Political Theory/Political Philosophy

Justwartheory.com is a very useful set of resources on just war theory maintained by Mark Rigstad of Oakland University. There’s also an accompanying blog .

Matthew Yglesias has a pair of interesting posts up (1, 2), responding to David Brooks’ latest. Basically I agree, but let me make one critical point about where Matt ends up.

I described the liberal as having a two-stage view about end of life issues. First, comes something like the "life as continuum" view Brooks attributes to us. Second, comes a principle of free choice – I think that I should make my own decision on this, but that my view should not control others, though I may try to persuade others that my view is correct (non-relativism). The problem here is that I think a lot of liberals don’t recognize that the second principle really does depend on something akin to the first. If you hold views about the sanctity of life and the doing/allowing distinction that lead you to the conclusion that failing to keep alive someone who could be kept alive is the equivalent to murder, then adopting a principle of free choice at the second level makes no sense. An absolutist view on the first question requires an absolutist view on the second question.

I think the last sentence is not actually true, due to ambiguity in ‘absolutist’. It can mean either: cleaving to a black-white view of a matter (that other folks say they see in shades of grey.) Or it can mean: insisting that views besides one’s own are beyond the pale of moral reasonableness and tolerability. Let’s thumbnail the first absolutism: denying the continuum; the second: denying pluralism. These may sound as though they come to the same, and they probably have a tendency to run together; but in fact they are distinct. [click to continue…]

I’m rereading Louis Hartz’ 1955 classic, The Liberal Tradition in America, one of the first academic books that fired my brain when I got to college. (David Greenstone taught me. I should read his Lincoln book out of filial piety.)

Here’s a bit on Hartz by Arthur Schlesinger: "The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed
economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between
capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied
by both capitalists and socialists." Interesting shifts in usage since that was written. For a Democrat to stump for a ‘mixed’ economy today would be ballot box poison. But all Schlesinger is saying is: the New Deal. Which folks like.

Hartz’ basic thesis is packed into his Tocqueville epigraph: "The great advantage of the Americans is, that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so."

[click to continue…]

The latest New Left Review has a piece by Perry Anderson on the thinking of Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio on global order and justice. Since I’m busy teaching Rawls’s Law of Peoples at the moment, I thought I’d give it a read. The article has all the classic Anderson hallmarks — the arrogant pronouncement of judgement from on high, the frequent lapses into Latin, a will to the most unsympathetic reading possible. Typically, Anderson is incapable of reading his targets in any other way that as providing pragmatic cover for the American hegemon. On the one hand he seems to adopt the stance of high principle against the unwitting tools of US power whose every argument is accounted for in terms of their personal history and psychology, but on the other it seems hard to know where the critical principles can be coming from since it is hard to see how, on Anderson’s world-view, principles can ever be anything other than the residue of power politics as false consciousness.

The central charge against Rawls and Habermas is that of providing left philosophical cover for Western intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In Rawls’s case, this is because Rawls argues in general terms that “outlaw states” which violate human rights and threaten their neighbours cannot claim immunity from intervention from liberal states. Does Anderson advance a counter-argument to the effect that the state sovereignty of such regimes is inviolable, or that considerations such as those adduced by Rawls are insufficiently weighty to over-ride such considerations? No, of course not. Anderson wouldn’t stoop to construct such an argument: for him, all that counts is the interest of powers.

Two examples which especially annoyed me of Anderson misresepresenting Rawls to his readers are below the fold, no doubt others could be found.
[click to continue…]

We’ve had a few discussions over CT’s life span where commenters have claimed that free markets produce just deserts; that is, that if markets are working correctly, people end up more or less where they deserve to be. Elizabeth Anderson has a great post over at Left2Right setting out Hayek’s argument that free markets can’t and shouldn’t lead to just deserts if they’re going to have the informational efficiencies that Hayekians see as essential. Key grafs:

bq. Let’s consider first Hayek’s claim that prices in free market capitalism do not give people what they morally deserve. Hayek’s deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational. Free market prices send signals to producers as to where their products are most in demand (and to consumers as to the opportunity costs of their options). They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information, and then only in aggregate form. This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure: there is no way to collect individualized supply and demand information in a single mind or planning agency, to use as a basis for setting prices. Free markets alone can effectively respond to this information.

bq. It’s a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking. They aim to reward people for virtuous conduct that they undertook in the past. Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now, not where the demand was when individual producers decided on their production plans. Capitalism is an inherently dynamic economic system. It responds rapidly to changes in tastes, to new sources of supply, to new substitutes for old products. This is one of capitalism’s great virtues. But this responsiveness leads to volatile prices. Consequently, capitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents. However virtuous they were, by whatever standard of virtue one can name, individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn’t to reward people for past good behavior. It’s to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past.

i.e. – you can’t have it both way folks. Via Brad DeLong

The latest Prospect has a nice piece on Durkheim by Michael Prowse, arguing that we should take him seriously as a critic of free-market capitalism. I was, however, struck by this paragraph concerning Durkheim’s views on the advantages of marriage for men:

bq. Durkheim used the example of marriage to illustrate the problem of anomie or inadequate social regulation. You might think that men would be happiest if able to pursue their sexual desires without restraint. But it is not so, Durkheim argued: all the evidence (including relative suicide rates) suggests that men do better when marriage closes their horizons. As bachelors they can chase every woman they find attractive but they are rarely contented because the potential objects of desires are so numerous. Nor do they enjoy any security because they may lose the woman they are currently involved with. By contrast, Durkheim argued, the married man is generally happier: he must now restrict himself to one woman (at least most of the time) but there is a quid pro quo. The marriage rules require the woman to give herself to him: hence his one permitted object of desire is guaranteed. Marriage thus promotes the long-term happiness of men (Durkheim was less certain that it helped women) because it imposes a sometimes irksome constraint on their passions.

No comment from me, except that it reminded me of a dialogue between Gabrielle and her boy-gardener lover during a recent episode of Desperate Housewives . It went something like this:

bq. He: So why did you marry Carlos?

bq. She: Because he promised to give me everything I desired.

bq. He: And did he?

bq. She: Yes.

bq. He: So why aren’t you happy?

bq. She: It turns out I desired the wrong things.

Cue Aristotle stage left?

Having recently read W.G. Sebald’s The History of Natural Destruction , I found myself referring to Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars and his discussion of the “supreme emergency exception”. I was _slightly_ relieved by what I found there. Walzer doesn’t justify the bombings of Dresden (1945) or the firebombing of Hamburg (1943) but rather holds that Britain, with no other effective means of waging war against the appalling evil of Nazi Germany, and facing the threat of national annihilation, was only justified in the area bombing of German cities — in violation of the prohibition on attacking noncombatants — until early 1942. Nevertheless, what Walzer calls “the supreme emergency” exception is there, and the grounds for it are reasonably clear: necessity. The bombers were the only weapon available to leaders the continued independent existence of whose people was mortally jeopardized.

Surfing over to a blog post by Oliver Kamm , concerning our old friend Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, I find Walzer invoked as an authority against Qaradawi’s apologia for suicide bombing.

[click to continue…]

The latest terrorist bombings in Iraq came closer than usual to home for Australia, with two soldiers suffering (reportedly) minor injuries in an attack on the Australian embassy[1], while 20 more Iraqis were killed, adding to the tens of thousands already killed by both/all sides in this terrible war, which seems to get more brutal and criminal every day.

It’s pretty clear by now that Iraq is approaching full-scale civil war and that, as is usually the case in civil wars, the presence of foreign troops is only making things worse. But rather than arguing about this last point, it might be better to put it to the test. This NYT Op-ed piece by three researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests a referendum on US withdrawal to be held soon after the forthcoming elections. They make a pretty good case that it would be hard for the Baathists to justify disrupting such a referendum, though no doubt some would do so anyway. At least, this would be true if the main Shiite parties adhered to their previously stated position of favoring withdrawal.

[click to continue…]

I’m about to start teaching a new course on global justice. The course starts by looking at some general theoretical issues around justice and then moves on to look at some recent attempts to extend thinking about justice to the global sphere. I’m also going to accompany this with a blog which will basically be an opportunity to point to relevant stuff elsewhere on the web as well as being a course noticeboard. The reading list is here and the blog (currently empty) is here .

Following a lead from Bill Gardner (and a tip from Henry) I’ve been reading The Status Syndrome : How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity by Michael Marmot[1]. The core of Marmot’s book, which is fascinating in itself is his empirical work showing that, as you move up any kind of hierarchy (Marmot looked at British civil servants) your health status improves. I’ve done a little bit of work myself relating to the links between health, education and life expectancy at the national level, and Marmot’s micro findings fit very neatly with mine.

What’s even more interesting though (to me and to Bill, I think) is the general idea of autonomy as a source of good health[2]. He debunks, for example, the long-discredited, but still widely-believed notion of executive stress and shows that the more control you have over your work environment and your life in general, the less likely you are to suffer the classic stress-related illnesses, such as heart disease.

It seems to me that autonomy, or something like it, is at the root of many of the concerns commonly seen as part of notions like freedom, security and democratic participation. I’m still struggling with this, but reading Marmot has crystallised some thoughts I’ve had for a long time. I’ve put some thoughts over the page – comments appreciated.

[click to continue…]

A while ago, I looked at the ticking bomb problem and concluded that, whatever the morality of using torture to extract life-saving information in emergencies, anyone who did this was morally obliged to turn themselves in and accept the resulting legal punishment. Reader Karl Heinz Ranitzsch has pointed me to a real-life case, reported by Mrs Tilton at Fistful of Euros. The case involved a threat of torture, rather than actual torture, and the deputy police commissioner involved was convicted and fined. Without detailed knowledge of the circumstances, I tend to agree with Mrs T that this was about the right outcome.

My article The Unsustainability of U.S. Trade Deficits has just been published in The Economists’ Voice along with a piece on government deficits by Ronald McKinnon. Although relatively new and oriented to a general audience, EV looks like being a high-powered journal, having already published Stiglitz, Posner and Akerlof among others, so I’m pretty pleased to have made it into volume 1. Thanks to everyone here and on my blog who helped me to sharpen my arguments on this topic.

Update One point in my piece that I thought was at least modestly novel was my observation that the US government has been shortening the term of the Treasury securities (bonds, notes and bills) it issues. Now, via Brad DeLong, I see that Nouriel Roubini has just covered the same issue in a lot more detail, offering what he describes as “A Nightmare Hard Landing Scenario for the US $ and the US Bond Market..”. And you all thought I was bearish.

Don Arthur had an interesting response to my pieces on the precautionary principle and wars of choice[1]. Don correctly observes that this kind of argument can be used in opposition to reform, and is therefore inherently conservative. He mentions, as an instance, the possibility of making this kind of argument against gay marriage.

Don goes on to argue

The welfare state is another area conservatives might want to apply the precautionary principle. Just as environmentalists argue that we should withdraw genetically modified crops from sale until they are proved safe, conservatives could argue that welfare benefits to never-married single mothers should be withdrawn until they are proved non-hazardous to social functioning. After all, the widespread use of income support for alleviating poverty in families where a woman has had a child out of wedlock is relatively recent.

While there’s always room for dispute over what is meant by “relatively recent” here, I don’t think this argument works. The main institutions of the welfare state developed in the first half of last century, before most of us were born, and its extension to single mothers dates back to the 1960s. In this debate, the self-described advocates of welfare reform are those who want to do away with social institutions most of us have grown up with and try something radically new. The fact that reform may be sold as a return to an idealised and largely imaginary past, rather than a leap into the future, doesn’t change this. In fact, reformers of all stripes have used this characterisation of reform, sometimes validly and sometimes not, most obviously in the case of the Reformation[2].

[click to continue…]

Bill Gardner has another, more lengthy, post on Michael Marmot’s The Status Syndrome. He quickly reviews the evidence for Marmot’s thesis that there is a social gradient in health. Marmot is pretty persuasive (to Bill and me anyway) that the social gradient in health is not explicable by appeal to the idea that healthier people move socially upward. What is more conjectural is Marmot’s claim that the explanation lies in the fact that people who find themselves lower down the social scale have less ‘autonomy’. Bill explores what autonomy might mean in this context.

I’m again disallowing comments, in an authoritarian manner, to force you to discuss it at Bill’s blog.