Political Theory/Political Philosophy

The FLDS incident has stirred up plenty of discussion in the blogosphere. Laura got so annoyed in her first thread that she, sensibly, shut it down, and then, equally sensibly, opened up a more general thread about when the government is justified in terminating parental rights. (See also Russell, here and here). I am uneasy about commenting much on the FDLS issue, mainly because I have not been following it as obssessively as I’d have needed to to feel comfortable. But I do have some observations about parental rights. These are partly drawn from my paper with Adam Swift, Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family (pdf, but free, and no registration required, at least as of now), so in what follows the usual Brighouse/Swift rule for anything I say that draws on our work — whatever you agree with credit him, whatever you disagree with blame me — applies (for the final, published, paper, we get joint credit/blame).

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I gave a couple of lectures on Hobbes last week, having volunteered a long time ago when doing so seemed like a breeze, then remembering rather late in the day that I hadn’t taught Hobbes for a while. Anyway, it all seemed to go pretty well but then a smart first-year student asked me a question that I’ve been puzzling about ever since. No doubt *real* Hobbes scholars have the answer all sorted (and if so, please tell me) but I wasn’t quite sure what to say. The problem is below the fold.

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I invited my political philosophy undergraduate class to attend the conversation about No Child Left Behind, and several of them came along. I told the students beforehand that it would be fun, because lots of people would be annoyed with what I had to say, and that certainly someone would accuse me of using a “deficit model” of poverty. The thing is, if you didn’t already know what the “deficit model” of poverty is, and heard the talk (which you can read here), you couldn’t discern that I was saying anything rude or insulting. So after I had spoken, I could see a couple of my students at the back puzzling at why anyone would give me a hard time. But then it came, second question, and I watched one of them open her eyes in thrilled disbelief, as if I were some sort of soothsayer. I’ll forward this link to her to apologise for giving her that impression.

How, my student may have wondered, could I have known that I would be accused of holding a deficit model of poverty?

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I suspect that I disagree with Eric (and very likely other CTites) on how we should think about academic freedom. To clarify this (and also to figure out better for myself why I think what I think), some propositions below. [click to continue…]

Following up my last rhythm-related YouTube post: who would win in a fight between Mighty Mr. Titan and Orgesticulanismus? (both via Cartoon Brew, at one time or another.)

If you are into that whole MST3K thing, the whole Cartoon Dump is worth your horrified gaze. (Titan is merely episode one.) Here [Big World of Little Adam] and here [Captain Fathom] and here [Spunky and Tadpole] and here [Bucky and Pepito] and here [Adventures of Sir Gee Whiz on the Far Side of the Moon]. I have to admit that, before seeing that last one, I had no idea Gee Whiz was an Irish name, nor that Irish accents came from the moon.

As a bonus I’ll throw in Buster Keaton in a 1964 Ford van ad.

Jeremy Waldron has a great piece in the latest LRB reviewing a recent book by Cass Sunstein. He has a nice discussion of the Cheney doctrine that even a one-percent probability of a catastrophic event should be treated as a certainty for policy purposes, where the class of catastrophic events is limited to those with a military, security or terrorist dimension. Reasoning like this interacts neatly with “ticking-bomb” scenarios: now a 1 per cent chance that the there’s a ticking bomb the terrorist knows about is sufficient in to justify waterboarding or worse. Of course other potentially catastrophic developments — such as climate change — haven’t generated a “treat as if certain” policy response from the US government, even thought even the most determined denialists must evaluate the probability that anthropogenic global warming is happening at greater than one in a hundred.

Waldron is also pretty acid about Sunstein’s treatment of global warming and distributive justice, noting some of the shortcomings of the idea that poor people’s lives should be valued according to what they’re prepared to pay to avoid the risk of death. But read the whole thing, as they say.

Normblog has published an argument by the Manchester political philosopher Jon Quong to the effect that national Olympic committees (and presumably states) would be justified in imposing a top-down boycott of the Beijing Olympics on their athletes. I don’t want to engage in the China-specific aspects of the argument here, but rather to note one of the steps in Jon’s argument, viz

bq. (2) We are each under a duty of justice not to participate in, or benefit from, projects or activities that involve violations of other people’s rights. _I assume this premise is uncontroversial_. [Emphasis added by CB]

Jon adds some further clarification of this point in the following step:

bq. (3) The duty described in (2) is very stringent, and it cannot be ignored on the grounds that doing so would prevent us from achieving something we very much desire to achieve, even if this means we will never get to achieve the thing in question. Here’s an example in support of this premise. One of the things I would most like to have done in my life was talk about political philosophy with John Rawls. Suppose, before Rawls died, I were invited to a dinner party where Rawls would be the guest of honour. But also suppose, unbeknownst to Rawls, that the host of this dinner party would be employing slave labour to work in the kitchen. I am under a duty not to go to the party, even if we are certain this represents the one and only chance I will ever have to talk philosophy with Rawls, and even though my non-attendance will not halt the party. If I went to the party I would be participating in, and benefiting from, a gross injustice, and the duty not to do so is more weighty than my desire to take the once in a lifetime opportunity to engage with Rawls.

I have to say that what Jon takes to be an uncontroversial premise strikes me as very questionable indeed, at least pending some further detail about what is to count as a “project”, an “activity” and “involvement”. It seems arguable that involvement in just about any major institution or in economic activity is going to violate this prohibition. Certainly, if you buy into even a part of Thomas Pogge’s arguments about the effect of global economic institutions on the poor, then all citizens of wealthy countries routinely breach it. Drink coffee? Eat fruit imported from a nation that violates rights? And what about the past? Most residents of countries with a history of imperialism or colonialism certainly benefit from past projects or activities that involve rights violations. Many current citizens benefit from the exclusion of would-be immigrants from labour markets in ways that also involve such violations. And we could add the ways in which our taxes contribute to the sustaining of our own governments which regularly breach human rights in various ways (think Belmarsh, Guantanamo).

Following Pogge, we might want to discuss how justice might require _compensation_ in some form for such involvement or benefit, or, possibly might require some action from us to oppose injustice. But the duty of non-participation, as Quong states, it strikes me as anything but uncontroversial.

I’m working on a co-authored paper on the notion of agency in Amartya Sen’s work. Agency as related to empowerment and autonomy, and not as an institution such as a real estate agent. Suddenly I recalled that when I was teaching on Sen in Louvain-la-Neuve two years ago, I was told that there is no word in French for ‘agency’. So now I am wondering: is this true? And if so, are there more languages that do not have a word for ‘agency’? (in fact, I even have a hard time to come up with an appropriate translation in Dutch). I checked it with “an internet translator”:http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr, which only translates it (for Dutch and French) as an institution, not as a property of human beings. Weird.

Two people I’ve read with interest and profit over the years: Stanford’s Joshua Cohen and Cato’s Brink Lindsey manage to have a very reasonable conversation on bloggingheads. Topics include Rawls on baseball, Obama and Wright, the McCain campaign. Check it out.

As some of you may know, David Reidy (Philosophy, University of Tennessee) is working on an intellectual biography of John Rawls. He has done research in the Rawls archive at Harvard which contains much, but not all, of his correspondence. He asks of anyone who might be willing to share with him their correspondence with Rawls – baseball-related or otherwise – to please contact him directly at: “dreidy [at] utk [dot] edu”.

I can’t resist a racing metaphor to describe the problem that’s now facing the US Democrats, but one that is a more-or-less generic problem for democracy. In any system of government, there is a problem of succession, which has a large contingent element. In monarchies, for example, the absence of an adult male heir can produce crises of all kinds (in England, this problem recurred in different forms for all the Tudors from Henry VIII onward). Dictators rarely nominate a capable successor until the last possible moment, so their sudden death often brings about the collapse of the regime. To avoid this, it’s common to see a quasi-hereditary succession which rarely works well, indeed, at all, for more than one generation.

In democracy, close election results can cause big problems, since there is always a range of uncertainty in which normally unimportant procedural decisions or rule violations become critical. Obvious recent examples include the Bush-Gore race in 2000, the Mexican election of 2006, the recent election in Kenya and now the Democratic nomination race. Such close races inevitably produce a lot of bitterness and can lead to disaster. At the moment it seemed as if the threatened breakdown of democracy in Kenya has been averted, but it’s by no means certain that the power-sharing agreement there will hold, and lots of people have already died. At a less drastic level, but one with big consequences for the world, it seem quite possible that the closeness of the race between Obama and Clinton will produce a vicious contest that sinks the eventual winner.

It’s tempting, and sometimes correct, to argue that the sharp divisions that emerge at times like these were there all along. But often this is no more valid than the kind of analysis which ascribes civil strife to “ancient ethnic hatreds” when these are, in reality, little more than rationalisations of contemporary power politics. Certainly, in the case of the Democratic nomination, it’s clear that the vast majority of Democrats would be happy with either candidate and likely that the majority would prefer an immediate end, regardless of the choice, to a continued contest.

Rather than reflecting deeper underlying problems, to a large extent, these succession crises really are problems of institutional design. Some kinds of institutions manage succession problems better than others. Confining attention to democratic systems (broadly defined), I’d argue that there are substantial benefits to simple and definite procedures. If US national elections (including primaries) were based on popular vote (whether first-past-the-post or instant runoff) the likelihood of a result so close as to permit serious dispute would be very small. By contrast, when the result is reached from 50 state ballots, each operating under local and variable rules, the only surprise is that crises are as rare as they are.

Via Lindsey, I read this paper by Simon Blackburn (pdf) which appears, again, in Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life edited by Louise Antony, and containing essays by 20 or so atheist philosophers. The collection is well worth reading. Its not as though it can have been difficult to find atheist philosophers who are willing to talk about their views, but netween them the contributors display a nice range of attitudes toward religion, including deep respect, envy, and outright hostility.

Blackburn’s chapter is, for the most part, an argument against versions of respect for religion that hinge on interpreting the claims of religious believers as not being the kinds of claim that can be true or false, and he makes that argument rather well. The point in dispute, though, is whether we can truly respect people who have what we regard to be false beliefs. He thinks not:

We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds.

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Russell has “a very rich post up”:http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2008/03/thoughts-on-kosovo-mill-and-walzer.html discussing some of the questions I raised in “two”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/26/the-kosovo-non-precedent/ “posts”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/29/kosovo-and-the-dark-side-of-democracy/ recently concerning self-determination, democracy, ethnicity and matters related. I’m a bit too busy to respond right now, so this is just a pointer. I hope to write something more in a few days.

This is obviously a terrible abuse of posting privileges to promote something that really ought to be a comment on Harry’s piece below, but whatcha gonna do? I just wanted to add a small note on a technical issue to do with his conclusion about our civic responsibilities:

When you vote, you have a very stringent obligation to deliberate responsibly about the effects of your vote, and about whether those effects are morally justifiable or not. You should deliberate about the moral issues at stake in the elections, and come to have a tentative, but warranted view, about what justice requires, as well as about what the likely effects of policies your candidate is likely to implement (and whether they are morally justified).

That sounds like pretty hard work doesn’t it? However, luckily the Condorcet Jury Theorem comes to our rescue. More or less the same mathematics which ensure that voting is a waste of time also ensure that as long as the average voter has a slightly better than 50% chance of making the right decision and the electorate is large enough, the majority vote will be correct in a two horse race (like a Presidential election; voters in multiparty democracies, do what Harry says). It’s one of those seeming informational free lunches which are the basis of the James Surowiecki’s book.

So, the full advice to potential voters would be that your civic duty is:

1. If you are a reasonably intelligent and responsible citizen, just kind of think for it a bit and make a snap decision, like Malcolm Gladwell says and you’ll probably be right.

2. If you are voting for an essentially completely frivolous reason which has nothing to do with the actual election (like, for example, P Diddy threatened you with death if you didn’t, or you thought it might get you a shag, or you want to commemorate people who died a hundred years ago), then toss a coin; you won’t be bringing the average below 50%.

3. If you’re so stupid that you nearly always cock it up, then follow the Costanza Principle and do the opposite of what you think you should do. Actually, people like that probably can’t be trusted to follow the principle properly, so you lot flip a coin too.

4. If you’re reasonably intelligent, but also a selfish bastard, then stay at home.

So there you go. Voting isn’t actually quite as onerous a social duty as it would seem, at least in two-horse races, so go on, make Stone Cold Steve Austin proud. Or not, as the case may be.