Political Theory/Political Philosophy

My friend, Jim Johnson, who teaches political theory at Rochester, has just started a fascinating new blog. “Politics, Theory and Photography”:http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/ aims, as its title suggests, to explore the intersection between political theory and photography. Jim has a particular take on this, which springs from a vigorous disagreement with Susan Sontag and others who write about photography as a means towards creating compassion between the subject of the photograph and the person looking at it. He thinks compassion is a bad idea.

bq. compassion, as Hannah Arendt rightly notes, is de-politicizing and I think it is a major mistake to identify the aim of documentary photography as eliciting compassion in viewers. How is compassion de-politicizing? Two ways. First, insofar as it demands that we identify with the suffering of some other, compassion collapses the space for argument which is a basic medium of politics. Second, compassion focuses resolutely on individual suffering and so cannot generalize to the large numbers of people who are subject to war, famine, dislocation and so forth. What photographs might more properly aim for is establishing solidarity. But that would require rethinking many of the conventions of documentary practice.

Jim has written a “long paper”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/jim/compassion2.pdf on this topic, but he’s using the blog to do things that would be difficult or impossible to do in a conventional academic article. The blog mixes together photographs and commentary so that his claims and arguments don’t just emerge abstractly from argument with other writers, but concretely, in dialogue with the work of real photographers. It’s a really nice example of the new uses to which blogging can be put.

A few days ago I finished The Right Nation, by Micklethwait and Wooldridge, a pair of "Economist" writers. Perhaps you recall their June 21, 2005 WSJ op-ed, “Cheer Up Conservatives, You’re Still Winning,” in which they declare “the right has walloped the left in the war of ideas.” Ahem:

One of the reasons the GOP manages to contain Southern theocrats as well as Western libertarians is that it encourages arguments rather than suppressing them. Go to a meeting of young conservatives in Washington and the atmosphere crackles with ideas, much as it did in London in the heyday of the Thatcher revolution. The Democrats barely know what a debate is.

Well, the book is not such a polemical and high-handed affair as that portends. Mostly. [click to continue…]

For reasons best known to themselves the Havens Center staff have given the George Galloway tour higher billing on their website than the Chris Bertram tour (scroll down the first link for Bertram, he has lower billing). Don’t bug me about this, or about sponsoring gorgeous george — I had nothing to do with either decision (it would be silly to pretend I had nothing to do with the Bertram visit). I’m going to miss Galloway, for domestic reasons, but I haven’t the slightest doubt that Chris’s talks will be more interesting.

The annual American Political Science Association meeting is taking place this week in Washington DC. Some spots that CT-reading attendees may want to know about …

Food:

There are several decent restaurants in the Woodley Park neighbourhood, where the conference hotels are located. Of these, the best that I know of is the “Lebanese Taverna”:http://www.lebanesetaverna.com/restaurants/dc/. If you want a real treat, and you’re prepared to walk for 10-15 mins, or hop on the Metro, “Indique”:http://www.indique.com/Indiquemainpage.html (north up Connecticut, or take the Metro one stop to Cleveland Park) is a great nouvelle Indian restaurant – one of the few places inside DC’s city limits to make it into Tyler Cowen’s excellent “guide to ethnic food in the Washington area”:http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/cowenethnic17th.htm. Alternatively, you can go south to Dupont Circle – but the restaurants here aren’t as good as they used to be and can be a little pricey. I like “Mourayo”:http://www.washingtonian.com/dining/Profiles/mourayo.html, a Greek place, especially for their “Sappho” dessert (Greek yoghurt, strawberries and honey in a phyllo pastry – yum!). Also good, but expensive, is “Pesce”:http://www.washingtonian.com/dining/Profiles/Pesce.html, which is a little bit off the Circle, on P street, and which specializes in fish. Just across the street is “Pizza Paradiso”:http://www.washingtonian.com/dining/Profiles/PizzeriP.html, which is a lot cheaper and does great wood-burning oven pizza. Expect long lines at lunch time, unless you make it early – the dining area is tiny. Those who are prepared to be adventurous and travel into the suburbs should trust to Tyler’s extraordinary knowledge of the great food to be found in Virginia and Maryland stripmalls.

Alcohol:

I’m not as well up on this as I used to be, but I can heartily recommend the “Brickskeller”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=entertainment/profile&id=792636&typeId=5 which is just off Dupont circle, and is listed in the Guinness book of records as “the bar with the largest selection of commercially available beers.” Over 1,000, mostly in bottles. They serve them a little warmer than is usual in the US, but nonetheless tasty for that. The “Childe Harold”:http://www.childeharold.com/, which is close by, is very good downstairs; for a fictional description (thinly disguised), see Elizabeth Hand’s short story, “Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol”:http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/hand/hand1.html.

Bookshops:

Always one of my first priorities when I go to a new city. DC doesn’t have any big bookshop to rival Powells or the Strand, but it does have a superb specialized bookshop that should be of interest to APSA types, “Politics and Prose”:http://www.politics-prose.com/. Excellent on politics and history, as you might expect, but also has a quite superb collection of childrens’ books downstairs (a legacy from the Cheshire Cat, a famous childrens’ bookshop that it took over a few years ago). “Olssons”:http://www.olssons.com/ is also pretty good, if not quite what it used to be – the Dupont Circle branch is probably the best. Secondhand places are a bit hit-and-miss – the Rockville branch of “Second Story Books”:http://www.secondstorybooks.com/ is pretty good, but it’s a long drive from the city.

Additions, corrections etc welcome in comments.

About a month ago, Chris noted a new book that our own Harry Brighouse co-edited. Well, I’m here to tell you there’s more Brighouse that you should read! Specifically, Harry’s new book Justice published by Polity, as part of their “Key Concepts” series. Here’s a US link to it on amazon; here’s a UK link. (Disclosure: I just finished a book for the series that should be out early next year on Global Justice.)

This is simply the best introduction to contemporary philosophical accounts of justice around. So if readers of this blog want to learn about or brush up on their Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum, Nozick, Kymlicka, Jerry Cohen, et. al., you couldn’t do better than to read this. Best of all, it is written in a very accessible style that doesn’t presuppose any philosophical background. Really!
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My friend and colleague Jimmy Doyle has a guest post on Normblog: “Human Agency and the London Bombings”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/human_agency_an.html . I hesitate to summarise Jimmy’s argument here, since it is stated with characteristic carefulness and precision, but among the more striking claims he endorses is that genuine human actions cannot figure among the causes of other human actions:

bq. human actions cannot be thought of as mere events in a causal chain of further events. This is expressed in the traditional legal doctrine of _novus actus interveniens_ , according to which a human action cuts short the chain of causally-connected events consequent upon any previous action. For the cause of a human action is not an event at all, but an agent: a person, a human being.

I am not putting a counter-argument, but merely making an observation, in saying that if Jimmy’s view is correct then much of social science and history rests on a mistake. Economics and psychology, for example, certainly presuppose that one person’s action can figure among the causal antecedents of another’s. And all those books on the “causes” of the First or Second World Wars would have to be pulped or substantially rewritten.

Jimmy advances this consideration in favour of his view:

bq. I should emphasize that I have not tried to show that what is presupposed in our ordinary thought and talk about human action is true. But if it turned out false, that would be a disaster; and we would very likely find it impossible to lead recognizably human lives consistent with such a realization.

I suspect that we would find it a good deal easier than he supposes to lead “recognizably human lives”, but let’s leave that to one side. The examples of history and social science show that whilst Jimmy may be right to say that we engage in much thought and talk about human action which rests on the very presuppositions he mentions, we also engage in a great deal of talk about human behaviour that rests on the causal view he rejects. Very likely we would find it hard to get along without that mode of thought and talk too.

The “Rousseau Association/Association Rousseau”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/default.htm , which is a very fine bunch of scholars and a nice crowd of human beings, has “a new website”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/default.htm thanks to Zev Trachtenberg at the University of Oklahoma. It is still in development but when finished it should be an important resource and marks a distinct improvement on the last version. Visitors can dowload works by Rousseau, follow links to other sites of interest, browse a selection of images and even “listen to some of the music”:http://www.rousseauassociation.org/aboutRousseau/musicalWorks.htm Jean-Jacques composed. (Full disclosure, I’m currently VP of the Association.)

I’ve just wheeled the latest issue of Imprints (8:3) to the post office and it will shortly be sent out to subscribers. Having just done this, I’ve noticed there’s *a typo on the cover* Crossland for Crosland — aargh!! Still, if you can get past that there’s a great deal of interest inside:

bq. * An interview with Joseph Raz
* Philip Bielby on equality and vulnerability in biomedical research
* Kevin Hickson on revisionism from Crosland to New Labour

and reviews by — cue drumroll — Crooked Timber stalwarts Harry Brighouse and Kieran Healy of, respectively, Anne Alstott’s “No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195162366/junius-20 and Eric Klinenberg’s “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226443221/junius-20 . Kieran’s long-awaited “review was pre-published here on CT”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/22/hot-in-the-city/ .

“Jonathan Cohn”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/18/114013/338 asks whether there’s any good reason to believe that nice guys do indeed finish first in the business world.

bq. I’d love nothing more to believe that treating employees well is actually better business than treating them shabbily. But at the moment, anyway, count me as skeptical.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, Gary Miller has used economic theory to make exactly this argument, in a series of publications over the last fifteen years (this “piece”:http://www.isnie.org/ISNIE99/Papers/millerg.pdf co-written with Dino Falaschetti, gives a good flavour of his work). Miller uses social choice theory and game theory to argue that managers, if they are to get workers to deliver their full effort, need to be able to make credible commitments to them that their efforts will be rewarded over the longer term. It’s thus a good idea to keep a strict separation between management and owners. Efforts to make the interests of stockholders and managers coincide with each other are going to weaken management’s ability to credibly commit to workers that they will continue to be employed, as managers become more interested in chasing short term stock market gains than in ensuring the long term health of the company. Long term success, for Miller, is produced through “gift exchange” in which managers credibly commit to insulate workers from the pressure for short term profits, and workers reciprocate by giving additional effort. One of Miller’s examples of a firm that used to do this very well is rather timely. From Miller’s 1992 book, “Managerial Dilemmas”:http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?partner_id=%2029956&cgi=search/search/&searchtype=kw&searchfor=gary%20miller%20managerial%20dilemmas :

bq. Another condition for the achievement of cooperative equilibria in a repeated game is the mutual expectation that the relationship will go on long enough to justify the investment in cooperation. This was achieved at Hewlett-Packard by an early decision by the two founders not to be a “hire and fire company,” but one in which employees would have the security of employment commitment. In the 1980 recession, this policy was tested severely, but everyone in the organization took a 10 percent cut in pay and worked 10% fewer hours so that no one would be fired (Peters and Waterman 1982: 44). This confirmed everyone’s subjective belief that the relationship was long-lasting and that employee efforts were not going to be exploited for short-term gain by Hewlett-Packard.

How “things have changed”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_07/006756.php.

Harry’s post on consequentialism and opportunity costs, as applied to the Iraq war, raises a couple of important points about consequentialism, and also leads me to suggest a specific correction to my post on this topic.

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This is a quibble with something in John’s long discourse on the war. It’s more of a question, than a quibble, really. John rightly points out that, in assessing the true consequences of some policy or action, we have to take into account the opportunity costs:

A second common feature of pro-war analysis is a failure to take account of the opportunity cost of the resources used in war. The $300 billion used in the Iraq war would have been enough to finance several years of the Millennium Development project aimed at ending extreme poverty in the world, and could have saved millions of lives. But even assuming this is politically unrealistic, the money could surely have been spent on improved health care, road safety and so on in the US itself. At a typical marginal cost of $5 million per live saved, 60 000 American lives could have been saved. This is morally relevant, but is commonly ignored.

Please don’t think about the war, or John’s more general argument about it, for the moment. Assume that all we are doing is trying to figure out the consequences for the purpose of moral evaluation (whatever weight you think the consequences should have — for me, its less than for John, but more than for some). What are the real opportunity costs that we should figure in?

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Chris’s post on responsibility got me started on what I plan to be the final instalment of my attempts to analyse the ethical justification for war. It’s not quite Holbovian in scale, but quite long enough. Comments much appreciated.
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It is always a mistake to pick fights with people when you are about to be away from a computer and so will be unable to take part in further iterations of the argument. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the position I find myself in with respect to “a post from Norman Geras and Eve Garrard”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/bertrams_quibbl.html responding to “my attribution to them”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/14/battle-lines/ of the view that only the immediate perpetrators of bad deeds can be blamed for those deeds. They deny that they hold the view I pinned on them, and say that I should have seen that if I’d read more carefully. I’m happy to receive the correction.

Now comes the “but” bit ….

Nevertheless, my belief that they hold a view like that was not based only on that single post but on many others, especially concerning Iraq. In particular, Norman has often argued against the view that Bush and Blair should be held responsible for the continuing carnage in Iraq, stressing, rather, that the immediate perpetrators of (most of) that carnage, the Iraqi “resistance” should be blamed and that Bush and Blair should not be. Norman and Eve’s latest post quotes an interesting earlier paragraph in this respect, which counts — as they insist — against my attribution.

bq. The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity, doesn’t show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn’t serve to justify it.

There is, I think, doublethink going on here. Norman wants to tell us that the Iraq war was justified because of the many bad things Saddam did and would continue to do to his people if he remained in power. Critics of the war (like me) want to say that we should also take account of the bad consequences of overthrowing Saddam, including the carnage caused by the “resistance”, the many many thousands of excess dead (see the Lancet report …), etc. Norman and Eve’s restrictive clause enables them to argue that, even if things are actually worse, their worseness can’t be blamed on the initiators of the war, because their actions were not in themselves wrong (because justified by stopping Saddam) and don’t serve to justify the Iraqi “resistance” (agreed, they don’t). In other words, Norman helps himself to an essentially consequentialist justification for the Iraq war, but, faced with bad consequences, uses a non-consequentialist discourse of responsibility to filter them out of the consequentialist calculus. At least, that’s what seems to me to be going on.

This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of “The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521609097/junius-20 , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!