Rust Belt Philosophy

Rust Belt Philosophy: now featuring philosophical linguistics!

2012-02-02T20:00:00.000-08:00

As inspired, bizarrely enough, by an astrophysicist.

"Every generation has the right, indeed the responsibility, to take the language it was given, listen to its resonances and use them for the purposes at hand. To do anything less would be to kill the language through atrophy. In a sense this is what scholar Elaine Pagels means when she talks about 'creative misreading' of earlier texts in a religious tradition."

Adam Frank is saying this because he, like so many bored thinkers of our time, would like to come up with a creative solution to the religion vs. science debate. Though his idea sounds sort of crazy on its face, in the context of "listen[ing] to [language's] resonances and us[ing] them for the purposes at hand," it actually almost makes sense. Not quite, mind you - but almost.

Science, Frank says, is

"an organic focus of the human sense of 'spirit'...For all its usefulness in developing technology, science is elementally a path to hierophany. The insight and all-embracing vision of life (and cosmos) so apparent though science is also gateway to the experience of the sacred.

It always has been."

People love to learn about science, Frank is saying, and that love is the same sort of emotion as (if not the exact same emotion as) the feeling that religious people refer to when they talk about the "sacred." Hence we can resolve the science/religion thing by - well, actually, I'm not exactly sure how he says we can do that, but he seems to think that we can. At any rate, whichever solution he's proposing (or hinting at, or whatever) relies on his ability to argue that science is this "gateway to the experience of the sacred" thing that he describes, and I think that he pretty clearly lacks that ability.

For one, there is almost no sense in which it is useful to talk about science as being fundamentally or essentially a "gateway to...the sacred." That's not how we distinguish good science from bad science, for one, and it's also not actually something that science accomplishes most of the time or for most people (or, for that matter, should accomplish most of the time for most people). It is certainly true that one can find scientists from any given era for whom science worked that way - Frank's examples are Pythagoras and Kepler - but I have really no idea how that's supposed to be relevant. We could, for instance, use that same criterion to prove that ("for all its usefulness in" being "a path to hierophany") science is fundamentally or essentially a means of developing technology, but Frank explicitly denies that, so this path can only lead to a dead end.

The only other obvious path, however, is even more confusing and weird. We should use "sacred" to talk about science, Frank says, because it has

"old, old word whose roots are in Roman temple architecture. One meaning of 'Sacer' is to be 'set apart'. In Roman temples it meant the interior where visitors needed to be attentive to the needs of the gods. Outside the sacer you could do anything you wanted including selling walnuts or old 8-track tapes of the Commodores Greatest Hits. Inside however you were expected to pay attention to a different quality of experience."

One reason this is strange is because Frank wants us simultaneously to be attentive to the "resonances" of language but then also to ignore the intensely religious (supernatural) resonances of the word "sacred" - even though those are the exact resonances he finds compelling. But the other, and I think more decisive, reason that this argument can't work is that being a "gateway to the experience of the sacred" is not what makes science "sacred" in this sense, i.e., what sets it apart from any other human activity.

Sure, scientifically-oriented "sacred [experience] often appears to us in the middle of our 'profane' everyday activities," such as when we observe the behavior of animals or (in Frank's case) the mathematically elegant fluid dynamics of a cup of coffee, but scientific sacred stuff is only one kind of sacred stuff and, so far as I can tell, does not substantially differ from any other kind of sacred stuff (qua sacred stuff). Frank argues that calling science "sacred" is a necessary part of having "an informed deployment of science," but it seems to me that this is actually the exact opposite of the case: by identifying science as just one more way of getting a specific kind of emotional high that can be equally well obtained with drugs or sports or art or, yes, even religion, it seems like we would necessarily strip science of what makes it a unique human enterprise. And it seems relatively clear that science-as-sacred requires a very different sort of deployment than science-as-controlled-empirical-inquiry does.

The really ridiculous thing about all of this, of course, is that accepting Frank's proposition probably wouldn't do a damn thing to cool the debate between science and religion. Why would it, when it amounts to an attempt by science (or, really, the self-proclaimed defenders of science, which in this context amounts to the same thing) to move in on religion's territory? I've said before that I think science and other secular enterprises are important to people who use them to have sacred-style experiences, and I still believe that, but that doesn't change what science is or how science works any more than it does the same to, say, basketball. Unless we're going to call everything that makes us feel good (in some special way) "sacred," we need to take all of that word's resonances seriously and think twice before applying it to anything secular, methodological, or inquiry-based.

Any post in which I get to quote from Fight Club is a good post

2012-02-02T14:04:00.000-08:00

So thanks, I guess, Barton Hinkle.

"[To witness 'the glories of free-market capitalism,' j]ust check a vending machine. There you will find every possible combination and interpolation of snack food. In the potato chip category alone—we don't have time to look at crackers, cheese puffs, corn chips, or cookies—one finds not just barbecue- or cheddar-flavored chips, but chili cheese, cool ranch, ragin' ranch, habanero, cheddar jalapeno, hot sauce, honey cheese, creamy chipotle, Mediterranean herb, and ketchup-flavored chips...

I [personally] am among those who have a weak spot—call it a fetish, call it an obsession—for school supplies. Pens, especially.

There are pens, you see, and then there are pens...And each of them has its place in an ordered world. You want the right pen for the job, after all. For marking up page proofs, there's nothing like a Pilot Bravo, which leaves a thick red or blue correction that bellows 'FIX THIS' in a manly baritone. For jotting down a phone number on a scratch pad, you can't beat the speed of a Uniball Signo 207 gel. For everyday writing, the Pilot Precise V5 rolling-ball is splendid."

The point here, as in Steve Horwitz's very silly article about socks, is supposed to be to show how great capitalism is. And, as in Horwitz's very silly article, Hinkle takes it for granted that the modern proliferation of potato chips and pens, together with the history of capitalism, is proof positive that capitalist methods are all we need to get whatever it is we want. "There's a pen for everyone," Hinkle victoriously declares, "just as there is (sigh) a potato chip for everyone," and so eventually everything will work out.

Though this argument is probably at least a little tongue-in-cheek, but I think it says something about these people that they can only manage to make the argument with boutique consumer items and not with, say, shit people actually need. But if we're going to be serious about this, we cannot fail to see a certain troubling pattern in the examples listed by Horwitz and Hinkle: they only include items that are easily mass-manufactured. If you want good services, which (we can say by definition) are not goods that can currently be mass-manufactured, then it sure seems like you're out of luck. So people like me, who would like to have relatively cheap high-quality art, and sick people, who need relatively cheap high-quality medical care, are generally gonna be out of luck. And there are going to be limits even when we talk about mass-produced goods, as certain segments of the market have proven themselves to be incapable of real innovation (coughautomakerscough).

In any case, every way we turn we run into apparent limitations on what capitalism can accomplish. As long as we only need an infinite variety of things like pens or socks, we'll be fine; once we start needing anything else, however, things become a good deal dicier. Hinkle, being a market fetishist, believes that:

"It's obvious what's going on here...America's [companies] live in deathly fear that the other guys are going to come up with the next 'disruptive innovation' first, so everyone is trying to innovate as fast as they can."

But, having seen the existing and even long-standing patterns of market failure, I strongly prefer Chuck Palahniuk's interpretation:

"I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."

So go ahead, market people. Keep telling me how many different ball-point fucking pens I can buy or how many flavors of potato chips are available in my hallway vending machine. But when my brand-new car gets the same mileage as cars from 25 years ago, when we have spiraling medical costs with stagnant or even declining health as a nation, or when Hollywood can't come up with an original movie idea to save its life because you can only mass-produce something you already have a mold of, don't you fucking tell me about "the glories of free-market capitalism."

Shark: jumped

2012-02-02T05:46:00.000-08:00

This may not come as a surprise to learn - if, in fact, it's new information for you at all - but many observers consider the Oscars to be more of a political (or, worse, promotional) exercise than a legitimate awards show. As I understood it, this was only partly true: although there was never any question that the recipient of any given award is determined not just by judging the worth of the relevant performances, my thought was that the politics-or-desert dilemma was a false one. There are, I was given to understand and eventually came to believe for myself, enough deserving nominees in any one year that one could not always pick the best artistic performance but rather only one of the best such performances. In that case, it seemed to me, there was no reason not to make sure that every deserving person had his or her "turn." But then this happened:

Best Supporting Actor
Kenneth Branagh – My Week with Marilyn as Laurence Olivier *Jonah Hill – Moneyball* as Peter Brand** Nick Nolte – Warrior as Paddy Conlon Christopher Plummer – Beginners as Hal Fields Max von Sydow – Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as The Renter

They nominated Jonah Hill for an Oscar! Jonah Hill! I've seen better acting jobs from Daily Show correspondents and professional athletes, for fuck's sake:

And this is the same Motion Picture Academy that won't nominate Andy Serkis? Because what he does isn't really acting? Fuck outta here. This is enough to make a fella want to start his own awards - and so, I think, I will. Starting this year (i.e., 2012 going forward), I'll just skip the Oscars and do it my own fucking self. It'll be a little more work to actually keep track of all the movies I've seen and so on, but at least I'll never make the mistake of nominating Jonah "I'm funny because I'm mildly obese and for literally no other reason" Hill.

Yes.

2012-02-01T09:13:00.000-08:00

Yep:

"One way to get a politician to withdraw a bill requiring drug-testing for welfare applicants? Just tell him lawmakers also have to get tested, and see how fast he boomerangs. Rep. Jud McMillin, a Republican member of the Indiana General Assembly, took back his drug-testing bill after one of his helpful Democratic colleagues amended it ever so slightly."

Uh huh:

"The state Senate this afternoon gave preliminary approval for legislation that would require pregnant women to undergo ultrasound imaging before an abortion, but not before rejecting a Democratic senator’s attempt to add what she described as 'a little gender equity' to the bill. Democrat Janet Howell of Fairfax County proposed requiring men to undergo a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra."

And, since I'm me, affirmative:

Anybody know this joke?

2012-02-01T09:05:00.000-08:00

Starts like this?

"Sammy is attending his first Comedian's Convention. He's very excited to see all the comic's he's seen on TV sitting at tables all around him. The proceedings begin with a joke session. [One comedian] gets up and says 'Number 64.'"

Anyway, the idea is that comedians are so familiar with jokes that they've numbered them all and memorized the numbering system, so that all they have to do when they perform for each other is call out a number and the whole room will get the joke. Sometimes I feel like politics works that way. "False dilemma number eighteen!"

"Does civil society consist of a set of institutions that help the government achieve its purposes as it defines them when their doing so might be more efficient or convenient than the state’s doing so itself, or does civil society consist of an assortment of efforts by citizens to band together in pursuit of mutual aims and goods as they understand them? Is it an extension of the state or of the community?"

And this is one of those false dilemmas that's doubly false: not only is civil society both a set of institutions that helps government and an assortment of mutually supportive groups of citizens, it's also other things (like people working on their own to achieve stuff).* But if you're like Yuval Levin and you want to make it seem like anything the government does is coercive, it sure might help to propound the idea that the only alternative to a wholly people-run society is a wholly government-run society. The same goes for the idea that society must necessarily be "an extension of" some thing that existed before it, rather than a compound entity composed of (or dependent on) many diverse such things.

Then again, it may not even be the case that civil society ought to be considered as being composed of or extended out from some thing or things. Maybe the idea of a civil society is more teleological, say, or more descriptive than normative, which in either case would make this whole thing moot. But even if Levin is right to try to shape civil society according to its roots, there's very little reason to accept his description of what those roots are.

*It may even be triply false, in that the government presumably is (at least sometimes) "an [effort] by citizens to band together in pursuit of mutual aims and goods."

By George, this time he's definitely got it

2012-02-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

When Dennis Prager planned to compare "secular fanaticism" to Islamic terrorists, he probably thought that it would sound at least a little scarier than this.

"The Islamists impose Sharia law; the American Civil Liberties Union and the left generally impose secular law."

Because, well, yeah: we impose secular law. This is a secular country with a secular government, so our laws - which, being laws, we impose on people - will be secular. Welcome to the 18th century, Denny.

Magical new urbanism as white supremacy (yes, really)

2012-01-31T12:38:00.000-08:00

Continuing now to examine the idea that we can cure our social ills just by setting up small-town-style neighborhoods or aesthetics in big cities, it's worth taking the time to learn why Rod Dreher fears the "cultural Third World to which America is descending." Citing the writing of a* scholar by the name of Charles Murray, Dreher reports that "elite white American culture has diverged from working-class white American culture [such as in] the white elite Boston suburb of Belmont with the white working-class Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown." While Murray evidently wants to fix this by having the elites move in with the rest of us shlubs, Dreher is skeptical:

"Why should Mr. and Mrs. Belmont send their kids to school at Fishtown High, which is likely to be a place where the education won’t be nearly as good as what’s on offer at Belmont Prep, and — more crucially to Murray’s main point — the mainstream culture is likely to be inimical to the values that they prize. There may be a moral case for doing this, but Murray doesn’t make it. Moreover, he doesn’t stop to think that the working-class people of Fishtown may not particularly want to adopt the moral and cultural values of the Belmontese. There is a certain sense of noblesse oblige informing Murray’s prescription. What if the people of Fishtown don’t give a rat’s ass about the cultural preferences and values of the elites who deign to live among them? Where is the guarantee that the Fishtownians will be improved by the presence of the Belmontese? The assumption is that if people have a better example set for them, particularly an example of people who prosper by living according to a certain set of bourgeois norms, then they will all want to be like the bourgeois. How do we know that’s true, especially in a popular culture that constantly and powerfully agitates against bourgeois values of self-discipline and stability?"

That Dreher would complain about noblesse oblige while simultaneously extolling the "bourgeois values of self-discipline and stability" is more than a little ironic, I think, but the main idea goes back to one of the most basic problems with new urbanism as a tool for real social reform:

"Connecting to one's neighbors isn't just a matter of doing things with them; otherwise all of us would be good friends with almost all of our coworkers. We tend to gather around and support people who think and act (and, yes, look) like we do. That means having shared rituals, shared schedules, and shared priorities. That doesn't mean that we have to vote in lockstep or anything like that, but if I want to be a rowdy bachelor who doesn't discriminate in his company and my neighbor wants to have a safe, peaceful place in which to raise three small kids then there's probably going to be some tension. All of this is going to be even harder if my local friends and I work in different industries (say, because we live in a city) or if our kids go to different schools (say, because we live in a city) or if we're from different backgrounds (say, because we grew up in a diverse place, like a city)."

I should have added at the time that it will be even harder to homogenize "moral and cultural values" in the age of the internet, where one can find and adopt foreign or minority values trivially easily, and also in our present age of vast wealth disparity, which makes some values irrelevant (or inapt) for the rich and others irrelevant for the poor. To his credit, Dreher seems to acknowledge the latter - "there’s something troubling about a broadly democratic America turning into a Third World model, where a superrich cultural elite rules the teeming masses from behind gated communities," he says - but when it comes to the former he can only manage to conceive of diversity as a problematic "cultural brokenness." And that's where he and I part ways.

Cultural brokenness, I think, cannot just be cultural heterogeneity. "Brokenness" implies that something is wrong - that, in other words, the broken thing really should be whole. For Dreher to talk about cultural brokenness therefore indicates that he thinks that our culture should be unified in some way. Since he talks about the "moral and cultural values" by which people live their lives, one can presume that unification of values is at least part of the cultural unification that he would prefer to "cultural brokenness." Lovely though this idea might sound in the abstract, I've got two big problems with it: it shouldn't work and it can't work.

The reason it can't work is simpler: thanks to the internet and easy travel and multiculturalism and all those good things, people are exposed to a huge number of widely differing value sets (cultural more so than moral, I would think, but there's still a good deal of variety just within the moral values). It would be tremendously foolish to think that people could reliably be steered towards only one set of values when they have so many to choose from and so much opportunity to, for want of a better word, experiment. Assuring consistency in a population's values was hard back when populations were small and images of alternative lifestyles were hard to obtain; now that populations are huge and information proliferates, you can pretty much forget about it.

But even if we could, through some dark magic or other, limit people's options in that way, I think it's sort of sinister to think that we should. By talking about how great the white, wealthy ("Belmontese") are, contrasting that with "the persistence of poverty and dysfunction among black folks who reject bourgeois values," and then wistfully pining for the day when our culture was integrated and whole, Dreher sure makes it seem an awful lot like he wants to punish (especially black) people whose values differ from his - or, at least, that he doesn't want to give them the same kind of help that he would want to give someone more like himself. That, to put it lightly, is kinda fucked up.

To repeat the point: if we're going to talk about using new urbanism or its tenets to fix society, we have to start by recognizing its limits. As Dreher rightly observes, it's not going to make everybody somehow hold hands and sing kumbaya because now they're all living in close proximity to one another. But it also isn't going to create well-paying jobs out of thin air, which used to be available to non-bourgeois people before we destroyed the labor and manufacturing systems in this country; or fix our education system, which could allow more people to join the bourgeoisie; or provide basic goods like safety or medical care. Trying to turn the whole country into one giant community with more or less one set of values won't help to fix our economy, get us to stop spending money on gratuitous wars, move us towards greener energy, or make us less politically divided. If the problem is "cultural inequality," what we need is not cultural homogeneity of the sort promoted by the magical-thinking wing of the new urbanists but rather cultural equality - duh, right? - of the sort promoted mostly by liberals. In other words, we need an educational system that teaches kids more than just arbitrary factoids about history - not to mention one that stops lying to them about history. We need a strong and generous social safety net so that people waste less of their time and energy keeping their heads above water. And, oh yeah, we need economic (including tax) policies that are tilted more towards giving people what they need rather than what (we feel) they deserve, because there's almost no better way to stack the deck in favor of one's own lifestyle than to codify that lifestyle in labor, business, and tax laws, standards, and practices. As far as I can tell, though, Dreher and the other magical new urbanists aren't willing to do any of this - or even just to try. Their new urbanism is little more than another way to enforce the false dilemma "be happy as a bourgeoisie or be miserable," and Dreher could not be more wrong than to think that we can make things better by reinforcing the very notion that is responsible for the problem in the first place.

*NB: not "another" scholar. The last thing I would accuse Dreher of being is scholarly.

The case against the contraceptive mandate, as made by a dumbass

2012-01-31T08:19:00.000-08:00

So apparently lots of people have been whining about the fact that employers will have to cover their employees' copays for contraceptive goods and services because they (the whiners) think that this is too much of a burden for Catholic employers. This post will address one argument from the whiniest whiner of them all, Andrew Haines, but before I get there I just want to point out one thing: we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if we as a country weren't so fucking terrified of having a single-payer healthcare system like every other developed nation on the fucking planet. So conservative and moderately liberal Catholics? You're reaping what you sowed on this one. Hope it tastes good, cause you earned it.

Anyway, though, Haines:

"The example [of] walking as non-necessary yet clearly medically relevant is...not equivalent to what’s going in with contraception. If my legs were maimed, there’d be a healthy part of my body that was made unhealthy. Thus, medical care would work to return to health what is properly, by nature, healthy."

This was already in response to one commentator, one ScottEF, but it was so stupid that I decided I had to pile on. As I've already said on this blog, the right-wing "pregnancy is not unhealthy" argument is wildly anti-scientific (or, if you prefer, anti-reality):

"Unless Haines and Tollefsen are willing to say that chronic nausea and incontinence aren't illnesses - not to mention chronic pain, anemia, varicose veins, and a whole laundry list of other potential complications - they have to admit that contraception does prevent illnesses, namely, those illnesses that are typically a part of being pregnant."

Given all of this, it should be a no-brainer to classify contraception as a preventative medical good. Haines, however, continued to disagree, saying that while my

"comparison works on the surface...there’s a built in preventive method in the natural status quo—i.e., abstinence. Contraceptives only become preventive when someone engages in the act—which is almost always voluntary."

This is the right-wing's second-favorite anti-contraception* argument and, like the first, its basic (but unspoken) premise is that sex is only good if it goes to make babies. Since this is not (yet) a psychoanalysis blog or a feminist sociology blog but rather a philosophy blog, though, I'll leave that for another time. Luckily, I have a good backup plan: looking at what Haines said explicitly.

The gist of Haines's argument, I think, must be one of two things. If Haines is really dumb, he's saying that contraception can't be preventative because there's a better (in the sense of more effective) preventative measure out there, namely, abstinence. To translate this into a less contentious context, this would essentially be like saying that seat belts in cars are not actually safety devices because it would be safer still not to drive at all. If this is how we're going to understand the concept of prevention (either in terms of illness or trauma), the concept of prevention is fucked, so this one's a no-go. The only alternative, though, is for Haines to say that contraception is a preventative medical procedure but shouldn't (or maybe just needn't) be mandated for or provided to everyone because of the existence of "a built-in preventative method." This may seem more plausible at first, but again, consider the seat belt: there's a law about having seat belts in cars (and another one about using them), but you can definitely obviate the need for them by not driving. Unless Haines thinks that those two facts are discordant, he's being inconsistent. (And if he does think that those two facts are discordant, he's being doltish - just not as doltish as before.)

There is, of course, one major contextual difference between contraception and safety belts: the latter don't go against the (arbitrarily enforced) tenets of a major religion. But really: if Catholics had some kind of crazy thing against seat belts, would we want to make them exempt from wearing them? Or, if they worked for a car company, designing them, or producing them? (Or, to use a more realistic example, would we expect a Jewish or Muslim person working for a meat company to be able to get out of all pork-related activities?) Presumably not, yet that would actually be more invasive than the situation Catholics will soon be facing.

Haines and his cohorts can only make headway in this argument under the pretense that this would be an altogether new and unprecedented kind of government action. The fact is, though, that it ain't, and the more they try to pretend otherwise the more they have to distort or outright fabricate the reality of the situation. Even for people who might not care about contraception as such, the contortions that these people are going through to argue against it should be more than enough to mark their cause as a suspicious one and one that, if it succeeds, could easily make things much worse later down the line.

*Bam! Three hyphenated phrases in a row. New high score.

Rights are not Rights!, part n

2012-01-31T07:07:00.000-08:00

This was going to be one of my "By George, I think he's got it" posts, but Rand Simberg doesn't quite get it. Close - but not quite.

"Recently, the Texas legislature passed (and the governor signed) a law with a seemingly modest requirement — that any woman getting an abortion in the state of Texas be allowed (and required) to see a sonogram of the fetus twenty-four hours prior to the surgery...

Contrast this with the hoops that gun owners must often jump through to purchase firearms — background checks, waiting periods, purchase limits within a certain amount of time. Or the requirement that they undergo training, spending money and investing time, to get a permit to carry their weapons, even in states where it is allowed. All of these are far more onerous than the simple requirement that a woman have an ultrasound picture taken of her womb, and see it."

Because liberals tend to complain only about the former - and, indeed, tend to approve of the latter - Simberg accuses us of having a "flexible attitude towards 'rights.'" And d'you know what? I do have a flexible attitude towards rights! Absolutely, unequivocally, and, above all, intentionally: my attitude towards rights could perhaps most accurately be described as "flexible." Because gun ownership provides negligible benefits but paves the way for drastic harms, I construe the right to own a gun as being limited; because abortions are primarily helpful and go to mitigate or even avoid harms, I construe the right to have an abortion as being broad. Flexible!

But I admit: I only take a flexible approach to rights because I care about reality. If I didn't, like Simberg appears not to, it would be the easiest thing in the world to say that every right must be equally easily accessible, or that rights must be protected absolutely, or some such thing. Alas, experience and reason tell me that such a system is incoherent and impracticable, and so I reject it. But hey, good for Simberg. At least he's brave enough to confess that his political theory, apparently being inflexible, lacks the ability to adapt to changing circumstances or changing knowledge. It takes a very proud man to display his stupidity to prominently, but I guess pride in one's own stupidity must be one of those Republican macho virtues we recently had the chance to learn about.

The people vs. ...people?

2012-01-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

Quoth Rupert Read,

"[T]here is a problem that would still remain [in developed nations], even in the much-improved reformed democracy that would eventuate from a whole series of ‘standard’ democratic reforms, such as radically reforming the House of Lords, introducing proportional representation, reining in the unbridled power of media oligarchs, etc. The problem is this.

The people who would rule, even in such an improved democratically reformed future, are only the people (in fact, the adult, registered to vote, not extremely infirm etc. people) who are alive in the present."

At first you might wonder if Read isn't maybe writing in circles here. Could he really mean to include non-living people in our systems of governance? After all, the idea "that 'tradition is egalitarianism extended into history'...is nothing more than a glorified ad populum fallacy," and that's before we even begin to talk about the lunacy of talking about non-living people in the first place.

Alas, however, Read means exactly what he says:

"[S]urely ‘the people’ ought to be thought of in a far more temporally extended manner. Does a people only exist as a momentary ‘time-slice’? Surely not. A people, a nation-state, a community, a society, is something extended over time. It extends into (or rather from) the past, and extends indefinitely into the future.

This report aims to propose a solution to the problem identified here, a way in which we can enable the people considered as distributed over time (crucially, into the future) as well as over space, to rule."

If this is a solution at all - and it may well be, sort of; more on that in a second - it sure as shit isn't a solution to a problem that democracies have. That's because a democracy is not actually supposed to operate on the basis of the dictates of a people but rather the people. If you're confused on the difference, go back and read Read: a people "is something extended over time" and is more like "a community" or "a society" than it is like the actual societies that exist at any given time-slice (i.e., moment in time) or over any short period of time. The current citizens of the United States, for example, are the people of the USA, but we are definitely not a people: we're too diverse, too disconnected from one another, and too disparate in general to form the unified, coherent whole that makes up a people. To see this clearly, consider an immigrant or first-generation American. Such an individual would be connected to his or her original country's past but also to America's future - if, as Read states, the existence of a people requires "a contract between the dead, the living and those unborn," someone who just arrived here from, say, Brazil is not going to be part of the same people as I am, because I have no contract with any dead Brazilians. (One should also question whether any random Brazilian automatically has such a contract just in virtue of being from Brazil, but I for damn sure don't.) Thus, if we were to interpret democracies as working the way that Read says they work, immigrants and first-generation citizens of a nation (and probably other categories of people I'm too lazy to think of) would not have any right to participate in that nation's governance. Along similar lines, one could pretty easily dismantle the idea of the popular vote in a "democracy" that was supposed to honor the wishes of, say, some abstract idea of the French people and not the actual French people who were around at any given time. That Read thinks he's fixing the democracies that we already have rather than trying to replace them with something new indicates that he's got a really insane idea of which "people" matter to democratic systems.

Of course, that may not be a bad thing. Democracies aren't perfect, as we all hopefully know, so maybe it'd be a good idea to replace them. And Read does claim to be concerned about making sure that future generations have things like a "healthy environment," which is something that our current political systems are not doing a great job of protecting. But I have a real distrust of anybody who tries to achieve something good through sophistry, which sure looks to be Read's strategy here. Even assuming that a people is something coherent, which is far from sure, that's not the entity that should direct a democratic government - least of all if we want that government to be progressive. (Think about it: we can say with relative surety what past generations wanted and what we want, but how much do we really know about what people will want hundreds of years from now? Giving a "voice" to both the past and the future is a great-sounding idea, it's symmetrical and egalitarian and all that, but in one case you're letting someone speak and in the other you're putting words in their mouth. Not exactly the same.) If Read wants to go around making shit up about etymology and whitewashing his ancestors' beliefs and behavior in the name of environmentalism, let him at least do so without calling it philosophy.

"Dead Zone": still a better movie title than "Man on a Ledge"

2012-01-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

Honestly, what the fuck, Hollywood? Man on a Ledge? Unbelievable...

But anyway, "dead zone" is not actually the name of an upcoming movie (at least, that I know of). It is, instead, the name for what will happen to places that follow the economic advice of conservatives and allow their economy to form around the acquisition and sale of some non-renewable natural resource, like I said last week.

"Just like the Pennsylvania family farmers who are now being 'rescued' by natural gas companies, [some third-world] nations form the bulk of their economies around extracting and then selling natural resources, thereby disregarding the need for longer-term economic stability. Unsurprisingly, what happens as a result is that the countries profit for a short time - i.e., for as long as the resources last - and then go right back to abject poverty. Worse still, their abject poverty means more after their period of success because other countries have continued to develop, leaving them farther behind."

You may have thought at the time that this couldn't happen in a nation like the USA. After all, aren't we an economic superpower? Couldn't we find a way around that cycle? Well, in a word, no.

"Recent headlines of a brighter economic picture have given many people hope that the economy is not in another free fall. GDP growth did tick upward in the last quarter. But for many communities the picture is enduringly dark, because unemployment rates have lagged far behind the national average for years and will likely continue to do so."

These are the dead zones of which I was speaking. How did they get to be dead zones, you ask?

"The Northwest dead zones (Oregon, Washington and Northern California) historically had large numbers of jobs in the timber and fishing industries. Because of overfishing, many coastal communities saw jobs vanish. In addition, when the Spotted Owl was placed on the endangered species list in 1982, it forced the shuttering of many timber yards because of encroachment on newly protected forestland...

Employment in the Deep South has never fully recovered from the decline of the cotton industry and mechanization. Since then southern dead zones have experienced considerable emigration, and many areas have not made progress towards the development of alternative industries.

Dead zones along the Appalachia and Atlantic Coast (Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee) have relied either on coal or timber industries, both of which suffered steep declines in the 1970s and have yet to fully recover." (emphasis mine throughout)

In fairness, not all of the dead zones were reliant on limited natural resources. Stated in its more general form, the real problem is having only one significant industry; economic diversity, like ecological diversity, goes a long way towards assuring longevity. Only when that one industry is the (unsustainable) sale of a limited natural resource, though, does one know in advance that one's economy is running on borrowed time. Rather than using those resources as a way of acquiring money that could be used to invest in a new economy, however, conservatives and other business-first sorts of people are hyping it as a way to "save" farms - which, in pragmatic terms, means "put off dealing with the fundamental problem for even longer than you have to, thereby undermining your ability to eventually resolve it."

We certainly could adopt the conservative model and strip one area after another of its natural resources, each time picking up and moving whole economies. That is, we could if we didn't mind ruining the environment and wreaking havoc in people's lives every generation or so. But those of us who would rather not do those things - who would rather, say, manage our resources for the long term or find new sources of economic growth altogether - just might want to consider supporting a different way of doing things.

Virtue ethics: now also for bigots

2012-01-30T07:24:00.000-08:00

Politically inclined as I am, I still cannot bring myself to listen to the yearly state of the union address. Didn't listen to this year's, didn't listen to any other of Obama's SOTUs, didn't listen to Bush's, nor Clinton's. They're just unimportant: the president gets to regurgitate 90% of what his predecessors have said and add 10% of obfuscation and vague promises, and then the other party gets to talk about the whole thing as though the president said he wanted to douse the entire country in cooking oil and light it on fire. So when Joseph Knippenberg criticizes Obama for something or other in the SOTU he just gave, there's not really any good way for me to defend Obama (nor do I even particularly want to SOTUs, again, being what they are). But that's not to say that I can't attack Knippenberg.

"What the President was reaching for in his invocation of the military was republican virtue—the virtues of citizens willing to subordinate themselves to the ends of the community, enduring hardship and privation, subjecting themselves to a rigorous self-discipline, and holding one another responsible and accountable. These are impressive virtues...

The point I’d like to focus on is that these are not soft, self-indulgent qualities. They have, as I’ve already noted, a hard core of self-discipline and personal responsibility, which can only be cultivated in settings that inflexibly demand these qualities of those who participate in them. You may not need the Spartan Agoge system or the Great Santini, but you do need, at the very least, old-fashioned fathers."

Now, readers of this blog should know by now that virtue ethics is the ethical theory of choice for idiots.* But this is a new twist: Knippenberg is not just idiotic but is also misogynistic when he says that fathers (and specifically old-fashioned fathers) are needed in order to teach people "to subordinate themselves to the ends of the community, [endure] hardship and privation, [subject] themselves to a rigorous self-discipline, and [hold] each other responsible and accountable." I mean, seriously: does he think that mothers cannot do this? Or, more to the point, that the "virtues" we've associated with femininity in this culture cannot also teach people to serve the broader community, endure hard times, and so on?

The really insulting thing about this isn't even Knippenberg's casual condescension towards and inadvertent dismissal of women. It's that the abilities he lists are precisely what our culture has required of women for centuries. Especially for married mothers - i.e., "good" women, for most of our history and even today - there was a shitload of self-subordination (to husbands, usually), hardship (pregnancy, anyone?), self-discipline (you try being the only housekeeper for a whole family), and the like. Given all of this, it borders on the sickening for someone like Knippenberg to run around talking about how our country can only be saved by making it more masculine and macho. Granted, I don't know how he could have avoided this - virtue ethics is basically just ethics-as-cultural-bias - but it's more than a little pathetic that he's allowing his blatantly sexist biases to dictate his philosophy in such an obvious and direct way.

*If I had to categorize the other main competitors, I would say that human-dignity-type stuff is for sociopaths (or liars), utilitarianism is for pessimists, and divine command theory is for children.

Random art post!, episode 2: more than just a spoonful of sugar

2012-01-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

Over this past week, I've tried to go into a little more detail about the "making lemonade" concept that I've shamelessly stolen from former San Antonio Spurs swingman Sean Elliott. When I first brought it up, it was merely to demonstrate the fallacy of trying to achieve an impossible ideal rather than settling for an outcome that is less than ideal but achievable - which, if you've forgotten, is basically the same kind of fallacy I talked about when I argued that existence could not be a virtue in the philosophical sense (i.e., a fallacy of assuming that we're living in an ideal world). But that doesn't say very much about how to make lemonade. To some degree this was an intentional omission on my part, because the way to make lemonade varies widely depending on which sort of enterprise you're in, but there is at least one thing that I should say on the subject. Rather than just coming out and saying it, though, I want to enlist the help of Aimee Bender's excellent An Invisible Sign Of My Own (minor spoilers ahead).

Invisible Sign - which, incidentally, is officially recommended - is bookended by fables of Bender's own invention, one of which is told to the main character and the other of which is told by her. Though they arguably are less thematic than many other textual elements in the novel, the difference between the two fables reflects the protagonist's personal development over the course of the novel. Better yet - at least for our purposes - the difference between the two can be used to make a salient point about my (or, rather, Sean Elliott's) making lemonade imagery.

In the first fable, the people of an unnamed village have discovered the secret to eternal life and so no longer die. Unsurprisingly, however, they soon run up against the awkward fact that an exponentially-increasing population cannot live on a fixed amount of land and other resources. In order to free up space for its new inhabitants, the village decided to ask for volunteer martyrs - and, being a fable, people actually agreed. "So that afternoon," Bender writes, "each family that showed up in the town square had chosen one martyr to die for the cause...that is, all except one family. This family simply could not pick." Rather than choosing one person among them to die for the cause, the indecisive family instead contributed a collection of body parts - which, being a fable, the village's leadership accepted - with the mother of the family offering her leg, the daughter her ear, and so on. As you may have guessed, however, this did not go entirely as planned:

"The cut-up family, after recovering, still made their sausage rolls, but no one could stand to buy them anymore because it was so disturbing to go into the store and see [them]. The family, broke, was forced to leave. They moved to the next town, which wasn't so bad after all, and opened up a new business, and since no one there had ever seen them whole, here they accepted the family of pieces without a problem and bought sausage rolls day after day. Each family member lived a long long time, and only the baby, who was complete, contracted any disease. When she did, at age twenty, they nursed her and nursed her until her leg fell off with gangrene, and then they had a party to celebrate her arrival."

At first - at least for me - it wasn't clear just what I was supposed to take from this. There's certainly some ambivalence in the fable's conclusion, to say the least, but it's not at all clear which part of that ambivalence is the relevant part. Though I could see that there was some lemonade-making going on - and at multiple points in the fable, no less - it was far from obvious how I was supposed to feel about that as a reader.

In the second and concluding fable, however, that was cleared up - but not entirely in the way I had guessed. As in the first version of the fable there was a death-free village that was running out of room, and as in the first version of the fable one family decided to offer pieces of themselves. In the retold fable, however, the daughter speaks up, informing her family and hometown that she intends to leave. "But daughter," they reply, "if we leave, we'll all die eventually." Of course, she knew this and had already taken it into account.* "But I don't want to cut off my ear," she replied. "I want to be able to hear things. I want to see my mother use her hands. I'd like to see my father with a nose. I want to see my brother with shoes on." And so, despite the protests of her family, she and some other members of the village who apparently felt the same way eventually just walked away, "straight into death," leaving their families behind.

The surprising thing about this, at least for me, was that Bender refrained from making any judgments about the people (in the fable) who stayed. My instinct (and I suspect most people's instinct) is to look for the right answer in a situation like this, and so it's almost automatic for me to read the second fable as the corrected or right version of the first one. But there's next to nothing in the text to support this interpretation. The girl in the second fable doesn't try to convince anyone to come with her nor does she criticize anyone for staying behind, and Bender's prose gives very little impression that one group made a better decision than the other. Making-lemonade-wise, you'd think this would be problematic: how can I say how to make lemonade if there are some circumstances that seem not to admit of normative comparisons between the available options? (Or, in English: if there's no such thing as right or wrong?) In fact, though, Bender's writing suggests not that there are sometimes no right answers but, much more reasonably, that there are sometimes multiple right answers. Sure, it's trivially true that neither group in the second fable could have made the better choice if any choice would have been as good as any other, but it's also true that neither group would have made the better choice if their respective choices were equally good. More specifically - and now, at last, we come to the point - neither group could be said to make a better choice if their respective choices were equally good for the individuals in those groups.

This is more or less the point I was trying to make in the post about Rick Santorum and abortion: although I use the phrase "making lemonade" consistently just for convenience, I don't want to give the impression that lemonade is the only thing people can make. If life gives you lemons, then yeah, you can make lemonade - but you can also make lemon pound cake, lemon risotto, lemon sorbet, or any number of other delicious lemony items. (And if that metaphor just got way too extended for you, you can blame Iron Chef.) The bad decision in the first fable, in other words, was actually not the one where the family decided to cut themselves up to save their family, or even the one where some people decided to die so that their families could live; those decisions, presumably, were undertaken by self-aware individuals who knew what they were getting themselves into. Instead, the bad decision was the one where the family decided that their baby had to make the same choice they did - that, for example, her "arrival" into normalcy and full family membership would only happen once she, too, had lost part of her body.

There's a good deal more that one could say about these fables - say, about the fact that the more cynical one was told from the perspective of a parent whereas the more idealistic one was told from the perspective of a child - but it suffices for my purposes to end here. Although there definitely are situations in which one would be absolutely wrong not to make lemonade in the general sense, it's entirely common for these to be situations in which one would be right not to make lemonade in particular (and instead make pound cake or sorbet or whatever). To insist one one choice in these cases would be to simply reverse the error of Bender's first fable: just as it was wrong for the baby's family to impose their preferred choice on her, it would've been wrong to expect or demand them all to follow along with her preference.

Whether this is cultural or universal, I confess that I (and, again, I assume most people) can have a hard time letting other people do what's best for them. Like Alain de Botton, it makes me feel good to think about having a "giant [institutional] machine" that runs everyone's lives and makes sure that everything works out. But philosophies that try to flatten the diversity of the human experience are badly impoverished, not to mention wrong, and knowing this makes it easier to let that immature instinct just burn itself out and go away. So please, by all means find opportunities to make lemonade, and encourage the various organizations around you to do the same. Just understand that not everyone likes lemonade, and that - at least in matters of taste - there is ample room for harmless disagreement.

*If you read the novel, you'll see that this change is thematic: now that the protagonist is telling the story rather than just hearing it, she can make herself a character who plays an active role rather than one who is passive. In particular, in the original story the protagonist is represented by the baby, but that in the retold version she's represented (or, really, represents herself) by the older daughter.

Skepticism with a bias is not really skepticism

2012-01-27T08:12:00.000-08:00

According to Aaron Powell,

"How money and speech work within the byzantine rules of political campaigns is a field every bit as complex as name servers and Internet protocols. These same folks who laughed at the late Ted Stevens’ characterization of the Internet as 'a series of tubes' have no problem ignoring their own ignorance when it comes to judging regulations outside their expertise.

The skeptic’s lesson [is] that we should be skeptical of laws we don’t understand when we so often discover how bad those are that we do understand."

And this, he says, is why we should all be libertarians. The strange thing is that I sort of agree: if you're dumb enough to think like Aaron Powell does, you should be a libertarian.

Powell is, I admit, not wrong to say that campaign finance and the internet are both complicated, albeit in different ways and for different reasons. And he's also right that some laws (or merely law proposals) are truly awful. SOPA was one; just to have another example, so was prohibition. But those two facts together do not amount to a case for universal skepticism, or even for universal skepticism in contexts where we lack expert-level knowledge. The reason for this is actually surprisingly straightforward: even if the subject itself (campaign finance, internet technology, whatever) is exceedingly complex, the rules for good governance are almost always very simple.

Again, take SOPA as an example. You could approach the law from a purely technological standpoint, trying to understand the practical details of internet censorship and then using that understanding to imagine what your own life would be like under SOPA. Or you could start with the idea of copyright and intellectual property, from which you could try to come up with a convincing reason why people's copyrights should (or should not) be protected through methods like SOPA. There are probably even other ways of doing it that would be equally complicated and equally labor intensive - and, when it comes right down to it, equally useless. The main problem with SOPA, after all, was not that one could easily circumnavigate its means of censorship or that it was based on a flawed theory of intellectual property. The main problem - as Powell himself admits - was that "any benefits the legislation [would have] create[d would have] accrue[d] exclusively to a small but powerful interest group," and, considering the cost of the measure, that amounts to bad governance.*

Of course, it does take at least some tiny amount of technical knowledge to figure that out. But it's not nearly as monstrous a task as Powell makes it out to be. Applying this same theory to finance reform, his other hand-picked example, is really quite easy: insofar as we decline to restrict the influence of money on politics, "small but powerful [read: moneyed] interest group[s]" will increase their power disproportionately to the rest of us. In a bizarre way, this Powell's whole argument here is a fallacy not of oversimplification (under which I've filed it) but of overcomplexification. Even though reliable information can be hard to come by, it is a tremendous mistake to think that we can only rationally support a law if we understand all the details of all the technical fields related to that law.

And, in the end, I think that Powell himself would have to agree to this. I mean, what other choice does he have? His argument is based on the premise that "we so often discover how bad [laws] are," but presumably he would still want us to be skeptical even if we so often discovered that laws were good. (A quick reminder: bear in mind during the rest of this paragraph that Powell has not actually proven that laws are more often bad than good. One data point does not a trend make.) If so, his argument cannot really try to say that our skepticism should be based merely on a history of bad laws, because that same reasoning would recommend credulity given a history of good laws. This may seem like a good thing for Powell because it helps him avoid a rather basic inductive fallacy,** but it forces him to admit that we have the ability to rationally analyze laws even without being experts on the subjects of those laws. Indeed, Powell couldn't even advise libertarianism without this extra component. After all, if we know so little as to be unable to evaluate what a proposed law would do, how could we possibly know enough to be able to predict what would happen in the absence of that law? Deregulation is not somehow a special political state that obeys its own unique rules; it, too, can have unintended and dangerous consequences (such as redistributing wealth "more and more in the pockets of those very interest groups we hope it would instead work against"), so it, too, would have to come in for skepticism if our ignorance was as extreme as Powell makes it out to be.

So if you want to opt out of politics because you're afraid of what you don't know, great - be my guest. But don't pretend that you know just enough to advocate for across-the-board non-intervention but too little to talk about real solutions, cause that's nothing other than self-righteous bullshit. If Powell has a problem with systems of governance that require us to step outside our areas of expertise, his beef should be with democracy as such. But if he doesn't want to take the logical step and become an anarchist, he should really think again about his political epistemology and try to realize that the bad guys are just as capable of conning people into libertarian under-regulation as they are conning people into statist over-regulation.

*Interestingly, I think that this is not too far off from my own complaint, i.e., that SOPA was an effort to make money more important but distributed to the "right" individuals, whereas proper governance makes money less important.
**As my fellow mathematicians know, in order for inductive reasoning to be valid you must have a base case and an inductive rule. A history of laws (good or bad) can only be a base case, which means that the reasoning, "There is a history of bad laws, therefore we should be skeptical" is an improper use of induction.

Weekly webcomic: seriously, if you drink Dr. Pepper, stop

2012-01-27T07:01:00.001-08:00

This one's for you, Alain de Botton

2012-01-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

As you'll all hopefully recall, yesterday I disputed Alain de Botton's idea that the secular world needs "institutions, giant machines, organisations, directed to managing our inner life," saying in part that the secular world is already saturated with small machines that already do just that. I like to show my work when it comes to empirical claims like that, so here are some examples.

Emotional Bag Check

Religions get a lot of credit for having people who will help you out if you're in trouble or feeling low. But guess what? Regular ol' people will do that, too.

Cabin Porn

"Inspiration for your quiet place somewhere": sounds like a tool to help with "managing [one's] inner life," right? Cause it is.

Critical Mass

No, not the thing from nuclear physics, the thing with bikes:

"Critical Mass is a cycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world. The ride was originally founded in 1992 in San Francisco. The purpose of Critical Mass is not usually formalized beyond the direct action of meeting at a set location and time and traveling as a group through city or town streets on bikes. Some bigger scale events as in Budapest, Hungary, have an activist group formed around it, organizing the rides and communicating the desires and problems of the cyclists to the city council."

Generally speaking, any relatively friendly and open group-hobby event is going to make a positive difference in people's inner lives.

Savage Love
If you can read Savage Love for more than a month without learning something or being challenged in some way, you are probably that Most Interesting Man In The World guy from the beer commercials.

Cracked
Scary thought, innit? But they've dealt with real psychological/inner-life-type stuff in addition to random lists of comical factoids. Why, just today they have an article about 6 stupid things we use to judge people we don't know. They may have more uncalled-for penis jokes than most religions, but they sure do "mak[e] ideas vivid and real in people's lives."

And me!
Yes, that's right: at this very moment, dear reader, you are engaging with a secular institution directed to managing your inner life (albeit only in some small way). I even flatter myself that I succeed in this management from time to time - though, of course, I admit that I probably have more success with those of you who understand basketball.

De Botton, of course, will say that these institutions and organizations (which represent only a drop in the secular-organization ocean) may contribute bits and pieces to the overall effort but that that is precisely why they aren't enough. He would think that we'd need some way of uniting them - or something like them - into a bigger mechanism, a "giant machine." But this sort of thinking severely underestimates the power of small institutions like my own humble blog and severely overestimates the power of large institutions like traditional religions. Given a diverse population with widely varying abilities to learn from and/or appreciate things like music, cabins, bicycling, and long-winded philosophy blogs, the only kind of interior-life management that a big, unified institution can engage in is mismanagement. For reasons that I'll get into tomorrow, that's exactly the kind of population we have and will probably have for the foreseeable future, which means that the only inner-life-management system that will be feasible in general is one that an individual builds for her- or himself out of relatively small inner-life-component-managing institutions. That's a real challenge, because we don't have good historical examples of how to do that sort of thing, but we surely will not help ourselves accomplish it if, like de Botton, we take every opportunity to cut these smaller institutions off at the knees.

Just how full of shit is the American right?

2012-01-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

Readers, I give you Mitt Romney (with my emphasis):

"Well, actually, I released two years of taxes and I think the average is almost 15 percent. And then also, on top of that, I gave another more 15 percent to charity. When you add it together with all of the taxes and the charity, particularly in the last year, I think it reaches almost 40 percent that I gave back to the community. One of the reasons why we have a lower tax rate on capital gains is because capital gains are also being taxed at the corporate level. So as businesses earn profits, that’s taxed at 35 percent, then as they distribute those profits as dividends, that’s taxed at 15 percent more. So, all total, the tax rate is really closer to 45 or 50 percent."

Did you see that? Mitt Romney, American conservative, just lumped his charitable donations in with his taxes! Fucking unbelievable! (And that's without even touching his magical made-up bullshit arithmetic.) This comes after years - literally, years - of conservatives telling us that charity and taxes were totally different and any attempt to conflate the two was lefty-liberal-communist double-speak:

"The problem of poverty, at least in America, is not just that it makes it difficult for people to fulfill their material needs, but rather that it blinds us all to what we really need. After all, what the truly destitute—those without food and shelter—need most isn’t a handout or a redistribution of wealth. What they need is for Christians to heed Jesus’ command."

"Of all Christ’s teachings as reflected in the gospel accounts, there is none as consistent as his defense of the poor and downtrodden. This teaching applies also to international relations and individual and societal responsibilities toward the poor and marginalized beyond one’s own borders. The Christian desire to assist the economic development of poorer peoples is founded on the principle at the heart of the Christian life: love. To be concerned about and act in favor of the poor around the world is to practice the virtue of charity.

However, in this context, it is a mistake to equate charity with government aid."

"[Jackie Cushman] has a number of complaints [about the idea of government charity], but the recurring theme seems to be the idea that 'public service [cannot come in the form of] more government intrusion and more government jobs.' For one thing, she says, tax 'payments are required' whereas charity is optional."

"True compassion requires us to take charity a little more personally than to expect government to do the work."

"A person is not volunteering if they are required to do community service by a court. Similarly, obeying the law and paying taxes is not an act of charity. The government should encourage charitable giving by easing the tax burden on individuals who have money to spare after paying their expenses...Forced charity is not moral."

And so on and so forth. But oh, when a rich guy gives to charity, then it's okay to conflate these two things which must never be conflated and which it is un-Christian and un-American to conflate. I should not be surprised. I know I should not be surprised. But I am surprised. And appalled. And pissed. Fuck Mitt Romney, and fuck the rest of these clowns.

Absolute confusion about moral absolutes

2012-01-26T09:38:00.000-08:00

A brief summary, to catch you up: in the first episode of the ongoing moral absolutes saga, Matthew O'Brien tried to argue that there were such things as moral absolutes, i.e., "exceptionless norm[s] against choosing...certain type[s] of action." This was not particularly interesting, because moral absolutes (so defined) are hardly a key part of morality. In the second episode, I tried to explain why moral absolutes weren't needed by identifying some limitations one faces when one tries to engage in moral reasoning using "types of actions" and not just actions per se. (For instance, discussing only a type of action means excluding things like context and intent.) Then, in the third (and, I wrongly thought at the time, final) episode, I tried to show how even an apparently unhelpful action can be helpful (though not necessarily optimally helpful) in the long run, which was basically just another way of poking at the weakness of action-type-based reasoning. Now we come - alas - to episode four: a new dope.

"The problem with such examples [as the one I gave in episode 3], just as with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki problem, is that they trace the consequences of our actions too far. Only philosophers think that I am responsible for all the foreseeable consequences of my actions, and thus that all of these consequences must be taken into account in determining whether my action advances the final end [i.e., advances morality]. Normal people realize that my responsibility is more circumscribed."

Here Robert Miller is basically offering up the same objection that I posed to myself in ep. 3. In the (admittedly hypothetical) case that an embezzler actually made things better for his employer by embezzling and so outing himself as a thief (rather than continuing to steal on the sly), it seemed like someone might say that "[i]t's not the hypothetical embezzling of the money that would improve things but rather the hypothetical discovery of that embezzling and subsequent firing of the embezzler." I would, in other words, be wrong to attribute responsibility for the improvement to the embezzler (or, more accurately, the act of embezzlement). The same, Miller is saying, goes for the American nuking of Japan: though we believed at the time that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have the right consequences, he's arguing, we still shouldn't have done it because we weren't responsible for making those consequences come about. This, Miller concludes, shows that there are moral absolutes, because he now has a way of distinguishing between those "consequences [that] must be taken into account in determining [the morality of] my action" and those that must not. There are, however, several problems with this.

First, as Miller himself says, whether or not some action "advances the final end" depends only on "the causal structure of the world." By bringing responsibility into it, Miller departs from that structure, and so departs from talking about moral absolutes. (Again: this is because moral absolutes are meant to deal with action types, and action types are fucking useless.) Even someone as thick-skulled as Miller would have to admit that responsibility - even if it's a real thing - is causally inert and so cannot be used to determine which things "advance the final end." It might be useful for evaluating people, but evaluating a person is a very different thing than evaluating an action.

Second, as Miller again admits, his argument doesn't work out all the time even if we ignore the fact that he's no longer talking about moral absolutes (emphasis mine):

"[T]o show that an action is always wrong, we need not show that such actions never advance the final end, including in the most bizarre circumstances; we need show only that such actions do not advance that end in normal and usual circumstances."

Circumstances cannot be taken into account in order for the concept of an "action type" to be meaningful, yet here Miller is, talking about circumstances. (Yet again: action types are fucking useless.) What's even more embarrassing is that this contradicts Miller's own claim. Back in episode three, he said explicitly that "some actions will be absolutely prohibited...regardless of the circumstances," and yet here he is backpedaling on that remark like Mitt Romney at a backwards-bicycle race. Either moral absolutes apply "regardless of the circumstances" or the apply only "in normal and usual circumstances"; he can't really have it both ways.

On top of that, if we were to take this "normal and usual circumstances" thing seriously we would very quickly run out of road. After all, what counts as "normal" and "usual" is hardly obvious. To his credit, Miller does try to address this lack of specificity by referring to the law:

"There is a clear parallel in the law, for there is an immense body of legal doctrine concerning what lawyers call proximate causation, the whole purpose of which is to determine for which of the consequences causally following from his actions a defendant may be held liable...in general, defendants are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, as when a man who builds a fire on his own property on a windy day is held liable when the wind carries the fire to his neighbor’s house."

To his detriment, though, this is laughable. Replacing the vagueness of "normal" and "usual" with the vagueness of "reasonable," first of all, is no help whatsoever (not least of all because "reasonable" as used in the law explicitly takes account of one's social environment, i.e., one's circumstances). But also, could you even imagine trying to operate morally in a world where you could only consider those things that fell under proximate causation? As Miller says, one of the exceptions to proximate causation is "the intentional wrongdoing of others." How, if we apply that same thinking to morality, would one go about raising a child? Parents have to bear some of the responsibility for the intentional wrongdoing of their children in order for the very idea of parenting to make sense. Or think about prison reform: if we know that our current prison system is good at turning (relatively) innocent people into criminals and guilty people into worse criminals, do we really have no responsibility at all to change the way the system works? After all, crimes are acts of intentional wrongdoing almost all the time, so following Miller's reasoning we would have essentially no responsibility to make our prison system better. However well this sort of thing works in the legal context, using it in ethics is wildly idiotic and tremendously irresponsible (and, in all honesty, it may not even work that well in the legal context to begin with). I said in episode three that...

"[i]t would be rather stupid of Miller to focus on temporally local causes and effects, both because that's bad for his means-to-end reasoning (which, after all, often requires one to make long-term plans) and also because it's bad for the analogy to morality. If we thought that we were only allowed (or required) to do that which maximized good in, say, the next 24 hours, things would look very different, and not in a good way."

...and whadya know? I was right.

That this conversation has gone on for as long as it has is a testament to the capacity of the human animal for idiocy. Not only are there not any moral absolutes, we should be glad that they don't exist. Much of human moral progress has centered on our increasing ability to account for the way in which circumstances bear on the ethics of our actions - should we throw all of that away just for the sake of safeguarding a moral system that's simplistic enough to fit in with the text on a child's place-mat at Denny's? The fact of the matter is that we are responsible not just for ourselves but for the people around us. More pressingly, we are constantly faced with the opportunity to make another person better, at least in a limited context or for a limited amount of time. Only someone as intentionally ignorant as Robert Miller would deny that responsibility or refuse to acknowledge those opportunities and think that doing so gives him a better grasp on morality.

On idioms (or is that idiots?)

2012-01-25T14:04:00.000-08:00

Having just finished reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's super-famous The Great Gatsby for the first time, the ideas in this post by Mark Mann strike me as being very familiar:

"The Bible is complex and filled with a wide variety of literary types—historical, sayings, parables, wisdom literature, poetry, teachings, prophecy, etc.—which all entail the use of different literary devices...

Bible translators face these kinds of issues all the time. Indeed, it is why we have so many different versions of the Bible in English. Our scriptures were originally written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, and there are culturally embedded concepts, idiomatic expressions, and literary devices that are unique to each language and which do not translate well. A brief example: If I were to call someone a 'white crow', it would mean nothing to contemporary English speakers. But if I called that same person a 'black sheep' most would realize that I am saying that this person is someone who doesn't quite 'fit'. Yet, 'white crow' is the exact translation of the Russian expression (белая ворона, or 'belaya vorona') for a person who doesn't 'fit' within Russian culture, and a black sheep is to Russians merely a sheep with very dark wool. Nothing else. So, in fact, the best translation in English of a popular Russian expression would likely involve shifting 'white' to 'black' and 'crow' to 'sheep'."

I also happen to be sensitive to these sorts of issues because I'm a huge nerd and I watch a lot of (especially subtitled) anime. Mann, however, wants to take things one step farther than I do, because he wants to find a way to translate or understand the bible that accounts for linguistic challenges while also allowing for biblical authority in the traditional religious sense. Trouble is, you can't have both of those things.

Think about this in the case of Gatsby. At the time he was writing it, Fitzgerald took for granted that there was something suspicious or seedy about Jews. As a result, he writes the one (conspicuously) Jewish character in a way that marks him as different and inferior - for instance, the character says "Oggsford" instead of "Oxford." This is plainly the kind of linguistic quirk that Mann is talking about: if we were to attempt to translate Gatsby into another language or even just to translate it into modern-day English, we would have to deal with the problem of how to retain the overtones and subtleties of "Oggsford." But it could very well be the case that some of these things are untranslatable. To take a (much-needed) step back, we now know that there isn't anything suspicious or seedy about Jews. How, then, could we "translate" this character from one language or time period to another? At minimum we would need to find out which group we now consider to be shady and then switch the character's Judaism for membership in whatever group that is. But what if there isn't any such group? Hopefully we've progressed to the point where no religious, racial, political, or other group membership has the kind of disturbing connotations that Judaism had for Fitzgerald. Assuming that's true, which road is open to us?

Maybe we could still translate the character using some other sort of literary technique or by making significant changes to the text. If we do, however, we have probably left the realm of translation as such because we'd change not just the form of the text but its meaning. Alternatively, we could leave Fitzgerald's morally problematic insinuations alone - but then we would have to give up on translating his book well, because we would have to admit that there is no way at all to communicate the ideas he was trying to communicate. In the former case, we would do our best to carry the core content of his novel through to the present day (or to another language) while imposing our own (moral) authority on it; in the latter, we would accept the original (moral) authority at the cost of sacrificing at least some of the core content. This is the exact same dilemma we face with the bible.

Should Mann choose to keep the core content, he would have to admit that bible has no real authority. For example, in Mark 4:31 the bible identifies the mustard seed as the smallest seed on Earth. This is clearly meant to be metaphorical more so than literal - Mark 4:31 is primarily figurative - but if we were to keep the message of the passage by updating it, we would still have to admit that our modern scientific knowledge takes precedence over the bible's original claims. This is obviously no good for Mann, who claims that we can have both. Should Mann instead choose to keep the details, the core content will be almost entirely lost - again, not great for someone who thinks we can have both. What's worse, Mann has to make this decision with normative matters as well as descriptive ones. When Leviticus talks about "bonds-men," for instance, we would have to decide to translate that either into something like "slave" or something like "butler," and the difference between those two very much depends on how we interpret the moral nature of the "bonds" in question. This means that the bible - if we are to translate it or understand it as a literary document - would lack moral as well as scientific authority. Even his own example demonstrates this. In order for "black sheep" to be a reliable translation for "white crow," both Russian and American society have to have similar normative concepts about fitting in; take away or diminish that similarity, and the translation either becomes more approximate or ceases to apply altogether.. This is one of the reasons why the Japanese "nakama" can't really be accurately translated into English either as "friend" or "comrade": that word only achieves its original meaning in a normative social context that we simply do not have here in the states.

And hey - maybe he'd prefer to leave some imprecision in the translation rather than cede all authority to secular sources. That would certainly be what I would choose, if I were in his unenviable position. But even then he would have to admit that the bible couldn't really be used authoritatively: insofar as an authoritative statement is unclear or imprecise, it's useless. (For example, if one of the commandments was simply, "Do good," that would be just as [un]helpful as having no commandment at all.) Don't think, though, that this happens equally to any source as old as the bible: lots of ancient texts (and even lots of small pieces of the bible itself) can be translated while maintaining (at least some part of) their authority. Mann, however, wants the whole thing to be both translatable into modern language and ultimately authoritative, and there is simply no way for him to have both of those things with a document so thoroughly riddled with errors, biases, and confusions.

No! No no no! (or, A sleep trance, a dream dance, a shaped romance)

2012-01-25T09:33:00.000-08:00

Dammit, Alain de Botton, stop it!

"The starting point of religion is that we are children, and we need guidance. The secular world often gets offended by this. It assumes that all adults are mature – and therefore, it hates didacticism, it hates the idea of moral instruction. But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet the modern education system denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control. We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions recognise this. We need to build a similar awareness into secular structures."

Fuckin', maybe he's "on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time," but don't condescend to tell me that I must be the same way, you arrogant twit. And look: if he wants to talk about who's responsible for that, maybe we should start with the religious conservative right, not the secular liberal left. Last time I checked, the religious right was the group that opposed things like comprehensive sex education and anti-bullying programs in schools, just as it's the religious right (not the secular left) who most buys into the traditional economic myth that we're all "rational, reasonable, [and] in control." Maybe this isn't true overseas, but in that case de Botton needs to recognize that he's not talking about "the secular world" so much as secular Britain (or wherever).

But actually, what really gets me is that shit at the end there, about how "secular structures" need to be aware of our (factitious) panic and terror. Going into more detail about that idea, de Botton continues,

"Religions are fascinating because they are giant machines for making ideas vivid and real in people’s lives: ideas about goodness, about death, family, community etc. Nowadays, we tend to believe that the people who make ideas vivid are artists and cultural figures, but this is such a small, individual response to a massive set of problems. So I am deeply interested in the way that religions are in the end institutions, giant machines, organisations, directed to managing our inner life. There is nothing like this in the secular world, and this seems a huge pity."

This is so ass-backwards that I literally struggle to find the right words to describe it. People, I think we should start by realizing, are different from one another! So it's wildly idiotic to talk about having "giant machines" dedicated to the task of "managing our inner [lives]."* Y'know what you get when you try to have a giant machine manage everyone's inner life? You get Rick motherfucking Santorum, telling women who've become pregnant after being raped that it's best for them to carry the fetus to term. You get the Heritage Foundation's Jennifer Marshall, telling everyone that it's better for an orphan not to be adopted at all than to be adopted by two parents of the same sex. You get, in short, a giant machine - where what you really need is a bunch of smaller (perhaps even tiny) machines. While secular institutions can support those machines and help us build them and even constitute them in some cases, if you try to replace religion with a religious model that leaves out the supernatural then you are not addressing the real problem. And, thanks to a little bit of synchronicity, I can prove it.

See, when I was researching this post I could've sworn that I'd heard de Botton's name somewhere before, so I searched through my own archives to see if I wasn't just making things up. As it turns out, de Botton has been mentioned on this blog before - just not by me. A reader brought him up in the comments to this post, which contains nothing less than an attempt to build a secular institution "directed to managing our inner life." That institution was A.C. Grayling's Good Book, and it was just as misguided and unhelpful and ultimately regressive as de Botton's approach promises to be:

As I said at the time,

"Might there be some people who need to hear, for example, that '[w]hispered advice is not worth a pea'? Oh, probably. But does that make it true? Nope. And, even if some person were to need to hear that on a regular basis, that still wouldn't even make it a good aphorism for people in general. The reason for this is the same reason that [abstinence-for-all proponent Julie] Robinson fails to set the right scope for her moral declarations: other people are other people...I believe quite firmly that the only way for us to get things to work out for ourselves as individuals is to first explore and develop our own individual concepts of flourishing. If those so happen to coincide with religious or traditions [or even the teachings of a giant secular machine like de Botton's], that's fine - just so long as we don't make the rather unintelligent mistake of tacitly assuming that everybody else in the world needs to see, hear, read, and do the exact same things that we do."

Most of us probably do need help managing our inner lives - not, mind you, because we're on the verge of existential dread or anything like that, but simply because the world is a tough fucking place to live in and we are not put together in such a way as to navigate it smoothly. But we do not need - nor can we even get - that help from a giant, impersonal, monolithic institution modeled after the giant, impersonal, monolithic religions that have dominated inner-life-management for most of human history. Not only do such systems cost too much, they do not work and arguably never have. When it comes to managing one's inner life, it helps to have a good education, healthy relationships, basic material resources, one's medical health, and time, among other things. And it's true that big secular institutions can be and should be (and, in fact, are) used to supply at least some of those things - but they only succeed in doing so when the good in question is one that can be supplied in bulk. That, ultimately, is why de Botton's approach will always fail. Bread will nourish just about every type of person and so can be provided to essentially everyone; if you want to feed a bunch of people, you can send in a truckload of bread and not have to worry whether some of them need rocks instead. But "ideas about goodness, about death, family, community," and other significant concepts cannot be used in the same way; what is to me an enlivening, healthy idea about death could easily depress the living shit out of someone else, and vice versa. I agree that secular people need to find a way to do at least as much good as religion does in the areas where religion does good, but de Botton could hardly be more wrong about how we should go about making that happen.

*Please, please, please: note that I am talking here about managing people's inner lives. It is not anywhere near as stupid to have a giant machine dedicated to managing people's outer lives (though there are some lessons from the one context that need to be applied in the other).

With enemies like this, who needs speechwriters?

2012-01-25T08:22:00.000-08:00

Y'know, in a twisted sort of way, I'm glad that Rick Santorum is still in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. How else, after all, could we have someone so high-profile saying something like thi s?

Here's a transcript of the important part, in case you can't watch YouTube (coughatworkcough):

"I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach [to take when a woman has become pregnant as the result of having been raped] is [for her] to accept this horribly created - in the sense of rape - but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life, we have horrible things happen - I can’t think of anything more horrible - but, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation."

If that sounds terrifyingly inhumane, that's because it is. (Just imagine the bumper sticker: "Santorum '12: Accepting the horrible gift of rape pregnancies.") But it's also surprisingly common, and there are lots of people who can make the same basic idea sound much less insane - Charles Chaput, for example.

"Real hope and real joy are precious. They have a price. They emerge from the experience of suffering, which is made noble and given meaning by faith in a loving God...

Parents of children with special needs, special education teachers and therapists, and pediatricians who have treated children with disabilities often have a hugely life-affirming perspective. Unlike prenatal caregivers, these professionals have direct knowledge of persons with special needs. They know their potential. They’ve seen their accomplishments. They can testify to the benefits—often miraculous—of parental love and faith. Expectant parents deserve to know that a child with Down syndrome can love, laugh, learn, work, feel hope and excitement, make friends, and create joy for others. These things are beautiful precisely because they transcend what we expect."

Granted, Chaput talks about Down's syndrome (see also) whereas Santorum talks about rape, and that accounts for some of the difference. But it should be plain to see that both men want to make sure that people know how "to make the best out of a bad situation."

Or, well, not exactly: they both want to make sure not only that we know how to make the best out of a bad situation but, much more problematically, that we actually make the best out of a bad situation (by making it illegal to do otherwise). Moreover, they want to make sure that the "best" thing that we "choose" (read: are coerced into choosing) is the one that accords with their metaphysics. (One does not, for instance, ever see someone like Santorum or Chaput talking about how we need to love and support a woman whatever she chooses.) Well-meaning though this may be, their metaphysics are way off-base, just as Alex Pruss's were when he suggested that forgiveness is the only way to make the best out of having been victimized.

This is not, of course, to say that there is no (moral or other) difference between the choices that a woman faces when she finds that her rapist has impregnated her. Nor is it to say that the government should not place some choices out of her reach. (To illustrate this with an extreme example, we wouldn't want a woman to go through with the pregnancy, have the child, and then proceed to abuse the child as a sort of deflected way of avenging herself on the rapist.) Nor is it even to say that there's nothing to the idea of making the best out of a bad situation; in fact, if all goes well I'll expand on this idea in an upcoming (not-quite-)Random Art Post. But neither morality nor governance can safely happen when one relies on fictions, and there is no question that Santurom and Chaput (and, really, abortion opponents in general) are relying heavily on fictions. Life is not a "gift" in any real sense, nor is there a gift-giving deity; joy does not always come at a price, nor, again, is that transaction guaranteed or overseen by any god; and, most importantly of all, there are some women for whom making the best out of a bad situation means nothing short of aborting a fetus. Rather than denying this, Santorum & co. should take a dose of their own medicine and learn how to make the best of it (i.e., make lemonade). But if they can't manage to do that, the least they can do is be straight with us, because the last thing we need is to get fooled by a smooth talker like Chaput into thinking that this sort of thing is any less creepy and deranged than Santorum makes it seem.

Dear NFL

2012-01-24T12:44:00.000-08:00

First of all, your game is too fucking dangerous for the people who play it. But since that ain't gonna change...

Your game is also getting dangerously close to being as boring as baseball. Last Sunday's Giants/49ers game, for example, was a wreck. Here's the problem: professional football is in the sporting world what stop-and-go-traffic is in the driving world. For a while you can really pay close attention and pretend that every little nuance matters, but eventually your brain just gets tired of being engaged and then disengaged so rapidly for such a long stretch of time. You might as well try to listen to a song made up of four different concertos spliced up into three-second intervals and then mixed up with each other. Against my better instincts, I want to help.

Sadly, I know little to nothing about the intricacies of football, so there's not much I can recommend in terms of rule changes or anything like that. What I do know, however, is showboating, and there has been a distinct lack of noteworthy showboating in the NFL as of late. Take, for instance, this touchdown celebration from Sunday's game:

All he does is cross his arms. Booooooooring! We see more exciting celebrations for even relatively standard NBA plays, for crying out loud:

It was okay when you outlawed the use of props in celebrations because - let's be honest - props are kinda silly. But then it seems like people just gave up, and since we can't even seem to get decent commercials these days it is becoming the case that there are very few reasons to watch an NFL game. So I have a solution: transition to a basketball league.

Okay, that was unkind. But I do have a solution: fighting game taunts. Like football players, fighting game characters (usually) can't use their face to express emotion in the same way that, say, basketball players can. Also like football players, we don't really care about seeing video game characters just flex their muscles. And, still like football players, most video game characters (at least historically) can't taunt with words, so programmers had to find ways to make their bodies do the expressing. Of course, you could take an alternative route and encourage team-wide celebrations a la soccer, but, uh...

...just because you could doesn't mean you should.

So help me out, NFL. Make touchdown celebrations more interesting by encouraging players to take a page from video games. Because I still watch your games from time to time, and I sure would like to be able to give at least one good reason why.

For the last time...

2012-01-24T11:49:00.000-08:00

...contraception is not a fucking cheeseburger.

"Think about this reality: Catholics (and others) by their faith believe that the use of contraception is morally unacceptable. Nevertheless, under federal regulations, they will now be forced to pay for birth control pills, Plan B Emergency Contraception, and other basic contraceptive items...If Jews and Muslims were forced by HHS, for dietary reasons, to serve pork in their cafeterias, would that law stand very long?"

It sure is revealing that this is the best some people can do. Call it whatever you like, a public interest or the social good or whatever, but if you can't distinguish between the value of a condom and the value of a ham sandwich, you've got no business talking politics.

Conservative economic theory in a nutshell: if it's good enough for the third world, it's good enough for you (complete with obligatory basketball analogy!)

2012-01-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

By now we should all know that the right - at least in this country - sees nothing wrong with the downward spiral in wages, with vanishing benefits, or with the general erosion of worker protections. They're against the minimum wage, against child labor laws, against safe workplace laws...you get the idea. A sane person might object to this on the grounds that you can't have a dynamic economy while slowly crushing your labor - or, failing that, that we're supposed to be a country where you can come and be prosperous. In either case, there are lots of good reasons to think that the conservative approach to labor issues is wrong and dangerous; in fact, it is wrong and dangerous. But did you know that they're also in favor of more marco kinds of economic strategies that have likewise been proven to fail?

"When Greg Zyla, publisher of the Daily Review in Towanda, PA, moved to Bradford County, in 2008, the unemployment was 10%, now it is half that. Restaurants that looked like they couldn’t last another month have spruced up and are hiring. Help wanted signs are everywhere; they are begging people to work there. Every kind of business is being impacted by the influx of new families coming into the area. All thanks to horizontal hydraulic fracturing—which is allowed in Pennsylvania.

In stark contrast to their counterparts across the state line, farmers in Pennsylvania are now able to invest in their farms, buy new equipment, and keep their families together. Dairy farmer James VanBlarcom smiles as he tells of his son coming back home to work on the farm. Reflecting on his good luck, he says: 'Almost all my neighbors are in the same situation that we are. They have this windfall opportunity that came their way all of a sudden, out of the blue.' He hesitates: 'Out of the ground, I guess, is more like it.'"

As it happens, I know someone who has signed a contract to allow a natural gas company to engage in hydraulic fracturing - a.k.a. "fracking" - on their property, and I can confirm that these contracts are indeed quite remunerative. And since I sometimes watch television, I've seen commercials from natural gas companies in which real farmers talk about how they have in fact become "able to invest in their farms, buy new equipment, and keep their families together" thanks to similar fracking deals. But I also know the limits of this sort of thing, and they're pretty scary.

Think about it: the fundamental economic problem that these people face is that their business model (family farming, or whatever) is no longer viable. Now that may or may not be desirable - maybe we should be doing more as a society to support family instead of factory farming, for instance - but for the sake of this conversation we have to take it as a given. In cases like that, what's needed is either innovation within the business model or abandonment of the business model; in other words, you need either to make your business work (at least in the medium term) or to find a new one. Strangely enough, this is very much like San Antonio Spurs' center Tim Duncan's current situation.

See, at the beginning of his career, Duncan was a tall, athletic power forward playing in a relatively slow, physical league. He had lots of post moves and could reliably overpower defenders and, on top of that, the game was structured (both officially and by unofficial strategic consensus) to allow him to play the role of a traditional big man. In short, he had a very solid business model. And it worked: he won MVPs, championships, and all sorts of other awards and accolades. (Plus he made a shitload of money.) Over time, though, Duncan's athleticism has significantly declined, other big men have become bigger, and the league has increased both its speed of play and its emphasis on the perimeter game. Each of these changes adversely affected his business model, to the point where there were a few years where he was consistently made into a non-factor by opposing teams. He isn't taller than his defenders anymore, so many of his old moves simply don't work; even today, Duncan regularly gets shots blocked because he's (somehow) still not used to being defended by a taller, lankier person. He isn't stronger than they are, either, or quicker. And even in the few cases that he is athletically superior to his defender, there's almost no room for a traditional post-oriented offense in the NBA these days; even the best big men in the league (think Dwight Howard, Pau Gasol) play on perimeter-oriented teams and have to scrounge for points on hustle plays. On almost every level, then, Duncan's business model is just not suited to the modern NBA, just as family farming is pretty much just not suited to the modern economy. And, like the farmers, Duncan can fundamentally only approach this fact in one of two ways: either he can make himself seem better temporarily (by, say, playing more minutes against second-stringers and scrubs) or he can actually make himself better (by, say, changing his body type or reworking his offensive game). Although the second solution may be more difficult, the problems with the first should be obvious: it's only gonna work for so long, and then even the scrubs and backups are gonna be able to check him.

The same, of course, is true for the farmers. Sure, they can accept a fat check now - but then what happens when that money runs out? It's not like they can just find more natural gas and hide it on their property. Admittedly, they could take that money and use it to invest in something more economically sustainable, just like Duncan could (in theory) bide his time against second-stringers while he retools his game, but that sort of thing almost never happens. This, according to Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion, is why so many resource-rich third-world nations end up lagging behind the world economy. Just like the Pennsylvania family farmers who are now being "rescued" by natural gas companies, those nations form the bulk of their economies around extracting and then selling natural resources, thereby disregarding the need for longer-term economic stability. Unsurprisingly, what happens as a result is that the countries profit for a short time - i.e., for as long as the resources last - and then go right back to abject poverty. Worse still, their abject poverty means more after their period of success because other countries have continued to develop, leaving them farther behind. The situation in rural Pennsylvania is exactly the same: if farming communities take this money, all they will do is buy themselves a temporary reprieve from the inevitable crash - and, as if that wasn't bad enough, they'll do so at the cost of making that crash worse when it does happen.

Of course, the fact that this sort of strategy fails does not point to a better strategy in and of itself. And, yes, we do need some resources, so someone is going to have to supply us with them. But the drive-by, slash-and-burn style of resource acquisition favored by Republicans is nothing other than a good way to make an already-bad problem worse by pretending that it doesn't exist. Even if you're not a hardcore environmentalist, then, there are serious reasons to oppose the right wing on this issue. These sorts of things don't work for the third world and they sure as shit aren't gonna work for us. Whether or not we deserve better than conservative economics is an open question, but we damn well know better than to fall for this garbage, and that should be more than enough.

Like the Lorax, only for shit that doesn't actually exist

2012-01-23T08:20:00.000-08:00

How bad are things at Townhall dot com? Allow Brent Bozell III: The Good, The Bad, And The Subhumanoid* to show you:

"[Stephen] Colbert should be granted an exception [to federal campaign law] for his own PAC, since he works for a media company by the name of Viacom -- a corporation that despises the very notion of federal regulation of anything (SET ITAL) it (END ITAL) wants aired on TV. Comedy Central very much reserves the right to engage in vicious character assassination and borderline slander, and it does so virtually daily..."

Nuts, right?

Er - oh, no wait, sorry, I didn't get to the crazy part yet. Here it is:

"...regularly mocking God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Santa Claus, as they write laugh lines about the Devil ordering up 'unbaptized baby-arm soup.'"

Yes, really: in the middle of a political column in which he accuses Colbert and Comedy Central of "engag[ing] in vicious character assassination and borderline slander," the best examples that Bozell 3 could come up with were "God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Santa Claus." How you could possibly slander a fictional motherfucking character is utterly beyond me - but, then, maybe that's why I don't write for Townhall.

*Look, I've done this joke a lot of times and there are only so many trilogies out there. You do what you gotta do.

In which facts are checked

2012-01-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

Quoth Andrew Sullivan, self-appointed defender of good journalism,

"One of the oldest arguments we had in the old gay rights movement - back when it was a monolithic captive of the New Left - was whether discrimination could be countered more effectively by private choice or public mandate. My view was that the government should not discriminate against gay citizens in any way, but that the private sector and anti-gay religious communities should retain more freedom. The market would eventually win over bigotry, I argued. That's me and my libertarianism...

Today, we hear this news:
For the first time ever, all 100 firms on Fortune's Best Companies To Work For list this year have non-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation.
...Hence capitalism enables equality. And the last entity to get with the program is the government."

Sullivan's narrative here should be plain to see: the government cannot get things done, libertarianism is the way to go, capitalism makes all things right in time. Only problem? Almost none of this is, y'know, true.

For starters, Sullivan is simply lying when he says that "the last entity to get with the program is the government." Maybe the federal government has been slow to adopt anti-discrimination laws, but governments in general have in fact been pioneers when it comes to protecting LGBT workers:

"Wisconsin was the first state to ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, in 1982, while Minnesota was the first state to ban employment discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender identity when it passed the Human Rights Act in 1993. Currently, 16 states and the District of Columbia have policies that protect against both sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in employment: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey (see Law Against Discrimination), New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington in the public and private sector. An additional five states -- Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, and Wisconsin -- have state laws that protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation only."

Of the 100 companies that Sullivan names, fifty-five are headquartered in the states listed above. In over half of the instances that make up his case, then, we have no real idea whether the company or the government is responsible for the policy - and that's not even taking into account the companies headquartered in cities which have enacted anti-discrimination laws in the absence of similar state-level laws. If Sullivan's argument is supposed to be that governments lag behind and so are ineffective in comparison to more organic means of progress, he's making that argument in an incredibly untruthful way.

Moreover, what exactly has he proved by supplying us with this (at best halfway-useful) list of 100 companies? These are the best companies to work for, after all, not the biggest or the most representative. That some businesses have anti-discrimination policies does not mean that all businesses do, so there's very little reason to think that even the federal government is "the last entity to get with the program." And if the conclusion is supposed to be the one about how "capitalism enables equality," again we run into the awkward fact that Sullivan has cherry-picked the companies that are already most likely to support equality. It would be far more compelling if he had chosen, say, a random sampling of large companies, or old companies, or new companies - really, any sampling of companies other than this one. If anything, this gives us reason to believe that the rest of the private sector hasn't embraced equality with the same enthusiasm: if the 100 best companies to work for have only now all enacted anti-discrimination policies, it seems wildly implausible to think that most other companies (which, by definition, are worse towards their employees) have followed suit.

In sum, then, not only did governments lead the way in establishing workplace equality for LGBT people, the current state of voluntary private-sector compliance is almost certainly far less sunny than Sullivan makes it out to be. And d'you know what the worst thing is? By Sullivan's own admission, it would have hurt no one to just pass the damn law in the first place:

"This [i.e., the fact that these companies have anti-discrimination policies] is not because they are somehow being noble. It is because they are serving their shareholders by employing the absolutely best people for the jobs they have and do not want to miss someone's talents because of something irrelevant like sexual orientation."

So there you have it: libertarianism, for Andrew Sullivan, means stopping the government from speeding up inevitable progress at no cost to anyone, and he knows that libertarianism works because a tiny sliver of the private sector will be ahead of the curve, where "the curve" is measured by how slowly the slowest government organization changes its policies. Good journalism my ass.

What it looks like: Westinghouse in winter

2012-01-23T06:59:00.000-08:00

After weeks and weeks of 40-plus-degree weather here in Pittsburgh, we finally got some snow last week. Seizing the opportunity, I went and took a few more pictures of the old Westinghouse complex - and it's a good thing I did, cause it's back in the 40s today and the snow will basically be gone by tomorrow. But there's no such thing as global warming, you guys! That's just a liberal hoax! Or something!

Believe it or not, some construction worker tried to take my camera off of me. Cause, y'know, heaven forbid I should take pictures of the outsides of buildings and shit. He said I could keep it if I just deleted the pictures, so I pressed some random buttons and walked away. Don't really know what he thought he was accomplishing, but...

Unfortunately, I could really only do this for a day, as I said, so I couldn't cover any more than maybe 40% of the grounds. One of the things I did take advantage of, though, was the fire hydrants - for some reason, I like them much better with snow than without:

I was also surprised to find that the defunct fountains had frozen over:

Didn't really think it had been that cold. Then again, I wear sandals year-round, so maybe I'm not the best one to gauge how cold it is...

If I had been in LA, the sun would have been all blurry and dim like that because of smog. Since I was in fact in Pittsburgh, it was just clouds. Of the two, I prefer clouds.

Some of you may remember me saying in a previous Westinghouse picture post that there was one (and only one) building I'd yet to find a way into. At the time, I forgot to mention the main reason this irritates me so much:

There are always lights on! That means somebody must have been in there at least semi-recently, because even the longest-lasting bulbs will burn out if you leave them on for months on end. Yet literally every door I've tried has been firmly locked - shit, one of them is even welded shut. Seriously, this bothers me to no end.

So yeah - unsurprisingly, Westinghouse in winter looks more or less like Westinghouse in any other season, just with more snow and fewer leaves. But I thought it'd be fun to show you all anyway, so there it is. I'm taking a trip to Florida (gag) soon to visit family, so that should generate some more (and more varied) pictures for an upcoming photo post, and there may be a trip to New Orleans happening later in the year. For now, though, this is all I got, so it's back to text-based posts for the time being.

Let them eat plastic cake?

2012-01-20T13:37:00.000-08:00

As I may have said before on this blog, I am loath to associate myself with any eponymous -ism. I would rather call myself a utilitarian than a Millian, for example, and if I were doltish enough to fall for Kant I would call myself a human dignitarian and not a Kantian. Using names in this way, I feel, turns the original people into heroes when they don't deserve to be and leads followers of the -ism to defend the person rather than the associated idea. All of that being said, though, this is the sort of thing that really makes me want to change my mind.

"What Keynesians do not understand is that if a man is hired to dig holes and then fill them back up, he is fully employed but he produces nothing of value; effective demand is not increased by his efforts. Nor does giving him money or goods in exchange for his useless labor create effective demand; it only shifts it from the people who produced what was given him."

If that's what anti-Keynesians think, maybe calling myself a Keynesian wouldn't be so bad after all. I mean, Richard Fulmer seems so certain that Keynesian (or, rather, demand-side) solutions can't work, yet his reasoning is so utterly fucked.

To start with, let's go back a step and figure out just what effective demand is. Though Fulmer doesn't tell us exactly, he does say that certain things are necessary parts of it:

"The term spending power implies effective demand, which means not just need or desire but the wherewithal to fulfill that need or desire."

Whatever else is required in order for an individual to have effective demand, we know from this statement that an individual who has effective demand has the "need or desire" to purchase something and also "the wherewithal to fulfill that need or desire" (presumably in a way that comports with economics; in other words, I doubt that Fulmer would classify a pistol as the wherewithal, even though you can most certainly use one to fulfill your needs or desires). Now we can apply this to the earlier quote, like so:

"What Keynesians do not understand is that if a man is hired to dig holes and then fill them back up, he is fully employed but he produces nothing of value; [a desire to purchase goods together with the means to do so] is not increased by his efforts. Nor does giving him money or goods in exchange for his useless labor create [a desire to purchase goods together with the means to do so]; it only shifts it from the people who produced what was given him."

Problem is, we know that this is false. Although redistributing wealth transfers money, money is only part of the story when it comes to effective demand. If you move money from one place to another without also moving the need or desire to purchase some good or service, by definition you would not transfer the effective demand. Likewise, if you were to take money from someone who did not desire to purchase anything and give it to someone who did have such a desire, you would in effect be creating effective desire. So, for example, if you find someone who - oh I don't know - has obscene amounts of money just sitting in offshore bank accounts doing nothing...

"Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven."

...you could very much increase effective demand by taking all (or even just some) of that inert money and giving it to people who - oh I don't know - desperately need medical care but lack the funds to acquire it:

"Nikki White, a young woman from Tennessee...became too sick with Lupus to work — and then lost her health insurance, and then died because of lack of medical care."

That, however, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Fulmer's stupidity. Trying to create demand in order to solve economic crises, he says, is like telling "those who died of thirst in the world’s deserts [to just drink] more water" or telling starving people to just eat more. The image, I think, is supposed to suggest that demand-side economic stimuli are inherently self-defeating because they aim to utilize an economic tool (demand) that just doesn't exist, just like water just doesn't exist in the middle of a desert. While this strategy wouldn't work for water or food, water and food are dissimilar from wealth (in other words, purchasing wherewithal) in one very notable way: wealth is a collective fiction.

Presumably Fulmer has a college degree, which means that he was presumably a college freshman at one point in his life. He should, therefore, presumably have had the standard college-freshman revelation that money is just pieces of paper and has no inherent worth. In fact, the only reason money works at all is that we have all tacitly agreed (some of us without even realizing that we've agreed) to act as though money has value. Changing the distribution (or even total quantity of) effective demand is therefore different than changing the distribution of food or water in one very important way: we can rearrange the effective demand landscape just by changing what (or how) we think about it.* Especially because modern economies are so heavily dependent on the psychological states of the people in charge, it very well could work to use sleight of hand to kickstart a sluggish economy. It won't always work, granted, and I've not yet said anything in this post to indicate that it would definitely work in any specific instance, but at least we now know enough to look into the issue more seriously than Fulmer would have us do.

Y'know what, though? Having got all of that out of my system, I now no longer feel quite that connected to the idea of identifying as a Keynesian. I do think that I've found an alternative, though: from today on, you can call me an "anti-Fulmerian."

*Actually, I lie: this is also partially true of food and water. It's just true to a very minimal extent, is all: we could collectively begin to construe, say, insects as food, but that really wouldn't change much. And our options with respect to food and water are much more limited than they are with respect to effective economic demand.

Weekly webcomic: a long walk

2012-01-20T08:54:00.001-08:00

It's the most deja-vu time of the year!

2012-01-20T08:53:00.000-08:00

With great joy and pride tempered only by his infinite capacity for economic sophistry, Edwin Feulner announces the publication of

"a resource that ranks every country by [economic freedom] -- the [Heritage Foundation's] 2012 Index of Economic Freedom, [in which] the United States comes in at No. 10. That’s right: the nation that is supposed to lead the world in liberty finishes behind nine others, including Ireland, Chile, Switzerland and Canada. Even the small African nation of Mauritius beats us."

I'm fairly certain that I've written about the Index before, but for the life of me I can't find the post in which it happens. At any rate, I know for sure that I've at least read it before, and it is therefore completely unsurprising to me to learn that the Heritage people think that there are

"certain key areas [in which] the United States is lagging badly. A big one is government spending. The U.S. now ranks 127th in the world in this category. Spending by government consumes 42.2 percent of gross domestic product. Total public debt is now larger than the entire economy.

Taxes are another problem."

Of course, this tells us little to nothing about what we should do. Just because the word "freedom" is involved doesn't automatically mean we should seek more of it. So in order to fill in the gaps in Feulner's conspicuously uncritical reporting, I went and looked at the full index - and, in particular, the two categories that Feulner tags as being particularly problematic for us.

When it comes to government spending, it's certainly true that the Index puts us squarely in the bottom of the pack. What Feulner isn't telling you, though, is which countries are even worse than we are. Stable, wealthy, happy nations like Denmark, Belgium, the UK, Germany, and Canada all rate significantly below the USA in terms of government spending. Not all the countries beneath us are that luxurious, of course, but take a look at the countries that the Heritage Foundation identified as being the best when it came to government spending:

Burma
Guatemala
Bangladesh
Madagascar
Turkmenistan
Uganda
(seriously, would you want to live in any of these countries?)
Central African Republic
Taiwan
Indonesia
Dominican Republic
Singapore
Ethiopia

...and so on and so forth. This doesn't automatically mean that more government spending is good, of course, but it does strongly suggest the need to consider whether more "freedom" in this case is automatically helpful or useful. Maybe there's an optimal range, somewhere between Burma's level of government spending (which earned a 96 out of 100) and Cuba's (0 out of 100), in which governments tend to get the most bang for their buck. That is, maybe it's not just about "freedom."

Or take taxation, which appears to have been folded into "fiscal freedom." The freest countries in that category are, in order:

United Arab Emirates
Kuwait
Bahrain
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Turkmenistan
Oman
Maldives
Bahamas
Micronesia
Vanuatu
Paraguay

...whereas the following countries are far less "fiscally free" than we are:

Switzerland
Germany
Norway
Netherlands
Belgium
Denmark

Again, to a rational person this should lead to the idea that maybe the idea isn't to seek absolute freedom. We probably don't want to end up with North Korea's zero in this category, but it sure doesn't look like we want the UAE's ninety-nine-point-nine, either.

Maybe if Feulner and his Heritage coworkers were interested in making the US a livable country, or a prosperous country, they would have explained why we should always strive for greater economic freedom despite the fact that plenty of nations out there are trucking along just fine in conditions that the Heritage Foundation identifies as - and this is their word - "repressed." After all, it's not impossible that greater freedom would be good for us. All we're working with here are very loose correlations, and there are quite a few relevant background factors that could swing things one way or the other. So it's not like there would be no chance at all for the Heritage people to convince us that more freedom is always good even though some countries have it better than we do while being less free than we are.

But neither Feulner nor anybody else involved with Heritage seems to want to make that argument. Instead, they're happy to hit us over the head with the word "freedom" until we either capitulate or are forced to say in public that, yes, we would rather have less freedom. I know - this shouldn't be as disappointing as it is. It's politics as usual, and politics as usual is, well, usual. But is it really too much to ask that, one year, we could have an Index of Economic Effectiveness or an Index of Economic Contribution to Human Welfare instead of another copy of the same rigged report that the Heritage Foundation publishes every year?

Eu-lose the Euthyphro

2012-01-19T12:45:00.000-08:00

Sorry, that title was awful, but I'm low on sleep. But at least I'm not as dumb as Matthew O'Brien:

"Plato’s Euthyphro, which is superficially interpreted by modern readers as critical of theological ethics, is in fact entirely consistent with a theological law conception of morality...[The 'superficial' Euthyphro says that] divine law cannot generate a moral obligation unless there is already a moral obligation to obey divine law. This is like saying that a doctor can’t give you a prescription unless there is already a prescription for you to go to the doctor."

Yes, it is like that. In fact, it's exactly like that: just like the doctor is not responsible for the fact that it'd be good for you to take (say) penicillin, God could not possibly be responsible for the fact that it's bad to (say) torture people. In order for "a theological law conception of morality" to be at all meaningful, the exact opposite would have to be the case - but that would be just like a world in which you could become healthier by chugging battery acid if your doctor wrote you a prescription to take two triple-As and call him or her in the morning. It only makes sense to go to your doctor or to the bible if your doctor or the bible knows what it's talking about - which, in turn, means (for all intents and purposes) that God is only needed for morality if the bible is to the rest of us as doctors are to laypeople. Since not even O'Brien believes that, he really should feel differently about that doctor analogy.

Near-miss economics, part 2: a means of last resort

2012-01-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

So apparently there's something called "solidarism"? Who knew?

"Although [solidarist author Heinrich] Pesch is obviously against individualism as such, he objects to the state that attempts to provide for everything people want, rather only those things that follow in the principle of subsidiarity. In a sense, the use of the state is, like the just war theory, only used as a means of last resort. Pesch’s prescription is not absolute private property for persons or collectivism of means of production. His answer is 'socialization of people,' desiring cooperation rather than antagonism as the basis for human activity in the market, producing goods and services that serve the good of [one's] neighbor."

If this seems a bit utopian, perhaps that isn't a bad thing. "Cooperation rather than antagonism" is as decent a slogan as you could want, after all. But political philosophies have to contend with the inconvenient parts of reality just as much as they have to be designed to eliminate or minimize those inconveniences. What would solidarism do when people antagonize rather than cooperate with one another - say, by squeezing laborers for more and more work while paying them less and less?

"The just wage must also be determined for the workingman. This means that if society is not willing to pay a man a living wage for his labor then society probably has no demand for the fruits of his labor and he places the principle actor for determining this wage as which is in 'accord with the common good of society.'"

Tragically for Pesch (and, really, all of us), there are plenty of goods and services for which society has demand but for which "society is not willing to pay a man a living wage." (While we're here, why do all of these articles from the distributism website use "man" to mean "person"? Which fucking century are we in, again?) It would be one thing if there was no market at all for shitty fast food or poorly-made clothing, but - as we just saw - there very much is a market for those things. So if this solidarism thing is going to work, it looks like we're going to need to find a "principle actor for determining...wage[s]" whose interests are "in 'accord with the common good of society.'" Presumably this actor can't be the company that has set the unlivable wage in the first place. It could be the government, of course, but Pesch wants governments to be "means of last resort." So if it's not companies and it's not unions, who's left?

Well, perhaps unions - except unions need governmental support in order to have any real effect. And, in fairness, maybe that's the point at which we know we've reached the last resort. But in that case it doesn't seem like the state is a measure of last resort so much as a measure of only resort. (Which, yes, means that it's trivially also the measure of last resort - but in that case one might equally truthfully say that it's the measure of first resort. The phrase becomes meaningless when there's only one option.) It's very well and good to say that people should cooperate and pay living wages and so on, but it's more than a little silly to disallow the government from having any role in making that happen unless literally every other method fails.

Near-miss economics, part 1: socks

2012-01-19T09:45:00.000-08:00

Given that I've recently spent some time explaining why we can't solve the problems associated with large cities (or other institutions) by just giving up on them and returning to small ones, you'd think that I'd be thrilled to read this article, in which the much-maligned Steven Horwitz seems to agree. "Just as markets allow pockets of voluntary socialism, but socialism cannot abide capitalist acts between consenting adults," he says, "so a global economy has room for the local, while mandatory localism cannot meet the needs of those who prefer to buy global." If you look closely, though, you'll notice that something is amiss: is Horwitz saying that the problem with localism is its inability to meet people's needs or its inability to fulfill their preferences? Obviously one does not need one what merely prefers, so there is no middle road for him to choose.

In order to see just how much we actually agree with one another, one would need Horwitz to have provided an example of just what it is that he's talking about. With such an example in hand, we could relatively easily determine whether he's really talking about needs or if he's using the verb "need" to artificially enhance the relevance of his preferences. Luckily, he provides just such an example:

"On a recent trip I forgot to pack dress socks. Thankfully, in a strange town 2,500 miles from home there was a Walmart five minutes up the road. I happen to like Walmart’s in-house Faded Glory cotton dress socks, so I was able to buy several pairs of exactly the socks I like and usually wear (for less than $2 per pair). In a 'local only' economy, not only would I have had to spend more time searching for a store that carried dress socks (and was open at 8:30 a.m.!), I would also have faced uncertainty over whether those socks would be the kind I like."

And, well, there goes the pretense that he was talking about his needs.

Granted, part of the problem here is that Horwitz overstates the difficulty of operating in a strange environment. Assuming he was staying at a hotel, any of the hotel's employees should have been able to direct him to a store that sold socks. Even if he was sleeping on a park bench, though, the internet would have been more than capable of pointing him to some nice dress socks (even at 8:30 in the morning). Probably none of the alternatives would carry "Walmart's in-house Faded Glory cotton dress socks," but, gee, is it really that crucial that Horwitz be able to buy socks anywhere on the globe without "fac[ing] uncertainty over whether those socks would be the kind [he] like[s]"?

Or, to make the question more pointed, is Horwitz's ability to find the exact kind of dress sock he likes really worth all the negatives that come with a Walmart? You know - the unlivable wages, the abusive business practices, that sort of thing? Yes, goods are also cheaper at Walmart than they are elsewhere, but for Horwitz that appears to be almost beside the point. The main thing, for him, is (to shift industries) that "you can always go to a national fast-food chain and get a meal of nearly identical quality to what you’re used to at the chain’s restaurant at home." As reassuring as that may be - which may not be very much, when you stop to consider how shitty fast food is - it's a little pathetic that Horwitz finds this to be a significant point in favor of big businesses.

And, again, the reason it's pathetic is not that there aren't significant points in favor of big businesses. You usually (though not always) can get quality goods cheaper from bigger sellers, and in some cases you couldn't get a given good or service at all from a smaller company. Bigger companies also tend to be more stable. All of these and more are legitimate reasons to support at least some big businesses in at least some sectors of the economy. But being able to get the exact kind of dress sock you want? Fucking pathetic. If we're going to behave economically like a bunch of spoiled kids, I have a hard time believing that we're going to end up with an economy that will allow us to live like adults.

An addition to moral epistemology?

2012-01-18T13:18:00.000-08:00

I have to admit, Matthew O'Brien surprised me today. Previously, I'd only known O'Brien to say horrifically stupid things, like when he said that legal systems were "natural" or when he said (and I swear I am not making this up or taking it out of context) that "the only way to show that some action is bad is to show that it frustrates and impedes the happiness of the person who does it." But here he is, talking about the difference between applied ethics and ethical theory in a merely mostly stupid way:

"In our present intellectual climate, where rival atheist and theist camps disagree about whether God exists, why not circumscribe God’s role in [morality], bracket the question of his existence, and focus upon the ethical requirements of human nature alone? I want to consider a few reasons why this strategy is flawed, if it is adopted as a general method of ethics. It is, of course, possible to address many individual ethical problems in piecemeal fashion and on theologically neutral terms. There is no reason why vexed contemporary debates about abortion or gay marriage, for example, need to implicate theology. But the construction of an ethical theory, as a general matter, inevitably implicates what natural human reason can know about God."

That's awfully good, that part there at the end where he distinguishes "individual ethical problems" from "ethical theory, as a general matter." As we're about to see, the rest of it is shit, but that one part is pretty darn good.

But yes - God and ethics. You were saying, O'Brien?

"Let’s assume that the criterion of moral action is the final end, or ensemble of ends, that perfects human nature, and actions are good or bad insofar as they contribute to or frustrate the attainment of the final end. Actions will be intrinsically bad if they can never be ordered to the final end."

Aha! So when he says that morality inevitably involves God, he meant inevitably within some very narrow confines. But actually: what are those confines, exactly? Human nature is an abstraction, I would think, if it even exists, so how could we perfect it? (Could you, to make a relevant analogy, perfect the number eight?) Or, if he means to talk about some person's human nature, whose?

Alas, O'Brien never answers these questions. He does, however, add yet another arbitrary restriction:

"On atheistic assumptions...it is difficult to see how the final end could be specified determinately enough to demonstrate that certain kinds of injustice, such as intentionally killing the innocent, could never be chosen in order to advance the final end."

So now O'Brien has assumed - with no supporting evidence or argumentation of any sort - that morality must be teleological, must be based on "human nature" (whatever that is), and must also comport with justice in at least some hard cases. Maybe this is just me, but that's an awful lot of assumptions to be piling up, especially because, when taken together, they start to look an awful lot like the theistic moral view of the world.

Even worse, O'Brien somehow thinks that he can save us from ever having "to sacrifice [our] own moral integrity by doing something [we take] to be bad [because we know that] the action will seriously benefit others." God will save us from this, he thinks, because if God exists then God would pull strings so that everything always worked out in the end. Sadly, though, this isn't at all relevant to protecting individuals' moral integrity - which, if that's part of the "human nature" in question, would make this a really big fucking problem for O'Brien - because your moral integrity (as defined by O'Brien) is damaged when you think you're facing a tragic dilemma, not when you actually are facing one. Maybe some tiny sliver of hardcore true-believing theists would escape with their moral integrity intact, but that's hardly what O'Brien promises.

There's actually one more piece of O'Brien's essay that I want to touch on, but I want to save it for a future post because everything up to this point follows a trend that I find worthy of being marked and identified. Far from making morality simpler by invoking God, O'Brien has forced himself to invent something that can only be considered science fiction (human nature) and promise empirical consequences that he can't have (the protection of moral integrity) all in order to justify his prior belief in the non-existence of something he himself doesn't like (tragic dilemmas) - and he only managed to produce that string of moronic mistakes by quietly slipping in a whole slew of baseless assumptions that should have worked out in his favor! All of this goes to support the theory that God, for many people, is nothing more than a way of obtaining plausible deniability in the face of unpleasant realities. Typically when people talk about this theory they specify the unpleasant reality in question; usually it's death or the fact that gratuitously bad things happen (to good people). But those aren't the only candidates - as you can see, in this case the unpleasant reality is the fact that we are sometimes faced with decisions whose outcomes can only possibly be bad. (Just for the sakeo f having another example, we recently saw how Alex Pruss invoked God in order to explain away the unpleasant reality that some people die as victims and so never "defeat" the fact of their victimhood.)

Philosophically this tendency to use God as a shield against sad truths is a problem because of the contrapositive: if it's the case that God's existence implies the non-existence of unpleasant fact X, then the existence of unpleasant fact X likewise implies the non-existence of God (and, as we know, the unpleasant fact is going to win that fight every time). But this can also be a real problem for real people: O'Brien's opinion of morality is clearly wishful thinking, and if you continually apply wishful thinking to real-world situations eventually somebody's going to get hurt. Philosophy should and can stop us from following wishful thinking in this way - but only if it's good philosophy. Philosophy that starts by making arbitrary and biased assumptions, warps what little science it pays attention to, and decides the facts of the matter before investigating them, on the other hand, won't be able to do a damn thing.

Preference without judgment

2012-01-18T11:31:00.000-08:00

And while we're on the subject of the government not being in the business of giving people what they deserve, let's talk for a moment about Amelia.

"At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a couple’s mentally disabled child is in fact being denied a kidney transplant...'because of her quality of life,' while the social worker reminded the parents of the lasting inconveniences of caring for an older disabled person. Elizabeth Scalia, joining 'team Amilia [sic],' a group advocating the parents’ demand for the procedure, comments: 'Assessing people as units is evil. . . Amelia’s life is the life she has. She’s entitled to it.'"

The logical errors here are boring: being entitled to a life is not the same as being entitled to a kidney, and even if it was we would still be faced with the fact that there's a drastic organ shortage in this country and so somebody would have to go without the kidney to which they would be entitled. Like I said, boring. What's interesting is the implication, elsewhere made explicit, that "a committee of doctors felt Amelia was not worth saving." The impression given by Scalia and the other members of "team Amelia" is that organ allocation is just a matter of "determining who is worthy for advanced medical treatment" or "judging who deserves to live or die," and so if a mentally disabled child is passed over in favor of somebody else that must mean that we as a society have determined that people with mental disabilities aren't worthy of life and deserve to die. Fortunately, this is simply not the case.

When people evaluate the potential impact of a kidney transplant on an individual's life, they do so by projecting the value of that kidney to that individual in the future. This says nothing about how good or worthy or valuable the person has been in the past, nor is it dependent on how much good the person will (or is expected to) do in the future. What the person deserves, in other words, never even enters the picture. (If you doubt this, consider the fact that we give organs to prison inmates.) We prefer to give organs to those who will benefit from them most because we prefer to do the most good,* but we can have that preference without even beginning to think that e.g. people with mental disabilities are inferior. It's dishonest and manipulative for Scalia et al to play this game, but it's going to be effective so long as we continue to ignore the difference between preference and judgment. It'd be one thing if "team Amelia" wanted us to reconsider the way we form our preferences (in fact, I can see room for at least one valid criticism along those lines in Amelia's case). But not everything in this world is or should be about what people deserve, and they need to figure that out.

*Or, to be more pedantic but also more accurate, we prefer to do the thing that we expect will do the most good, given the very limited information we have in these kinds of scenarios.

Perhaps you have heard of SOPA?

2012-01-18T10:14:00.000-08:00

If not, maybe this will clue you in:

...and so on and so forth. Believe it or not, I wasn't planning on doing a SOPA post. I believed - perhaps naively - that there was already enough anti-SOPA sentiment floating around that my voice would've been redundant. But then it occurred to me that the SOPA debate is not really about the limits of copyright law or about censorship vs. freedom of expression or anything like that. It is, instead, about one of the things that yesterday's random art post was about, namely, the difference between money mattering less and people having money more.

Of all the sites that are taking today off to protest SOPA (that I've seen), I think wiki expresses it best: the question we need to ask ourselves is how much we trust in the value of freely available things. Notice that this has nothing to do with blacklisting or censoring alleged pirates, because piracy is only a concept that makes sense in a system centered on private ownership, and in particular private distribution rights. Absent these things, piracy is impossible - you can't, for instance, pirate the ocean or the air or clouds or even things like streets or sidewalks. This is one very important and often-understated (if not outright ignored) way in which we can shortcut concerns about income distribution: if you make enough things freely available to the public (especially things that can be leveraged easily, like knowledge), income distribution will matter less because money will come to act less as a barrier to people getting what they want. There is still, of course, a difference between trying to make money mean less and trying to make it meaningless: the latter would be something very much like pure communism and would probably be doomed to failure. The former, however, only requires some constraints on capitalism (like, say, net neutrality).

Even for those of us who know the difference, though, it can be hard to believe that capitalism should be restrained, especially when it comes to something like piracy. Haven't artists (or writers, or whoever) earned that money? Won't piracy eliminate things like the arts (or, at least, good art) if we don't keep it well in check? Questions like this are, I think, related more to cultural myths than to facts and logic. For one, it's very difficult to say what people have earned - or, at least, it's far more difficult than we often make it out to be. But even if this were not the case, it would still not be the government's job to make sure that people get what they deserve. Rather, the governments exist in order to help people and protect them from harm, and that's not something that can always (best) be achieved through purely capitalist means. Again, one can promote the use of restraints to capitalism without promoting the total abandonment of capitalism; I'm not saying, for instance, that there shouldn't be any piracy that's illegal or that we punish. It's just that the value of a relatively open (i.e., relatively freely accessible; relatively public) internet is so high (even to the artists themselves!) that closing it down would be an act of cutting off our collective nose to spite our face.

I get that artists want to be able to make a good living making art. And I'm not against that - I know artists, I buy art (and not just mass-produced art, by the way), I go see movies in the theater, I think art should be a viable profession (for people who are any good at it, anyway). But there are serious limits to what we can accomplish by trying to make the government an agent of capitalism and then assuming that capitalism will work everything out (in other words, by making money matter more). SOPA may be a relatively unimportant example of this - I'd have a much stronger case for publicly available health care, for instance - but it's the example of the day, and hopefully it's something we can all understand. Yes, there may be some people who would make more money under SOPA, and maybe we can even say that they would earn it. But that's such a small thing to trade for the immense social value of an open internet that it's absurd that we're even considering it.

Random art post! (or, A sheep in wolves' clothing)

2012-01-17T14:09:00.000-08:00

Back in December, Andrew Louis proposed in a comment that he'd like to see some posts that just talk about art (technically music, but I'm expanding it) and culture. Well, don't say that I never did anything for you, Andrew, cause here it is.

I want to start off slowly, both to feel this process out for myself and to give you all a chance to respond and possibly shape what these posts are going to look like in the future (if they're going to continue at all), so for now I'm going to (a) use an older song that I'm already familiar with and (b) not try to go into every nook and corner of it but only bring out one of its themes. That song is "Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)" by Iron & Wine, and it goes a little something like this:

"Wolves by the road
And a bike wheel spinning on a pawn shop wall
She'll wring out her colored hair
Like a butterfly beaten in a summer rainfall
And then roll on the kitchen floor
With some fucker with a pocketful of foreign change
Song of the shepherd's dog
A pitch in the dark in the ear of the lamb
Who's going to try to run away
Whoever got that brave?

Wolves in the middle of town
And the chapel bell ringing through the wind-blown trees
She'll wave to the butcher's boy
With the parking lot music everybody believes
And then dive like a dying bird
To any dude with a dollar in the penny arcade
Song of the shepherd's dog
Waiter and the check or a rooster on the rooftop waiting for day
And you know what he's gonna say

Wolves at the end of the bed
And a postcard hidden in her winter clothes
She'll weep in the back of a truck
To the traitors only trying to find her bullet hole
And then run down the canopy road
To some mother with a baby and a cross to bear
Song of the shepherd's dog
Little brown flea in the bottle of oil
For your wool and wild hair
You'll never get him out of there"

I include the full lyrics to give a sense of what the overall themes of the song are, but the part that interests me today is the connection that Sam Beam draws between smallness and (something roughly like) self-determination. This has been a minor theme in the philosophical posts from the past couple days, so in my head it makes sense to approach the same thing from an artistic point of view as well.

The song opens with an image that, to me, points out one of the biggest flaws of traditional smallness: once you're in it, it's hard to leave. That would be the spinning bike wheel. I think Beam was right to choose a bike over a car, even though America is famous for being the nation of the road trip and the open road and other such car-related things, because bikes are far easier to own and operate. In many ways, a bike is to a car what a blog is to syndicated column, and when you're someone who's relatively down and out you just want the simplest tool that gets the job done. At any rate, I'd argue that cars are (and have, artistically, been) more useful for adventuring than making real change; see also, for instance, Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car." (This is going to be relevant later, so keep it in the back of your mind.)

This particular bike wheel, however, does not just represent the ability to move oneself, literally or figuratively, to a better place. It's spinning, true, and that's a reference to its capacity for motion and change, but it's only a wheel - where the rest of the bike is, we don't know. Moreover, it's spinning in place. Its capacity for movement has thus been reduced twice, first by being separated from the rest of the mechanism and second by being nailed in place. If anything, the fact that it's moving at all is a subversion of its usual symbolism: it looks just like it does when it's working, but it's not working. (This same kind of subversion reappears in the third verse with the "postcard hidden in her winter clothes.") Perhaps worst of all, the bike wheel belongs to a pawn shop. Though we don't know the bike's back-story, we can infer from the wheel's current location that somebody was in such dire need of money that they literally sold their only means of escape. The flip side of this, meanwhile, is the fact that the song's subject will need money in order to escape herself. This last theme is carried through the rest of the first verse and into the second, as the protagonist finds herself being (harmfully) drawn to anybody who has money. It's no coincidence that these men are also symbols of escape - or, more accurately, escapism. By admiring foreign currency or spending a few bucks at the video arcade, our protagonist gets a taste of what she could have if she had real money. It's only a taste because the men only have (or are only willing to let her have) a little bit of money. But this only begs the question: why should her opportunity to leave, or at least to have the life she wants, be so thoroughly tied to money?

That she needs money in this way probably won't come as a surprise to us Americans. Unless I miss my guess, we're so thoroughly accustomed to everything costing money that we probably wouldn't even think to ask that question. But, at least if we stop to think about it for a minute, it should be obvious that things like travel don't have to be bought. To name a sort of silly alternative, she could just walk somewhere - at least, if she lived within walking distance of anywhere, which, in this country, is doubtful. More plausibly, she could hitch a ride, and so rely on social capital instead of monetary capital. Or, at least, she could have, if she had been lucky enough to have been born in a town where the people are trustworthy. Because she lives in a traditionally small place, however, the exact opposite is the case: her peers and fellow citizens are "wolves" and "traitors" who have no interest in helping her either develop herself according to her own desires or relocate to place where such development is possible. Though Beam doesn't explain why traditional smallness has this effect on people, it's not hard to come up with a plausible explanation: it's a cultural adaptation, without which small places could never survive because everyone would leave for somewhere else. Again, this doesn't have to be part of the small-town experience, but it is something that we have to grapple with when we look to smallness for answers.

In a way, then, I feel like this song highlights something about American life that the Occupy movement has been wrong to disregard: our national experience with smallness should have taught us the dangers of relying entirely on money as a social gatekeeping mechanism, but we don't appear to have learned that lesson. That is to say, if you have no (or very little) money in this country but want to change your life, how could you do it? You probably can't buy the things you need - in fact, you're more likely to sell them (think of the bike wheel on the pawn shop wall). You can buy transitory pleasures (some foreign coins, a few hours of flashing lights), but everybody knows that changing one's life means more than experiencing even a very long sequence of transitory pleasures. Or you can try to rely on other people for help, except the people who could help you - mostly middle- or upper-class white men - have never been forced to develop the kind of empathy that would make them (us) anything other than wolves and traitors. The system, in effect, is closed: "you'll never get...out of there." The Occupy movement, much though it would help if it succeeded, is apparently unequipped to address this problem, because its main concerns are the distribution and protection of wealth, not the purposes to which that wealth is put once it is acquired. In short, the Occupy movement - as many, many people have pointed out before - is basically a social justice movement aimed at fixing problems that have historically only applied to middle- and upper-class white males. To return to the earlier comparison, it seems fair to say that the Occupy people (and even most of the liberal presence in this country) are demanding cars in which to have navel-gazing, soul-searching adventures when they should be demanding that everybody at least has a bicycle. Translated into more literal terms, that means building a society in which money means less rather than a society in which people have money more. This, if anything, is why the main imagery of the song pertains to the people and not the coinage - it is, to name just one example, called "Wolves" and not "Euros." Because people like me tend to have problems only insofar as we lack money, so we tend to focus on money-related problems. But we only have that luxury because we've made a world in which our small set of desires can reliably be fulfilled by buying things. For people who don't have the same desires - who want to leave or to change or just to be different - that smallness is constricting and even threatening. If you can't trust the people around you to respect and understand you, even to some minimal extent, you might as well be a sheep among wolves.

So yeah, as I was just saying...

2012-01-17T10:11:00.000-08:00

Me, yesterday:

"[I]ntentionally seeing only the upsides of smallness is one of the many ways in which followers of return-to-smallness political philosophies (distributism, front-porch-ism, some kinds of new urbanism) can trick themselves into trading the ugliness of cities for the ugliness of towns. The way to avoid this, in my opinion, is to realize that the notion of unqualified return is a fatally flawed one. Are there good things that Fargo has that New York City (or even Pittsburgh) lacks? I'm sure that there are. But does that mean that New York City (or Pittsburgh) can only have those things by returning to some arrangement like the one that Fargo has now? Nope! Rather, we should look for ways to improve what we have so that we acquire the best of NYC with the best of Fargo. Such a thought process, however, requires more than return-to-smallness thinking can give us. Our options are not limited to the impersonal grind of New York or the overly intimate parochialism of Fargo - but they will be if our most creative solution is just, 'stop doing what we're doing now and do what we did before.'"

Carl Bankston III (yes, this is really his name), also yesterday:

"There are good reasons...to question whether having some nations strive to position themselves as global leaders is necessarily a good thing. Internationally, rather than seeing the domestic challenges of other nations as impediments to their direction of regional or global events, we should see their concentration on their own internal issues as paying attention to their proper business. The less China or Russia meddles in the lives of people in other countries, the better. It is not simply that these countries would need to be efficiently centralized and externally directed in order to, say, attempt to address the financial crisis in Europe. The direction of causation also works the other way. The more that Russia, for example is able to direct its attention toward European affairs and shape those affairs, the more power the Russian Federation government will have and the less real autonomy and self-direction the republics, provinces, and territories will have."

Certainly it can be the case that increased centralization (either in terms of power or funding or whatever) detracts from self-direction in the way that Bankston 3 describes, but that doesn't have to be the case; in other words, he's wrong to limit the options to "globalize or localize." To give just one example of this, I admit that the recent global financial crisis would've done less harm to the "real autonomy and self-direction" of things like "republics, provinces, and territories" if the global financial system had been smaller in scale or reach or whatever. But it also would've done less harm if that same global financial system had been more tightly regulated, more subject to central oversight, more attentive to the circumstances of regular people, and so on.

As with culture or community, "bigness" and "smallness" do not by themselves describe the full range of options. There are different kinds of bigness (globalization) and smallness (localization), and among these are kinds of bigness that promote local self-direction and kinds of localization that detract from small-scale autonomy. Maybe the right move really is for the US (and other nations) to scale back its international efforts overall - honestly, I haven't looked into our foreign policy enough to know what all it is we're doing "to position [ourselves] as global leaders." But even if that's true, it would be idiotic to conclude that the only way to scale back overall is to scale back in every aspect, as Bankston seems to want us to do. As always, evidence, evidence, evidence; details, details, details. Good philosophy does not follow from bad facts.

Fear and loathing...of the government

2012-01-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

As you may or may not know, gentle reader, the US of A is currently in the midst of something of a weight crisis. Over one-third of our adult population is obese, and as of 2010 there was not one single state in which less than 20% of the population was obese. The trend, as you can imagine, is also not good: over time, we're getting more and more overweight. As a result, the Obama White House, particularly in the form of Michelle, has thrown its support behind the idea that maybe we could stand to weigh less and exercise more. To conservative nutcases like Michael Swartz, this crosses the line.

"[G]overnment didn’t really care all that much about obesity until a 2004 study of mortality — written and reviewed in large part by an Obesity Task Force heavily populated with directors of weight loss clinics — concluded 400,000 Americans per year died from obesity. But he doesn’t continue on and follow the money, nor does he wonder about who’s really paying for the implicit message which benefits certain favored industries like Big Medicine or Big Pharma. After all, the narrative and coverage plays into the belief that if the government says it’s true, it must be so...

In [The Fat Fraud author Mike Schatzki's] chapter on 'Derailing Obesity Epidemic Researchaganda,' he calls on those who are really interested to give their side of the story, countering the government-sponsored message that thin equals healthy. Because it is the flip-side of the political narrative, Schatzki feels it’s worth finding media contacts to make sure the commonsense approach of simply doing enough physical activity to maintain a weight healthy for your body."

In Swartz's mind, the government is being led around by its nose by "favored industries like Big Medicine or Big Pharma." It only deigns to care about obesity because of the influence of malign interests, and that's why it doesn't recommend "the commonsense approach of simply doing enough physical activity to maintain a weight healthy for your body." According to Swartz, all we need to do is walk 10,000 steps per day and eat "a reasonable diet," but those dastardly fiends in the government would rather have us "opt for diet pills, group programs like Weight Watchers, specialized diets provided by companies such as Nutrisystem, or the extreme case of bariatric surgery."

Having encountered this very issue in my graduate schooling - and, of course, being someone who's generally pro-government - I was interested to see just what was going on with Michelle Obama's much-maligned Let's Move! program. So, unlike a certain Michael Swartz I could name, I went and did some actual research - and guess what? The government is on his side:

"For adults (that’s anyone aged 18 and older), your goals are:
Physical activity: You need to be active 30 minutes a day, at least 5 days a week, for 6 out of 8 weeks. As an alternative, you can count your daily activity steps using a pedometer (goal: 8,500).
Healthy eating: Each week, you’ll also focus on a healthy eating goal.[*] There are eight to choose from, and each week you will add a new goal while continuing with your previous goals. By the end of the six weeks, you’ll be giving your body more of the good stuff it needs."

See that? The government is actually more lenient than Schatzki (8500 steps vs. 10000) - how's that for scaremongering? Oh - but that's just what they have on their info sheet for us regular schmoes. Maybe they tell doctors to push patients into more extreme treatments like surgeries and pills and things. Or, y'know, maybe they don't.

"IDEAS FOR HEALTHIER LIVING
5 Eat at least 5 fruits and vegetables every day.
2 Limit screen time (for example, TV, video games, computer) to 2 hours or less per day.
1 Get 1 hour or more of physical activity every day.
0 Drink fewer sugar-sweetened drinks. Try water and low-fat milk instead."

What's really sad about all of this is that Swartz had already identified the villains of the story: the companies that promote, and then profit off of, unrealistic body images and unhealthy lifestyles. There was just no need for him to bring government into the picture, especially since - again - the government is on his side. We have now officially reached the point where people can throw tantrums about the need to hear "the flip-side of the political narrative" while simultaneously repeating "the political narrative" almost verbatim. If ever there was proof-positive that our political debate is taking place in a fictional world, this is it. So be careful, readers: this is bat country.

*I would say more about this part but the link is broken.

Is:Ought::Law:Nature?

2012-01-16T13:18:00.000-08:00

Last week's post about technological rights has sparked a lively (and ongoing) debate in the comments, and while I don't want to interrupt or sidetrack that particular discussion I would like to reinforce the main point made in that post and perhaps thereby supply a new way of looking at the discussion that has followed. This time our reference will be William Allen, professor of - you guessed it! - philosophy.

"Civil rights may be comprehensively defined as the rights to common or equal participation in civil society. Natural law governs the terms of participation in civil society, comprehensively extending from conception to full maturity...civil rights are [therefore] founded on 'the stable foundation of nature,' and not 'the precarious and fluctuating basis of human institution.'"

In case you're struggling with Allen's philosopher-ese, all of this is just a rough restatement of Eric Sterner's basic premises from last week: human rights (for Allen, "civil rights") depend not on "the existence of [some] technology [but] on our intrinsic humanity" (for Allen, "the stable foundation of nature,' and not 'the precarious and fluctuating basis of human institution'"). But there's something hidden in there that should give you pause - assuming, that is, that you can fight through Allen's needlessly opaque prose. In his very first sentence, Allen says that civil rights are designed to ensure "equal participation in civil society." They have, in other words, a consequence as their goal, even if that goal is an ideal and perhaps also is sought in non-consequentialist-type ways. The problem with this is that the consequence of an action has just as much to do with the context in which the action happens as the nature of the action itself.

For example, say that we're like Allen and we only want our civil rights to pertain to "domestic economy or household management, (or in other words, marriage, parentage, and character formation), because it is precisely in that environment that citizens are [made] fit for the common or equal enjoyment of and responsibility for the order of civil society." (This isn't the only way to think about civil rights, and I don't even think it's the best way to do so, but let's just go with it for now.) At the end there you'll see that he's concerned with the ability of citizens to enjoy and be responsible for the order of civil society - which is, again, a consequence. You might think, though, that it's a relatively context-independent consequence. After all, aren't the basics the same as they were hundreds or even thousands of years ago? In order to enjoy and participate in society, people need to be healthy, educated, protected, and so on - nothing new there, right? Well, yes and no. Although the words are the same, the details are very different. Illiteracy, for example, would be a huge burden to bear in a modern society, but for most of history literacy was just not needed. Similarly, there are threats to our health and safety now that our ancestors could not even have fathomed. But even more than that, there are also new kinds of barriers to social participation. One of these is technological literacy, which is why internet rights were the subject of last Friday's post. (Yes, really: as we've seen before, the internet is not just a fun toy anymore and is really part of our common civil society.) Another is money: education and health are becoming tremendously expensive, and that pressures people in ways that preclude "common or equal enjoyment of and responsibility for the order of civil society." I could go on, but that should suffice to make the point: if we're looking for justice, as Allen is, we aren't going to get it without considering at least some detailed facts about the way our society actually works.

This basically means death for Allen's natural-rights politics, as there's no way to identify detailed facts of this sort just by using "reason and the moral sense." "[T]he precarious and fluctuating basis of human institution" will also have to be referenced sooner or later. We shouldn't be afraid of this, though - if anything, we should be afraid of what happens when we don't have to account for context, because if "human institution[s]" aren't fluctuating then they aren't getting any better. It's to our credit that we eventually outgrow traditional sets of rights - but if we don't recognize that growth and fabricate ourselves something bigger, we shouldn't be surprised to find that our social needs are straining the seams of our legal fabric.

A life of smallness, in depressing picture form

2012-01-16T11:47:00.000-08:00

Y'know...I didn't want to go to North Dakota before, but now I really don't want to go to North Dakota:

And I'm not even a woman! I mean, yeah, this ad is more than a little irritating in its banal endorsement of the sexual predator/prey dynamic, but just think about how fucking boring North Dakota has to be in order for the predator/prey dynamic to be the most exciting thing happening there. Worse yet, imagine how boring North Dakota has to be in order for you, as a tourist, to have a shot at becoming "a legend" there. It's the year two thousand and twelve, for crying out loud - shouldn't North Dakota have legends of its own by now?

Granted, it is probably not terribly easy to become a legend in North Dakota. Indeed, they may even have legends of their own. (Although, if this wiki list is any indication, maybe they don't...) This is, after all, an ad, and so is almost certainly lying. But you'd never see a similar lie coming from the tourism board of a New York or a California or really any state with an actual city in it. And do you know why? Because the difficulty of becoming a legend in a place is directly proportional to the richness of the lives of the people who live in that place. Could you imagine becoming a legend in, say, Chicago by dressing up in generic semi-casual clothing, spending money stupidly at local institutions, and bedding a local woman? I didn't think so. But this poster sure does make it look like that's a real possibility in Fargo.

There is, I would venture to say, nothing wrong with wanting to exceed the limits of the provincial life as depicted in this (admittedly probably lying) North Dakotan tourism poster. For one thing, if you're a woman that might mean being able to walk down the street without being harassed by strangers in restaurants who evidently have nothing better to do with their lives. But, more generally, it also means being able to live a more discerning and more diverse life; quite simply, if there's more to do, you'll likely do more. As someone who lives in a real city, when I want to have an amazing experience I don't have to wait for one to fly in from out of state. This is not to say that there aren't also upsides to smallness, of course. When done right, smallness can contribute to a sense of community, for example. But intentionally seeing only the upsides of smallness is one of the many ways in which followers of return-to-smallness political philosophies (distributism, front-porch-ism, some kinds of new urbanism) can trick themselves into trading the ugliness of cities for the ugliness of towns. The way to avoid this, in my opinion, is to realize that the notion of unqualified return is a fatally flawed one. Are there good things that Fargo has that New York City (or even Pittsburgh) lacks? I'm sure that there are. But does that mean that New York City (or Pittsburgh) can only have those things by returning to some arrangement like the one that Fargo has now? Nope! Rather, we should look for ways to improve what we have so that we acquire the best of NYC with the best of Fargo. Such a thought process, however, requires more than return-to-smallness thinking can give us. Our options are not limited to the impersonal grind of New York or the overly intimate parochialism of Fargo - but they will be if our most creative solution is just, "stop doing what we're doing now and do what we did before."

Love is not a conference center

2012-01-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've been exploring the idea that political philosophies, if they are to succeed, must be ugly in a certain kind of way. Namely, they must "make lemonade" - that is, must abandon aspirations to elegance when the real world presents a situation that cannot productively be handled in an elegant way. It appears, however, that this idea of mine is not universally accepted. (Shocking, I know.) D.W. Sabin, for one, defends Distributism (see also) on the grounds that it is beautiful, and

"beauty is about love and unless you are a completely imbecilic adherent to this death cult of modern technocratic statism, you may hold onto some rudimentary appreciation of the value of beauty in your life...Beauty is a wing of love. It is a sturdy refuge in our fallen state, our bit of firm ground in the face of the manifest ugliness of our prevailing surrender to base desires and zero-sum commercial freebooting."

While I won't flatter myself to compete with Sabin in the rhetoric department - "death cult of modern technocratic statism" is pretty good, I have to admit - his reasoning is target that's more than wide enough for me to hit.

The problem with our current political system, first of all, is not its ugliness. Technocratic statism (whatever that is) may well be ugly and it may even describe our current political system, but the problem with what we have now is that it doesn't work (for most of us). We can easily see the difference just by looking to other nations whose governments are equally technocratic and statist but whose people are far happier and healthier than we are. However much ugliness comes along with technocratic statism, if it doesn't interfere with citizens' welfare it shouldn't be our concern. Maybe - maybe - there's a reason to choose the more beautiful political system when all other things are equal, but that's not the kind of decision we're facing now.

Of course, if love were somehow a guarantor of effectiveness and beauty a "wing" thereof, we could just shortcut all of this. And that does seem to be what Sabin believes:

"Beauty is everything...We need to recover the ground of beauty in this once and still beautiful land. It is the helping hand of Love and with Love, all things are possible. There has never been a case of inflation, nor deflation in the realm of Love."

Only problem is, this is pretty obviously delusional. Neither love nor beauty makes all things possible; in fact, the entire point of making lemonade is that beauty makes many things impossible. Nor is beauty a "wing" of love, as though human emotion could somehow be analyzed in the same way that we analyze floor plans. Before we go around tying things like politics to simple emotions, we have to understand what those emotions are, and Sabin hasn't even come close to accomplishing this. Even if distributism or some other pro-smallness political philosophy is in some sense more beautiful than the system we have in place - which, more on that in today's second post - that tells us nothing helpful unless we also know what it means for one thing to be more beautiful than another, which is something we'll never know if we buy into Sabin's wild fantasies.

To his credit, though, Sabin does get one thing right: I do count myself among the "opponents of beauty" in many instances. It's not that I hate purple mountain majesties or golden waves of grain (or good books, etc.); if anything, that Sabin conflates all of these sorts of beauty is just one more strike against him. It's just that I'm not insane enough to place something as finicky and fickle as beauty over the needs of individuals.

Asking questions philosophically is more important than asking philosophical questions

2012-01-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

In the comments to the recent post about Alex Rosenberg's pro-scientism stance, Patrick astutely asked:

"When you say

'But really: is [Rosenberg's characterization of morality] the most plausible way of interpreting [the concept]?'

what could you possibly mean? I'm assuming you don't really mean to presume that morality exists, and then, based on that assumption, search about for the most plausible candidates. If what we're trying to figure out is whether 'morality' exists at all, then that's begging the question.

On the other hand, if you just mean something like 'Humans engage in this thing they call morality. What best explains it?' then you'll probably end up with a purely sociological, biological, or anthropological answer, and from what I've read, you seem to expect more than that."

If I can put some words in Patrick's mouth (hands, keyboard, whatever), what he's saying is that I appeared to have been asking one of two questions, neither of which was really all that helpful or revealing. Either I was asking...

1. What is morality?

...in which case I was begging the question (and in a pretty stupid way, no less), or I was asking...

2. What is "morality"?

...in which case I was asking for the relatively boring technical details about the way in which the concept of morality originates, changes over time, and affects other human concepts and institutions. Neither of these questions, Patrick correctly implies, is the right one to use to start thinking about morality in a philosophical way. The second doesn't even set you on the right track, and if the first one does - which is hardly guaranteed - it does so by insisting on a level of naive dumbness that is generally not what one wants when one starts to do philosophy. But what's really problematic about these problems, so to speak, is that it may seem that these are the only two questions to ask. After all, the first one seems to be the philosophical question, and the second one seems to be the best question to ask in case the first (philosophical) one doesn't work out. It is, therefore, lucky for me that I don't want to ask either but to, in a way, split the difference between them.

To illustrate, allow me to shift to a different topic that just so happens to work in sort of the same way: religion. Over at the Rethinking Religion blog (run, incidentally, by Columbia University's aggregated social sciences departments), Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Abby Kluchin (hereafter C&K) talk about having run into the exact same problematic dilemma that Patrick identified above:

"In his 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller wrote of the 'Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz,' a monastic order whose members—quite literally—religiously copy the texts of the scientists of a pre-apocalyptic age. While maintaining the practices and beliefs of Catholic monks, they painstakingly recreate electronic schematics, hydraulic plans, and pages of fragmented statistical research findings and journal articles, each new version copied by hand, gilded, margins adorned with smiling cherubim and mythical creatures. They didn’t have the slightest idea what any of it meant...

[A] recurring theme of [our recent] discussion was the attempt to sequester 'religion' from 'religious practices,' and to separate 'religion,' 'literature,' and 'technology' into discrete categories. And yet this neatness, this orderliness, kept collapsing [because of ideas like the ones presented in Canticle]."

C&K started by asking questions that are analogous to question 1 above: what are religion, literature, technology, and so on? They discovered, however, that they couldn't really ask those questions until they knew that religion and literature as such existed - that is, until they knew that they weren't begging the question. But when they began to look for those things, all they could find were various social-science interpretations thereof - religion seen as a social-psychological phenomenon, science as a cultural practice, technology as a metaphor, that sort of thing. Although they settled for having these social-scientific kinds of answers - they are, after all, professors of the social sciences - I don't think that they had to. In fact, I think they erred in doing so, because they gave up on finding the answers to questions they were right to ask.

In order to find these answers, however, they would have to have asked one more question: why do we think that these things are different in the first place? Why, in other words, am I bothering to ask that other question at all? This is the same kind of question that - at least in my experience - people consistently fail to ask about morality, and that they get into a lot of trouble in failing to ask. In C&K's case, the answer presumably has something to do with the apparent differences between the scientific and religious belief structures or between the products of science and religion (i.e., technology and relic, respectively); in the case of morality, I take it that most of us are inspired by having (and/or witnessing others having) good and bad experiences. There might be other reasons, of course, but I'm talking about these ones because they seem to be the best ones, and - again - you might as well start with the best when you start to think about something philosophically. The reason that you need to ask this question and to answer it intelligently is that philosophy, if it is to work well, cannot start from scratch. In order to do good philosophy, we have to start with a phenomenon or idea that is very firmly established and then try to expand, elaborate on, or explain something about that phenomenon or idea.* C&K, for example, might want to figure out whether - as is apparently the case in Canticle - the scientific method can not be not just employed by religious people but actually employed as a religion.** Only after you nail down a specific question like that one can you start doing philosophy, because only then have you described the problem in terms that actually make sense. Any attempt to "separate 'religion,' 'literature,' and 'technology' into discrete categories" without knowing why is not real likely to succeed, because without a motivation it's gonna be really hard to figure out which kind of category (and so which gloss on religion, literature, and technology) would even satisfy you. Likewise, just asking about morality without any clear agenda is not likely to work out in the end, because there's just too much going on to go in blind.

So, to return to morality, you might ask about morality because (as suggested above) you have both good-seeming and bad-seeming experiences and you'd like to know if there's any logical reason not to do everything in your power to just have the good ones. This (one hopes) would lead you to the realization that other people have the same sorts of experiences, and that there is no logical reason to count one experience but discount another one just like it simply because of who is experiencing them. Then you might recall that there are times when maximizing good experiences for yourself will both (a) not do all that much for you and (b) really make things tough for others. Eventually, assuming you don't stumble on any fallacies or fictional premises, you'll probably reach the right (correct, true) answer: yes, in most circumstances there are overwhelming reasons not to do everything in your power to just have good experiences.

It might not seem possible to build a moral theory (or to understand why science is different than religion) just by asking smaller questions like this, but I assure you that it is. Or, at least, I assure you that either it is or you've been tacitly operating with a nonsensical concept of a moral theory that you would never have been able to build anyway - which you would probably never know without asking these smaller, more precise, better-formed questions. Whether these questions can be found in any philosophy curriculum or text is utterly irrelevant; it is, as the title of this post says, more important to ask questions philosophically than to ask questions that are readily identifiable as philosophical in nature. Admittedly, doing it the way I'm suggesting is harder, takes longer, and requires a lot more research than the way you typically see people doing it. But d'you know what? You're also going to get better answers my way, and that should be more than enough to make up for it.

*This is why philosophy of religion is such a waste of fucking time: the phenomenon or idea in that case is almost always God, and God does not exist. It's also another way of understanding my position that philosophy should always be fact-based. Finally, it's why I wanted to split the difference between the armchair-philosophy approach and the empirical/social-scientific approach: we need to do armchair-y stuff, but we often need to start by viewing the topic at hand as belonging to some technical field(s) or other.
**For the record: probably, but this doesn't tell us very much, and it certainly doesn't have anything to do with what happens in Canticle. At least as far as I understand having not read the book, people rarely (if ever) use the scientific method in Canticle, so if that's the inspiration for asking questions then we'd better find a different question. (This is a super-simple observation, but all that proves is that my approach is powerful enough to help people - even very smart people, like oh I don't know professors - avoid fucking up the super-simple things.)

Protect the first amendment!

2012-01-13T08:35:00.000-08:00

Sort of!

"While well-intentioned, the [Obama] administration’s efforts to advance the cause of 'Internet freedom' as a human right should raise some concerns [such as] the administration’s desire to tie Internet freedom to human rights. A simple interpretation of the 'freedom to connect' might be as a negative right: freedom from government interference in one’s access to and activities on the Internet — just as the right to free speech protects the individual from censorship but does not guarantee a means of publication. The administration’s way of framing the issue, however, opens the door to something else: a positive right to the use of a technology. That is to say, the right’s existence is predicated on the existence of the technology rather than on our intrinsic humanity. Cyberspace is, after all, a created medium."

Eric Sterner, as you can see, loves him some first amendment. Insofar as internet freedom (which, surely, cannot be the most elegant phrase for that concept) is just like "the right to free speech" established in said amendment, Sterner is all for it. But if it "is predicated on the existence of the technology," then he's out. First amendment rights and human rights in general, he's saying, arise just from "our intrinsic humanity," and so cannot rightly have any special connection to technologies. One can only wonder, therefore, what he would have to say about freedom of the, y'know, press.

Part of his response would, I think, be to repeat the thing about how legitimate human rights only pertain to "freedom from government [and, presumably, at least some other kinds of] interference," but this is a straw man. Having read the sources he links to, I've not seen anything to suggest that the Obama administration actually does believe in "a positive right to the use of a technology." (They aren't, for example, drafting legislation to ensure that every American child can have a laptop and an internet connection even if his or her family can't afford one. Nor are they encouraging other countries to do this.) The rest of his response, I suspect, would look like Rights! thinking and (worse yet) would rely on some poorly-conceived notion of what "our intrinsic humanity" consists of. Even if those approaches weren't tremendously flawed just on their own terms, however, neither of them could help him explain why we have freedom of the press or a right to bear arms: neither of those operates in a Rights! kind of way and neither one can be derived just from premises about what it means to be human, so neither of them is going to get Sterner what he needs.

And really: why would Sterner even want to have rights that are only "predicated on...our intrinsic humanity"? It makes no sense to try to draw up a rights schema with respect to any given technology without also taking into account the nature of the technology. I mean, would he really want to say that we should have the same rights relative to nukes as we have relative to iPods? Although the relevant differences between those two technologies certainly relate back to facts about humans, it would be absolutely insane to say that we can identify the relevant differences between those two technologies without knowing the technological differences between them. We need to establish technological rights based both on facts about humans and on facts about the technologies in question, but Sterner is making it out to be the case that we can only do it one way or the other.

I have to say, having read so many Rights!-esque arguments, that I really think we're teaching our kids the wrong things in civics classes. For one thing, nobody but nobody remembers how the fucking government works. That shit is too complicated for a 12-year-old to comprehend and too obscure to our everyday lives for anybody to remember even if they do comprehend it. We'd be far better served to teach kids to think about things like rights in a sane, measured way instead of teaching them that there's some spurious distinction to be made between positive and negative rights or that rights can only be derived from our (inherent, unchanging) humanity (and therefore are inherent and unchanging themselves). Sterner may be a smart guy, but this is an awfully dumb way to think about internet - or really any - rights.

Weekly webcomic: talk about your constructive pedantry

2012-01-13T06:29:00.001-08:00

Making lemonade, pt. 2

2012-01-12T13:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we saw why political philosophies must be able to make lemonade, but I didn't give any kind of illustration of how they might do so. Allow me to rectify that, with a little help from Marcia Pally.

"The proposal to give fertilized eggs legal status as persons [in Mississippi] failed in this heavily evangelical state— not because it was too radical but because it was not radical enough. Whatever that proposal would have done, it could not have effectively reduced abortion because it provided no resources to enable women to have and support their babies...

Because 73% of U.S. abortions are economically motivated (according to the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit that researches reproductive issues), abortion would drop significantly if medical, financial and emotional support were provided during pregnancy along with day care post-partum services. It would drop further if we re-thought our adoption policies and dealt with the values taught to our kids about the worth of others and of intimate relationships, and — especially for boys — about using others for one's own pleasure."

One might call this the "don't think of a pink elephant" problem (hereafter the DTOAPE problem): there are certain behaviors that will only proliferate if you try to stamp them out directly. For decades - and even still today, primarily - the anti-abortion crowd held to a political philosophy on which abortions were impermissible and so could only be made illegal. As Pally indicates, however, there was a gigantic, gaping logical hole between their premise and their conclusion, namely, the DTOAPE problem. Their political philosophy relied on a far-too-simplistic understanding of human psychology, on which simply making abortions illegal (or harder to obtain) would be enough to make them rarer. Even when these individuals were presented with countervailing evidence and more effective alternatives, they stuck to their guns. Making lemonade, in short, was simply not on their agenda.

And so they failed. And failed. And got pissed off, and murdered doctors, and then failed some more. All because they, unlike we pro-choicers, were not willing to make lemonade. Of course, it's also the standard practice of anti-choice activists to allege that we aren't making lemonade, either. They call us "pro-abortionists," implying that we really like abortions and so are not making lemonade so much as, I dunno, apple cider. But the slogan of choice for our side has long been "safe, legal, and rare" - as in, "we don't like abortions that much, either, but we'd like to make lemonade with these lemons instead of just throwing them in the trash." Indeed, the difference between the pro-choice willingness to make lemonade and the anti-choice obsession with making apple cider out of lemons appears to be the only major difference between the two sides. Yes: the only major difference, meaning that neither religion nor one's general political leanings nor even one's stance on feminism is more important than one's willingness to make lemonade.* How do I know this, you ask? Again, Pally:

"This [pro-lemonade] argument is usually made by feminists. But this time it's coming from 'new evangelicals' — those who have left the right for a focus on economic justice, environmental protection and immigration reform. Theologian Scot McKnight calls it 'the biggest change in the evangelical movement at the end of the 20th century, a new kind of Christian social conscience. 'Richard Cizik, president of The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, calls it a 'slow earthquake'...'I am decidedly pro-life,' Southern megachurch pastor Joel Hunter says, 'but…by working together instead of arguing, both sides (for and against legal abortion) can get what they want'...Midwestern megachurch pastor Greg Boyd explained it this way, 'A person could vote for a candidate who is not "pro-life" but who will help the economy and the poor. Yet this may be the best way to curb the abortion rate.'"

See? In a real sense, it all comes down to making lemonade. If you can bring yourself to do that, you'll preemptively avoid a lot of problems. But if you can't, get ready for decades of lying about science, supporting domestic terrorism, voting for ineffectual and even harmful policies, and generally trying to bend reality past its breaking point. It can often be difficult (emotionally or intellectually or whatever) to acknowledge that the DTOAPE problem and others like it exist - to acknowledge, that is, that you're holding lemons and not some tastier fruit. But given that the only alternative is to embrace a delusion, it's not hard to see which is the right choice.

*Of course, those other factors may bear on one's willingness to make lemonade; these are not, in other words, independent variables.

By George, I think they've...nope, never mind

2012-01-12T13:04:00.000-08:00

It's interesting, isn't it, to see someone finally realize what you've been trying to tell them for years? "Civility should always rule," say the editors of the right-wing Ethika Politika blog. And hey - better late than never! It would've been nice, of course, if these same sorts of people had discovered the value of civility during, say, McCarthyism, or during the Clinton administration, or when Bush supporters wore band-aids to mock John Kerry's three Purple Hearts, or when half of the conservative establishment decided to call Obama "Kenyan" and throw a fit about his birth certificate, or any time Sarah Palin opened her mouth, or...you get the idea. But at least they have finally now come to understand that a certain level of civility is required in order to maintain a well-functioning democracy. Right?

"Google Santorum’s name (or variants) and a neologism comes up which defines his name as a vile bi-product of anal sex...decency depends on civility being maintained through self-restraint, and when that is not possible, society—people and corporations like Google—have a responsibility to protect the good names of others and to do no harm, when it is in their rightful power to do so."

...is...are they...Dan Savage, help me out here:

"It wasn't [Santorum's] opposition to gay marriage [that inspired the new definition of his last name], which Barack Obama also opposes (or pretends to oppose on teevee), or his anti-abortion stance, which Bob Casey shares. It was Santorum equating loving, committed same-sex relationships with dog fucking and child rape...in an interview in which Santorum argued in favor of states being allowed to arrest, prosecute, and imprison Americans—gay and straight—for private, consensual, adult sexual conduct. Santorum cemented our enmity when he went on to compare gay relationships to incest and Islamic terrorism."

It's so much easier to call for civility when the "victim" is on your side, isn't it? I'll start believing that conservatives care about civility when they stop being that guy who pushes you all the time in a pickup game just so he can call a foul on you for pushing back.

Living the American dream - just not in, y'know, America

2012-01-12T11:05:00.000-08:00

Sheldon Richman, professional ignorer of facts, would like to explain why we in the states have done a worse job than our European and Canadian counterparts of building "a society in which someone born in (relative) poverty can work his or her way up to better material circumstances." Though he leaves his explanation intentionally incomplete, there are two reasons he's happy to name:

"When I think 'limits to mobility,' two phrases immediately occur to me: minimum wage and public schooling. If you wanted to impede upward mobility, there could hardly be better ways than to scuttle job creation for the unskilled and to give poor people a bureaucratically produced 'education.' Those are not features of the free market."

Normally I'd go into lots of detail about the intricacies of economic thought and the need to use more than just some idealized theoretical explanation of economic behavior, but it turns out that this case is pretty tailor-made to make those kinds of complexities irrelevant. After all, Richman's thesis is that countries that have a higher minimum wage and more public schooling should - all other things being equal - have less economic mobility. But if you look at the data...

...you sort of get the opposite impression. The table above shows that the US's minimum wage is well below that of many western European nations and Canada, yet the US lags behind those same countries in class mobility (see e.g.). Likewise, most European-and-Canada nations rely much more heavily on public education than we do here, but Richman's theory predicts the opposite.

Of course, it may not be the case that all other things are equal when we compare the US to a country like France or Denmark; in fact, probably all other things aren't equal. But the relative success of the Euro/Canadian model and the relative failure of the American model should at least make us think twice before saying the sort of thing that Richman has said - or, at the bare minimum, should make us back it up with some kind of facts or rational argumentation. And hey, maybe Richman has facts and/or argumentation like that. He didn't present anything of the sort, but, y'know, maybe he's just keeping it under wraps for now. To, uh, surprise us with it later. Or, alternatively, maybe he's a sophist and a hack. I leave it up to you to decide.

Big talk, bigger talk...way too fucking big talk

2012-01-11T14:37:00.000-08:00

When people go do to philosophy, they sometimes make what is in my book a pretty serious mistake: they start not with a specific problem they want to solve or a specific idea they want to investigate but with a mere linguistic oddity. Language isn't always a bad inspiration for philosophy, granted, but in my experience it's a bad inspiration much more often than it is a good one. Take, for example, Stephen Talbott's last couple of articles about evolution, starting here.

"Most biologists, I suspect, will happily own up to the fact that they think of the organism as engaged in strikingly directed and meaningful activity. The lion stalking the gazelle, the bird building a nest, the larva spinning a cocoon, the rose flowering, the cell dividing and differentiating, the organism maintaining its own way of being amid the perturbations of its environment — they all reflect a kind of intentional pursuit we would never attribute to dust, rocks, ocean waves, or clouds."

Talbott's inspiration here is the actions that we attribute to organisms - that is, the way in which we talk about organisms. There's a related issue about the way in which we think about organisms - and we'll return to that later - but Talbott clearly lays his cards on the table with that last clause: "we would never attribute [intention] to dust, rocks, ocean waves, or clouds," he says, and that's the thing that catches his eye (or, I guess, ear).* Problem is, that's pretty big talk, because as a matter of fact we do verbally attribute intentions to inanimate objects. Water, we say, "seeks its own level"; certain molecules are called "hydrophilic," as in "water-loving." We talk about "stubborn" doors, gasses that "want" to escape confined areas, and, of course, heat-seeking missiles. This is the surface-level reason why language cannot be reliably used as the basis for philosophical reflection: language is more or less infinitely malleable, so we should almost never be surprised or puzzled by something that happens in the linguistic realm.

A second, somewhat trickier, reason is that language is not what it seems on the surface, as Talbott inadvertently discovers in his second article:

"Meaning — at least when we are not trying to camouflage it in some narrow mechanical or mathematical notion of information — derives from and expresses a qualitative inwardness. It testifies to mind, feeling, volition, consciousness. And because, in our biological descriptions, we refer meaning to organisms, it appears we are ascribing inwardness to these organisms. And so we are. But there are important distinctions to be made.

Meaning need not be thought of solely in terms of our own human consciousness. Everyone accepts that neither the bird building a nest nor the embryo 'constructing' a heart is self-consciously realizing its own purposes and meanings. Likewise, the directed nature of cellular processes does not imply conscious, human-like purpose, and, more generally, the meaning I have been referring to need not involve anything like our own conscious awareness."

The trouble with words is that they are not, strictly speaking, fully definable. Any dictionary will give you a sense of how to use a word correctly by describing that word using other words, but knowing how to use a word is not the same as knowing what a word means. (As the poets say, "deluge" does not mean "flood.") At least for humans, meaning is multidimensional - that is to say, its component parts cannot all be accounted for with a single mode of understanding or analysis. It's for this reason that the word "bridge" means something very different to German people than it does to French people:

"In German, the noun for bridge, Brücke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. German speakers saw prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones. Similarly, Germans describe keys (Schlüssel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as masculine and which as feminine?"

The masculinity of "pont" is not a part of the word's definition, but it unquestionably is a part of the word's meaning. Moreover, the masculinity of "pont" is not something that comes out of language alone but out of experience. It's important to realize this because otherwise we have almost no way of understanding the word salad that Talbott produces when he tries to explain why there's meaning in an "embryo 'constructing' a heart." He says that meaning, as a rule, "derives from and expresses a qualitative inwardness" that can only come from "mind, feeling, volition, [or] consciousness" - but then he goes off and says that many meaningful actions don't "involve anything like our own conscious awareness." There's meaning there, he's saying, but just don't ask him what that meaning is.

His difficulty in giving us anything to work with that's more descriptive (or coherent) than "qualitative inwardness" is indicative of the fact that he's working with the meaning of "meaning" and not its definition. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, even if it does make it harder to know what he's thinking (I mean, if you can describe what "qualitative inwardness" is supposed to mean, please let me know, cause I got nothin'), but it does open up the possibility that he's drawing more on his inchoate experience than he thinks he is - the possibility, that is to say in his own words, that he's just trying

"to point to the profound darkness of substance itself, in both rock and amoeba, and to ask what quickening mystery may be hidden within it, capable of producing the brilliant kaleidoscope of perceptible qualities we call 'the world.'"

Admittedly, the experiential components of the meanings of words are often mysterious, profound, and so on. But when we encounter this quality, we have to begin by asking ourselves if it isn't something in us (i.e., our experience, our understanding) and not in the world. (Another way of asking this would be to ask whether the mysterious quality belongs to the surface level of the word [i.e., its definition] or the murkier, less easily explicable parts.) This is the question that Talbott consistently - one might even say persistently - fails to ask, and his failure to ask it is what ruins his attempt to find free-standing meaning in natural processes like evolution.

That apparently meaningful natural phenomena "testif[y] to mind, volition," and so on only matters if their testimony is true, but we won't know that their testimony is true unless we can successfully distinguish between accurate and inaccurate perceptions on our part. While it would be correct for Talbott to attribute meaning to nature if our perceptions of meaning in nature are accurate, he provides absolutely no reason to think that this is the case. If anything, he gives us a reason to think that our perceptions aren't accurate by positively sprinting away from the only relatively coherent way of understanding meaning. "Accurate perceptions would be sort of like this," we can read him as saying, "but, boy, do I not think that our perceptions are at all like that!"

In a way, this has all just been a long-winded way of restating the point I made in this post: language is meant to encapsulate and convey experience, but it does this in a way that trades accuracy for efficiency. You can say a lot without using a lot of words, sure, but the capacity for error in linguistic communication is disturbingly large. When we want to be really accurate, we therefore have to find a way to reverse that trade - that is, to use a method of communication that has a lot of precision but purchases that precision at the cost of decreased efficiency. The less-efficient-but-more-precise "language" that we usually use for this purpose is math - but, unsurprisingly, the use of math is precisely what Talbott thinks is wrong with science. This is the third and most serious problem with using (especially everyday) language as your starting point: it presumes from the start that we don't need the increased precision of something like math because our regular language is already precise enough.** This presumption is better known as the ad populum fallacy, and that means that people like Talbott ought not rely on it so heavily. I doubt that anybody would be dumb enough to deny the existence (and therefore the need to explain the existence) of a kaleidoscope of perceptions, but only a special kind of idiot would conclude that there's a matching set of perceptible qualities that are equally in need of explanation.

*If this isn't enough to convince you that language is the starting point, he also goes through the trouble of listing six or eight examples of scientists who use figurative language. He really is very focused on language.

**Math, I should note, is not the only suitable substitute for everyday language. Even regular human languages like English can have varying degrees of accuracy. I'm just using math consistently in this post cause I like it best.

Political philosophies must make lemonade

2012-01-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

I wonder what Steven Horwitz would have to say about this:*

"I want people to be able to own insurance if they wish to, and to buy it for themselves and perhaps keep it for the rest of their life and to choose among different policies offered from companies across the nation. I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me."

As you surely recall, Horwitz was one of a group of "bleeding heart" libertarians who base their support for free markets on "obvious truths about economics" and other vaguely-alluded-to theories that bear, at best, a passing resemblance to reality. These same "obvious truths" are, I think, the basis for Romney's position on health insurance, quoted above: if things go as economic theory predicts, it will be better for everyone to own insurance (instead of having it be provided to them by the state) and to "fire" their insurance company if and when that company provides substandard service. Now, there are a number of things that one could say about this (and which others have said already), but in view of my recent interactions with Horwitz it seems wisest to continue that particular thread, and so I will.

Again, Romney's position on the insurance market is much like the position that Horwitz (apparently) has with respect to markets in general: keep it free, keep it privatized, keep government out. And, in theory, this should work. But does it? So far as the evidence shows, not really. For one thing, it's actually pretty hard to just go out and buy health insurance: that shit is expensive, difficult to compare, and requires you to jump through lots of hoops. In fact, there are some cases in which you can't buy insurance at all even if you have the necessary money and time. On top of that, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to find a better insurance company than the one you had. As in every other sector of the economy, insurance companies don't actually "have an [economic] incentive to keep people healthy." They only have an incentive to keep people healthy enough not to leave in disgust, and the point at which people leave in disgust depends in part on what the rest of the market can provide. In other words, you might not like your insurance company even a little bit, but if all of its competitors are worse then you can forget about them having an incentive to improve. Then again, it's not even clear that Romney is addressing the real problem here. Health insurance, as many people have pointed out and continue to point out, is not the same as health care. What we really want is for people to get the health care that they need; insurance is only one of many possible means of getting them that care. Once more, in theory this shouldn't matter. Theoretically, you and I should go get the care we need regardless of the channels we have to go through to get it, so perfecting the health insurance system should theoretically be tantamount to perfecting (the part of) the health care system (that's relevant to this conversation). The fact that it this isn't true in practice, however, pretty much ruins the whole thing.

The pattern should be obvious at this point. Free-market theories of economics are basically glass cannons, meaning that they have lots of power and elegance but will break at the slightest pressure. This is why a successful political philosophy has to be able to make lemonade - that is, to work with inconvenient or even stupid facts and still make something good out of them.** It's all well and good for Romney to tell us what he wants, but the far better question is whether or not he can have it. At some point, we have to stop being satisfied with politicians (or whoever) telling us what they expect and start demanding to know why they expect it. It's clear from Romney's quote that he expects to install a free insurance market in which we'll all be able to hold insurers to account and so obtain the care we need, but all the evidence available to us suggests that that's never going to happen. If he has different evidence, let him present it. Otherwise, maybe it's time we stopped pretending that the lemons we're holding are gold.

*And yes: I checked his blog, and he hasn't said anything about it.
**Kudos to Spurs color commentator Sean Elliott for introducing me to this phrase. Or, well - I already knew the full one - "when life gives you lemons..." - but I like the shortened version better.

GOP candidate bigotry update

2012-01-11T08:11:00.000-08:00

Remember Ron Paul? Old guy, is (somehow) getting lots of credit for not wanting to bomb Iran? Well...

"Ron pulled me aside the first time we went [to Laissez Faire Books, a San Francisco book store owned by a gay man named Jim Peron], and specifically instructed me to find an excuse to excuse him to a local fast food restaurant so that he could use the bathroom. He told me very clearly, that although he liked Jim, he did not wish to use his bathroom facilities."

But don't worry! Ron Paul is a doctor, so he knows full well that you can't (for instance) get HIV from a toilet seat. He's just a raging homophobe, is all.

That, however, pales (so to speak) in comparison to Rick Santorum's most recent "did he really just fucking say that" moment:

Oh, sorry - did you think that that was the "did he really just fucking say that" moment? Nooooo, no no no. Clearly, if you thought that, you don't know Rick. This is:

"I looked at that, and I didn't say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of -- blah -- came out. And people said I said 'black.' I didn't...And I can tell you, I don't use -- I don't -- first off, I don't use the term 'black' very often. I use the term 'African-American' more than I use 'black'. I can tell you as someone who did more work for historically black colleges, I used to have -- every year, I used to bring all the historically black colleges into Washington, DC to try to help them."

A Republican saying something racist should hardly be surprising; if anything, that's the lowest bar you would have to clear to get elected in a red state. But the pseudo-apology/pseudo-defense he came up with afterwards is much more disturbing. There is, for example, the implication that you can think racist thoughts but so long as you don't say them - that is, so long as you "sort of [change] it and it sort of -- blah -- [comes] out" - you're in the clear. There's also the part where Santorum seems to think that "black" is a slur, or, at least, that not saying "black" makes him less racist. (One wonders: does he also not say "white"? Does he describe himself as a "Caucasian-American"?) As is so often the case, we're learning much more about ol' Rick from his attempt to tell us what he was trying to do than we ever could have from what he actually did.

In fairness, neither Paul nor Santorum ever had even the merest chance of becoming the eventual Republican nominee for president. But they sure as shit are still in the race - and we know it's only a matter of time until Mitt "vote for me cause you don't have a choice" Romney comes up with something just as shockingly bigoted as anything we've seen from Ron or Rick. If you're not part of the straight white Christian male "majority" to whom these idiots are pandering - or, really, even if you just know and like people who aren't part of that "majority" - the GOP is not the party for you, plain and simple.

I love Stephen Colbert, but...

2012-01-10T13:07:00.000-08:00

...he's just wrong about this:

"'There’s a common explanation that profound sadness leads to someone’s becoming a comedian, but I’m not sure that’s a proven equation in my case,' [Colbert said]. 'I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so.' He added, in a tone so humble and sincere that his character would never have used it: 'She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option?'"

I mean, "the pain is actually a gift"? Really? One wonders if Colbert has a bottle of aspirin in his house - or, perhaps more interestingly, if he ever gives aspirin to his kids. But more interestingly, one also wonders why he - a very, very smart and creative individual - apparently can't think of any other options.

This quote immediately reminded me of a similar inability on the part of Alex Pruss. For those of you who didn't read the comments to my last post about one of Pruss's ideas, it was in those comments that he offered forgiveness as a way to make things right for the person doing the forgiving:

"Holding that the value of forgiveness outweighs the disvalue of evil makes it is possible to say that the victim can defeat the evildoer rather than remain a victim. That seems a desirable thing to say."

More than just presenting forgiveness as an option, however, Pruss thought that it was necessary - that is to say, the only option. And he's far from alone. As it turns out, lots of religious people can only think up religious solutions to common problems. There's Colbert, obviously, and also the pope...

"Only if God accepts me, and I become convinced of this, do I know definitively: it is good that I exist. It is good to be a human being. If ever man’s sense of being accepted and loved by God is lost, then there is no longer any answer to the question whether to be a human being is good at all. Doubt concerning human existence becomes more and more insurmountable."

...but it's not just Christians:

"Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? We will always ask those three questions because homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal, and religion has always been our greatest heritage of meaning. You can take science, technology, the liberal democratic state and the market economy as four institutions that characterise modernity, but none of these four will give you an answer to those questions that humans ask."

This last example is particularly worthwhile because of the multiple subtle ways in which the author arbitrarily limits the scope of his investigation. First, he looks only at those things that (in his opinion) "characterise modernity." Philosophy (to name just one relevant alternative) is thereby excluded before the real game even begins. Second, he expects one of those things to answer all of his questions, instead of allowing his questions to be answered in a piecemeal fashion. Third, he sneaks in a fourth question about meaning that is not obviously reducible to - or even related to - any combination of the three questions he makes explicit. There may even be others, but that should be enough to demonstrate my point.

Whether this mental block is expressed subtly or not, however, the problem is the same: it is trivially easy to show, using real-world data and evidence, that these are not the only options. People who struggle with a profoundly sad event (or want to move beyond being a victim, or are looking for validation of their existence, or ask themselves who they are) can and have found the solution elsewhere than in the religious and religiously-inspired answers compiled above. Look no farther, in most cases, than your humble narrator: I know that it's good that I exist, how to move beyond sad events, who I am, and so on, and you can take my word for it that I don't do any of those things in the way that Colbert et al say that I must. (That is, I don't [typically] take pain to be a gift, I don't [typically] gain peace of mind by forgiving people who have wronged me, and so on.) As important as it is to get these questions right philosophically - to find, for example, a sound philosophical way of understanding morality - it's equally important to realize that people who ask about these topics are not always asking philosophical questions. Just like you won't achieve good philosophy while relying on bad facts, you aren't going to come up with good philosophy by starting with non-philosophical questions. Asking after the ways in which you yourself might avoid falling into a long-lasting depression, for example, is very different than asking about the moral or epistemological nature of depression or what it means about humans that we can be depressed. As happy as I am to have Colbert and to have him happy, he ought not confuse his personal way of navigating through life with the way that reality is or must be for everyone else.

Belonging and fringes, part n

2012-01-10T12:01:00.000-08:00

To recap: Andrew Sullivan believes that he is a "real" Christian and a "real" conservative whereas others are "Christianists" and "[un]serious" conservatives; this is bad. The reason that it's bad is because it leads him to do things like this.

"Same-sex marriage is arguably the most successful socially conservative reform ever...It has brought families together; it has strengthened mutual responsibility; it has integrated a minority much more healthily into the majority; it has added an insitution designed to mitigate the chaos of love and sex, and help guide them to more lasting, stable forms."

It is just not helpful to define "conservative" so that it's pro-family (as opposed to anti-family), pro-responsibility (as opposed to anti-responsibility), and so on. Nobody except maybe some hard-core anarchists are anti-family or anti-responsibility, so the above-listed qualities provide no reason at all to say that same-sex marriage is conservative rather than liberal (or left rather than right, or whatever). It would be far more helpful - not to mention more honest - to follow Ophelia Benson's example in cases like these:

"I don’t conclude [that] atheists/freethinkers who have egalitarian commitments are doing their atheism or free thinking wrong [because their egalitarian commitments bear on their free thinking]. It would be the other way around. Atheists and freethinkers who had no egalitarian commitments would in my view be the wrong kind of atheists and freethinkers, however good (tightly argued, carefully thought through, eloquently expressed) their atheism and free thought might be. They would still be atheists and freethinkers, certainly, but I wouldn’t want them as comrades."

You can, in fact, be a "real" and "serious" atheist (or whatever) and be anti-feminist. You can even be anti-feminist for some of the same reasons that you're an atheist (though, admittedly, this is probably harder). Similarly, you can be a conservative and be against same-sex marriage, and your opposition to same-sex marriage can stem from some of your conservative principles. Moreover, both principled conservative approaches to politics and skeptical approaches to truth-finding can fail - we would not, for instance, want to say that this or that method of study must be a free-thinking one because it sometimes finds truth.

This all connects back to a theme that was common in the earlier days of this blog: a thing does not stop being what it is just because you (dis)like it. Taxes that you like don't cease to be taxes, murders that you like don't cease to be murders, charity that you dislike doesn't cease to be charity, and so on. Analogously, conservatism that you dislike doesn't cease to be conservatism, liberalism that you like doesn't magically become conservatism, people you dislike who are atheists don't stop being atheists, and so on. I mean, it used to be that "Christian" was roughly synonymous with "good," as in, "Gee, that was awfully Christian of you not to press charges," and I think that almost everyone is (rightfully) glad that that's no longer the case. Every time somebody does what Sullivan is doing in that first blockquote, however, we get pushed ever so slightly back in that direction, and there aren't a whole lot of people who seem to care.

The conscience con

2012-01-10T11:05:00.000-08:00

Last time we looked at the issue of conscience protections in medicine, we saw that those protections were (unsurprisingly) requested and reserved for only those circumstances where the "conscientious" action is the conservative one. Pro-conscience advocates like Helen Alvare, that is to say, are not really interested in protecting consciences as such but rather - and this is in her own words - are interested in "elevating the value of respect for life in health care." Accordingly, if you are a nurse and you don't want to participate in an abortion, the pro-(")conscience(") people will line up around the block to help you out - but if you're a doctor who doesn't want to throw money at a brain-dead patient who cannot possibly benefit from your care, you're on your own. So understood, the "conscience" debate adds nothing to the bioethical debates we've been having for decades (abortion, euthanasia, etc.).

Happily, though, Denise Hunnell claims to have read a study that adds an empirical dimension to the conscience debate and so changes its tenor entirely:

"The APPROPRICUS study, results of which were reported in the December 28 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA ), suggests that the inability of physicians to practice medicine in accord with their personal ethical standards leaves them professionally dissatisfied and clinically less effective."

If conscience protections are necessary to ensure that the quality of care is sufficiently high, that would be a very powerful argument in their favor. Moreover, this sort of thing is much more helpful than the sort of arguments we usually hear about conscience, because now we're talking about real, concrete harms that befall actual people (and not, y'know, "conscience"-related harms). As it turns out, though, Hunnell is vastly overstating the results of the study - and, bizarrely, she herself admits this.

"Among a group of European and Israeli ICU clinicians, perceptions of inappropriate care were frequently reported and were inversely associated with factors indicating good teamwork...There was no attempt to assess whether or not patients actually suffered from the care given by study participants."

See? "There was no attempt to assess whether or not" health care professionals are "clinically less effective" in this study. Hunnell says that the data suggests that conscience violations are dangerous because they seem dangerous to her, but her chosen study provides no evidence about this one way or the other. Indeed, the relevant causation seems to run the opposite way, at least as far as the study is concerned: as Hunnell also admits, the study indicates that the "factors indicating [poor] teamwork" preceded the "perceptions of inappropriate care." In other words, the general pattern is that doctors and nurses fail to communicate with each other (at least, respectfully and productively) and then feel as though the care was inappropriate.*

And note as well that this study only investigated cases where people felt as though the care was inappropriate, "inappropriate" of course being a different word than "immoral." Hunnell's argument pertains to conscience protections - i.e., laws that allow health care workers to act on their moral compasses - but this study looked at "care that did not meet the professional, ethical, or moral standards of the medical personnel."** As far as I can tell, Hunnell has no way at all of knowing how many cases specifically related to an individual's moral standards (i.e., conscience) or what the results of those cases were. This doesn't mean that none of them were conscience-related or that the conscience-related ones didn't matter, obviously, but it does mean that Hunnell can't go around trumpeting this study like it proves exactly what she's been saying all along. To be blunt, it doesn't.

But what if it did? What if doctors and nurses consistently performed worse when they were required to perform procedures that violated their consciences? Hunnell would have us believe that we would have to respond by enacting conscience protections in order to prevent the level of care from dropping, but this is hardly the only response that would be open to us. We would, for example, hardly come to the same conclusion for doctors and nurses whose conscience warns against - oh I dunno - treating Hispanic people. Those doctors and nurses, we would rightly say, don't belong in medicine; racism is not the kind of conscientious position that we should be protecting. Even in the absolute best case for Hunnell, then, there's still a piece missing - and, of course, this is far from being the absolute best case for her.

Or, at least, it's far from being the absolute best conceivable case. In fact, I suspect that this is the best plausible case for Hunnell and other conscience advocates. That is, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the most harm that comes from conscience violations is a very slight drop in patient safety due to a lack of professionalism on the part of doctors and nurses, a drop which would moreover be more than outweighed by the good of actually providing controversial health care services (and which could very well be eliminated altogether by teaching health care professionals to act like decent human beings towards one another). Either way, though, Hunnell and her ilk are still extremely far way from proving that conscience protections are at all valuable, let alone that they're necessary.

*E.g.: "Nurses who perceived care as inappropriate were more likely to work in an environment with poor communication between doctors and nurses and where input from nurses was not considered in care decisions." This, to me, is not a surprise: having interned very briefly in a hospital bioethics department, I have both first- and second-hand knowledge suggesting that the causal arrow typically runs from poor teamwork to substandard care, not the other way around.

**And yes, in this context "ethical" means something very different than "moral."

Some deja vu for your Monday (complete with obligatory basketball analogy!)

2012-01-09T10:04:00.000-08:00

Here's what Luis Tellez said last week about religion's place in society:

"People’s ethical convictions are most shaped by the institutions of civil society, particularly religion and the family. This suggests an answer to the question of how to promote the ethical foundations of a good society: Let the government make space for private institutions to develop their own practices and promote their associated virtues."

And here's what David Cochran has to say about that very same subject this week:

"If we need moral standards to exercise the kind of self-evaluation, -control, and -direction that freedom requires, where do these standards come from? They don’t appear out of thin air...The broadest, deepest, richest, and most important sources of these moral materials, both historically and today, are religious traditions. Even in the contemporary United States, religion remains the most significant source of moral reflection and orientation to the good that our society has."

That these two guys are making essentially the same mistakes is not exactly a surprise: they're both writing for the same organization and they both want to conclude that "religious freedom is so important to freedom itself" that the government needs to give special consideration to religious individuals and religious groups. Cochran adds in some weird stuff about what "freedom requires," but the same basic equivocation is there. Just like Tellez's "virtues" were not always virtues in the sense of actually being connected to the truth about morality, Cochran's "moral standards" are not always standards that actually connect to the truth about morality. Both men, therefore, equivocate in a way that creates a fatal logical disconnect between their premises and their conclusion, and so neither man succeeds in justifying a special place for religion in society.

Cochran, however, does include one additional fallacy that I think is worth highlighting. Namely, he cites the way that things have historically been as a reason for keeping things that way now. Religious traditions, he says, are where we get our morals, "both historically and today." Whether or not any of this is true, the fact that he references history should make you wonder a little bit about Cochran's agenda. Think about it: if history matters, it's hard to conceive of a scenario in which governments wouldn't need to grant religions special privileges. After all, once something happens in history it can't un-happen. Moreover, if the patterns of history are enough to justify action today, a self-supporting cycle is created in which we repeat the actions of our forebears simply because they're the actions of our forebears. Since we ourselves will then become the forebears of future generations, they would just repeat our actions - which, remember, are just repetitions of our ancestors' actions - and so on and so forth, presumably until we go extinct or until the zombie apocalypse cuts us off from knowing what our history was. But, at least as far as Cochran is concerned, the important thing is that religion "plays another vital role in the life of a free society" - that is, as my emphasis shows, to say that the important thing is that religion currently and presently matters. Again, whether or not this is actually true is, logically speaking, beside the point: so long as we're agreed that we only need to react to the way things are now, it makes no rational sense for Cochran to reference history. From the perspective of someone who wants to know what our government's responsibilities are with regards to religion, pointing to historical facts is about as helpful as trying to draw up a defensive scheme for the Celtics' big three of Larry Bird, Robert Parish, and Kevin McHale.*

It's not, of course, that history doesn't matter for anything. Nor am I saying that it doesn't matter whether Tellez and Cochran are right about the present - again, I sure would like to see some evidence instead of just bare assertions. But if you go around talking about stuff that you yourself say should be irrelevant, that's a problem. There should be no question that religions will be harder-pressed to disseminate their own "moral materials" (and inculcate their own "virtues") without receiving special privileges from governments, but we'll never know if this is a good thing or a bad thing if we allow ourselves to be distracted and confused by irrelevancies like the ones that Cochran brings up.

*Who, if you don't get the reference, all retired twenty-ish years ago.

Old man river?

2012-01-09T08:04:00.000-08:00

Somehow I don't think that this was what Oscar Hammerstein meant:

"Weird analogy (since I'm pre-coffee): suppose you think a river works deterministically, its direction and flow constantly determined by past events. You now learn that the river is conscious and experiences itself as making various decisions. Should you stick to your guns as far as determinism goes? I think you ought to slow down at least a little--what's going on to make the river conscious? And is that, whatever it is, relevant to whether the river flows deterministically? Until you're on top of consciousness, it seems only reasonable to be a little modest on the subject of free will."

This is Jean Kazez, who we last saw trying to defend a right (or Right!) to reproduce on the basis that, and this is a direct quote, "any approach to ethics that says otherwise won't have much connection to the way people really live and think about their lives." As you can see, this time she's trying to convince us that consciousness is mysterious - though, as it turns out, her motivations haven't changed much:

"It's [very] unsettling to suppose the course of history was settled, in every last detail, before you were born... It's not just seeing myself as an automaton that's disturbing. What really bothers me is thinking that my efforts never alter the course of the future, though of course I do my part to bring about the future that's bound to be."

And, as before, her reliance on intuition leads her to propose scenarios that are ridiculous and entirely discordant with what we know about the world. The thing with the river, for instance, is very nearly a parody of itself. And then there's this, in her comments:

"Here's something that puzzles me about mental events, and gets in the way of my being a committed causal determinist about them. If I sit here and do a few simple math problems, the events in my brain will be responsive to truths about mathematics. It's as if these brain events have two masters: (1) the past which led up to them, and (2) the domain of mathematics."

I mean, are you kidding? We don't need to posit some direct connection to "the domain of mathematics" in order to understand why we can do math.* There are really easy ways of explaining this kind of thing, but they just so happen to be - and this time I can be quite literal when I say this - explanations that Kazez dislikes, and she thinks on that basis alone that we should all "slow down at least a little" when we talk about them. The really crazy thing about all of this is that, if she's going to play the I-don't-like-it game, why does she then get to posit nonsensical science fiction scenarios with living rivers and magical brain connections to "the domain of mathematics," whatever that is? She should be way more unsettled by the idea of a conscious river than by the idea that her (physical, material) brain might be responsible for her consciousness, but for some reason she gets to shelve that discomfort for the purposes of making her point. Quite honestly, this is bullshit philosophy and not worth the RAM that my computer uses to display it on my screen. Philosophy doesn't exist to justify and validate our every intuition, and we don't get to just make shit up to prove a point. There may be a good reason to believe that minds are more mysterious than science is now suggesting, but this conscious river shit ain't it.

*...correctly. When we do math incorrectly, presumably even Kazez would disavow such a connection.

Never say I don't do my homework

2012-01-09T07:19:00.000-08:00

In the comments to last week's post about deliberative democracy, Steven Horwitz invited yours truly to look into the libertarian blog at which he primarily posts in order to learn more about the political philosophy to which he subscribes. Another writer may have considered this to be unnecessary - after all, it's not like libertarianism is a secret or is confusing. But I try to do my own legwork, so over to the Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog I went.

And what, you ask, did I find? Well, nothing too surprising. There's this post from Horwitz in which he applies libertarian principles in support of same-sex marriage, but libertarians are generally liberal on social issues, so that wasn't exactly a surprise. Anyway, since our original encounter came in the context of economics, I was much more interested to see how a (self-proclaimed) bleeding heart libertarian like Horwitz would justify extreme government non-intervention in the market even though laissez-faire economic policies have consistently proven to be worse not just for the economy of a nation but for its citizens - that is, even though libertarian policies seem to go against the very idea of a bleeding heart. Scrolling through the posts, I was happy to find just such a justification - or, at least, a promissory note therefor.

In his post on "Libertarianism and Morality," Fernando Teson writes that,

"if...we are libertarians because we believe in other [moral] values [than strictly libertarian ones], we must be careful not to allow pursuance of any one of those values to augment the scope of state coercion, and thus abandon libertarianism. For myself, libertarian institutions are supported by a combination of normative and empirical reasons (I sketched them in my very first post). Usually, attempts to privilege one of those reasons will undermine the others."

Great!, I thought. Not only will this tell me why, exactly, the "bleeding heart" libertarians deserve the name they've given themselves, it will go some way towards confirming Horwitz's claim that he's actually pessimistic about unregulated markets but - due to "a combination of normative and empirical reasons" - is forced to endorse them anyway. So I click the link, and what do I see? Bupkis.

"The empirical case for classical liberalism [i.e., in this context, economic libertarianism] is strong indeed. It includes not only obvious truths about economics but the insight of public choice about government failure and similar pathologies."

Quite obviously, this is not a "sketch" of anything. At best, this is an oblique reference to a drawer in which one might find a sketch, if one knew enough to decode the oblique reference and had access to the drawer in question. What's really bad, though, is the casual way in which Teson calls on "obvious truths about economics." That, to me, does not sound like pessimism about unregulated markets; it sounds, in fact, like the exact same "myth of market perfection" that Horwitz disavowed in his comment to me, and that makes me very grumpy.

It's not even the lack of evidence, or the fact that the evidence would come down heavily against Teson and Horwitz if they bothered to provide it. No - what really gets me is that neither man even recognizes the need for evidence in the first place. I mean, look at the way in which Teson introduces his thought: he thinks that he's telling us about "[t]he empirical case for classical liberalism." Where, then, is any statement of empirical fact? Presumably the "obvious truths about economics" to which he refers are truths about economic theory; if so, these "truths" (which, of course, are probably false) are not empirical. Likewise, "the insight of public choice about government failure" is just an idea, as insights always are. This is a huge problem: so far as Horwitz and Teson are concerned, it seems, "obvious" theoretical explanations of empirical phenomena are just as empirical as the phenomena themselves. The philosophical problem with this is easy enough to see - it's a category error - but the real problem is the way that Horwitz and Teson blind themselves to reality by selectively considering only those empirical events that fit with their pre-selected theories of choice (in other words, the way in which their thinking is implicitly shaped by the myth of market perfection).

Because here's the thing: even if I were to concede that Teson is right about everything that he's talking about in his "empirical case for classical liberalism," that would only give us part of the picture. Government failure is real, and it is (partly) explained by the insights of public choice theory, and some markets can be accurately characterized by classical economic theory. But if we were to look honestly at the real world, we would see that government failure is not the only outcome of government action, that government failure cannot always be explained by public choice theory, and that many (indeed most) markets cannot be described just using the "obvious truths" on which economists have traditionally relied. In short, an empirical investigation that deserves the name would not look anything like the so-called empirical evidence provided by Teson and Horwitz.

Bad philosophy, I keep saying, is not going to follow from bad facts. Horwitz, Teson, and other libertarians (bleeding heart or otherwise) may well have a very convincing abstract case for why their political and economic philosophies are the right ones - say, Horwitz's earlier claim that "can [in the abstract] meet the tastes of just about everyone." But none of that means anything in the face of incontrovertible real-world evidence that they're wrong.

Weekly webcomic: my childhood was not blurry!

2012-01-06T10:38:00.000-08:00

Tough competition

2012-01-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

In the nine-ish months since I stumbled upon the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, I never once entertained the sincere belief that they didn't have the single shadiest name of any organization in the USA, if not in the world. Oh, sure, the Heritage Foundation is in the running, but they're way behind; if nothing else, "heritage" is only one word. But now I'm not so sure. I give you, dear readers, Christians for a Moral America:

Impressive, no?

Of course, this might not be a real organization. (I hope it's not a real organization.) But here's the crazy thing: if it isn't a real organization, what does that say about the "tradition, family, and property" people? All that stuff about not judging a book by its cover notwithstanding, there are several points at which one should step back and reevaluate what one is doing - and then, if one is doing something like naming one's organization "Christians For A Moral America," one should fucking stop and go do something - really, anything - else.

Virtue ethics (will never not be) for idiots (complete with obligatory basketball analogy!)

2012-01-06T04:41:00.000-08:00

Give Luis Tellez credit: he's an optimist. Despite the problems with our economy, he thinks that we'll be able to recover and build "a new social compact - one with fewer billionaires but more decent jobs, one with less unsustainable welfare but more family and community support for the poor and elderly." It's hard not to read this as a sign that the Occupy movement has made some major victories. Tellez, you see, is the president of the Witherspoon Institute, which takes a laissez-faire approach to the economy - its people don't like regulations, taxes, or government programs in general - so for him to come out against an inevitable consequence of a laissez-faire economy (namely, the existence of lots of very rich people) is kind of impressive. It would be even better, however, for him to refine that optimism through the use of good evidence and sound reasoning, instead of just sort of vomiting it up onto the screen:

"People’s ethical convictions are most shaped by the institutions of civil society, particularly religion and the family. This suggests an answer to the question of how to promote the ethical foundations of a good society: Let the government make space for private institutions to develop their own practices and promote their associated virtues...Government can promote virtue in at least three ways. First, it can enforce criminal laws against obvious and gross vices: theft, child pornography, rape, murder, and other clear moral evils. Second, it can avoid well-meaning but counterproductive social policies that end up discouraging virtue. Third, it can let formative private institutions, including businesses, flourish on their own terms."

Here you can see Tellez's laissez-faire instincts coming through: he thinks that the government has a role to play, but that role is, in effect, to not play a role. In part this is because he takes an oversimplified view of the way in which our "ethical convictions are...shaped." While I don't deny that people's families and religions tend to be important in that process, wiki lists six other contributors, and it's far from obvious that families and religions are the two most important.* Tellez, however, fails to provide evidence for that claim, so it's a little difficult for me to debate it. What I can do, on the other hand, is pretty thoroughly dismantle the stuff about virtue.

If you were to read the aforequoted excerpt lazily - as, I think, Tellez wrote it - you'd probably come away thinking that "virtue" was roughly synonymous with "moral goodness" or "righteousness." After all, Tellez does equate "vices" with "clear moral evils." And, indeed, according to virtue-ethical thinking this is pretty much correct: a virtuous character portends good behavior, and (no pun intended) vice versa. But that's not the whole story, as Tellez himself demonstrates. There is another sense of "virtue," according to which a virtue is only something that helps to accomplish some goal. In virtue ethics this goal is, of course, ethics, but that does not mean that other kinds of virtues cannot exist elsewhere. When Tellez talks about "private institutions...develop[ing] their own practices and promot[ing] their associated virtues," for example, the virtues in question are not automatically moral ones. To illustrate this using my favorite case study for everything, the practice of basketball has a number of distinctive "practices and...associated virtues." There's the virtue of rotating to help on defense, the virtue of having good shooting form, the virtue of knowing when and how to move without the ball, and so on. It would, however, be a little on the ridiculous side to say that these are moral or ethical virtues. My ability to slide my feet on defense, for instance, does not exactly make me a better person.

This matters for Tellez because he's tacitly assuming that generic virtues (i.e., virtues that allow "private institutions, including business, [to] flourish on their own terms") are ethical virtues - that is, do make for better people. Not only is this not necessarily the case - again, "virtue" in the context of ethics means something very different than "virtue" in the context of basketball - the opposite is often true. Just look at the way in which most orthodox religious organizations inculcate homophobia, misogyny, racism, and so on: within the context of, say, orthodox Judaism, sex-negativity is a virtue, but that sure as shit doesn't make sex-negativity a moral virtue.

Now, this by itself does not mean that the government has any particular responsibility to make us more virtuous (or even just more virtuous as citizens; again, even political virtue is not moral virtue). But Tellez is basing his hands-off theory of governance on the premise that different kinds of virtues are all essentially the same in that they're all essentially good, and this is absolutely false. And, in fairness, it would be one thing if Tellez had come out and said something like, "Yes, I know that many private institutions - even including religious ones - teach people to engage in practices that are harmful and to adopt virtues that are deleterious. But this is still the system I want." But to say, "We can safely trust private institutions to 'flourish on their own terms' because virtues are virtues no matter where you go"? That's just disingenuous. The very least we should expect from a small-government conservative like Tellez is to promote his position honestly, but - thanks to virtue ethics - that's exactly what he's failed to do.

*See e.g.

Flat pop psychology: we have a winner

2012-01-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

Today in Unintentional Irony, I bring you Ryan Messmore:

"An entitlement mentality—a sense of being owed something for nothing—settles in when people interpret wants as needs and then view those needs as rights. And once something is understood as a 'right,' people tend to hold government responsible for providing it...

Such a 'we’re due' attitude can suppress aspiration and sap the ambition to work. It often accompanies envy and class warfare. And it can weaken personal bonds of mutual responsibility and care among citizens."

And this, Messmore says, is why the Occupy movement is wrong. Because, of course, the Occupy movement has said nothing at all about the existence of an "entitlement mentality" among certain segments of our population who have come to "interpret wants as needs and then view those needs as rights," and nobody in the Occupy movement ever talks about the way in which those segments of our population "weaken personal bonds of mutual responsibility and care among citizens" by engaging in "class warfare." They wouldn't, for example, be able to say anything about this:

"Trustees [at the University of Pittsburgh] said they had agreed to Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg’s request that he not receive an increase in his salary of $561,500 for FY12. In December 2010, Nordenberg’s base salary for last year was set at $486,500 but trustees later rolled into that base salary the $75,000 that was part of an annual deferred retention incentive plan awarded to him each year for staying at his job through June 30.

Under the same deferred-pay plan, two other senior officers, Jerome Cochran, executive vice chancellor and general counsel, and Arthur G. Ramicone, chief financial officer, each had retention compensation rolled into their FY11 base salary. At last year’s compensation committee meeting, Cochran’s base salary was set at $412,500, but later was increased by his $50,000 retention compensation; Ramicone’s salary was set at $285,000 last December, then increased by his $50,000 retention compensation."

It is, admittedly, to Nordenberg's credit that he refused a raise. You'll note, however, that he did not refuse the seventy-five thousand dollar "retention incentive," nor did the other two officers who were eligible to receive it. Of course, this alone does not point to an "entitlement mentality." For that, you'd have to read down to the end of that article:

"'Chancellor Nordenberg in particular should be commended for his FY11 efforts, as well as for turning down a compensation increase for FY12. He certainly earned his pay last year, and deserved the $75,000 increase in base salary he received in FY11 due to the phase-out of the retention incentive plan,' [budget committee chairman John] Baker said."

See? In the minds of the executives at Pitt, the chancellor deserved to make $75000 per year just for not taking another job; he was, in other words, entitled to it. One can only imagine that the same is true for their ridiculous list of benefits:

"In addition to salary, Pitt senior officers receive benefits that include: an automobile for personal/business use by the chancellor and by other officers as determined by the chancellor; personal liability insurance coverage of $5 million; group term life insurance and accidental death and dismemberment insurance policies, each in the amount of $50,000, plus three times the salary rounded up to the next higher thousand; up to $5,000 per year for health care expenses not covered by basic insurance; up to $5,000 per year for tax preparation and financial planning services, and initiation fees and monthly dues for selected clubs."

This is the world in which we're living: executives are entitled not only to exorbitant salaries and "bonuses" that they "earn" by merely not leaving but also to "$5,000 per year health care expenses not covered by basic insurance," but the rest of us aren't even entitled to have basic insurance in the first place. When the rest of us try to point out the problems with this system, we're told that people have a right to keep their money - which, of course, they do not need - and that our well-being is worth less than the ability of the already-wealthy to join "selected clubs" for free and have their taxes prepared for them. At which point in the process, do you think, are the "personal bonds of mutual responsibility and care among citizens" threatened: the point at which executives decide to cut into other people's livelihoods so that they can have "an automobile for personal/business use," or the point at which those people who lost their livelihoods object?

If the Heritage Foundation - Messmore's employer - wasn't such a bunch of bastards about pretty much everything, I would be startled to find that someone could write what Messmore has written and believe that it applies only to the poor. As it is, I'm just disgusted.

Not what to think but how, part 73

2012-01-05T09:23:00.000-08:00

What do you think - is Steven Horwitz a conservative liberal (or a liberal conservative, I've already forgotten which), or just a plain ol' conservative?

"As [professional economist(!) Mark] Pennington points out, one major problem with [deliberative democracy] is that democratic processes ending in a vote necessarily mean that some views win and others lose. Compare that to markets, which can meet the tastes of just about everyone, even if a particular demand is fairly small. If you love lounge music covers of heavy metal songs, your odds of verbally persuading others to vote for such music are slim. In contrast the market requires not verbal persuasion, but simply a willingness to pay if we like something and the ability to walk away (or 'exit') if we don’t."

Ah, "can"! What a wonderful word. Sure, the market can "meet the tastes of just about everyone," but does it? (In other words, is there always "simply a willingness to pay if we like something and the ability to walk away...if we don't?) Horwitz, alas, will not tell us, and so his argument is a little on the incomplete side. In particular, he hasn't given us very much reason to doubt "that the market privileges wealthier people in the way it allocates resources and ranks wants or needs," which is the claim he's supposed to be disproving. Especially because deliberative democracy is meant to address - can you guess? - political issues, it's really not helpful to talk about the availability of "lounge music covers of heavy metal songs." Nobody but nobody is saying that the government should be in charge of producing that stuff or that deliberative democracy is the best way to get it. Happily, though, Horwitz eventually moves on to a more relevant example:

"Understanding the importance of verbal persuasion is key to seeing the real flaw in deliberative democracy: The system pretty much has to assume that all knowledge relevant to social decision-making can be articulated. But can consumers and producers always articulate what they want and how best to make it? How exactly can the potential producers of health care articulate what sorts of inputs would be best to use, or what sorts of health care to produce and how to produce it, apart from the market and its prices?"

Unfortunately for Horwitz, though, this argument only emphasizes his failure in the previous paragraph. When it comes to the market, his view is: "I know that this can work, so I guess it does"; when it comes to deliberation, his view is: "I don't know that this can work, so I guess it doesn't." What's missing in both cases - and what Horwitz badly needs - is evidence one way or the other.

Moreover, there's nothing in deliberative democracy that precludes the use of economic data or even of the market itself. The still-ongoing deliberative debate about universal health care in this country, for instance, is positively rife with references to "the market and its prices." To imply, as Horwitz does, that deliberative democracy can only work by departing from the real world and operating in a realm of detached abstractions is really misleading, not to mention stupid. This stupidity is amplified in his concluding paragraphs:

"Notice who would likely do best under deliberative democracy: those with a comparative advantage at persuading others using words and numbers. It would be a tyranny of the articulate and rhetorically sophisticated...The people who created the idea of deliberative democracy are largely academics, who, perhaps not coincidentally, specialize in using language to persuade others. Only academics could cook up this sort of proposal because they are so focused on that form of persuasion that they are blind to the market’s use of the price system to make inarticulate knowledge socially usable and to the communicative power of exit.

The real failure of deliberative democracy is that it’s a reflection of the tendency of academics to privilege their own world of reason, rhetoric, and articulate knowledge, even as they decry the supposedly unearned privileges of others."

First of all, observe the surety with which Horwitz derides the "world of reason": as I am learning more and more, many of our most heated debates are not about what to believe but how, and here Horwitz positions himself squarely against rational ways of knowing. Over and above that, however, it's also amazing that Horwitz thinks that deliberative democracy would create "a tyranny of the articulate and rhetorically sophisticated." For crying out loud, where was he from 2000 to 2008? How does he explain Rick Perry? I grant that we don't have a fully functioning deliberative democracy now, but (a) we never will, nor will we ever have a fully functioning any-kind-of-political-system, and (b) it's laughable to say that we're even approaching "a tyranny of the articulate" run by people who "privilege their own world of reason, rhetoric, and articulate knowledge." Once more: evidence, evidence, evidence.

Perhaps worst of all, Horwitz never says why a system that privileges the articulate would be worse than a system that privileges the wealthy. In other words, even if he's right in every one of his criticisms of deliberative democracy, he has still given us no basis on which to believe that we shouldn't opt for deliberative democracy anyway. The implication is that a deliberative democracy will necessarily ruin all the good things that the market gives us, but we've already seen that this is wrong on at least two counts. (In case you've forgotten, (1) the market doesn't always provide good things and isn't the source of all the good things we do have; and (2) having a market is perfectly compatible with having a deliberative democracy.) Unless we believe from the start that the unspoken is superior to what is made articulate - that is, unless we already see eye-to-eye with Horwitz on the central issue here - there's nothing convincing or compelling at all in what he says. As usual, the myth of market perfection means more to its proponents than does evidence, reason, rationality, and, I am tempted to say, reality.

Doublespeak much?

2012-01-05T08:36:00.000-08:00

If, according to people who believe that scientism is a thing, the only alternative to scientism is magic, what (I cannot help but wonder) is the alternative to "conservative liberalism" according to people who believe that conservative liberalism is a thing? Let's find out together, shall we:

"Like those imperious bumper stickers commanding us to question authority, democratic capitalists’ condemnations of coercion [on the part of other political/economic arrangements] are both hypocritical and disingenuous. Oh, of course, rest assured that when left to their own devices, rich big-shots would never ever dream of coercing anybody – just ask the Appalachian coal miner. And of course the corporate system owes nothing whatsoever to heavy-handed government meddling — like, for instance, the creation of corporations as legal entities with rights and privileges."

Jerry Salyer, here acting as the representative of the anti-"conservative liberalism" crowd, would not like to have a totally free market; that much is evident from his coal miner reference. But he also thinks that the mere legal recognition of corporations is "heavy-handed government meddling" and so should be avoided. This second criticism is particularly strange, given the way that Salyer himself defines conservative liberalism:

"A conservative liberal is somebody who encourages the prevailing progressive view that the past was benighted and is best forgotten, but then demands respect for the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution."

I mean, never mind the part where Salyer wrongly alleges that progressives think "that the past...is best forgotten" - exactly who believes in moral progress, clings to literal and basic interpretations of biblical and political documents, and favors significant government intervention in the marketplace? Nobody I know fulfills all three of those requirements. Certainly Salyer's target, Joe Carter, does not: as we've seen, Carter is firmly committed to the "let them eat cake" school of economic politics and so is entirely against any kind of government intervention in the marketplace, heavy-handed or otherwise. So, again: who, exactly, is a "conservative liberal"?

The problem here is not that Salyer is wrong about any individual thing he says. Unfettered capitalism often is just as capable of coercion as other systems, and the government often does create legal structures that worsen the problem. The problem, rather, is that Salyer is not giving us an accurate sense of the choices among which we can choose. He makes it out to be the case that we should simply reject "conservative liberalism," but as far as I can tell there's no such thing. Instead - and this should not come as a surprise - there is conservatism, and there is liberalism. (There may be other things, too, but this at least covers our bases with respect to what Salyer is saying.) Just like we can have science without having scientism, we can have liberalism (or even conservatism!) without having conservative liberalism; to be more specific, we can have a market-based economy without "le[aving economic agents] to their own devices," and we can have formalized market controls without "heavy-handed government meddling." But it's gonna be pretty damn hard to have either of those things if we buy into the convenient straw man that Salyer is pushing.

Holy shit, distributism

2012-01-04T14:34:00.000-08:00

And here I thought Ron Paul was retrograde. That'll teach me.

"During the week of Christmas in 1926, G.K. Chesterton wrote an article about Birth Control [in which he argued against it on the grounds that it was a rich-man's scheme to keep salaries low]...

How was Chesterton’s article received? It was not attacked by any rich industrialists or economists defending capitalism or even geeks with statistics about overpopulation. It was attacked by a feminist named Dora Russell who complained that Chesterton did not talk about women. She said that it was apparent that he had never been left in sole charge of a family of eleven with the cooking, the cleaning, the washing and the mending all to do. His concern about the 'family wage,' and improving housing does not help this problem, but only organizes 'a state of little patriarchs, where wives are literally slaves, in that they must accept whatever size family happens to them and they are dependent on the husband’s mercy for their daily bread.'"

And, gee, might she have a point? Like, for example, how maybe people shouldn't have to have bigger families in order to get paid more? Not to mention how the (hypothetically) higher wage garnered by a man with many children will not actually go to the benefit of the family, as though that were a distinct unit, but rather to the benefit of family members, some more so than others? And how, no matter how much of that extra salary the wife receives, she can only "earn" it in one way (i.e., by popping out babies)? Doesn't any of that sound at all convincing?

"Chesterton responds by first admitting that he has never been a woman. 'It is well to have the mystery cleared up as soon as possible.' But while he has never known what it is be a mother who has to cook and clean for a large family on a small wage, he adds, that he has 'never known what it is to be a master who paid a small wage and then justified himself by telling the mother not to have a large family.'"

I - wait, what?

"He reminds Mrs. Russell that at the very beginning of the whole discussion 'stands the elementary fact that limiting families is a reason for lowering wages and not a reason for raising them.' She may like the limitation for other reasons, and she may, if she likes, 'drag the discussion off to entirely different questions, such as, whether wives in normal homes are slaves.' The topic of Birth Control touches many different things, but it touches all of them in a bad way. It has, says Chesterton, 'so rich an abundance of bad qualities, it offers so varied a choice of blunders and degradations, that nobody can deal with all its ugly features at once. I have only dealt with is exceedingly unpleasant origin.'"

Wow. GK Chesterton was an asshole. If you're going to make a moral case against such-and-such a thing, it does not help to "only [deal] with [its] origin." It also doesn't help to respond to somebody else's legitimate (i.e., morally relevant) counter-arguments by saying that those arguments "drag the discussion off to entirely different questions." Seriously, this is some grade-A scumbag behavior - and, incredibly, it only gets worse.

"'[Birth control] is unclean in the light of the instincts; it is unnatural in relation to the affections; it is part of a general attempt to run the populace on a routine of quack medicine and smelly science; it is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands; it is ignorant of the very existence of real households where prudence comes by free-will and agreement.'"

It's hard to take this seriously, except that it's phrased with such smarmy self-assurance. For example, it should be painfully obvious to anybody with two neurons to rub together that it doesn't help a woman deal with an abusive husband to simply know about "the very existence of real households" (whatever distinguishes a "real" household from a fake one) "where prudence comes by free-will and agreement," as though somehow by sheer will she could transmute the entire character of her marriage. And, again, is it really appropriate to say that women bear the responsibility for "help[ing] their husbands" obtain a higher wage? For someone who claimed to have been exposing the bad, bad motives of the capitalists of his time, Chesterton sure went out of his way to make their job easier: don't worry about paying people a fair wage, he's effectively saying, if men want more money they'll just knock up their wives and that'll take care of that. Even aside from the part where he lies about science and tries to subordinate reason to "the instincts," this is really atrocious, corrosive, borderline hateful (not to mention wholly illogical) material.

"As for Mrs. Russell’s desire for the 'right' to earn outside the home, Chesterton calls 'the right to be a wage-slave and work under the orders of a total stranger because he happens to be a richer man.' Her quarrel with motherhood is not 'a quarrel with inhuman conditions, but simply a quarrel with human life.'"

See? There it is again: Chesterton evidently could not conceive of a job in any other terms than wage slavery, and so instead of asking rich (socially powerful, privileged) people to change he puts that burden on women (socially weak, disadvantaged). And what's this stuff about motherhood being equated to "human life"? Not all women are - or even can be - mothers, and just because most women (at the time) were mothers hardly means that any individual woman has an obligation to be a mother (let alone a mother of enough children to guilt her husband's employer into paying him more).

And then this goes on for a while more, but I'm done. Dan Savage recently won Andrew Sullivan's Moore award (for "divisive, bitter, and intemperate left-wing rhetoric") for suggesting that American conservatives are against women's health measures like the HPV vaccine because American conservatives are, in fact, against women. Sullivan, being the soft-headed compromise-fetishist that he is, took this to be beyond the pale because American conservatives are (usually) careful to lie about their motivations, but when you scratch that surface just a little, what do you get? GK fucking Chesterton, quoted at length and uncritically, talking about how women have more of an obligation to bear however many children their husbands desire than employers do to just pay people a fair fucking wage. You will, therefore, have to pardon me for being just the slightest bit skeptical of Republicans, philosophers bearing GK Chesterton, and anybody else who even looks like they might support this sort of fallacious, misogynistic, altogether thick-skulled bullshit.

"Just movies"

2012-01-04T12:03:00.000-08:00

I can't quite tell: does this sort of thing display an atavistic attitude primarily towards human diversity or primarily towards humanity altogether?

"When I try to bring to mind occasions on which I am awed, it disappoints me to realize how many of them are at the movies. Those are the times when I see, hear, or witness things that cause me to grab the armrest and hold my breath. Some of the scenes are frightening or suspenseful. Others are violent or overwhelmingly emotional. But shucks, they are just movies...

There is another kind of awe. It is what happens when we encounter something amazing or majestic. It stirs a sense of wonder so deep it is never forgotten. These impressions forged in experience create memories that do not erase. I experienced that many years ago when for the first time I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon to watch a sunrise."

That it's atavistic at all is a given because of the un-self-conscious usage of "shucks," so for me the only relevant task is to describe and characterize the nature of the atavism. I think it's also fairly evident that we're best suited to look at Mary Vander Groot's attitude and not any of her premises or explicit beliefs, because the premises and explicit beliefs actually seem to be pretty solid: generally speaking, experiences of awe do more for us when (in her clumsy phrase) they "create memories that do not erase," and that typically happens when (and, I think, only when) we associate the experience with "something amazing or majestic" that "stirs [one's] sense of wonder." The trouble shows up when Vander Groot implicitly contrasts "amazing or majestic" things with "(just) movies."

Maybe this is me being snobby, but I recall seeing quite a few "amazing [and] majestic" works of film. More generally, I frequently find it to be the case that human achievements are amazing and majestic - although, of course, I also concede that many (probably most) human achievements fall well short of that mark. In the absence of reasons to think that only natural phenomena can be amazing or majestic, though, it begins to look like Vander Groot is just talking about the things that work well for her. And, well, that'd be perfectly fine - if only she didn't insist on applying her conclusions to everyone else, too.

"A few weeks ago I was at the post office to mail some documents in one of those flat rate boxes. It is not my favorite place to be in December. It makes me grumpy. Working next to me at the same table where I was putting the address on my own box were two kids emptying the contents of a backpack into theirs. He was young, she was pretty, and they seemed to be enjoying their adventure at the post office. After some squishing, pressing, and taping it was clear that it was all going to fit, and the young man uttered, 'Awesome!' I think he meant the box, not the girl.

Awe has been down graded lately. Awesomeness is cheap. Of course, the young man in the post office is free to use the word as he pleases, and his using it to pat his own back after fitting everything into the flat rate box hardly deserves my comment. But it reminded me that awe used to mean something more."

Sure, packing things into boxes sounds unimpressive. But really: does Vander Groot actually know what those people experienced? I've seen cars get packed so full of stuff that I was literally awed - who says the same can't happen with boxes? (Remember, these kids apparently fit "the contents of a backpack" into a small box - that isn't at least kinda impressive?*) Even if bin-packing doesn't do it for you, it should at least be easy to see that people are awed by different things, and that the experience of awe (of persistent amazement or majesty) depends for its existence on personal facts about the individual experiencing it. There are tons of people who don't feel awed by basketball players in the same way that I do; most of you were, if I am honest, probably a little bewildered by yesterday's awestruck post about video gamers; and then there's Vander Groot's apparent inability to feel persistently awed by (self-identified) fiction. (She is awed, apparently, by religious fiction, but that pretends to be true.) If we're going to really stringently talk about these things at a personal level, we cannot then turn around and say that other people's awe is "cheap." Different, yes; hard to understand, quite possibly. But "cheap"? That's a no-no.

It would have been one thing if Vander Groot had talked about the way in which each person seemingly cheapens his or her own sense of awe by overusing words like "awesome." That kind of argument would still be historically blinkered and kind of petty, but at least it might be plausible on a purely pop-psychological level. What Vander Groot actually says, though, is that people are ruining awe for everyone by using "awesome" in ways of which she disapproves, and that's just ridiculous. So whether her fundamental problem is one of projection (I like x; therefore, everybody should like x) or one of mild misanthropy (it's always wrong to "pat [our] own back" by calling our accomplishments awesome), Vander Groot should really have kept this to herself. Nobody is forcing her not to spend more time in nature, and if other people would rather trade awe for something else that's their business. As ever, there's just no reason to take one's own predilections and cast them as being universally applicable or, worse, as being the hard truth of the matter.

*Or maybe it was awesome because they could only afford a box of a certain size and didn't think they were going to make everything fit. Or maybe it was awesome because they were anticipating the effect of their packing job on the recipient. Or...

Death, oh baby

2012-01-04T09:29:00.000-08:00

It looks like Ra Ra Riot has a bone to pick with Wes Smith (or would, anyway, if they ever read his stuff). See, Ra Ra Riot wouldn't like death if death were good, not even if death were good, whereas Wes Smith actually seems to kind of like death already:

"Uniquely among the species, we know it is coming ever closer and that, transhumanism notwithstanding, there is no escape. More than anything else, I think, that terrible understanding is core to what it means to be human, powerfully influencing what we believe and how we choose to live. Death matters because life does, and life matters because we are all going to die."

I have to be honest: I'm not sure that I ever really understood this whole "life matters because of death" thing. Perhaps that's just because the awareness of (even my own) death, to me, has rarely if ever been a "terrible understanding." Or maybe it has something to do with the actual ways in which our awareness of death - "morality salience," to those who study it - "powerfully influenc[es] what we believe and how we choose to live":

"Mortality salience has the potential to cause worldview defense, a psychological mechanism which strengthens people's connection with their in-group as a defense mechanism. This can lead to feelings of nationalism and racial bigotry being intensified. Studies also show that mortality salience can also lead people to feel more inclined to punish minor moral transgressions. One such study divided a group of judges into two groups - one which was asked to reflect upon their own mortality, and one group which was not. The judges were then asked to set a bond for an alleged prostitute. The group who had reflected on mortality set an average bond of $455, while the control group's average bond was $50."

It's all well and good for Smith to talk in the abstract about the powerful influence of mortality salience as though it could only possibly work out for the best, but I'm fairly certain that we would all be better off without strong feelings of nationalism and racial bigotry or strong desires to punish minor moral transgressions. If that's supposed to be what makes life meaningful or valuable or worth living, jingoism and so on, then maybe we're in more trouble than we think.

So I wanna open this one up: does anybody have any idea why death might make life (or our actions therein) important, such that the life (or actions) of an immortal being would not matter?

Thanks, Brazil!

2012-01-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

Back in September when we looked at Miriel Thomas's new-urbanism-y claim that we should interrupt "the cycle of moral degradation and cultural disintegration" by "reclaim[ing] our physical environment," I didn't think that we'd ever get to see that sort of thing happen in practice. Among other things, Thomas wanted to strip our neighborhoods and cities of as much commercial iconography and clutter as possible, and - pessimist that I am - I just didn't think that would ever come to pass. But, well, I'm happy to be proven wrong!

"In 2006, Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil, passed the 'Clean City Law.' Citing growing concerns about rampant pollution in his city, Kassab decided enough was enough. But this was no ordinary piece of pollution legislation. Rather than going after car emissions or litterbugs, Kassab went after the billboards. Yes, you read that right: Kassab wanted to crack down on 'visual pollution.'

Saying that visual pollution was as burdensome as air and noise pollution, Kassab banned every billboard, poster, and bus ad in São Paulo with the Clean City Law. Even business signage had to go. Within months, city authorities had removed tens of thousands of ads both big and small."

Pretty fuckin' sweet, right? And pretty much exactly what Thomas was asking for when she talked about "decommercializ[ing] our milieu." So now we get to actually ask the question: what did happen to Sao Paulo's "cycle of moral degradation and cultural disintegration"?

Well, according to wiki, Sao Paulo's murder rate dropped 25% between 2006 and 2007 (the latest year for which I can find data) - so things are looking pretty good for Thomas, right? We know that Sao Paulo took action to make their environment less alienating, and then after that they had a pretty significant indication that at least one kind of moral degradation had been reversed. All of this seems very much to go against what I said in my post:

"There are, after all, reasons why our communities are fragmented and full of commercial dreck. Suburbs thrive because people want to have the economic advantages of cities (cheap goods, reliable basic services, good jobs) without making the social compromises that go along with them (decreased personal space, increased diversity). Unless Thomas knows some very interesting things about architecture, she won't be able to reverse this trend just by making buildings prettier...Thomas talks about redesigning our living spaces as though that would be a baby step that might lead to further changes, but she fails to realize that her suggestion will only be possible if we've already made a whole host of changes in the way we value things and the way we translate those values into action...Rather than attempting to [fix 'moral degradation'] with roundabout solutions like making communities more livable, new urbanists might want to consider adopting some of the more direct policies liberals have been asking for (and that conservatives have been arguing against) for ages: more racial integration, better and more wide-ranging primary education, strong support for public and alternative transportation, and so on."

I was saying that the reversal is more likely to happen in the other direction (i.e., less moral degradation first and then less cultural disintegration) and that the fringes of culture (e.g. architecture and urban design) by themselves would not have the effects that Thomas wanted, but the case of Sao Paulo seems to put the lie to all of that. Until, that is, you look a little deeper.

While it's true that the murder rate in Sao Paulo dropped from about 23 people per 100000 to about 17 people per 100000 after the "visual pollution" legislation, it had already been declining for years: it hit a peak at 69 murders per 100000 people in 1999 and dropped every year thereafter. Moreover, the problem is due much more to bad government than bad culture - or, at the very least, the solution was vastly political than cultural:

"In 1999, armed robbery, home invasions, rapes, and kidnappings as well as homicides, had reached such high levels that the state was becoming ungovernable. Officials watched as rampaging criminals killed innocent people at such a rate that foreign investors began to pull back from the state, which is South America’s economic powerhouse and the regional headquarters for most United States and European corporations.

Recognizing the seriousness of the problem, the state government adopted a new crime prevention strategy starting in 2000."*

While it's not the case that the government is entirely responsible, this does go a long way towards confirming my initial position: the direct solution is usually the better one, and there just are certain direct solutions that can only be implemented (effectively) if the relevant government gets involved. At the very least, there's nothing at all to suggest that the anti-billboard legislation was the start of the process in the way that Thomas thought it could (or should) be.

Admittedly, it may be misleading to compare a horrific situation like Sao Paulo's to anything that exists in the USA or in any given European nation. I don't necessarily know why that would be a bad comparison, mind you, but it might be. Even so, the only evidence that we have - well, okay, that I have - weighs against Thomas and against the idea that nitpicky little fixes will (or can) start the upward spiral of political and social amelioration that they're looking for. If that doesn't place a much more significant burden of proof on Thomas and the magical-new-urbanism crowd, I don't know what will.

*Incidentally, "a[nother] factor was an aggressive campaign against guns. The federal government tightened gun control laws, making it a criminal offense to carry an unregistered weapon. As a result, civilian handgun possession has fallen to about 3,000 registered users, and the number of illegally held weapons has also plummeted, he says." Just sayin'.

More on criterion #5

2012-01-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

It's been almost a whole year since my real post on the epistemology of ethics, but in that time I've not referenced it directly almost at all. Allow me, now, to remedy that, starting with an epiphany recently experienced by Charles Mudede.

"After being hit by a car on the corner of Madison and 7th avenue, I thought:
It's a woman driver. I can't let her know I have been hurt. Men must hide their pain. I will reassure her that everything is fine and warn her to next time better mind the road. The light was green for me and red for her; she was clearly asleep at the wheel. Probably her nerves or something. I will be the man in this situation, make no big deal about it, and continue to my destination, the Pioneer Square Station.
...But while taking Link to Columbia City Station, it occurred to me that if it had been a man who had hit me, I would have taken the fucker to the cleaners. Lawyers, insurance agents, neck braces—the entire legal apparatus of punishment and payment would have been dropped on the poor idiot. This contradiction revealed to me yet another bad thing that had been planted in my identity. It's not so much that I've been taught to be kinder to women; it's much deeper than that. It's this: I tend to cooperate with women, and be competitive with men. This asymmetry is not good. Something has to be done about it. The development of the self is a slow and long process."

This might not come across as such an amazing revelation, that treating women differently than men as a policy is not ethically sound, but you might be surprised at the extent to which people ignore the reason for treating women and men equally. That reason is, if not in so many words, my criterion #5 for being confident when building an ethical theory:

"5. A theory must not presuppose scientific falsehoods, philosophically incoherent concepts, or anything of the sort.Virtue ethicists may employ a concept of character that has no psychological existence, Kant may have given too much credit to the common idea that we can choose the reasons for which we act, Wes Smith likes to invent specious distinctions between humans and other animals, and of course any number of ethical theories refer to concepts of self or free will that seem to be either incomprehensible or fictional - and then there's divine command theory, which I take it I need discuss no further. Ethics needs to describe the actual world, not a world of convenient folk-wisdom fantasies."

Mudede's asymmetrical attitude is an example of an ethical position that presupposes a scientific falsehood, a philosophically incoherent concept, or some such thing. It's not clear what exactly the problematic presupposition was, but it's easy enough to think of candidates - for instance, an obsolete gender-determinist view that says that men and women are destined for different things in virtue of their bodies (or genes, or whatever) would do the trick. Likewise, there are lots of moral theories out there that say that we owe different things to our family or friends (or compatriots, or whatever) than we do to people in general, and these I cannot but believe also rely on bad information. There may well be good reasons to treat our family or friends (or whatever) differently, but the same moral principles need to apply consistently across the entire range of morally relevant entities. (And, of course, what counts as a morally relevant entity needs to be informed by things like science and not just decided ad hoc.)

Similarly, this argument from Julian Savulescu shows an admirable amount of consistency and honesty:

"Lethal separation of infant conjoined twins can be ethically justified when the chances of survival or decent quality of life of one twin without separation is low, but the chances of decent quality of life of the other twin is high if separation is performed [but not otherwise].

But in many cases, our law and judgements are ill suited to deal with this kind of case. Such separations do involve the killing of one twin to benefit the other. However, this is often put as allowing one twin to die, or by saying that one twin is using or is parasitic on the other twin. This is false. We have two individuals who share organs. The organs do not uniquely belong to one twin or another...

But it is important to recognise that such separations are infanticide. We should be open and honest in such cases that infanticide is occurring for the benefit of the other twin."

For good reason, we have a strong bias against infanticide. Still, that does not mean that we get to make shit up just to avoid saying that infanticide is sometimes acceptable. Disagree with Savulescu because you don't think that infanticide is right even in extreme cases if you like, but don't agree with him because you're willing to BS about the scientific reality of the situation in order to reach the conclusion you want.

This is only one criterion, of course, and it's a negative one at that (i.e., it says what not to do), but these two examples should suffice to show why we can't do without it. It's not that you can't accidentally stumble on the right answer by using a bad moral system - again, Savulescu provides several bad reasons for agreeing with (what we can posit is) the right position. But if you want to know that your position is the right one, there are certain steps you have to take, and excising bad presuppositions is one of them.

Button-pressers vs. wheel-turners

2012-01-03T08:52:00.000-08:00

Having ended last year with a brief word on video games as art, I figure I'll score some cheap points by starting this year with a brief word on video games as sport.

I want to start by saying that I only think that video games are sport-y or sport-ish. It's a personal policy of mine to withhold the term "sport" from any activity that a person could reasonably be expected to do twice in a day. This is why, for me, basketball and soccer are sports but baseball and bowling are not: even at their highest levels, most professional baseball players and bowlers could be (and, in fact, are) expected to play two or more matches in a day. (The key difference here is between athletic activity and athleticism. While you have to be athletic in certain ways to play baseball, you generally wouldn't use that athleticism enough in the course of playing the game for it to be a sport and not just an athletic game.) At least for now, the same is also true of video games; they just don't require enough athletic activity to count as a sport, so far as I can see.

That being said, though, video games are way more sport-like than certain other activities that sports channels currently air. Poker, race car driving, hot dog eating, trick-shot pool, possibly even regular pool, golf, fishing, and lots of other semi- or even not-at-all-athletic activities currently air with varying regularity on channels like ESPN, but you can't even find video game tournaments on the (self-proclaimed) video game channel. Why not, you ask?

Well, it can't be because just anybody can do what people do in video game tournaments. That's one of the things that we like about watching professional athletes, is that they do impressive things insofar as those are things that we can't do ourselves. But even if that wasn't true of video gamers at one point in history, it's certainly now the case that they, too, do things that most of us could not reasonably expect ever to do:

For those of you who could even follow what was going on, you'll recognize a level of manual dexterity and (contextual) mental agility that is probably beyond anything you'll ever accomplish in this lifetime. Again, this is only minimally athletic at best - but then, how much athleticism does it take to eat hot dogs or make a very fancy pool shot? Not much.

Another invalid reason for excluding video games is the false belief that one does not need to build a basic mental or physical skill set - that, in other words, video gaming is not something in which one can recognize superior skill but rather only superior luck. In the video above, for example, the untrained eye probably just sees a bunch of random commotion out of which no meaningful patterns can be drawn (and which the commentary does not help at all to clarify). This video should go some way towards dispelling that notion, even for people who don't have any real video game background knowledge:

As the announcers for this match suggest, it is the elements of strategy, practice, manual skill, and analysis that typically make the difference between winning and losing. Moreover, there are different types of players - technicians, flow players, tricksters, and so on - in just the same way that there are athletes or athletic teams that flourish in (that is to say, whose skill is most conducive to winning in) a certain playing style or milieu. This is no different from what one might see in pool or car racing or poker - except, as any poker player will tell you, there's much more luck in poker than in something like a video game.

In fact, the only convincing explanation I can come up with for why some (even incredibly boring) non-sports are still privileged over video games (or, to give another example of a marginalized activity, extreme [a.k.a. "action] sports) is that sports are still implicitly understood to be primarily manly or masculine whereas video games (and, say, skateboarding) are still understood to be primarily not-manly. So far as I can tell, manliness is pretty much the only attribute shared by football and fishing - and the only relevant attribute not shared by high-level Street Fighter and high-level trick-shot pool. If this is correct, it's just one more illustration of the way in which gender issues cannot be ignored or explained away even within a society as advance as ours. There are much more important reasons to care about that sort of thing, obviously, but eliminating prejudice is always a nice thing to do, and it's really very hard to come up with a non-prejudiced reason why video games should not be granted at least as much respect as fishing or car-driving.

Really? Someone who's pro-scientism?

2012-01-02T16:08:00.000-08:00

Really?

"There’s a feeling you get when reading [Alex] Rosenberg that he’s fed up with atheists who avoid facing up to the big persistent questions such as: ‘what is the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, and the meaning of life? Is there any rhyme or reason to the course of human history? Why am I here? Do I have a soul, and if so, how long will it last? What happens when we die? Do we have free will? Why should I be moral? What is love, and why is it usually inconvenient?’...

His position is a mad-dog scientism. ‘Scientism’, in the past used as a term of abuse, he reclaims as a term of honour. What he argues is for a naturalism of reductive physicalism. Reductive physicalism claims that everything is just bosons and fermions. Physics explains these. They are without purpose, without meaning, are blind, law governed entities that have no encoded propositional or intentional scripts. So the problem is how we can understand ourselves as having intentionality, free-will and purpose if this is the case."

...sigh. Okay, if we must...

Most of my criticism in this post will be reserved for Rosenberg, but it's worth taking a moment now to say that Richard Marshall, the guy who I'm actually quoting, is not exactly flawless, either. It is, for example, hard to believe that Rosenberg really doesn't know how atheists feel about the soul, so I'm tempted to say that Marshall more or less made that part up. Likewise, it's a little bizarre for someone to say both that "everything is just bosons and fermions" and also that bosons and fermions are "law-governed entities" - I mean, what are the laws, then? How could bosons and fermions be governed by non-things? (How, in other words, could a nonexistent thing govern anything?) Either there's something fishy going on here with the meaning of "thing" or else Marshall is making Rosenberg out to be much dumber than he really is. In either case, though, Rosenberg's self-satisfied scientism deserves to be the focus of this post, so let's leave Marshall's probable failings behind and get to the subject at hand.

The first thing that has to be said is that Rosenberg appears to commit a pretty unsubtle error when he attributes the qualities of bosons and fermions to the qualities of everything made thereby. We philosophers know this error as the fallacy of composition, and the basic gist is that a thing needn't share any qualities of its component pieces (or, likewise, lack any of the qualities that its component pieces lack). If I turn on my TV, for example, it would be true that the TV is on, but it would not be true that the TV's power button is on; indeed, it doesn't even make sense to ask whether a button is on or off. The reverse is also true: just knowing that a piece of the TV (e.g. the power button) is neither on nor off does not give us enough reason to say that the TV itself is neither on nor off. So even if everything - whatever we mean by "thing" - is made up of bosons and fermions, it would be ridiculous to think that nothing can have a property that those things lack on their own. At least on a surface level, then, this introduces a contradiction into Rosenberg's system, as Marshall explains:

"At this point it might seem that Rosenberg is being inconsistent. He accepts that tables exist because they are real patterns of fermions and bosons in local equilibria, so why doesn’t he accept purposes as existing as similar patterns in local equilibria?"

I made this same point when we started on this whole nihilistic-atheism thing, and I think it's a good one:

"If our lives as we perceive them are just chemicals, [Jennifer Fulwiler said], then they are meaningless because they are in some sense unreal. Should this prove to be true, it would certainly be an exception to the rule: generally, when things in the world are just other things, they are also themselves. DNA, for instance, doesn't stop being DNA just because it operates according to the laws of chemistry; maybe more interestingly, the information that DNA encodes doesn't stop being information, either. Rust isn't not-rust because it's just oxidized metal, nor are clouds not-clouds because they're just gaseous water (and other miscellaneous compounds). Even a building remains a building despite being just a pile of bricks and mortar (or wood and nails, or what have you)."

The difference, according to Rosenberg, is that meaning cannot be explained scientifically.

"The really hard problem is to give an account of meanings and meaningfulness – both in terms of linguistic meaning and values meaningfulness – that are more than merely consistent with the laws of physics describing a universe of only these bosons and fermions. This is the nihilism at the heart of Rosenberg’s naturalism...There is no purpose, no meaningfulness, no free-will in this blind, deterministic universe. The universe of fermions and bosons is our universe. So there is no purpose and meaningfulness in our universe."

Unfortunately for Rosenberg, this seems to me to be a serious case of mistaking a quilt-question for a blanket-question. For those who aren't familiar with that terminology, the basic idea is that many of the questions that we ask are not well-formed. When we ask what "blue(ness)" is, for example, we are almost always asking after multiple things - a wavelength of light, in part, but also the kind of chemical (and therefore physical) structure that would make an object give off that wavelength of light (when exposed to certain other wavelengths of light), and the kind of experience of blueness that can probably only be described neurologically, and so on. So long as we persist in believing that all of these things can be explained neatly in a single simple package, we are going to be disappointed; the question itself, that is to say, is set up so that no satisfactory answer is possible. By separating each answerable question from each other one, however, we can eventually come to understand everything we originally hoped to understand - just not in the way that we had originally hoped to understand it.

This, again, looks to be the trap into which Rosenberg has fallen. Questions of purpose, meaningfulness, and free will really are very different questions, but apparently Rosenberg tries to lump them together in truly distressing ways:

"The very same illusion that makes us think there’s a purpose in the universe governs our self image as purposive and meaningful. ‘The purpose driven life is an illusion’. We don’t have free-will and we’re in the grip of a false self image."

That Rosenberg is wrongly blurring the lines between different concepts can be seen in his confusion about what purposes (plans, decisions, choices) are and how they connect to a purpose-driven life. For one thing, it's ridiculous to talk about purposes, plans, decisions, choices, and purpose-drivenness as though they were all the same thing or are so tightly interrelated that they all stand or fall together. But these things are not even all that simple when considered individually. In the same way that we often ask after a blueness that does not exist, it shouldn't be surprising to consider the possibility that we have a pop/folk concept of e.g. "purpose" that does not apply to the real world. For instance, we might think that purposes are Aristotelian final causes, or that they are psychologically pure and undifferentiated and so exclude all other purposes that one might have had, or that they are simplistically connected to the ways in which we behave, and so on. We would - and, I think, we do - have to reconsider what it means to be purposive in light of what we're learning about the brain, but there's nothing here to indicate that we must abandon the idea of a purpose altogether.

Why, then, does Rosenberg not consider the possibility that this is the real problem? As we've observed before, for a proponent of scientism like Rosenberg the only alternative he's willing to consider is a kind of magic:

"Rosenberg argues that it follows that therefore in reality there are no statements of meaning anywhere either. There is no propositional or sentential reality, there’s only the appearance of such."

Unless he defines "meaning" to be something magical, like a "blueness" that is simultaneously a conscious phenomenological experience and a wavelength of light, there's no reason to think this. Sure, if meaning could only exist independently from physical systems of representation and interpretation - systems that store and manipulate data in a way that allows for multiple kinds of comparisons and interactions - then meaning probably couldn't exist. But we have no reason to think that this is true of meaning; indeed, everything we know about meaning suggests otherwise. Even though this means that we have to break apart the concept of meaning into smaller, cooperative concepts (in the way that e.g. semiotics already does), that's different than rejecting meaning altogether. Rosenberg differs from the other scientism theorists we've seen insofar as they accept the magical explanation and he rejects it, but the same false dilemma applies to both: if the thing you're looking for is defined in such a way as to be impossible, it is entirely valid to look for a new definition instead of concluding either that the thing doesn't exist or that it exists but is magic.

Another perfect example of this is Rosenberg's approach to morality:

"Rosenberg argues that nothing in science underwrites the value of any categorical imperative such as thou shalt not steal or kill or you ought to look after your neighbour, the frail, weak and so on."

Usually we ask after a kind of moral value that just is, that sort of exists independently of physics off in some pseudo-Platonic realm of pure ideas. People often characterize it as being like logic or math (or, if they're very silly, like aesthetic values): just...being, somehow. And, on those terms, it is very hard to figure out how ethical values could exist, especially if we're looking for them to be built out of bosons and fermions. But why would moral values have to exist on those terms? Ethical inquiries are questions about which actions are best and why; determining which actions are best can only be done by determining which things experience value (both positive and negative) and investigating how they experience it; and, so long as we don't buy into the superstition that brains can't have experiences, that can be done scientifically. If Rosenberg wants to find the ten commandments encoded into string theory, then yeah, he's not gonna find it. But really: is that the most plausible way of interpreting morality?

The really sad thing about all of this is that Marshall praises Rosenberg for his detail work: "the strength of [Rosenberg's] book," Marshall alleges, "is that it sets out his position clearly and therefore allows those who disagree to know what they must do to answer him." So far as I can tell, though, this is precisely the opposite of the situation. At least as depicted in Marshall's review, Rosenberg's entire position consists of denying things that are not well-defined. He doesn't think that "values" or "plans" or "meanings" exist, that much is clear. But just what is he denying the existence of? If he's just refuting the half-baked, nigh-talismanic concepts that were developed in response to a much more naive set of questions about reality, then he ought not conclude that those concepts cannot be rescued by forcing them to respond to what we know now. Some historical concepts are very much like those ridiculous products you see on late-night TV, in that they promise to do everything and more but will break comically as soon as you try to actually use them. But just because the magic detergent on the infomercial doesn't work as promised does not mean that all detergents are worthless or that the notion of a detergent is a fantasy that we cannot obtain. On the other hand, if Rosenberg is not going after the all-in-one, slice-and-dice, 800-number version of things like meaningfulness and morality, he needs to offer arguments that specifically apply to more modest versions, and this he has apparently not even come close to doing. I don't disagree that we (all) need to put in more work addressing "the big persistent questions," but the first part of that work must be to understand just what it is we think we're asking.