by Harry on July 20, 2005
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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by John Q on July 18, 2005
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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by Chris Bertram on July 15, 2005
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 responding to my attribution to them 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.
by Chris Bertram on July 12, 2005
This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism , 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)!
by Henry Farrell on July 5, 2005
David Glenn has an interesting article today about Glyn Morgan’s new book on the justifications for EU integration. I’ve just started reading the book (it begins very nicely). Morgan sets out to discomfit both euro-skeptics and most euro-enthusiasts by making a straightforward argument for an European super-state rather than the sort of post-sovereign multilevel fudge preferred by many pro-EU types.
bq. Mr. Morgan invites his reader to imagine that foreign-based terrorists someday launch large-scale attacks in Europe, and that the United States cannot offer much help, because its own military is bogged down in China or Iraq or elsewhere. Without a unitary state and a unified military, he writes, “there would be little that European leaders could — other than fulminate about U.S. isolationism — do about it.” … “Europeans need to confront this brutal choice,” the British-born Mr. Morgan says. “Are they going to remain weak and dependent and maintain their decentralized government units, or are they going to try to become players in the world? And if they’re going to become players in the world, they need to centralize. I think presenting that brutal choice is profoundly annoying to both sides of the debate.”
Morgan will also be doing an online colloquium at the Chronicle on Thursday. I’ll be posting on this more when I finish the book.
by Chris Bertram on June 24, 2005
Over at Urbandriftuk , Mizmillie has been pondering the recent explosion in commercial operations by the British public sector, so, for example, the North Wales police have been running a massive driving school for profit . She writes that “insidious blurring of the public and private is likely to be one of the current [British] government’s enduring legacies” .
She asks:
bq. Are there any principled moral reasons against public bodies carrying out private business?
bq. Or are they mainly consequential concerns, e.g. leads to two-tierism?
bq. If they trade should they be treated as private businesses and have their profits taxed in the same way? Or should they be exempt from tax since the monies get ploughed back into public coffers?
Part of my reaction to this is to look at things in historical perspective. After all, there have been many commercial operations, such as docks and airports, that have, up until recently, been run by local authorities in Britain. But on the matter of tax, I guess there has to be an question of equity. After all if the police are allowed to open an driving school next door to mine but can do so on more favourable terms, I’m going to go out of business pretty quick.
by Chris Bertram on June 14, 2005
At Samizdata the other day, Natalie Solent wrote :
bq. In Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose it says:
bq.
Of course, an egalitarian may protest that he is but a drop in the ocean, that he would be willing to redistribute the excess of his income over his concept of an equal income if everyone else were compelled to do the same. On one level this contention that compulsion would change matters is wrong – even if everyone else did the same, his specific contribution to the income of others would still be a drop in the ocean. His individual contribution would be just as large if he were the only contributor as if he were one of many. Indeed, it would be more valuable because he could target his contribution to go to the very worst off among those he regards as appropriate recipients.
bq. I have a question for all the protestors planning to give up their time and money by going to Edinburgh for the G8 summit. Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?
Later in comments to the same post she adds:
bq. They could do both: go to Edinburgh and give their spare money away. That’s all their money above what is required for subsistence, of course, because by their own account the Third World is poor because they are rich and money transfer is the way to correct that situation.
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by Henry Farrell on May 31, 2005
Reading some of the responses to Chris's and my posts on Turkey and the future evolution of the European Union, reminds me of Tyler Cowen’s aside a couple of weeks ago, that:
bq. The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of, and/or to rule out foreigners from the relevant moral universe.
The latter bit is the relevant one here, of course, and it’s a tough question for European leftwingers. Is some dilution of the traditional European welfare state acceptable, if it substantially increases the wellbeing of current outsiders (i.e. for example, by bringing Turkey into the club). My answer is yes, if European leftwingers are to stick to their core principles on justice, fairness, egalitarianism etc. Of course, this is a somewhat broader variant of the more general theoretical questions surrounding the relationship between nationality and cosmopolitanism. So far, I haven’t seen any very convincing counter-arguments that suggest that lefties should privilege fellow-Europeans or fellow nationals over those from elsewhere. Below the fold, I set out some of the arguments that I’ve seen or can think of, but that don’t seem to me to be convincing. Others may disagree – or have other, better arguments that I haven’t thought of.
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Talking of higher education and athletics, I want to recommend to people that they read Leveling the Playing Field. It’s is a terrific book, and a wonderful model of how to do applied normative philosophy. It pursues hard and interesting normative questions in the context of detailed and careful empirical analysis of the situation in higher education. The philosophy guides, but does not get in the way of, the empirical exploration; it is also obvious that the authors are steeped in the empirical evidence and institutional detail of the area they are investigating. In the areas where I know the empirical literature in detail they consistently introduced me to new, and more up-to-date findings than I had to hand.
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by Chris Bertram on April 26, 2005
I was very pleased to get a copy of Nicholas Dent’s new <em>Rousseau</em> in the post today. It appears in the Routledge Philosophers series edited by Brian Leiter. There’s an endorsement from yours truly on the cover, saying that is is “The best general introduction to Rousseau’s life and thought in English…” I think that’s true. Highly recommended.
(BTW this is a completely different book from his earlier Rousseau: An Introduction to his Psychological, Social and Political Theory, which was published by Blackwell and is also excellent.)
by John Q on April 23, 2005
The latest London Review of Books[1] has a great review article by David Runciman (subscription only, unfortunately). The books covered are Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business and Healthcare by Dennis Thompson , NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Healthcare by Allyson Pollock and Brown’s Britain by Robert Peston.
Of these, I’m most interested in the book by Pollock, who’s been a prominent critic of the Private Finance Initiative, particularly in relation to health care. I think the biggest problems with the PFI are going to emerge ten or twenty years into the contracts, when any safeguards written into the original contracts will be obsolete, and the private party will have an incentive to extract as much rent as possible from the remaining life of the deal.
The whole idea of governments signing these long-term contracts is dubious in many respects. It’s bad public policy for a government to bind its successors in this way. And it’s bad commercial policy to sign 30-year contracts for services where ordinary principles of risk allocation would suggest a term more like five years. The PFI and similar initiatives have already run into plenty of problems, but I think the worst is yet to come.
A particularly egregious example came to light in Australia recently. The late, and not much lamented Kennett government signed contracts giving monopoly rights to operate gambling enterprises to two firms, Tabcorp and Tattersalls.
It now emerges that, if these contracts are not renewed, obscure clauses entitle the monopolists to compensation of up to $1 billion.
fn1. That is, the latest to reach Australia.\
by John Q on April 20, 2005
he price of oil is stlll around $50, and there’s no reason to expect it to fall in a hurry. In particular, if China revalues the renminbi yuan, as is commonly expected, there will be a corresponding fall in the effective price of oil, both for suppliers and for consumers in China and other countries that revalue, for any given $US price. This probably doesn’t matter much on the supply side – everyone is pumping as hard as they can and will probably keep doing so. But China’s demand is probably quite price sensitive, and a reduction in the price could keep demand higher, even in the face of a slowdown in exports to the US.
The other thought that occurred to me relates to climate change. Although there are a variety of ways in which we could mitigate climate change, the simplest would be to double the price of carbon-based fuels. This would certainly reduce demand significantly in the long run (I’ll try and update this with some estimates soon). On the other hand, there’s a lot of concern about the short-run macroeconomic impacts of such an increase.
Well we’ve seen a doubling of oil prices, and substantial increases in coal and gas prices over the past few years, and any macroeconomic impact is undetectable amid the general noise. The cases aren’t perfectly comparable of course, notably
* the rising price has been driven by increased demand, not imposed exogenously
* the effect of rising market prices is to redistribute income to oil-producing countries, and increase trade deficits. This effect wouldn’t arise with carbon taxes and would be much smaller with tradeable permits
Still, the evidence is against the idea that higher energy prices would bring the economy to a grinding halt. Rather, the response so far seems to be a textbook case of orderly adjustment, as people gradually shift away from gas-guzzling vehicles, look again at energy saving options and so on. So far the response has been small, but over time (if supply declines and prices stay high) more substantial responses can be expected.
by Henry Farrell on April 18, 2005
Howard Kurtz’s blog round-up points to this small gem of insight on the estate tax, from blogger and University of Nebraska law professor, Rick Duncan.
Of course, the Democrats played the Marxist class-warfare card and said this legislation would only help the dirty, stinking rich. Actually, it is a very egalitarian law that ensures that no one will pay death taxes. What is wrong with equal treatment?
Duncan finds himself in some interesting intellectual company. If I’m not mistaken in my recollection, Karl Marx himself was fond of quoting Anatole France’s not-dissimilar observation that “[t]he law in its infinite majesty, prohibits rich and poor alike from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.” (I fear however that Duncan, unlike Marx and France, believes himself to be making a serious argument).
by John Q on April 16, 2005
In the comments thread to Chris’ post on tactical voting, Michael Otsuka very sensibly suggests
I believe there’s an extensive, sophisticated social science literature on the expected utility of voting in elections which has made some progress beyond the speculations posted above. Could anyone who’s up-to-speed post a reference to an accessible summary to save us the trouble of trying to reinvent the wheel?
This brings me to one of those papers I’ve been meaning to write for years (I wrote a several drafts of a joint paper with Geoff Brennan, but we never quite converged), and which has finally (2005!) been written by someone else. The idea was to prove an assertion I’ve made quite a few times in academic papers, and here at CT, that, as long as voters have ‘social’ rather than ‘egoistic’ preferences, the expected utility of voting is independent of the size of the electorate, and potentially large enough to justify high levels of participation. You can read this paper by Edlin, Gelman and Kaplan (PDF file). There’s an excellent appendix on why the probability of a decisive vote is of order 1/n.
There’s still the question of why people vote when one side or the other is bound to win. EGK have a go at this, and in my paper[1] on the subject, I say
This approach, in which b [the social benefit of the preferred party winning] is a simple step- function, may be replaced by a more sophisticated one in which b depends not only on the party elected, but on the size of its majority. This would be consistent with the fact that there is a substantial, though normally reduced, turnouts in elections which are perceived as foregone conclusions.)
That’s not a complete solution, and I think it’s also important to consider that voting per se is considered as a social duty or as yielding social benefits, but I think it’s at least as important as expressive motives.
fn1. Quiggin, J. (1987), Egoistic rationality and public choice: a critical review of theory and evidence’, Economic Record 63(180), 10–21.
by Belle Waring on April 14, 2005
If Vicente Fox is serious about democracy in Mexico he will exercise his power of pardon and allow Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (currently polling ahead of all other candidates for the upcoming Presidential race) to stand for election next year even if he is found guilty of what amount to minor charges in Mexico’s corrupt political culture. In fact, it would be fairer to pardon him in advance of the verdict in a lengthy court case, Mexican courts not being known for swiftness.
The U.S. should make its views known as well. Lopez Obrador may not be the most palatable candidate, but that is all the more reason for the U.S. to take a stand in favor of his not being shut out on dubious procedural grounds. This seems a chance for the U.S. to show its pro-democatic bona fides at little cost.
[Presidential spokesman Agustin] Canet Gutierrez strongly denied that Fox was trying to scuttle Lopez Obrador’s candidacy, but he said the critics had a point in noting that seemingly far greater corruption had gone unpunished.
“It is difficult to answer that — it doesn’t show coherence, and we accept that,” Gutierrez said.
That’s just what I was thinking…