Political Theory/Political Philosophy

There’s an article over at Al Jazeera by historian Mark LeVine about Bradley Strawser, the philosopher who has been making a stir with his arguments that drone warfare might be morally permissible, or even obligatory. There’s quite a lot in what LeVine says that’s going to grate with philosophers. I reacted to

bq. “Most philosophers today accept the argument by the seminal inter-war philosopher Walter Benjamin that violence cannot be understood or judged except “in its relation to law and justice”.

Really? Has he done a survey? And what he says about Kant, well …

But what LeVine observes about Strawser’s conditional arguments is surely disturbing. Strawser claims that IF drones reduce civilian casualties compared to other means THEN the use of drones is justified (I’m simplifying). Philosophers will typically then say that the argument is merely conditional, and that therefore, if the antecedent is false then the conclusion doesn’t follow. Clearly that’s right. But does it get us off the hook in a world of propaganda, mass media, think tanks and the like? In the paper Levine links to, the principal evidence for the truth of the antecedent is a brochure from an Israeli arms manufacturer. And then there’s the matter of counting civilian casualties accurately, in a world in which the Obama adminstration has simply decreed that the dead males killed by drones are “bad guys”. Of course this kind problem, involving the escape of the argument from the seminar room into the wider world, isn’t limited to just war theory. So, for example, I’ve heard it argued by philosophers that IF sweatshops improve opportunities for poor people in poor countries THEN they are on-balance justified: so people shouldn’t campaign against sweatshop labour. This then gets supplemented with “evidence” that the antecedent is true, but by this time the casual listener has been inclined by the rhetoric to accept the conclusion. (That’s particularly likely if the listener, be they naval academy cadet or visitor to libertarian website is already ideologically predisposed to believe that the antecedent is true.) But where’s the evidence from? From Cato? From the AEI? From some “free-market” economist? As philosophers we claim innocence. “I wasn’t saying that drone strikes (or sweatshops) are justified, I was merely saying that IF they meet condition X, THEN they’re justified. My job is to assess the arguments, someone else can supply the facts.” That leaves me feeling uneasy.

ADDENDUM: it would be an interesting psychological experiment (which, for all I know someone has done) to test whether people who are exposed to conditional arguments in the total absence of evidence for the truth of the antecedent become more inclined to believe the consequent, perhaps especially for cases where the antecedent is some morally dubious policy. So, for example, are people exposed to the conditional “IF increased inequality ends up making the poorest better off THEN increased inequality is justified” more likely to believe that increased inequality is justified, even when no evidence that increased inequality benefits the poorest is presented?

I was planning this as a followup to my earlier post on the feasibility of guaranteed minimum income (GMI) and universal basic income (UBI) policies[1]. Chris has opened debate on some of the fundamental issues associated with a Rawlsian transition, so there might be some benefits in a parallel discussion of the specifics of these policies, which seem to me to capture a fair bit of what Rawls had in mind.

Although the two kinds of policies can be made roughly equivalent in terms of their effects on the distribution of income net of taxes and transfers, they seem (to me, at any rate) to indicate quite different political approaches, and therefore different transition paths, each with their own difficulties.

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(Since my attempt to make a point in a somewhat offhand and popularizing way seems to have been at the expense of clear communication, let me have another try, this time in a duller and more academic mode.)

Rawls has an idea of a feasible utopia, a well-ordered society, taking the form of a property-owning democracy,[1] in which distributive outcomes are programmed into the basic institutions via incentives attached to rules such that citizens, pursuing their own good within those rules, are led to bring about those outcomes. Importantly, those outcomes have the properties that they guarantee the worth of the basic liberties to citizens (material inequalities don’t undermine political equalities) and the difference principle is satisfied. This conception of what the just society would look like is important in responding to critics like Nozick, because, contra Nozick, the holdings that individuals have in the Rawlsian just society result from history: people are entitled to what they have because they have the rewards that have come from some action specified in advance by the rules (such as a net salary for doing a certain job or the winnings associated with a fair bet).[2] However the system as a whole is designed such that the invisible hand brings about just (or at least tolerably just) outcomes. A Rawlsian feasible utopia therefore satisfies someone like Hayek’s understanding of the rule of law: the government isn’t constantly intervening, trying to realize some antecedently decided-upon distributive pattern; rather the preferred distributive pattern emerges automatically from the normal operation of the system. Of course, this isn’t exactly laissez-faire: since the government does have the job of constantly adjusting the rules (such as, but perhaps not even mainly, tax rates) because left to itself entirely the system would drift away from its distributive “target” and the political equality of citizens would be undermined.
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Hi there liberal rule-of-law fetishists!

Now that I’ve got your attention, I’d like to mention something that’s been bothering me. This idea that we all order our affairs under a system of predictable rules sounds very nice, but I do wonder whether it’s compatible with some of the other things that you seem to be signed up for. Some of you, I know, are worried about this so-called 1 per cent, and even about the 1 per cent of the 1 per cent: the people who own lots of stuff. Not only do they own lots of stuff, but they own the kind of stuff that is useful if you want to own even more stuff. That’s how it goes. And, of course, they also have the means to bring about a favourable “regulatory environment”, so that they get to hold onto that stuff.

Now I suppose you want to do something about that? Yes? One option would be to let them hang onto all their existing assets – after all, they got them justly (or at least non-criminally) according to the rules of the system they themselves helped to formulate – but to introduce a new system of rules (call it a “basic structure” if you like) that works to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Assume you have the knowledge to design it with the distributive effects you want (big assumption that!). Let that system grind away for long enough – a few generations perhaps – and you’ll have shifted things a little bit in the right direction. (Assuming, that is, that the 1 per cent don’t use their residual wealth and influence to throw you off-track as soon as you hit the first bump.)

I think you can see where I’m going by now. If you really want a shift in the distribution of wealth and income, if you really really want it, then realistically you’re going to have to use state power to do a bit of _ex post_ redistribution. You’re going to have to take stuff from some people and give it to others. Doesn’t necessarily have to be that total Marxian expropriation of the expropriators: a comprehensive programme of debt cancellation would fit the bill. Life is about making choices: and you’re going to have to choose. Is it outrageous to dispossess someone of the wealth they acquired under the rules of the game; or are you going to say that substantive fairness sometimes matters more?

Now I know there are some wrinkles there. What about predictability? What about incentives? Sure. (Of course the predictability of stable property rules is a bit overstated: all those people who got their houses repossessed when the economy went bad didn’t see that coming!) You might have to duck and weave. You might have to convince property owners that you’ll only go so far and no further. But don’t kid yourselves that you can do the redistribution you want and treat the rule of law as absolute. If robbing the rich appals you, become a libertarian instead.

(UPDATE: Well I’ve clearly managed to confuse a bunch of people with this post. Probably a consequence of trying to make a serious point in a knockabout style. I had in mind not any old garden-variety idea of the rule of law but something a bit more specific, namely that society ought to be run according to predictable rules that provide individuals with certainty that their efforts won’t be nullified by state action, a view associated with Hayek but endorsed by Rawlsians. So _mea culpa_ for that.)

Discussion of those badminton players seems to divide into two camps: those who think it is fine to exploit the letter of the law to gain strategic advantage and therefore can’t see a problem, and those who don’t. Bracketing off for a second the embarrassing fact for those in the first camp that there does actually seem to have been a rule against deliberately losing, it’s plain that this is just a particular instance of a more general syndrome. There are people who devise and employ elaborate schemes to evade or avoid (I never know which is which) their taxes whilst staying just within the law. There are bankers who stay technically within a literal interpretation of the banking regulations, whilst engaging in dubious practices which undermine the regulator’s intention. There are employers who try to evade workplace regulations by reclassifying their workers as independent contractors. There are states which harp on about the technical details of the laws of war as they happily murder civilians. Well sometimes we need to punish the technically innocent but morally culpable. And it helps _encourager les autres_ to internalize the ethos behind the laws rather than seeing them as being just an inconvenient system of traffic control.

Rule-of-law fetishists, Hayekians, and the like tend to think this is just appalling. Legislators, regulators, sports administrators and similar, should devise watertight systems of rules within which people are entitled simply to go for it. But it is highly questionable that such watertight frameworks are possible, even in principle. So we need to give the enforcers some discretionary power to zap the bad people: people who knew perfectly well that what they were doing was at or over the moral and legal boundaries but didn’t care. (On the tax front, the UK’s plan to introduce a General Anti-Avoidance Rule is designed to punish just these characters.) Such power is, of course, liable to abuse. But that’s just the way things unavoidably are. The solution is not to pretend that we can make the rules work perfectly, but to make sure the enforcers are genuinely democratically accountable and removable.

Oh Christ. IMAGINATIVE EMPATHY FAIL. The imaginative empathy fail button at CT headquarters is turning around and blaring and stuff and I am sick so I don’t have time to deal with this plus it’s an annoying sound. Everyone, please try to imagine you are a poor person for at least 45 seconds at a minimum. Also, if you look at an 80-comment thread and only one commenter with a visibly female handle has said anything, would you please just, go get someone off the street or something, or like maybe the woman next to you at Starbucks, to comment? Don’t tell her it’s about libertarianism!! Don’t be hitting on her either. Unless you’ve got mad game like Kells. Tell her I asked you to. Anyway.

Do you know how becoming a Jesuit differs from taking on a job that is unpleasant? You don’t need to become a Jesuit to get money to buy food and clothes for your family! For real! You’re not even supposed to have a family! So is there an issue there, about whether one can potentially contract oneself to SeaOrg or the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and come out missing your freedom? Yes, and that is what separates cults from churches in most people’s mind. This could be an interesting sidebar discussion but it has nothing to say about the “putting up with awful things to have a job” issue.
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This post is mostly by way of trying to make Bertram, Robins and Gourvitch’s post sticky, as it deserves to stay at the top for a while. If you haven’t read their post yet, do so. If you are already reasonably conversant with their points, proceed under the fold, if you like, for what is really just a Hayek-inflected restatement and reinforcement of some of their main points. (Also, it’s effectively a late, long footnote to the Red Plenty seminar): [click to continue…]

[This post was co-written by Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch ]

“In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 79

Libertarianism is a philosophy of individual freedom. Or so its adherents claim. But with their single-minded defense of the rights of property and contract, libertarians cannot come to grips with the systemic denial of freedom in private regimes of power, particularly the workplace. When they do try to address that unfreedom, as a group of academic libertarians calling themselves “Bleeding Heart Libertarians” have done in recent months, they wind up traveling down one of two paths: Either they give up their exclusive focus on the state and become something like garden-variety liberals or they reveal that they are not the defenders of freedom they claim to be.

That is what we are about to argue, but it is based on months of discussion with the Bleeding Hearts. The conversation was kicked off by the critique one of us—Corey Robin—offered of libertarian Julian Sanchez’s presignation letter to Cato, in which Sanchez inadvertently revealed the reality of workplace coercion. Jessica Flanigan, a Bleeding Heart, responded twice to Robin. Then one of us—Chris Bertram—responded to Flanigan. Since then, the Bleeding Hearts have offered a series of responses to Chris and Corey.

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Today (the 28th, which it now is in Geneva) is the 300th birthday of Jean-Jacques Rousseau! It is fair to say that Jean-Jacques has divided people pretty sharply ever since he first came to public notice in 1749. There are those who love him, despite his madness, his misogyny and his occasional penchant for alarming political formulations, and there are those who loathe him as the progenitor of totalitarianism. For what it’s worth, I’m in the first camp.

Rousseau’s genius is to have perceived that the gains of modernity were accompanied by significant loss. He was obsessed with the idea that as civilization has developed, we have acquired new needs, needs which exceed our capacity to satisfy them alone. From that dependence on others arises a threat to our freedom; from our living together with others springs a new self-consciousness and a sense of how we appear in the eyes of others. Dependence on others provides each of us with powerful incentives to get others to do what we want; our consciousness of how we appear to them leads us to yearn for their recognition, for their love and respect. But knowing that they too have an incentive to represent themselves to us in ways that get us to fulfil their material and recognitional needs, we are forever gripped by anxiety, jealousy and resentment. We, and others, are dancers in a terrible masked ball of inauthenticity, from which we cannot escape.

Or maybe we can. Maybe we can be educated so that our sense of self-esteem is less dependent on the opinion of others. Maybe we can bring into being a social form in which each of us is secure in the recognition of our fellow citizens and in which we cease to be dependent on the whims of our fellows, but are subject instead to impartial laws that we ourselves have chosen.

That was Rousseau’s project, and it has not been without consequence: without Rousseau, no Kant, no Hegel, perhaps no Marx or Nietzsche; without Rousseau perhaps also no Robespierre (though he would have rejected as laughable the Jacobin claim to incarnate the general will). But we also should not forget, on his birthday, his contributions to music and literature, the beauty and pain of his autobiographical writings, and his sensibility to nature and contribution to the science of botany.

Happy birthday Jean-Jacques.

On Unfogged, Lizardbreath continues the ‘fuck me or you’re fired’ debate

bq. The Crooked Timber discussion is pretty good, with attention to issues of abuse of power, and how sex work is fundamentally different from other work, so even if you think it should be legal, there should be more protections for sex workers. What I found interesting, though, is a simple point that’s implicit but not really highlighted in the CT conversation: that using consent as a baseline rule of thumb for determining whether someone is being wrongfully mistreated or injured in an interaction between people isn’t useful at all. … And while bringing sex into it helps drive my belief that there’s something wrong with quid pro quo harassment even where the victim consents, I don’t think there’s a specific sex-only problem with consent. Unpaid internships work just as well: in a tight labor market, you can get people who are willing to work hard and usefully without pay so that they have the experience for their resumes, and may be able to get paying work in the future. People who do this sort of unpaid work are clearly straightforwardly consenting to do it. They’re still being exploited by their employers, and an agreement to work for an employer for free, in the absence of an educational or charitable motive, is still the sort of thing that should be prohibited. Workplace safety rules? People will consent to take jobs knowing that they’re likely to get hurt — the workers’ knowledge and consent does not mean that it’s all right to leave the safety guards off the machine tools. … lack of consent can tell you there’s a problem, but the presence of consent doesn’t, by itself, give rise to any kind of presumption that an employment or other relationship is not a serious problem.

And, on email, by coincidence, Doug Henwood points me to this very interesting discussion of charter cities by David Ellerman.

bq. One of the interesting sidelights of the charter cities and seasteading debates is how they “out” the lack of any necessary connection between liberalism and democracy. As Mallaby puts it in the FT article about Romer: “In mild professorial language, [Romer] declares that poor countries should hand control of these new cities to foreign governments, which should appoint technocratic viceroys. The better to banish politics, there must be no city elections.”

bq. For classical liberalism, the basic necessary condition for a system of governance is consent. Consent could be to a non-democratic constitution which alienates the right of self-governance to some sovereign–which in the case of a charter city would be the technocratic viceroys, or their principals such as some well-meaning foreign governments. Consent plus free entry and exit suffice to satisfy the governance requirements of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism per se sees no moral necessity in democratic self-governance at all (with or without safeguards). Most modern libertarians are not “against” democracy; it nice if you have it (and it works well with safeguards) but it is also OK if you don’t have it but have a consent-based non-democratic governance regime with good rules and the possibility of exit.

Discuss.

What’s wrong with an employer saying to an employee (who needs the job, has bills to pay and kids to feed): “If you want to keep your job, you’d better let me fuck you”?

Rather like the wrongness of slavery, this strikes me as being one of those cases where my confidence that it is wrong outstrips my confidence in any of the explanations about why it is wrong, but, contemplating the case, I experience no great sense of puzzlement about its wrongness. But then, I’m not a libertarian.

I came across philosophical reflection on the issue at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians site after following a link from a Corey Robin posting on employers who insist that their workers piss themselves rather than take toilet breaks . This instance of private tyranny elicited a comment at Corey’s site from one of the “Bleeding-Heart Libertarian” crowd, Jessica Flanigan, deploring trade unions . An odd reaction to the case, you might think. Flanigan had herself written on workplace coercion at BHL , and, in the course of her discussion, commended Japa Pallikkathayil’s excellent paper on coercion at _The Philosophers’ Imprint_ .
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Over the last couple of years, Cosma Shalizi and I have been working together on various things, including, _inter alia_, the relationship between complex systems, democracy and the Internet. These are big unwieldy topics, and trying to think about them systematically is hard. Even so, we’ve gotten to the point where we at least feel ready to start throwing stuff at a wider audience, to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a paper we’re working on, which argues that we should (for some purposes at least), think of markets, hierarchy and democracy in terms of their capacity to solve complex collective problems, makes the case that democracy will on average do the job _a lot better_ than the other two ways, and then looks at different forms of collective information processing on the Internet as experiments that democracies can learn from. A html version is under the fold; the PDF version is here. Your feedback would very much be appreciated – we would like to build other structures on top of this foundation, and hence, really, _really_ want criticisms and argument from diverse points of view (especially because such argument is exactly what we see as the strength of democratic arrangements).

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Henry’s reading seems quite straightforward and I’m really not seeing why Vallier isn’t seeing it. Let’s take it slow and straighten the curves as we go. [click to continue…]

Via Martin O’Neill on FB, I see that reminiscences of Jerry Cohen by Philippe Van Parijs, John Roemer, Myles Burnyeat, Gideon Cohen and Tim Scanlon are now online (pdf). Enjoy.