My former student Colin Farrelly (now Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo) has started a blog — In Search of Enlightenment — go visit!
From the category archives:
Political Theory/Political Philosophy
A graduate student asked me the other day for some summer reading suggestions; must-read articles in political philosophy from the past 25-30 years. I was a bit shocked at how narrow my list was (though I did leave off a bunch of papers that I knew he’d already read, and that would have broadened my list a bit), and I thought it would be a nice exercise for the political philosophers who read CT; suggest one or two papers from the past 30 years that you think everyone who wants to write a dissertation in the area of political philosophy reasonably broadly conceived should have read. Do not suggest your own papers unless you are dead or plan to be by the summer. I’ll follow up with an eccentrically chosen list of 10 , with the best links I can manage.
One thing that strikes me as funny about this whole “let’s invade Iran” thing…wait, did I actually just type that? I’m looking at the desk and I don’t see any glass tube with burnt-up brillo pad in it, so I probably didn’t just smoke a glittering rock of yeyo. Probably. OK, nothing about this is funny except in a nervous, “ha ha I’m sure he’s just joking way” that one might employ if locked in a room with a drunk person holding a chainsaw and making jokes about how Texans love real meat. The warmongery is starting up, from Mark Steyn columns to “hawkish” “liberals” pontificating on how no options should be off the table (not even A NUCLEAR FIRST STRIKE ARE THEY INSANE???!!!!), to stop-making-me-commit-genocide wankery to credulous NYT articles to James Lileks relating everything back to this one chick who wouldn’t sleep with him was wrong about Iran in the ’70s. (You should really read the Vodkapundit post and accompanying thread. He says you’ll need a drink, and the man is not kidding at all. The story he links to [by Dan Simmons] takes grave misreadings of Thucydides to a whole new level, a category in which the competition is stiff. Simmons is sure to win this year’s coveted “Golden Hanson”. The trophy features a stern VDH uprooting an olive tree with one hand and hitting himself repeatedly on the head with an axe handle with the other.) [Edited for clarity–thanks tom scudder!]
Any minute now I’ll have to read from K-Lo about how hypocritical western feminists don’t care about women being oppressed in Iran. I can’t be the only one to find the machinery a bit creaky. Are the warbloggers’ hearts in it? The more important question is whether the US will really do something so extraordinarily, supremely crazy, but I’m firmly committed to lowering the tone at CT. If that means ignoring the important issues of the day to make mocking, ad hominem comments, then let the chips fall where they may.
No, the thing that strikes me as funny is that everyone who supports was with Iran is all about the “mad mullahs” and how they can’t be deterred by normal deterrance because they’re crazed jihadis content to incinerate their own country, plus OMG THE HIDDEN IMAM!!! The people making this argument now insist that of course MAD worked back when we faced rational opponents like the USSR or, you know, Mao’s China or whatever. But now, in a new era of crazy people having nukes, all bets are off. It’s like Iran is one big suicide bomber! The limits of the internet and my own laziness prevent me from researching this at all, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet that all these people (over a certain age) did not regard the commies as secular rationalists who weighed the costs or war carefully back in the day. Not at all. Much more of the “they’ve got a plan to retreat to their bunkers and sacrifice their own hapless citizens upon the altar of destroying America!!!” Just a theory. (Obligatory on-the-otherhanding: I’m sure some of the liberals now advocating deterrance railed against MAD at the time as an armageddon-hastening nightmare.)
The peculiar British tendency that is the “decent Left” numbers among its sacred texts Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. One of the most prominent Eustonian thinkers, the columnist Nick Cohen, has even mentioned Berman’s book as the reason for his own epiphany. But is it any good? Over at Aaronovitch Watch the Cous Cous Kid has been directing his attention to Berman’s work and noticing that the accounts Berman gives of other people’s ideas, of religion, and of historical events, ought to have impressed Cohen somewhat less than they did.
CCKs’ review is split into seven parts, so the easiest way to read his text is just to visit the site and scroll down. But for archive purposes, I also give the links to each part below.
Yale University Press has just released Yochai Benkler’s _The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom_. You can buy it at Powells, and Amazon, but it’s also available from Benkler under Creative Commons with an associated wiki. There’ll be more about this book on CT soon – for the moment, suffice to say that I think that this is a really important book, not only for people interested in the politics of technology, but for people interested in left or liberal politics more generally. It fizzes with ideas.
I recently wrote a review of a couple of books on global justice, one of which expended a great deal of effort in explaining how a liberal cosmopolitanism could be consistently combined with a reasonable patriotism. For some reason, the concern to combine these positions seems to especially concern liberal Americans who want be good patriots and think of themselves as endorsing universal values at one and the same time. Well I guess I agree about this far: that, within the limits justice allows, one both may feel an affection for one’s country and compatriots and promote the good of that nation and community, just as one can legitimately promote the good of one’s family and friends within the bounds set by justice. (I guess I think that promoting the interests of one’s family and friends is not merely permissible but also required, whereas promoting the interest of one’s country within the bounds allowed by justice is allowed but not obligatory.)
What I don’t agree with is the proposition that the citizens (or the government, for that matter) of a country are under any duty to promote the interests of that country in terms of its relative prosperity or military power, where their doing so is at the expense of the citizens of other countries. I’m mentioning this now partly because of some of the reactions I’ve read to the infamous Mearsheimer and Walt paper. Mearsheimer and Walt are neorealists, and, as such, they believe that governments (and their citizens) do have a duty to promote their country’s interests in the sense I indicated. So insofar as they claim that some group (the Israeli lobby) fails to do so, and promotes some other country’s interests, they are saying something bad about that group from their own perspective. [1]
My colleague Daniel Hausman and his collaborator Michael McPherson (formerly President of Macalester, now of the Spencer Foundation) have just published the new edition of their book Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy
This is the perfect book for many of our readers, presenting moral philosopical ideas in a way that directly shows how and why they matter for issues in economics and public policy. It contains accessible introductions to ideas in economics and moral philosophy (eg utility theory, social choice theory, game theory, libertarianism, utilitarianism and egalitarianism) and uses the controversies around pollution transfers and school vouchers to illuminate the debates about these concepts, and to show why those debates matter for public policy. There’s a great analysis of the notorious Larry Summers memo, a chapter which outlines the incredibly intricate “equality of what?” debate and an illuminating chapter about efficiency (which everyone who dares to use the word “effiicent” should be forced to read if only that were efficient). It is one of those unusual books which is great for an undergraduate or graduate class, but which as a professional economist or philosopher you will still learn a good deal from, not only about how to present complex ideas in a lucid manner, but about the ideas and debates themselves. It is also an unusual second edition, in that the authors have actually rewritten the book substantially, rather than just tacking a new chapter on the end and calling it a new edition. Strongly recommended.
djw has a nice post up about whether children should have the right to vote (unfortunately it sems to load very slowly, but its worth reading). He is somewhat persuaded that they should, and outlines the argument of a paper by Michael Cummings arguing the case (my colleague Fran Schrag has another interesting paper making a different argument for a similar conclusion). I’m not sure I disagree with any of the arguments djw presents, all of which are responses to possible arguments against enfranchising children. So he calls for an argument that is not easily responded to, so, ever willing to oblige, here’s a possible reason, which, I think, makes a better version of the case that his comment #4 is a response to.
I’m going to be in Boston on Saturday for a conference on Equality and Education, with papers by Debra Satz, Elizabeth Anderson, and me and Adam Swift, plus commentators. It should be very good; I’m looking forward to what Anderson and Satz have to say. I presume from the fact that there’s a webpage about it that it is open; whether so or not I always like meeting readers and hearing their complaints…
On unrelated news I got a lovely packet the other day from a former student, containing a signed copy of Loudon Wainwright III’s Here Come the Choppers
Likely you don’t remember me, as I was only a (mostly unmemorable) student in one of your classes 3 or 4 years ago. However, one thing you did was introduce me the the music of LWIII. I’ve always remembered that, and my life is better for it. Here is his latest CD, signed, and sent with my regards.
I do remember him, in fact, and am very touched by the gift. Even better, this is LW’s best in years; not as good as History
The question. I’ve wondered for about 15 years whether the Chaim Tannenbaum who plays on many of Loudon Wainwright’s albums is the same Chaim Tannenbaum who is acknowledged in “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom”. If none of our readers can enlighten me, I’ll give up wondering.
Here’s a bit of not-quite-shameless self-promotion. My new book On Education
I started writing the book around the time I started blogging here at CT, and wrote it largely with a CT-type audience in my head — smart, intellectually serious, and interested, but not necessarily specialists, in Philosophy or in Education. Also a transatlantic audience; I try to develop arguments and positions that will be interesting and useful to people in both the countries I know well. It’s an attempt to argue for a (small l) liberal account of the purposes of education, and to explore some current policy controversies in the light of those purposes — viz, funding of faith schools, teaching patriotism, and citizenship education; all with the aim of being accessible to just about anyone who is interested in these things (unlike some of what I write). It’s not for me to say how good it is, but it was reviewed very favourably in the TES, and the nicest comment was reported to me by the spouse of a teacher who is reading it: “She’s had several moments where her reaction as been that as soon as you said something, she sees that it’s obviously right, had thought about similar things, but had never formulated the point quite that way.” That’s a large part of what I hoped to achieve in the first part of the book.
I can say that it has three unquestionable virtues. It is short, inexpensive, and it has a nice cover (according to my wife, not always
Philippe Van Parijs has made some correspondence with John Rawls concerning the <em>Law of Peoples</em> available on-line. The final two paragraphs of the Rawls letter are remarkable for their explicit anti-capitalism, a sentiment that is not so clearly expressed elsewhere in his work.
[This post is co-written by Harry and Chris and is an extended follow up to Chris’s initial response to David Schmidtz’s Cato Unbound piece When Equality Matters .]
We live in a highly unequal world and in strikingly unequal societies. The income discrepancies between the global poor and those in wealthy societies are enormous, with around one quarter of the world’s population living on less than $1 US per day, and many suffering from acute malnourishment, disease and premature death.[1] (For some further details see articles by Thomas Pogge here and here .) But even within the very wealthiest societies great wealth coexists with severe poverty. Moreover, this is not simply an inequality in outcomes. Whilst the United States, for example, likes to imagine itself as a land of opportunity, social mobility is extremely low and in recent years the benefits of economic growth have been ever more concentrated in the very richest sectors of the population. According to one study, only 1.3 per cent of children born to parents in the bottom 10 per cent of income earners end up in the top 10 per cent. By contrast, almost a quarter of children born into the top 10 per cent stay there, and almost half stay in the top 20 per cent. Children born into the richest tenth of households are 18 times more likely than children born into the poorest tenth to end up in the top tenth. (Further see the Economist and Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis .)
David Schmidtz’s recent piece for Cato Unbound, When Inequality Matters is an artful and unnerving attempt to make use of some recent work within egalitarian political philosophy to argue against what we what we think of as the core of egalitarianism: the demands for greater equality of condition and opportunity. We are not convinced. In our view Schmidtz’s case neglects the impact that relative inequalities have on absolute levels of flourishing and depends at crucial points on dubious analogies and on muddying important distinctions. But it would be churlish not to acknowledge that he gets some things right. For instance, he is correct to emphasize that we must identify the dimensions in which equality matters, for the basic reason that making people equal on one dimension will often have the simple effect of making them unequal on another. Equalizing incomes, for example, would leave people unequal in well-being, because different people have different capacities to convert their income into well-being.
Will Wilkinson emails me to push a Cato Institute forum on When Inequality Matters . I see that he’s also emailed Glenn Reynolds to promote the same. The paper being discussed is by David Schmidtz. Schmidtz is a serious philosopher whose writings I’ve read with profit and interest in the past. Nevertheless, I have to greet his opening sentence with some skepticism:
bq. Everyone cares about inequality.
I’m back from a weekend in Tallahassee at the Werkmeister Conference on Cosmopolitanism, held at Florida State. It’s rather rare that we Timberites get to see each other in the flesh, so it was a treat that Harry was there, too. There were six papers with commentators, presented over a day-and-a-half. They were all quite good and spanned many different issues related to cosmopolitan political theory. One of the more striking things was how nice everyone was – and not in an obsequious way – despite some fairly sharp disagreements. In fact, Thomas Pogge commented on this at the beginning of his talk, and some interpreted this as a backhanded complement – yeah, and we had good handwriting, too. But I took the comment at face value – people were willing to talk and listen substantively and there was very little grandstanding or showing others up. Most of us went out for meals together, and a generally grand time was had by all. Still, my hotel room looked out over the capital building, and I just couldn’t shake the images of Elian Gonzalez, the 2000 election, Terri Shiavo …
The plan is for the revised papers to appear in Social Theory and Practice. Abstracts are on the web-page.
So far as I know the following fallacy has no name: ‘if x is funny, there must be a grain of truth to x.’ It’s sort of like affirming the consequent, but for ‘it’s funny because it’s true’. If you see what I mean. (You have to think of ‘it’s funny’ as the consequent.) It’s part positive ad hominem. Rather than proving what he says is true, the speaker generates a sense of himself as a clever, sharp, perceptive person. The audience then infers that there must be something clever, sharp and perceptive about the position taken. But mostly the fallacy works because funniness is next to truthiness. The mechanisms of stand-up comedy and propaganda are not fully distinct. What makes you laugh has a certain kinship to that which causes the crowd’s madness. When you put it that way, it’s darn obvious what I am talking about. You have read something Mark Steyn wrote in the last several years, I take it? As Hume writes: