depends on the presumption that accounts of life in the Gulag (from former inmates) and in Guantanamo (from former inmates) are both accurate. And they may not be. But here, for comparative purposes, are links to the online text of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”:http://tinyurl.com/zce6f and a “Guardian report”:http://tinyurl.com/rnx6g about the experiences of Guantanamo detainees.

bq. A top US official has described the suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a “good PR move to draw attention”.

So “reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5069230.stm the BBC. And who is this “top official”? She is Colleen Graffy,

bq. “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.”

I wonder what she says when she’s being undiplomatic.

Sadly, John Thornhill’s “a Martian economist visits earth” “article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9080568a-f7e4-11da-9481-0000779e2340.html is behind a subscription firewall. Hard not to smile at this:

bq. Our Martian friend scratches its heads. “When my economics professor last visited earth in 1945 he told me that the Europeans had just experienced a terrible civil war in which 36m people had been killed, including many of their most brilliant minds. Now you tell me that 60m French people produce almost as much economic output each year as 1.3bn Chinese, who have been the dominant economic power for most of your planet’s history. What is more, the French can do this while working 35-hour weeks and producing 246 different types of cheese. How did this economic miracle come about?”

I’d say “read the whole thing”, but unless you’ve got an FT subscription, you can’t.

I surfed over to the Daily Telegraph’s “obits page”:http://tinyurl.com/qxxoc , looking for someone who wasn’t there, and was struck by the way in which the headline writers dispassionately express the achievements of the dead. So

bq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — Jordanian terrorist associated with bombings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq.

is immediately followed by

bq. Raymond Davis, Jr — Physicist whose proof that the Sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions won him the Nobel.

Almost as if proving the sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions and beheading hostages were just different ways of spending one’s life. Sadly, I also learned that “Billy Preston is dead”:http://tinyurl.com/oas9n aged only 59.

Havi Carel, a philosopher at the University of the West of England in Bristol who has formerly taught at the Australian National University and the University of York, England, has recently been diagnosed with LAM, a very rare lung disease. She’s taking part in the Bristol Bike Ride (24 miles) on 25 June 2006 to raise money for LAM Action, the UK LAM organisation, and she would really welcome your support. Money that is raised will support research for this under-funded and under-researched disease.

If you want to know more about LAM go to: “www.lamaction.org”:http://www.lamaction.org .

You can donate online by credit or debit card at the following address:

“http://www.justgiving.com/havi”:http://www.justgiving.com/havi

All donations are secure and sent electronically to LAM Action. If you are a UK taxpayer, Justgiving will automatically reclaim 28 per cent Gift Aid on your behalf, so your donation is worth even more.

The main union representing academics in the UK is “in dispute with university employers at the moment”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/world/europe/01cnd-britain.html?hp&ex=1149220800&en=a1097c439ced02b9&ei=5094&partner=homepage, a dispute that is getting nastier all the time. Academics are refusing to assess students’ work, leading to the worry that many of them will be unable to get classified degrees this summer, and universities are now threatening to withhold a proportion of salaries (30 per cent in my institutions, up to 100 per cent in some other) as a penalty for partial breach of contract. I’m supporting the action as a loyal union member, but also because there is something right about the union case. However, as an egalitarian liberal, I can’t feel other that unhappy about some of the arguments put for higher academic salaries.

[click to continue…]

Blogger Alex Tingle has made enterprising use of Google Maps by designing “an overlay that shows the effects of the sea level rising”:http://flood.firetree.net/ . You can choose your level (up to 14m) and the map will show if a given bit of land would be underwater, and you can toggle between a map view (with placenames) and a satellite view, and you can zoom in and out. Of course, there are “lots of caveats”:http://blog.firetree.net/2006/05/18/more-about-flood-maps/ since he’s ignored tides and flood defences, the data may be less that 100% accurate, etc. Still, it’s an entertaining and instructive bit of coding. I’m happy to report that my own house will remain dry (though I’ll be dead long before we get to 14m, anyway).

“Ian Buruma in the NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/opinion/19buruma.html seems to me to get the Ayaan Hirsi Ali issue about right:

bq. Rita Verdonk was only a particularly extreme and unimaginative exponent of this new [anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant] mood. One of her wildly impractical suggestions, mostly shot down in Parliament, was that only Dutch should be spoken in the streets. It was she who sent back vulnerable refugees to places like Syria and Congo. It was under her watch that asylum seekers were put in prison cells after a fire had consumed their temporary shelter and killed 11 at the Amsterdam airport. She was the one who decided to send a family back to Iraq because they had finessed their stories, even though human rights experts had warned that they would be in great danger. This was part of her vaunted “straight back.”

bq. So when Ayaan Hirsi Ali told her own story of fibbing in a television documentary last week, Ms. Verdonk felt that she had no choice. If she didn’t investigate this case, and act tough, the law would not be applied equally. This was inflexible, and given Ms. Hirsi Ali’s value as a courageous activist who had already suffered a great deal, harsh. But it had nothing to do with her views on Islam.

bq. In this context, Ms. Hirsi Ali’s earlier remarks about the “terror” of “political correctness” have an unfortunate ring. It would have been better if she had taken this opportunity to speak up for the people who face the same problem that she did, of trying to move to a free European country, because their lives are stunted at home for social, political or economic reasons. By all means let us support Ayaan Hirsi Ali now, but spare a thought also for the nameless people sent back to terrible places in the name of a hard line to which she herself has contributed.

Via “Butterflies and Wheels”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=1377 .

Because I’ve managed to get myself a slot as a reviewer for “a local webzine”:http://www.decodemedia.com/tiki-index.php , I’ve managed to get to see a good number of gigs in the general area of america/alt.country/whatever in the past year. So I thought I do a little survey of what I’d been to and make some recommendations. Details below the fold since lots of you probably couldn’t care less!
[click to continue…]