Political Theory/Political Philosophy

I’ve just finished reading Philip Kitcher’s new book Living With Darwin (UK). It is fantastic. He provides a careful but completely accessible defense of Darwin’s ideas about evolution, against the defenders of Intelligent Design theory. He also agrees with religious opponents of evolutionary theory that it is a genuine threat to a certain kind of religious belief. He calls this “providentialist” belief, on which “the universe was created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and is especially concerned for humanity”. Darwin really is a threat to their beliefs and, in a nice observation that he attributes to Christopher Peacock, Darwin is probably singled out because he is the only threat whose views get encountered in a systematic way by anyone who does not get an elite college education in the humanities (in the US especially). Voltaire, Hume, Kant, all might be seen as worse threats if anyone knew who they were.

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Thanks to everyone for the suggestions concerning anti-same-sex marriage readings for my contemporary moral issues course. I was quite nervous about the topic, because I anticipated very strong feelings among the students, especially because we discussed it in the wake of the entirely unsurprising to me but shocking to many of them success of the anti-same-sex-and-civil-unions amendment in November. I emphasized at the beginning of the segment that I wanted the full space of reasons to be explored, and encouraged them to look for both anti- and pro- arguments, and reminded them that when someone argues for a claim in class they should be taken just to be exploring a reason, so there should be no presumption that they are committed to an undesirable conclusion. All to no avail. Not one student was willing to speak up against same-sex marriage, despite the fact that an anonymous survey revealed that 15% of them are strongly opposed. Interestingly, and in my view rather optimistically, conversations that I had with a number of pro-same-sex-marriage students coming from the Wisconsin heartland revealed that their views were completely at odds with those of their parents (well, their fathers) but not those of their fellow high school students, including those who remained in the towns from which these students came. Is there good survey data about the distribution of opposition to same-sex-marriage across age groups?

I used Margaret Somerville’s The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage, Lee Harris’s The Future of a Tradition, and Stanley Kurtz’s The End of Marriage in Scandinavia. And the truth is that the case against same-sex marriage seems pretty weak, unless someone can come up with some much better papers. Fortunately, I had some disagreements with Ralph Wedgewood’s excellent pro-same-sex-marriage paper which we also used. But the anti-papers are not very strong at all. I’ll focus mainly on the Somerville paper, then make a couple of comments about the others.

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This is the first year that we’ve contributed to the local NPR affiliate. I listen to NPR a fair bit, and so does my wife, but, unlike her, I’d happily do without it myself. It enhances my life, but not in a way that I value enough that I would pay if they turned it into a subscription-only service (she made the contribution, then, obviously).

I probably spend a similar amount of time listening to BBC7. On my new website I mention that it could have been dreamed up just for me – the best of BBC radio’s irresponsibly depleted archives, and an old school friend of mine is their best presenter; a joy. I’d be embarrassed to admit how much I’d be willing to pay if they made it subscription-only.

So, what if some super-national governmental agency decided to charge me to pay for the enjoyment I get from NPR and BBC7? Would I have a reasonable complaint against it? Just to put one issue aside – I wouldn’t complain, in either case. But I think I would have a complaint in one case and not in the other. I’d have a complaint in the case of NPR because my relationship to NPR is like that of the shoemaker to the elves. They do something nice for me, which I enjoy, but I didn’t ask for it, and if I’d been offered the choice between paying for it or not getting it at all, I’d have chosen the latter. But BBC7 is quite different; not only do I plan around it, but if I’d had the choice between paying for it and not getting it I’d have chosen the former (at an embarrassingly high price).

So, I don’t think I’ve any complaint if they charge me for BBC7 but I do if they charge me for NPR. To say this is different from saying that the people who, in fact, pay for BBC7 and NPR, have a complaint against me if I don’t contribute. Suppose (counterfactually, but to keep the focus where I want it to be) that both are paid for entirely voluntarily by people who are producing them just for themselves and I only get the benefit from them because they don’t know how to exclude non-contributors. If the contributors are securing what they want at a price they are voluntarily paying, it might be a bit oafish of me to consume it without contributing when I could, but it is hard for me to see that I am doing something unjust to them. So my intuition is that even though there is no injustice when I do not contribute to the production costs of BBC7, there is no injustice, either, when I am forced to contribute as much as or less than I would have voluntarily contributed in order to secure access if that were the only way of doing it.

Am I right about this? I’m sure that David Schmidtz says something about it in The Limits of Government, and even surer that Tyler Cowen does in his wonderful In Praise of Commercial Culture, but some bugger walked off with my copies of both! And I’m impatient to hear your thoughts.

I’ll write a follow-up post explaining what this post is really about in a week or so.

Thanks, Chris. And thanks to the people who contributed to the excellent comment thread. Let me try to continue the discussion by attempting to clarify what I had in mind in the passage that Chris quotes.

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We CTers don’t agree about everything, and here’s a case in point. I was reading Jon’s excellent “Global Justice”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745630669/junius-20 the other day and was arrested by the following sentences:

bq. When we face the question of how state borders should be drawn, it would be utopian in the pejorative sense to consider carving up territories from an imaginary state of nature. That is not a problem we will ever face. Because the current world is already divided into states, the question we must face concerns the possibility of redrawing existing borders. (p. 89)

Here Jon is echoing, and, indeed, referencing, similar sentiments by other philosopher, including Allen Buchanan whose “Theories of Secession” I was reading about the same time. Of course I agree with them both that, as a practical problem, we’re never going to face the issue of justifying state acquisition of territory _ab initio_. But the task of political philosophy isn’t just to provide practical guidance, it is also to produce critical understanding, and, anyway, there’s the question of the moral attitude individuals ought to adopt to the territorial (and other) claims of states. States claim the moral right to coerce those within their territory, to prevent others from crossing their frontiers, to deport aliens etc etc. We may have to live with the territoriality of states as a fact of life, but depending on whether we think state claims are justified (or could be justified) we’ll think differently about the morality of people who try to cross borders and people who try to stop them (among other issues). We’ll also think differently about history. The rise of the modern state and the claim of states to jurisdiction (separately or communally) over the earth’s surface, has been at the expense of non-state forms of organization, of tribal peoples, of anarchists. Simply accepting the legitimacy of statist territorial claims shuts out the perspective of the losers in an disturbingly peremptory fashion.

One of the most annoying responses we get from our students is when we ask what (if anything) might justify some aspect of social life (income inequality, say) and they shrug and reply “That’s just the way the world is”. Maybe. And maybe it always will be. But that doesn’t mean we should shirk the task of justification. Of course there’s a difficulty here, because we often aspire to practicality. But utopianism _in the pejorative sense_ is surely theorizing that assumes crazy things about human nature (universal perfect altruism, for example). Discussing state jurisdiction isn’t like this. We have states _now_ but they aren’t a permanent feature of the human condition in the way that some psychological or physiological facts plausibly are.

(Recommendation: A. John Simmons, “On the Territorial Rights of States” , _Philosophical Issues_ 35(2001) (Supplement to _Nous_ ).)

Via Legal Theory Bookworm I see that Samuel Freeman’s book Justice and the Social Contract is now out (the opportunity for immodesty is irresistible — my own book, On Education is, incredibly, on the same list as Freeman’s). A collection of his papers including at least 2 that are previously unpublished, this might qualify for Chris’s list of important books in political philosophy. (My only doubt is that, as a collection of papers, it might not meet his criteria, but I have a strong suspicion that reading them straight through will be a different experience from reading them one at a time). Looking forward, soon, to Freeman’s next book, Rawls which everyone will have to read.

“Milton Friedman has died”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6156106.stm at the ripe old age of ninety four. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution “writes a brief appreciation”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6156106.stm from the point of view of a fan. As “Harry said”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/10/adam-swifts-political-philosophy-an-beginners-guide-for-students-and-politicians/ around here only the other day, everyone should read “Capitalism and Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226264211/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 at least once.

_Update_: The “Milton Friedman Choir”:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6407847019713273360&q=milton+friedman sings about corporations, markets and social responsibility. (Hat tip: CB.)

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has “responded”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/11/xxx.html to “my claim”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/13/relativities-local-and-global/ that, once societies have achieved a certain threshold level, continued growth in output doesn’t matter that much (and that inequalities among such societies matter little, certainly when set beside the absolute poverty of the global poor). Tyler writes:

bq. Just as the present appears remarkable from the vantage point of the past, our future may offer comparable advances in benefits. Continued progress might bring greater life expectancies, cures for debilitating diseases, and cognitive enhancements. Millions or billions of people will have much better and longer lives. Many features of modern life might someday seem as backward as we now regard the large number of women who died in childbirth for lack of proper care. Most of all, economic growth limits and mitigates tragedies. It is a simple failure of imagination to believe that human progress has run its course.

I think what is most striking about what Tyler writes here is the way in which he runs together human progress and economic growth, as if they were the same thing. I’ll leave to one side any moralized or perfectionist thoughts about human progress and just notice that there’s a basic distinction to be made between scientific and technological development and economic growth in the sense of increased per capita GDP. Capitalism’s advocates have always had a tendency to equate progress with increased output, but there are other possibilities, chief among them being that output remains constant and people become progressively freed from burdensome toil. Jerry Cohen has some trenchant observations about Max Weber’s enslavement to a Tyler-like view towards the end of his _Karl Marx’s Theory of History_ (p. 321 and thereabouts). If the passage were online, I’d link. But you should all own a copy anyway.

The other thing to note is the way Tyler holds out the carrot of the benefits of medical technology, including “cognitive enhancements”. If scientific progress can come apart from growth in GDP I could just suggest that giving up on growth in one sense doesn’t necessarily require us to forgo such future benefits. (And I could also point to a list of societies that have innovated in medical technology despite not being at the front of economic development: the British invention of MRI scanning in the 1970s being a case in point.) But it is worth noting that the really great advances in longevity (so far) have mainly come from improvements in diet and public health and rather less from hi-tech. Maybe Tyler thinks that all this will change in the future and that we need to incentivize innovators now so that the benefits of “cognitive enhancements” trickle down to ordinary Westerners and then to the global poor. I’m unconvinced.

I recently posted Educational Equality and School Choice (pdf) at the Equality Exchange. The paper is supposed to be an example of the kind of work I called for in my recent article in Education Week, an evaluation of a school reform idea in the light of a theory of values. However, I very explicitly simplify the evaluation so that all I am considering is the likely effects of the wide variety of school choice schemes on educational equality, and not on other values. So it is, at best, a partial analysis. The basic argument is that however you conceive of educational equality, choice is likely to compromise it, but that this is not a sufficient reason to reject choice because the alternative is not a no-choice and egalitarian status quo, but a highly unequal status quo in which choice is realised through the housing market (to an extent which is hard to measure). So we have to look at the varieties of school choice on offer — and I suggest that some of these are likely to be worse, and others better, from the perspective of equality, than the status quo (giving reasons in each case). And, of course, in most English-speaking countries school choice is a fundamental part of the way schooling works, and is not going away any time soon, so I make some suggestions at the end of the paper (which I think I shall beef up a bit in the next version) about how to regulate and reform choice to give it a more egalitarian edge. I’d welcome suggestions for improvements.

In the past few weeks John and Henry have engaged in arguments with Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson on the subject of whether relative wealth matters. To be sure, that isn’t the ostensible focus of the dispute with Tyler, which is about demographics. But digging deeper, the crux of Tyler’s argument has been that Europe’s ageing population matters because it will lead to lower growth rates and that the compounding effect of these will be that Europe’s position relative to the US (and China, and India) will decline, and that that’s a bad thing for Europeans. Whilst Tyler insists that these global relativities matter enormously, Will suggests that domestic relativities between individuals matter hardly at all. Since I think of Will and Tyler as occupying similar ideological space to one another, I find the contrast to be a striking one, and all the more so because I think that something like the exact opposite is true. That is to say, I think that domestic relativities matter quite a lot, and that global ones ought to matter a good deal less (if at all) just so long as the states concerned can ensure for all their citizens a certain threshold level of the key capabilities.

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On my stack of yet-unread 2006 politics books – Thomas Edsall’s Building Red America [amazon]. I cannot help but think events have somewhat overtaken it, though I still plan to read it. (I took particular satisfaction in that NY Times graphic – with the blue and the babyblue and the pink and the red. Red for anywhere that got painted red. And, of course, there was no need to open that can of paint. So it sat there, lonely in the legend.) What politics books do you say will survive the season, in terms of relevance?

I have a semi-scholarly interest in this question because I’m trying – I’ve been trying – to write about the relationship between liberalism, as it gets discussed in political philosophy; and liberalism, in the Democratic party sense. Obviously it is anything but a simple relationship, and I just indicated it in the most approximate fashion, but who has discussed it well? Who has written well about the point where the rubber of liberal political theory meets the road of liberal politics (if indeed there is such a point.) One problem with political philosophy is, of course, the perennial suspicion that its abstractions make it be … well, not about anything. (I don’t really mean it. You know what I mean.) On the other hand, the books about partisan politics – typically journalistic – don’t have a long shelf-life. What books do a good job of splitting the difference in a happy way? Relevant, and they stay that way.

Our own Looking For A Fight – Is There A Republican War On Science? [amazon] is a prime example. Will it still matter in a year? Well, I’ll take this opportunity to report that we have so far sold a grand total of, like, 16 copies. And there were about 110 downloads of the free book. That’s sort of an interesting result. Not wonderful, not terrible. It’s a good sign that paper sales are more than 10% of total distribution, even with free PDF. It means people do value the paper. (More titles coming soon!) One rather curious thing that making the book has caused me to notice: on the Amazon page there are presently 14 new and used copies for sale from third party sellers, including some marked up to $26.79 (from someplace called Best Dictionaries). Amazon is selling it for $11. I’m used to sort of seeing that stuff down the page on any given Amazon page, but in this case I am reasonably certain those copies don’t actually exist. A few could be author copies or sold copies that were promptly resold. But presumably for the most part these sellers have just generated these offers in some automated fashion and marked up the price more than %100. If someone orders it, then they’ll buy a copy from Parlor and simply resell it. It’s like the old Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin is sitting at his lemonade stand, suspended between grim and glum. The sign says: lemonade $20. And there are little unsold cups, waiting. “I’ve just got to sell one.” An interesting business model. Of course, in a sense it’s perfectly rational. Find the idiot who doesn’t comparison shop. (Is there a person who always buys from Best Dictionaries?)

I’ve been using Adam Swift’s Political Philosophy: An Beginner’s Guide for Students and Politicians (UK) in my Political Philosophy course this semester, and, having now had several students thank me for assigning it, I should probably recommend it more widely. The book is written at an angle to my course. The course goes through the main ideas of various important contemporary theorists of justice: Rawls, Sen, Nozick, Milton Friedman (ok, he’s the odd-one-out, but my view is that nobody should leave college without reading chapters 1,2 and 6 of Capitalism and Freedom, and I abuse my position as a professor to do my bit), Kymlicka, Okin, Fraser, and G.A. Cohen. The book is more conceptual; it consists of chapters on Social Justice, Equality, Freedom, Community and (in the new, second, edition) Democracy, which go through various distinctions and problems in thinking about those concepts, and it only refers to the work of particular philosophers insofar as it is relevant to the problem at hand. The book also includes a lovely discussion of the division of labour between political philosophers on the one hand and political activists and politicians on the other, and offers a semi-sympathetic diagnosis of the reasons that politicians often seem to be such uncareful thinkers about matters of value. It really is a superb piece of writing, accessible to anyone with an interest in these matters, but somehow achieving the accessibility without compromising the complexity of the issues in question.

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In many (most? all?) Universities, the research output of the staff is evaluated every couple of years (every 4 or 5 years, for example). This is also done at a more aggregate level, for example in country-wide Research Assessment Excercises. For such evaluations, an unavoidable question is: what determines quality, and how should we weigh publications of different quality levels? In order to simplify matters a little, let us just look at journal articles and not at books. One possibility is to make three categories of journals, A, B, and C, where A would give you double points compared with B, and B double of C. The difficult question then becomes: how should one decide which journals to classify in which group?
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Education Week is currently hosting an open house; well worth visiting for anyone interested in ed policy issues in the US. It also gives me a chance to link directly to an essay of mine they published a few weeks ago, concerning the role of value considerations in evaluating educational reforms. The essay is a distillation of some of the points I made in a much longer talk I recently gave at the Spencer Foundation conference on Values and Evidence in School Reform, and I’m very interested in what other political and moral philosophers and applied ethicists (whom I’d like to encouage to do more work on education issues) think, especially about the analogy I make with the philosophy of health policy. When I talk to education scholars I often encounter a fair amount of resistance to the project of justifying objective moral values (as I do, with specific reference to education, in On Education). Some low-level variant of moral relativism or, perhaps to put it more fairly, a deep suspicion of moral realism, is quite entrenched among some education scholars, so my guess is there is a bit more resistance to the bigger project I suggest in the essay than philosophers would encounter in medical ethics and health policy.