Political Theory/Political Philosophy

Brief thoughts about that Bill Keller op-ed on candidates’ religions, and the kerfuffle that kicked up. But only by way of kicking off in the direction of what’s really going on here. The religion stuff needs a more general frame.

Keller is just being reasonable. If candidates say ‘my faith is a private matter and all that need concern the voters is how I will conduct myself in office,’ fine. But if candidates play up faith, for political advantage; if they announce that their religious views and values inform their political views and policy proposals, then obviously that makes religion fair game. Because in politics, your politics has to be fair game. Keller’s critics suggest that arriving at any such conclusion is tantamount to proposing something like a religious test for public office. Or worse! It’s an attempt to ban Christians from public life! But no. He’s only ruling out one or another of a couple possible norms that are so absurd that no one would ever advocate them explicitly. That you can’t fault politicians for concealing their policy objectives, so long as the politicians favor the policy on religious grounds. Or that you can’t fault politicians’ policy proposals, period, so long as they advocate the policy on religious grounds. Something like that. That’s nuts, so Keller is just being reasonable.

But, like I said, I don’t think this is the right way to think about this issue. For one thing, it misses that the religious case is just a special case of a more general phenomenon. Let me switch over to a question Kevin Drum asked last week: why do Republicans get a free pass? He’s absolutely right that they do. [click to continue…]

Last April, Martha Nussbaum’s book Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach came out. Too late for being included in my entry on the capability approach at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but I’m immediately making up for that omission since I’m working on a book review for the Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews. My verdict? It’s a useful introduction for undergrads and policy makers, but given its length it doesn’t (and cannot) have much depth. (for me, that’s not a criticism: it’s by definition almost impossible for introductory books that cover such a broad range of disciplines to have much, if any, depth). Yet I think it is somewhat more problematic that something is missing that many undergraduates and most policy makers reading this book will want to know, since it doesn’t cover the empirical work being done. Hence the book also ignores all the questions related to measurement, which is, in my experience, the #1 question asked by economists who want to understand this framework, and by policy makers looking for an answer to the question whether the approach has any bite.

One could be inclined to believe that this is merely a teaching book, and it is with that assumption that I read it; yet there is also something in there for scholars of the approach. They will also discover some new claims and statements – some of which I endorse, and some of which I contest.
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This is just a short post seeking, for the purposes of mutual clarification, to highlight where I think the real differences lie between someone like me and “left neoliberals” like Matt Yglesias. I think that something like Yglesias’s general stance would be justifiable if you believed in two things: (1) prioritarianism in the Parfit sense and (2) that real (that is, inflation adjusted) income levels reliably indicate real levels of well-being, at least roughly. For those who don’t know, prioritarianism is a kind of weighted consequentialism, such that an improvement in real well-being counts for more, morally speaking, if it goes to someone at a lower rather than a higher level of well-being. So prioritarism is a bit like a utilitarianism that takes a sophisticated and expansive view of utility and weights gains to the worse-off more highly. This view assigns no instrinsic importance to inequality as such. If the best way to improve the real well-being of the worst off is to incentize the talented (thereby increasining inequality) then that’s the right thing to do.
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I’ve been writing series of posts examining the question – what is left of Marxism, as a way to understand the world, and as a way to change it, once it is accepted that capitalism is not going to be overthrown by a working class revolution. The first was about class and the second about crisis. Now for the final instalment: capital.

By the way, the first post got translated into Spanish, here. It’s one of the things that I still find stunning about the Internet that things like this can happen.

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Quick thoughts in response to Yglesias’ ‘against character’ post. Zoning laws are a perfect example of an area in which it is hard to come up with good, principled, liberal answers – classically liberal, that is – that don’t reduce to absurdity. Richard Epstein philosophizes with a hammer about this, with the air of one delicately operating with a scalpel. Pretty much everything the government does should count as a ‘taking’. For a more winning defense of zoning libertarianism, see Daniel Pinkwater, The Big Orange Splot [amazon] – video here. It’s interesting that conservatives have never sought to open a permanent culture war front against zoning regulations. It seems like a perfect opportunity for a toxic mix of dog-whistles, pandering to bad actors, and all-around irritable gestures seeking to resemble ideas, while managing to be wedge issues. All this irritation, around a grain of truth, can produce scholarly pearls, such as Epstein’s classic book, which in a certain sense expresses an all-American conservative dream. Because, after all, Yglesias is quite right that it doesn’t make much sense, either in philosophic principle or economic practice, for zoning regulations to be so conservative a lot of the time (in the etymological sense of ‘conservative’, not the American political sense.) Possibly only the fact that Pinkwater’s Plumbean is obviously a Big Hippy has preserved us from an Epsteinian slippery slope, in polemical, culture war practice. Conservatives could do with astroturf Joe the Plumbeans, if only they could find them. Someone who can dump a big orange splot of pollution, while declaiming, like Walt Whitman, “My backyard is me and I am it! My backyard is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams!” Take that, ‘neat street’ zombie liberal clones! That would substantially confuse the issue, in ways that are really philosophically unresolvable. (Bonus style points if you can somehow connect Plumbean with Pruneyard without looking like you are trying way too hard, as I clearly am.)

Defenders of Epstein will note, correctly, that his view is very nuanced and he wouldn’t by any means say everyone gets to dump whatever toxic splot they want, so long as it’s their land. Quite right! Epstein’s philosophy would give a much more sensible resolution to the ‘nuisance’ posed by the Plumbean case than probably any existing zoning laws in the land. Granted. My point is different. Epstein combines exquisite theoretical sophistication with crude anti-New Deal contrarianism (in my opinion). Given the bottomless appetite for the latter, among American conservatives, it’s interesting that there isn’t a dumbed-down, popular talk radio talking point version of Epstein’s philosophy, minus the intellectually worthwhile bits, in constant circulation. It seems like a missed opportunity for debasing the discourse. Again, maybe it’s just that Plumbean is a Big Hippy. What do you think?

UPDATE: I suppose I should have linked to the Wikipedia summary of the plot. For the busy, executive reader of CT who needs the bullet point version of Pinkwater’s classic children’s picture book.

As promised in my previous post, I’m setting up a separate thread for discussion of my premise that a socialist revolution is neither feasible nor desirable. My own thoughts, taken from an old post are over the fold.

UpdateI’ve updated to link to the earlier post remove an unjustifiably snarky reference to aristocratic sentiment and to include a para from the previous post, on situations where revolutions are likely to turn out well.
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I’ve mentioned Erik Olin Wright’s Envisaging Real Utopias a couple of times, and I’ve also been reading David Harvey’s Enigma of Capital and Jerry Cohen’s if You’re an Egalitarian How Come you’re so Rich. In different ways, all these books raise the question: what becomes of Marxism if you abandon belief in the likelihood or desirability of revolution[1]? To give the shorter JQ upfront, there are lots of valuable insights, but there’s a high risk of political paralysis.

I plan alliteratively, to organise my points under three headings: Class, Capital and Crisis, and in this post I’ll talk about class

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Recently Pajamas Media’s own Anthony Klavan got some attention in the blogosphere with his moronic provocative contention that men’s bad behavior, ranging from tweeting pictures of their tighty-whities to serial forcible rape, is all the fault of…women!

I blame women. No, really. Women — by which I mean each and every single member of the female gender — you know who you are — need look no further than themselves to explain why Weiner-types behave toward them in this fashion. We men are always hearing complaints from women about how badly we treat them, what pigs we are, how pushy and abrasive… on and on. But what these same women conveniently fail to mention is that this stuff really works on them!….
So, then, ladies — what do you expect? All we guys want is for you to love us. If this is the sort of guy you follow after in droves, this is the sort of guy we’re encouraged to be.

Now, it’s very likely that I’ll be assassinated by a crack team of female ninjas before I can hit “post” (they are all hot 22-year old Japanese women who may also subject me to intensive questioning, should anyone in the Valley be at a loss for movie ideas.) But I am about to reveal a huge secret here: OPPEC. That is, Other People’s Pussy Economic Consortium. Note that the “People” who own the pussy in this case are the women themselves, contrary to traditional usage. But think about it: women, taken as a whole, have control of all the pussy in the world. That is some valuable assets right there. What could be more natural than the formation of a cartel?
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[Colleagues in the United States are used to the phenomenon where academic lectures and reading lists get pored over by Republican politicians and “operatives” keen to undermine academic freedom and redbait intellectuals. But it is sad and shocking that in the UK, Denis MacShane MP, who was elected to Parliament as a Labour Party candidate, has recently indulged in the same kind of thing. The Association of Political Thought has now issued a statement about MacShane’s behaviour and it is to be hoped that he now does the right thing, and issues a full apology to the scholar concerned, Anne Phillips. I was very pleased to be able to add my name to the list of signatories. CB ]

Denis MacShane and the LSE reading list: a statement from the Association of Political Thought

During the debate on Human Trafficking on 18 May 2011 (Hansard Col 94WH) Denis MacShane MP, quoting from the list of essay titles for an academic political theory course at the London School of Economics, accused a distinguished professor, Anne Phillips FBA, of being unable to tell the difference between waged work and prostitution, and of filling the minds of students ‘with poisonous drivel’. Fiona McTaggart MP agreed, accusing Phillips of holding ‘frankly nauseating views on that issue’. 

The ineptitude of this exchange – which is now forever on the official record – is extraordinary. Students are asked why we should distinguish between the sale of one’s labour and the sale or letting of one’s body. That condones neither the latter nor the former. It encourages students to reflect on how to draw an important line between things appropriate and things inappropriate for market exchange.  Asking such questions, far from being ‘nauseating’, is central to public debate about policy and legislation.  If Members of Parliament cannot tell the difference between an essay problem and an assertion of belief how can we trust them to legislate effectively?

Parliamentary debate is a cornerstone of our constitution and political culture. However, using the privilege of a Parliamentary platform ignorantly to traduce the reputation of a teacher of political theory is a dereliction of office.

[signatories below the fold.]
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Will Hutton had a piece in the Observer a week ago about immigration policy in the course of which he made the following remark:

bq. the European left has to find a more certain voice. It must argue passionately for a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment.

I’m not sure who this “European left” is, but, given the piece is by Hutton, I’m thinking party apparatchiks in soi-disant social democratic and “socialist” parties, often educated at ENA or having read PPE at Oxford. I’m not sure how many battalions that “left” has, or even whether we ought to call it left at all. Anyway, what struck me on reading Hutton’s remarks was that calls for the “left” to do anything of the kind are likely to founder on the fact that the only thing that unites the various lefts is hostility to a neoliberal right, and that many of us don’t want the kind of “good capitalism” that he’s offering. Moreover in policy terms, in power, the current constituted by Hutton’s “European left” don’t act all that differently from the neoliberal right anyway. In short, calls like Hutton’s are hopeless because the differences of policy and principle at the heart of the so-called left are now so deep that an alliance is all but unsustainable. That might look like a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. Assuming that what we care about is to change the way the world is, the elite, quasi-neoliberal “left” has a spectacular record of failure since the mid 1970s. This goes for the US as well, where Democratic adminstrations (featuring people such as Larry Summers in key roles) have done little or nothing for ordinary people. Given the failures of that current, there is less reason than ever for the rest of us to line up loyally behind them for fear of getting something worse. Some speculative musings, below the fold:
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I almost admire Ron Paul for sticking to his propertarian guns, even when he knows it’s going to cost him. All the same, I wish the next person who gets to play the Chris Matthews role could manage to make it cost him a bit more, maybe like so:

“Jim Crow was a legal institution but also a social institution. Both functioned to deprive African-Americans of what all Americans today would consider basic liberties. Your libertarian philosophy commits you to dismantling the legal institution, but also commits you to prohibiting legal dismantlement of the social side of Jim Crow. This means one difference between you, as a libertarian, and the liberals who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is that you are, in at least one important sense, less committed to guaranteeing individual liberty. You hope everyone will be free, but your libertarianism actually forbids you from fully guaranteeing basic liberties, in the no-Jim-Crow sense all Americans now take for granted. Is that right?”

That’s too many words, but I think it does a better job of pre-empting Paul’s responses: one, protesting he’s no racist; two, just expressing optimism that the market would somehow have caused the social problems to disappear, if there were no legal Jim Crow; three, saying it’s ancient history. Of course, boxing in Ron Paul is not the most vital task of the hour, probably. But it would be good if libertarians – tea party types generally – had more of an uphill slog, due to the fact that the liberty they want to guarantee is not quite the liberty Americans tend to assume should be guaranteed.

For students of agnotology there is no more striking finding than the observation that many people, presented with evidence that undermines a strongly held belief, react as if that belief had been confirmed[1]. This seems to undermine any possibility that evidence will ever settle political disputes. And yet, evidence does seem to seep through in the end. Although belief in Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction persisted long after the absence of evidence had turned into clear evidence of absence, it faded away in the end (not that it has completely disappeared even now).

As a slightly more optimistic take on the experimental evidence, I offer the example of Santa Claus. Young children, presented with the suggestion that Santa isn’t real, blithely ignore it. Slightly older children, though, react in exactly the manner of the experimental subjects, reaffirming their belief in the Santa story and (of course) the associated presents. Later, of course, they accept the truth.

In some social contexts children are likely draw the obvious analogy between Santa and God, while in other contexts, the distinction between the two beliefs is maintained successfully. But regardless of context, there is an obvious risk, for those who would like their children to grow up as theists, in insisting too hard on the reality of Santa.

Similarly, I suspect that the apparent success of Republicans in believing six impossible things before breakfast, and in taking up new delusions as old ones are abandoned, may mask an underlying erosion of faith. Birtherism may morph into torturism without any obvious sign of stress, but at some level people must gradually become aware that their political beliefs are more like the faith that belief in Santa will bring presents and less like the belief that kicking a rock will give you a stubbed toe.

fn1. The general phenonomen of confirmation bias (paying attention to evidence that supports your belief and disregarding contradictory evidence) is well established. The first finding of reinforcement Nyhan and Riefler find that Democrats ignore contradictory evidence, while Republicans respond in the way I described. I can’t find the study that supported this. Nyhan and Riefler cite earlier research by Redlawski that I haven’t been able to find.

Matthew Yglesias points to this Arthur Brooks piece, “Obama says it’s only ‘fair’ to raise taxes on the rich. He’s wrong.” Brooks says he’s shifting from the usual perverse consequences argument – if we tax the rich it will actually cost more money – to a fairness argument. But really it’s just a twistier iteration of the perverse consequences argument.

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Usually I half-agree with what Julian Sanchez has to say. But not in this case.

In a recent post, I suggested that claims about “desert” are generally misplaced in arguments about copyright—whether they are deployed on behalf of “deserving” small fry artists or against “undeserving” labels. As some commenters pointed out, there’s no obvious reason this argument should be restricted to the domain of copyright—and quite right. I think most areas of political philosophy and policy—theory of just punishment springs to mind as a possible exception—would be better off if we just scrapped the concept of “desert” entirely, and just spoke about what people are entitled to.

Here’s the difference, very roughly, in case this sounds like semantic hairsplitting. To say someone deserves X is to say that X is in some sense an appropriate or fair reward in light of that person’s morally virtuous qualities or conduct. To say that someone is entitled to X is just to say that the person has a just claim to X, without any implied commitment to some deeper claim about their moral merit.

Here’s his thesis, a paragraph or so further on: “I think political and policy discussions should concentrate on what people are entitled to, rather than on necessarily muddy attempts to determine (and embed in law) what people morally deserve.”

The post goes on at some length. Sanchez is at pains to confess that he is making a rather vague argument, not trying to nail anything down. But it seems to me 1) absolutely, completely hopeless; 2) a standing temptation to libertarians and conservatives; 3) worth shooting down hard. [click to continue…]