Political Theory/Political Philosophy

John’s “post below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/02/16/a-long-dated-call/ reminds me of one of the odder conventions of American journalism. Because US journalists aren’t supposed to express their own opinions, they often need other people to express those opinions (or the opinions that will ‘balance’ out their story) for them, so that they can use quotes from these people to spin the interpretation of the facts in the one way or another. This leads to some very peculiar interview techniques from journalists. About two out of every three calls I get from journalists have a strong line in directly leading questions of the ‘would you agree that _x_ ‘ variety.

This is of course a minor example of a much more general phenomenon. A very large part of the communications and public relations industry is devoted to what you might call ‘opinion laundering’ – the job of disguising the origins of self-interested or otherwise problematic policy positions by getting apparently legitimate third parties to validate and repeat them. Which is why I get nervous every time I see a “survey”:http://www.edelman.com/trust/2009/ that purports to tell us that academics are the most trusted interlocutors on this or that issue. While this may sound very nice, it increases the relative returns to using academics as flacks rather than some other profession, and hence “helps screw up further”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/16/ghostwritten/ a set of professional norms that are valuable ones to have.

So we’ve finally arrived at Chapter 3 in Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality. In Chapter 3, ‘The Basic Structure Objection’, he aims to show that principles of distributive justice apply to people’s legally unconstrained choices. Rawls, whose theory of justice is his main target in this book, has famously argued that the primary subject of justice is what he calls ‘the basic structure of society’, being “the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation” (TJ Rev Ed p. 6). Cohen’s critique on Rawls is that the principles of justice should also apply to choices which are left open by the rules of those institutions.

As with other chapters in this book, this chapter is also more or less a reprint, from his 1997 article ‘Where the Action is: on the site of distributive justice’. So the claims Cohen makes here are not new, and have already been debated. So let me just pick up a few points (hopefully not too idiosyncratic) that either struck me or particularly interested me. [click to continue…]

We’ve been discussing here at CT many, many times issues related to justice, care and the family, so I thought some of you may want to know that I’m organising a conference on that theme with some truly world-class scholars in this area. Information below the fold. There is a strictly limited number of seats, so if you’re interested, then immediate registration is highly recommended.
[click to continue…]

We aren’t up to Part II of Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality, but I’m going to jump the gun. There’s this bit about something from Amartya Sen – ‘his celebrated Prude/Lewd example’ – which I had never heard tell of. I’ll quote Cohen’s narration of the case:

There exists a pornographic book that might be read by one or other, or neither (but not both), of Prude and Lewd.

Let’s pause to admire that sentence. I think that is a great first sentence for a novel, or at least a Donald Barthelme story. (But I’m getting ahead of the story.) [click to continue…]

Update: please feel free to use the exercise below, or any adaptation thereof, with or without attribution, if you find it useful. (Prompted to post this by a conversation at Laura’s).

One of the first times I taught about the gendered division of labour in my Contemporary Moral Issues course, a student articulately challenged the relevance of the issue to her. I had assigned the key chapter of Susan Okin’s classic Justice, Gender, And The Family, which argues that the gender system is in violation of fair equality of opportunity, because girls are socialized to be carers (and boys aren’t), therefore end up disproportionately in caring (and therefore lower paid) labour, and, because they take the lion’s share of the burden of caring labour in the home, end up lower paid than their spouses; and yet face a high probability of a divorce after which they will not be able to share in their spouse’s greater earning power (I disagree with Okin about Rawls, but agree with her that if the mechanisms she identifies are at work there is a social injustice — more on that another time). For her empirical case, she relies heavily on Lenore Weitzman’s study of divorce. My student said this research was not relevant to her generation. Putting aside the methodological worries about Weitzman’s study, I was rather unnerved to figure out on the spot that the women she studied were in the generation of my students’ grandparents. I wouldn’t want to draw conclusions about my own life course from studies of my grandparent’s generation either, especially if I had had it drummed into me both by parents and teachers that my own circumstances were entirely different from those of my grandparents, and even more if I were aware (as some of the girls are) that so soon after admitting girls as equal participants universities now have to practice affirmative action for boys in admissions to get close to equal sex-ratios. I pointed this out, and then, again on the spot, tried to figure out a way of showing that the issues, if not the figures, probably are relevant to my students nevertheless. I was pretty happy that in 5 minutes I had them convinced that at least it might be relevant. Here is a slightly refined version of the exercise.

[click to continue…]

Brink Lindsey has a “post”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/02/04/brink-lindsey/partisanship-still-half-empty/ at _Cato Unbound_ criticizing Nancy Rosenblum’s “work on partisanship”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/02/02/nancy-rosenblum/the-moral-distinctiveness-of-party-id (I’ll be contributing to the seminar myself in due course).

she cites findings from the political science literature that independents tend to be less interested in politics, less informed about the issues, and less likely to participate in the process than are their partisan fellow citizens … All fair enough. Yet knocking independents down a peg doesn’t change the fact that partisanship in America today is a dreadful mess. … under present circumstances at least, partisan zeal ought to be attacked rather than defended.

I’ll confine my bill of indictment to two charges. First, partisanship undermines clear thinking. Second, it undermines moral integrity. In both cases, the root cause is the same: the conflation of friend and foe with right and wrong. … partisans are vulnerable to believing fatuous nonsense. … their beliefs, whether sensible or otherwise, about a whole range of empirical questions are determined by their political identity. There’s no epistemologically sound reason why one’s opinion about, say, the effects of gun control should predict one’s opinion about whether humans have contributed to climate change or how well Mexican immigrants are assimilating — these things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Yet the fact is that views on these and a host of other matters are indeed highly correlated with each other. …

Even when partisans know what the score is, they’re constantly tempted to shade the truth, or at least keep silent, in order to be a good team player. Recall, for example, the fury unleashed this past fall on the handful of conservative commentators who were willing to admit the obvious: Sarah Palin was obviously, embarrassingly unprepared for the office she was seeking.

[click to continue…]

When I picked my wife up from work the other day, she told me about a (teenage, black) kid in afterschool. He was trying to do his homework on the computer, and she sat with him as he worked. She pointed out that his sentences were very good, and asked some questions, eliciting further sentences. He wouldn’t look at her, and didn’t believe that his sentences were good. He mumbled “I’d be doing it on my own”. “What”. “At my house. I’d be doing it on my own. No help in my crib”. She understood that he was thanking her.

Now, Lemuel and Righteous kindly alert me to a wonderful and old passage from Dinesh D’Souza:

Equal opportunity seems like a logical fulfillment of the equality principle in the Declaration of Independence. Yet it is an ideal that cannot and should not be realized through the actions of the government. Indeed, for the state to enforce equal opportunity would be to contravene the true meaning of the Declaration and to subvert the principle of a free society. Let me illustrate. I have a five-year-old daughter. Since she was born–actually, since she was conceived–my wife and I have gone to great lengths in the Great Yuppie Parenting Race. At one time we even played classical music while she was in the womb. Crazy us. Currently the little rogue is taking ballet lessons and swim lessons. My wife goes over her workbooks. I am teaching her chess.

Why are we doing these things? We are, of course, trying to develop her abilities so that she can get the most out of life. The practical effect of our actions, however, is that we are working to give our daughter an edge–that is, a better chance to succeed than everybody else’s children. Even though we might be embarrassed to think of it this way, we are doing our utmost to undermine equal opportunity. So are all the other parents who are trying to get their children into the best schools, the best colleges, and in general give them the best possible upbringing and education. None of them believes in equal opportunity either!

Now, to enforce equal opportunity, the government could do one of two things: it could try to pull my daughter down, or it could work to raise other people’s children up. The first is clearly destructive and immoral, but the second is also unfair. The government is obliged to treat all citizens equally. Why should it work to undo the benefits that my wife and I have labored so hard to provide? Why should it offer more to children whose parents have not taken the trouble?

There are numerous errors here, some, but not all, of which Timothy Noah’s comments briefly point out. Here are a few. First, it is entirely possible to believe in equal opportunity while pursuing maximal advantage for one’s own kid. For example, one might not make the mistake of believing that when two values conflict in a particular circumstance, the one that should give way has no value at all. Or one might believe that one’s own actions are morally suspect. Second, it does not follow from the fact that parents should have some freedom to pursue the good of their children, that they should be free to do whatever they want to pursue the good of their children. Would D’Souza be justified in bribing a jury to get his (innocent) daughter off a drug charge? Third, there are numerous reasons why the government should offer more to “the children whose parents have not taken the trouble”. For example, the fact the equality of opportunity is valuable. Or the fact that it is wrong to allow misery to persist that one can relatively easily, and costlessly alleviate. What freedom of D’Souza’s or his child’s, exactly, was the government undermining when it paid my wife to sit with that kid the other day? Fish in a barrel? Sure, but while almost no-one makes all of D’Souza’s mistakes at once, many people make one or another of them. [1]

Anyway, this is mainly an excuse for some shameless self-and-other promotion. Swift and I, regrettably ignorant of D’Souza, nevertheless point out his errors at great length in a paper we have just published legitimate parental partiality. It seems not to require a sub, or registration. I’m rather proud of it, more so than I would dare to be of anything I had done on my own. But then, of course, it’s much better than if I’d been doing it on my own.

[1] Note that I have refrained from worrying about his daughter’s well being on the grounds that with parents like that one might become very materially successful but an emotional cripple. That’s because I imagine he’s exaggerating the repulsiveness of his behaviour for effect, and if I’m wrong at least she’ll have funds to pay for therapy.

Like Chris, I don’t find a lot in Chapter 2 of Cohen’s book that I didn’t already find in Chapter 1. It seems an attempt to make the basic argument more sharp and technical, without actually making it more plausible or clear. No harm done, I suppose.

So let me try to make a different sort of connection, ripped from the headlines. Cohen is concerned that a certain sort of ‘kidnap’ case makes trouble for Rawls. Basically, the trouble is this: you might describe a policy of paying off kidnappers as prudent – wise, rational – but you wouldn’t call it just or fair. There is a problem using actual kidnap cases to illustrate, because they tend to get lurid in irrelevant ways. And it may seem tendentious to port conclusions about kidnap cases directly over to the tax and social policy system. It invites the question: are you just assuming that capitalism amounts to mass kidnapping? It occurs to me that our contemporary bailout worries provide better and clearer illustrations of what Cohen is really getting at. So here goes. [click to continue…]

I invite you to put on your creative thinking caps and participate in the book cover contest now running over at Worth1000 for my methods edited volume called Research Confidential. The winner receives $150 and the chance to have the design show up as the book cover.

You may recall the thread here a while back regarding the book’s title. I received many great suggestions. In the end, an idea I got from Jonathan Zittrain won out. That said, the subtitle “Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have” came from a suggestion on that CT thread submitted by reader Vivian.* Many thanks to both! (In fact, many thanks to all who participated in that helpful thread and convinced me to abandon my original idea.)

The title is not the only idea for which I owe JZ thanks. I’m following in his footsteps by running a contest for the cover design. His book on The Future of the Internet – And How To Stop It ended up with its cool cover this way.

The contest page gives a brief summary of the book and some ideas I have for a cover design although I’m very eager to see all sorts of other suggestions. The site also lists technical specifications for submissions. The contest runs for a week. If you can think of friends who are good at this sort of thing, please pass the word along. And thanks to my publisher, The University of Michigan Press, for supporting this idea.

[*] A note to reader Vivian: I’ve tried to figure out who you are so I could contact you and see how you felt about having your full name included in the book’s Acknowledgments. Please let me know your thoughts on this.

I’ve mentioned Nancy Rosenblum’s _On the Side of the Angels_ a few times here; for those who are interested, Jacob Levy has organized a “seminar”:http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/search/label/Rosenblum-symposium that will be hosting responses to the book from Jacob, Melissa Schwartzberg, Maria, Marin, Andrew Rehfeld, Patrick Dineen, Nadia Urbinati and me (some are up there; others, including Rosenblum’s responses, will be posted over the next day or two). I will also be contributing to an entirely separate seminar on the book at _Cato Unbound._ Jacob mentions in his introductory post that CT helped pioneer this way of discussing books (nb the word ‘helped;’ doubtless there are others out there who had the same idea) – it’s nice to see that it is beginning to take off among academics more generally. While I don’t think that blogs and similar forms of online publication will ever replace conventional journals, I could see them replacing traditional academic book reviews, given their advantages of speed, dialogic component etc.

John Crowley’s piece on Thomas Disch, which I blogged about previously, is now “available online”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR34.1/crowley.php. Also of interest is _Ghost Ship_, one of Disch’s last poems, which Crowley quotes in its totality, and which is surely one of the few poetical treatments of an online comment section.

There must be many other such derelicts—
orphaned, abandoned, adrift for whatever reason—
but few have kept flying before the winds
of cyberspace so briskly as Drunk Driver
(the name of the site). Anonymous (the author)
signed his last entry years ago, and more years passed
before the Comments began to accrete
like barnacles on the hull of a ship
and then in ever-bifurcating chains
on each other. The old hulk became
the refuge of a certain shy sort
of visitor, like those trucks along the waterfront
haunted by lonely souls who could not bear
eye-witness encounters. They could leave
their missives in the crevices of this latter-day
Wailing Wall, returning at intervals
to see if someone had replied, clicking
their way down from the original message—

_April 4. Another gray day. Can’t find the energy to get the laundry down to the laundry room. The sciatica just won’t go away._

—through the meanders and branchings
of the encrusted messages, the tenders
of love for a beloved who would never know herself
to have been desired, the cries of despair,
the silly whimsies and failed jokes, to where
the thread had last been snapped,
only to discover that no, no one had answered
the question posed. Because,
no doubt, there was no answer.
Is there an “answer” to the war
wherever the latest war is going on?
If one could get under the ship
and see all those barnacles clinging
to the keel, what a sight it would be.
Talk about biodiversity! But on deck,
so sad, always the same three skeletons,
the playing card nailed to the mast,
frayed and fluttering weakly, like some huge insect
the gods will not allow to die.

There’s been a “serious”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/the_best_jobs_and_the_worst.html “debate”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/ivory_tower_sexytime.html at the “other place where I blog”:https://www.crookedtimber.org over whether academia in general, and political science in particular is a sexy profession. I’m glad to say that we actually have Real Social Scientific Data¹ that we can bring to bear on this topic. In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson “conducted research”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918283 that sought to establish, _inter alia_ how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines. My estimable colleague John Sides prepared a nice graph of the Felton et al. data (see below).

Three important research findings leap out from this picture.

First – that academic disciplines are, without exception, more ‘not’ than ‘hot.’ When adjusted positive and negative hotness scores are totted up against each other, no discipline does better than – 0.062 (Languages). Thus, the main hypothesis of “Careerbuilder et al. 2009”:http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-1737-Job-Info-and-Trends-10-Sexy-Careers-You-Never-Thought-Of/?sc_extcmp=JS_1737_hotmail1&SiteId=cbmsnhm41737&ArticleID=1737&GT1=23000&cbRecursionCnt=1&cbsid=3af4ed160fc34141a4e6546d5cc61da3-284680908-R9-4 is decisively refuted.

Second, the above proviso aside, political scientists are pretty damn hot in comparative terms. We rank as number 5, trailing only languages, law, religion and criminal justice. From eyeballing the data, it looks as though there is a minor discontinuity right after political science, where the hotness lurches down a notch, and another, more significant one between psychology (at number 10) and finance (at number 11).

Third, economists are, without any jot, tittle, scintilla or iota of doubt or ambiguity, the notties rather than the hotties of the social sciences (coming 30th out of 36). Tough luck, John. Sociologists are sixth (heh), philosophers come in at number 9 (which is a perfectly respectable score, I suppose), and English professors are middlin’, at number 12 in the ranking.

(An earlier version of this post appeared at “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org)

¹ Real Social Scientific Data is a term of art here, meaning ‘statistics that are sufficiently entertaining and gratifying² that I really don’t want to look at them too hard.’ This understanding of data is very commonly applied in the public sphere of learned debate although it is, perhaps surprisingly, rarely spelled out in explicit terms. I note in passing that some commenter at the Monkey Cage wants to control for differences in sex ratios between professors and students and similar irrelevant persnickets. All I want to say to this pedant (whom I suspect to be a jealous chemistry professor or denizen of a similarly low-ranked discipline) is _political science is number 5! Suck on it._

² In a collective rather than individual sense (I don’t imagine that I’m pulling my discipline’s score up).

Disclaimer: oddly, given my interests, I’ve never read much G.A. Cohen before picking up Rescuing Justice and Equality for this little event. (I understand his friends call him ‘Gerry’, but I won’t presume, on such slight acquaintance.) This matters only because my reading of the book is still preliminary and a bit scattershot. I’m not sure I get it. Also, I typed this post out like a maniac, just for the exercise of it. Also, I’m writing this post without access to my Rawls books, which I forgot to bring home, so I can’t quote. Well, I’m sorry about that. So stuff I say that is just plain wrong should be corrected in comments, without anger if you please. And we’ll just do our best, shall we? Also, I’m about to go on vacation for a few days, but I promised to participate. Also, I’m about to embark on an internet-free weekend getaway. Hence will not be very helpful in comments myself. Best I can do.) [click to continue…]

Melissa Schwartzberg at Columbia and I have an essay in the new issue of “Ethics and International Affairs”:http://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/index.html on the ways in which norms structure majority-minority relations on Wikipedia and the Daily Kos. The journal has made it “freely available online here”:http://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/22_4/essays/002.html.

Building on case studies of Wikipedia and the Daily Kos, we make three basic claims. First, we argue that different kinds of rules shape relations between members of the majority and of the minority in these communities in important and consequential ways. Second, we argue that the normative implications of these consequences differ between online communities that seek to generate knowledge, and which should be tolerant of diversity in points of view, and online communities that seek to generate political action, which need less diversity in order to be politically efficacious. Third, we note that an analysis of the normative desirability of this or that degree of tolerance needs to be tempered with an awareness that the actual rules through which minority relations are structured are likely the consequence of power relations rather than normative considerations.

The other lead essay is “Michael Walzer on democracy promotion”:http://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/22_4/essays/001.html, which should keep Daniel entertained …