Back to the Drawing Board

An Official Goodbye

2009-08-23T15:35:00.003-04:00

Those of you who pay attention to this space may have noticed a substantial drop-off in the rate of postings on this blog. This has been a busy summer: I've been to North Carolina, Israel, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New York, with stops in Connecticut in between and, finally, a trip out to Arizona at the end. My dad is remarried, I have sat through nearly a month of seminars, I've seen many of my friends from college, I somehow managed to not spend all of the money I saved from working this past year, and I have at long last arrived at the doorstep of the next major chapter in my life. I couldn't be more excited.

This semester will be my first as a student in the University of Arizona's philosophy PhD program. I will be taking a course in Environmental Ethics and Policy with David Schmidtz, a seminar on Equality with Thomas Christiano, and a first-year proseminar with Marga Reimer on a subject which has not yet been revealed to me. I'll also be TAing three sections of a class called The Economics and Ethics of Wealth Creation, taught by Michael Gill. Outside of my coursework and professional responsibilities, I have an incredible array of opportunities open to me. I can sit in on lectures, join reading groups, network with climate change researchers in other departments, enjoy the perpetual sun and magnificent mountains, spend time relaxing with some of the most brilliant philosophers in my age group, hang out with my mom, and explore the culinary awesomeness available throughout Tucson.

But one thing I've decided to cut from the roster is this blog. It seems to me that if I am going to be working on philosophy, there are much more pressing things I should be doing than posting here. I'm going to leave all of the existing content here, just the way it is, with two hopes. First, if there's anything on here that I've gotten right, I hope that people will find some use for my thoughts and that somehow all of this writing will help someone move across the terrain I've covered a bit more quickly than I did. But second, in the far more likely event that I one day look back on this blog as an amusing artifact of my mentality at a particular point in my young life, I hope that this site will serve as a set of snapshots of who I have been since I began writing here over a year and a half ago, and that I will be able to look fondly upon it in spite of its many shortcomings.

I want to thank all of the wonderful and brilliant people who have been a part of making this ongoing project as rich and productive as it has been for me. Dr. Hunt, Gene, Dr. Long, Dr. Chartier, Chip, Alex, Roman, Vichy, Michael, Greg, Dmitry, Dan, Jad, Giles, Stan, Alan, Joel, Radical Hippo, and JEK come to mind from the last several months, and I'm sure that there are a number of people who I'm leaving out but who played an integral role in helping me to refine my thinking. And that, of course, is leaving out the many fabulous anonymous commenters who have contributed substantially in their own right. Thank you all so much for making this such a worthwhile and educational experience for me!

I hope that this blog has been as interesting and thought-provoking for you to read as it has been for me to write. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you keep in touch.

The End.

Me From the Past!

2009-07-15T16:11:00.002-04:00

So I was just alerted to the online availability of a brief presentation I gave at FEE's Young Scholars Colloquium last year, and I figured it would be worth posting here. I should note that the presentation was basically a response to not having enough student presentations to fill the time and needing one of the interns to jump in to eat space, so I don't pretend that anything particularly groundbreaking was said.

But without further ado, here's the link. My talk starts at 12:30, and discusses pollution taxes. In it, I make the claim that there are pollution taxes, and I'm not actually sure that's true...can anyone think of an example? That aside, I think it's pretty decent presentation, and I hope you all enjoy it!

My climate change presentation from this year's seminar will hopefully be coming online relatively soon -- and with video! -- so look forward to that...

On Leviathan and Public Reason: A Reply to Chartier

2009-07-04T00:58:00.002-04:00

So I've been having a discussion with Dr. Chartier over at the LiberaLaw blog about the role of the sovereign as a source of public reason in Hobbes' political philosophy, in response to an interesting post in which he discussed how a Hobbesian account might be consistent with market anarchism. Because I am a horribly verbose person, I wrote more in response to Dr. Chartier's last comments than the comments system would allow, and I am therefore posting my thoughts here. Hopefully this is of some interest to someone!

In order to understand this, it would probably be a good idea to read Dr. Chartier's post and the comments that have already been published on it, particularly this one (since this post is directly a response to that comment).

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If I understand correctly, Hobbes sees the sovereign as existing to settle conflicts. In Dr. Chartier's post and comments, he's seemed to somewhat equated this to a notion of "preserving civil peace." And to an extent, this makes sense. With property disputes, for example, what the sovereign is being asked to do is to merely uphold some exogenous system of justice: the sovereign is just acting to make sure we maintain a peaceful environment, where we get our idea of "civil peace" from somewhere else.

But to Hobbes, this will treat too much as settled. He would likely want to say that we may disagree on what it is that even constitutes "civil peace." One person might have a desire to see all homosexuals put to death. Another person might have a desire to see his homosexual compatriots protected from this fate, and is willing to fight to defend them. Another person might want to see the bigoted guy put in the stockades for being such a jerk. Hobbes thinks that this kind of conflict is a serious problem. In the absence of any external norms and institutions to tell us who is right and who will get their way, and in the absence of any enforceable agreement between them, Hobbes thinks that the three people in our story will have no reasonable choice but to prepare for violence. So long as each relies on his private reason, they will be condemned to a state of war.

The liberal solution to this problem is the one which gives us the notion of "civil peace" that I imagine Dr. Chartier has in mind: this approach typically seeks to independently define some conception of right-of-way, so that we have a way of adjudicating disputes according to these independent norms. But Hobbes doesn't have this machinery in his system. He could say that there may be no standard of right-of-way that each of the three people in our story would accept if each relied on his private reason. The system of rights and duties that will appeal to the bigot will be seen as oppressive by the defender of the homosexuals, and vice versa. And even if they could strike an agreement, there's no guarantee that some new issue won't arise in the future to drive them apart. The only way for them to avoid the state of war, Hobbes thinks, would be to give some third party the authority to choose what constitutes the appropriate conception of "civil peace" that will underpin their society.

The problem with the limits Dr. Chartier seems to want to place on the sovereign, I think, is that it seems to be in conflict with Hobbes' desire that the sovereign have the authority to decide basically everything about how a society is going to function. If this authority is denied in areas where there could potentially be legitimate disagreements between people, then Hobbes is going to worry that conflicts will arise, where each side believes that his own private reasons are the right reasons. Hobbes wants to eliminate this possibility by giving the sovereign absolute authority to decide what's right and fair.

But all of this is drilling way further into Hobbes than I think Dr. Chartier was seeking to do. If all he wants to take from Hobbes is the idea that a government is necessary to adjudicate disputes, then none of these issues are going to be a big deal. In this case it seems to me that he's actually moving away from the substance of Hobbes' argument and actually moving closer to the sort of thing Locke was saying in chapter 9 of the Second Treatise. As Locke writes:

Thus mankind, notwithstanding all the privileges of the state of nature, being but in an ill condition, while they remain in it, are quickly driven into society. Hence it comes to pass, that we seldom find any number of men live any time together in this state. The inconveniencies that they are therein exposed to, by the irregular and uncertain exercise of the power every man has of punishing the transgressions of others, make them take sanctuary under the established laws of government, and therein seek the preservation of their property. It is this makes them so willingly give up every one his single power of punishing, to be exercised by such alone, as shall be appointed to it amongst them; and by such rules as the community, or those authorized by them to that purpose, shall agree on. And in this we have the original right and rise of both the legislative and executive power, as well as of the governments and societies themselves.

If Dr. Chartier is considering this sort of approach to thinking about government, then yes: I agree that it don't establish a whole lot about exactly what a government is supposed to do or how big it needs to be. As long as it addresses the "inconveniencies" of the state of nature, any system of government will seem to do, and insofar as a stateless, decentralized, or pluralistic system can address them, that would be fine too. But this shouldn't surprise us: this Lockean position is what underpins a great deal of the modern libertarian tradition, including Rothbard's market anarchism and Nozick's decentralized, pluralistic vision of Utopia. I should add, though, that it also shouldn't surprise us to find that we're led to conclusions very different from those that Hobbes professed.

Interesting Things to Watch

2009-06-23T06:39:00.005-04:00

Howdy, y'all. I just figured I should direct your attention to two conversations that have caught my interest recently, and which may be interesting to some of you as well.

Over at the Austro-Athenian Empire blog, Dr. Long has posted a discussion of the proper definition of "socialism," entitled "POOTMOP Redux!" (after an older post, "Pootmop!," in which he discussed private ownership of the means of production -- p.o.o.t.m.o.p.). If you want some background on the post, read Kevin Carson's initial contribution to the discussion, "Socialism: A Perfectly Good Word Rehabilitated," and Stephen Kinsella's response, "The New Libertarianism: Anti-Capitalistic and Socialist." I should point out for the time-starved, however, that Dr. Long's post is probably just fine on its own.

I've posted a fair amount in the comments section of the post, and Neverfox of Instead of a Blog has jumped in as well. Of interest as well may be Dr. Chartier's thoughtful contribution on the LiberaLaw blog, "Socialism Revisited," as well as Brainpolice's commentary on the Polycentric Order blog, "Anarchist and Socialist Semantics and Historicity (Or, Why Does Stephan Kinsella Act As If Individualist Anarchism Never Existed? Redux)."

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The other interesting conversation going on at the moment is a new chapter in the debate over state involvement in marriage, this time with a post on the ThinkMarkets blog by Dr. Rizzo, "What Should Be The State’s Role In Marriage?." The time scale for this discussion is a bit longer than that for the previous one. For me, it started with an overconfident post on this blog last year, now-amusingly entitled, "Open and Shut: Should Same-Sex Marriage Be Legal?" In it, I argued that the state should get out of marriage entirely in order to avoid a choice between discrimination and offending religious groups who I took to have some legitimate claim to the institution of "marriage." (That post, incidentally, marked the one and only time that this blog has ever been linked to on The Huffington Post. Go figure.)

A few months later, Dr. Koppl posted his own discussion of the issue over at the ThinkMarkets blog, "Ideas Have Consequences," in which he argued that gay marriage should be legalized. In the comments section of that post, we had what I found to be an incredibly productive conversation in which he convinced me that the religious groups in question really did not have the kind of claim to the institution of marriage that I had attributed to them, and that having a legal understanding of "marriage" was quite valuable. I accordingly posted a follow-up on this blog in which I conceded the argument to Dr. Koppl, entitled, "Roger Koppl Is Right About Gay Marriage."

Dr. Rizzo's point intriguingly takes up the banner for the sort of position I initially defended, arguing that the government ought to get out of defining marriage altogether. In the comments section, I tried to draw attention to the conversation that had already taken place on the blog earlier this year, and eventually Dr. Koppl himself arrived on the scene to defend his position again. Gene Callahan of Crash Landing, the (now willfully abandoned!) Morality Debate, chance meetings at AIER, etc., has also joined in the discussion. This should be good!

On Basic Structures and Starting Points

2009-06-19T11:09:00.000-04:00

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls writes (7):

The basic structure is the primary subject of justice because its effects are so profound and present from the start. The intuitive notion here is that this structure contains various social positions and that men born into different social positions have different expectations of life determined, in part, by the political system as well as by economic and social circumstances. In this way the institutions of society favor certain starting places over others. These are especially deep inequalities. Not only are they pervasive, but they affect men’s initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert. It is these inequalities, presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society, to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply.

He elaborates (82):

The primary subject of justice, as I have emphasized, is the basic structure of society. The reason for this is that its effects are so profound and pervasive, and present from birth. This structure favors some starting points over others in the division of the benefits from social cooperation. It is these inequalities which the two principles are to regulate. Once these principles are satisfied, other inequalities are allowed to arise from men’s voluntary actions in accordance with the principle of free association. Thus the relevant social positions are, so to speak, the starting places properly generalized and aggregated.

In this post, I want to jot down some thoughts on why I find this a concerning aspect of Rawls’ approach. My concern arises from Rawls’ supposition that basic structures “contain” social positions, and thus the array of social positions in a society are the result of the choice of basic structures in that society. But the basic structure of society does not itself directly produce the distribution of starting places. In each instance where a person is born into a particular starting place, it is the consequence of some people having a child. It is somewhat difficult for me to imagine why we would think that the basic structure of a typical society could directly cause a baby to be born. Perhaps we could coherently say this if we lived in a mechanistic totalitarian society in which children were in an important sense a product of social planning, but this seems like an odd way to think about the way children are born in our society.

The extent to which the basic structure of our society impacts the array of starting places is the extent to which it has some influence on the range of opportunities that prospective parents are able to offer their children, in those cases where these people actually do choose to have children. Approaching things with this mindset, we can see that any society will “contain” an infinite number of potential starting points, and in certain relatively rare circumstances, a child will actually be born into a particular starting point. But these starting points will be the product not only of the principles governing the basic structure of society, but also (and undoubtedly more importantly) the incredible confluence of events that led up to the possibility of a particular child being born into a particular set of social circumstances, almost all of which are only tangentially related to the basic structure of society. And significantly, the way that we characterize a starting place will be significantly conditioned by the kind of parenting the individual in question will receive. I would at least be hesitant to think of the quality of one’s parents’ personal contributions to one’s childhood as being entirely the product of the basic structure of society (I would actually be a bit hesitant to make these claims about pretty much any of the social interactions that help to shape a child’s life, but for our purposes it will not be necessary to raise this challenge). If it’s true that the distribution of starting points is at least partly determined by the way that people choose to treat their children, then Rawls’ claim that the basic structure of society “contains various social positions” (where the relevant social positions are “starting places”) seems a little worrisome.

But Rawls might counter that even if the basic structure of society does not solely determine the array of starting points into which people will be born, it still has some impact on the range of opportunities that will be available to individuals whose parents decided to have them. And this, he could say, may be cause for some concern. Intuitively, this seems fair enough. I think it’s entirely reasonable, for example, to think that we may want to consider the idea that we have some duty (as individuals, social groups, communities, or whatever) to ensure that people have certain opportunities provided to them if we can help it (I don’t intend to engage this question here, but I certainly wouldn’t want to rule this out). Rawls might say that we ought to help poor families to provide education, food, or clothing for their children. He might say that we ought to help children from less fortunate backgrounds get into college or enter the workforce. Though these suggestions might be problematic for one reason or another, they don’t seem totally unreasonable on their face.

But this isn’t what Rawls wants to argue: he wants to suggest that by allowing a certain array of starting points to come into existence, the basic structure of society might itself be seen to be unjust, and would thus need to be replaced with another basic structure. This, I think, is where Rawls might be running into real trouble.

Here’s what I have in mind: Individuals who are born into particular starting points are the products of particular reproductive events. These events are the products of long histories of social changes and reproductive events which produced the circumstances in which these events occurred. Altering the basic structure of society would bring it about that a different set of reproductive events would occur, and so a different set of starting points would come about, but into these starting points would be born a totally different set of people. This is a problem because Rawls’ view is built on a scenario where the members of society are supposed to try to agree on the basic structure of society -- a mutually beneficial system of cooperation. But if we assume that living is not itself a bad thing (I have heard this disputed, but whatever), then it seems clear that the most beneficial choice of basic structures for any individual would be whatever structure brought that individual into existence. No one would really have any grounds to complain about their starting place because it would be a necessary precondition for them existing in the first place. Altering the array of starting points in society might be justified, but not on the basis that it would somehow benefit the people whose “undesirable” starting points would be eliminated. And if we’re not trying to benefit these people, then it’s sort of difficult to see how we’re still talking about a contractarian view that’s focused on starting points.

(To be honest, I’m sort of unsure about this conclusion. In this case, when I say that it’s difficult for me to see how this could be accommodated, I am not saying that rhetorically; I don’t know how it works. If anyone can explain to me how Rawls’ approach could accommodate the fact that no one will benefit from the choice of any basic structure besides the one that causes them to come into existence, that would be sweet.)

So hopefully, this post has served to establish two points on which I am confused: a) the basic structure of society doesn’t itself produce the distribution of starting places, and b) messing with the basic structure in order to alter the distribution of starting points in fundamental ways would bring about an entirely different population, which would most certainly not benefit the people whose starting points are being eliminated, and would therefore seem not be an appropriate goal of a contractarian view like Rawls’. As should be clear from the above, none of this should be taken to be “damning criticism” of Rawls; I am just hesitant about the way that Rawls is proceeding, and I think he might have made a big mistake. Even so, these do seem like the sorts of things that would need to be addressed.

200 Posts!

2009-06-13T17:38:00.002-04:00

Jeez...I can't believe that there are two hundred posts on this frikkin' thing. I guess I don't really have much to say about this, but I figured it should get some kind of acknowledgment. Thanks so much to all of the incredibly interesting and intelligent people who read my ramblings and occasionally leave me comments. It's been really awesome getting to meet and talk with you guys, and I hope you've gotten something out of following this blog!

I should probably take this opportunity to briefly discuss the future of this blog. As you all undoubtedly know, I'm going to be starting graduate school in August at the University of Arizona. I fully expect that as a graduate student, it will come to be nothing short of irresponsible for me to spend my time typing up blog posts instead of concentrating on my coursework. I'll therefore be suspending all updates to this site for the foreseeable future, starting when I leave for school. Until then, I'll continue to update in my usual sporadic way. So...uh...I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with that information, except to remember it so you can't say you weren't warned when I suddenly vanish off the face of the Earth for several years of intense studiousness!

Thanks again for reading.

I Don't Get the Whole "Peak Oil" Thing...

2009-06-12T22:53:00.009-04:00

So here's a fancy story:

There's a commodity that exists in limited supplies on the Earth; let's call it awesomite. Awesomite can currently be harvested and brought to market for $5/oz, and at that price we can satisfy all the demand from people who are willing to pay that much. Eventually, some of the supplies of awesomite run out, and it becomes more difficult to meet the market's demand. We can get more awesomite for $7/oz than we can for $5/oz in this now-somewhat-depleted world, since that price would allow us to buy a sweet line of awesomite-carrying trucks which would help us reach sources of awesomite that simply couldn't be harvested without them. And at this higher price, some people decide to stop using awesomite; we can meet all the remaining demand for awesomite at $7/oz. Eventually, we start to deplete the supplies of awesomite even further, and so it becomes increasingly difficult to meet demand at $7/oz. For $10/oz, though, we can definitely get at some of the hardest to reach sources of awesomite, since we could buy a totally rad array of processing equipment that would enable us to get the valuable commodity out of ore that would otherwise be too impure to use. And at $10/oz, way fewer people want to use awesomite, so we can balance things again.

This entire time, we've known about a substitute for awesomite: spiffium. With current harvesting methods, we can get spiffium for $9/oz, but even at that price we can't produce all that much -- the technology is very limited. When awesomite cost $5/oz, people were only really using spiffium for specialized applications; it simply didn't make sense to use it when you could just use the much cheaper awesomite instead. The same was pretty much true at $7/oz. But when awesomite prices hit $10/oz, the spiffium producers went into high gear. They quickly found that they had maxed out the amount of spiffium they could produce, and suddenly people were willing to pay $10/oz for whatever they could put out. Accordingly, a lot of people started to invest in some excellent new methods to produce spiffium.

See, there was always a whole lot of spiffium that could be harvested, but no one ever really cared to figure out how. Developing any one of those new methods would be expensive and may never turn up anything. And besides, the price of awesomite was just so low; the investment would only have been worthwhile if it produced a radical breakthrough that totally revolutionized spiffium production, and that was a pretty big risk to take. But at $10/oz, things looked a lot better for spiffium producers. As awesomite supplies continued to dwindle, its market price continued to climb and awesomite producers continued to use even more remote and awesomite-poor resources to satisfy the market's demand for their products. But at these high prices, spiffium producers could justify radically expanding their own production and investing in all new methods to get spiffium to the marketplace.

As time went on, the spiffium producers had a series of breakthroughs which fundamentally changed the way that spiffium was produced. They could now get way more spiffium out of the ground than they ever could before with cool new pressurized water harvesting systems and computerized geological data processing programs that spiffium company engineers created once the investment dollars started flowing in. And they could do it at lower and lower prices. Soon the price for spiffium started to drop below the price of awesomite, and now it was only the specialized applications that used awesomite; any application that could use both commodities would be hard-pressed to justify using anything but the much cheaper spiffium.

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As might be rather obvious, I intended the above story to be an allegory for the growing concern about oil supplies. Oil -- the equivalent of awesomite in our story -- is really cheap right now, and has been for a long time. If you believe some people, it's too cheap! Why? Because at current prices, oil is preventing "needed" investment in alternative sources of energy -- a real-world version of spiffium. And the reason we need to be investing in alternatives is because we're going to run out of oil, and this would be terrible.

But as we saw in the story, when we started running out of awesomite, the price rose and we started using sources of awesomite that would have been uneconomical at lower prices. And eventually, prices rose high enough that it was clearly worthwhile to start investing in alternatives. The price mechanism automatically sent signals to the relevant actors that told them what they should do!

So I really fail to see what is the big deal about "peak oil" and dwindling oil resource supplies. As we start to actually run low on oil, suppliers will be hard pressed to meet market demand with their current resources. Prices will rise, people will cut back, and currently uneconomical oil resources will come into production. When prices rise high enough, alternative fuels will begin to make sense, and we will start to see a transition away from oil in applications where substitutes can be utilized efficiently. It will be just like how people slowly stopped using awesomite and switched to spiffium in our story.

Now, this shouldn't necessarily be taken as an indictment of social funding of alternative energy research; that's an entirely different issue with a whole separate range of considerations. But what I do think this discussion supports is the idea that people should take a few deep breaths and stop getting so worked up about peak oil. It will be okay.

How Climate Change Policy May Cause Economic Disruption

2009-06-07T01:41:00.001-04:00

A little while ago, I wrote a post discussing why I didn't think that a tax on emissions of greenhouse gases would result in an overall decrease in buying power spread across the economy. In that post, I focused on how a policy might work out if it were slowly phased in; my intention was to set aside the possibility of certain problems that a climate policy may expect to face in order to focus only on a particular set of concerns about overall buying power in the light of increasing the cost of emissions. In this post, I want to address some of the issues I set aside in that earlier post. Particularly, I wanted to focus on the possibility that by implementing a new climate change policy, we could disrupt the existing economic order in a very significant way, and that this might be expected to produce some very worrisome impacts. (Again, this post will talk about carbon taxes; if the translation to cap-and-trade schemes is confusing, I can explain.)

So here's the deal. As I explained in the previous post, a good carbon tax is built on the idea that we make carbon-emissions-intensive goods more expensive with a tax. The proceeds are used to finance a tax cut elsewhere which has the effect of making non-emissions-intensive goods relatively less expensive by increasing consumers' buying power (stated in terms of nominal dollars). This would tend to have the effect of increasing the demand for non-emissions-intensive goods at pre-tax prices, and lowering demand for emissions-intensive goods at prices reflecting the pre-tax price and the carbon tax.

In the previous post, I discussed an example involving two consumers (Cynthia and Xavier) who were part of an economy including rocks (which do not take carbon emissions to produce) and rubber balls (which do take carbon emissions to produce). Before the tax, both rocks and rubber balls cost $5. After the tax, rubber balls cost $6 and the price of rocks is unchanged. The proceeds of the tax on the rubber balls, I said, was used to finance a tax cut so that the consumers each ended up having more buying power than they would have had otherwise (in dollar terms).

If such a policy were enacted, we would imagine that people would shift their consumption choices in the direction of rocks and away from rubber balls. If we held market prices fixed for the moment, we would expect people to demand more rocks and less rubber balls. This could create an incentive for suppliers to decrease the prices of rubber balls in order to avoid building up excessive inventories, and to increase the prices of rocks in order to avoid creating a shortage. Alternatively, it could create an incentive to decrease the production of rocks and to increase the production of rubber balls. In practice, it would more than likely be a combination of both.

So here's the problem: In our modern economy, there is a lot of capital invested in the production of emissions-intensive goods. In our example economy, we might imagine that many rubber balls are produced using a sophisticated ball-making machine. And it may be that at the new lower demand, some of the companies that invested in these ball-making machines would need to sell them or might even go out of business. The people who made the ball-making machines would see demand for their products drop, and perhaps they would be put out of work. The ripples would move outward.

Of course, on the flip side, the rock producers would experience some seriously good times, at least at first. Once the drop in rubber ball demand put some people out of work and decreased the salaries of others, it's conceivable that the decrease in those individuals' consumption would balance out the increase in demand for rocks created by the carbon tax, or even outweigh it.

It should be clear that the more drastic a tax is imposed, and the more quickly it is implemented, the more significant the impacts on the structure of the economy. In our example, we might imagine that the tax was imposed only with a five year warning. In the scenario, it seems rather likely that the impacts would be substantially less severe. Producers would have time to plan for the tax, and they would be far less likely to make investments that would turn out to be really awful. Or alternatively, we could imagine that the tax was relatively small, and so the shift in demand might be rather small.

But with a quickly implemented or severe tax (or both), it seems rather clear that the impacts would be very noticeable. A number of otherwise sound investments would be converted into misallocations of resources, and these would need to be liquidated. It seems important that we acknowledge this possibility when we think about our climate policy options. Of course, nothing said here shows that we should reject climate taxes; I just think this is a side of the picture that needs to be seen.

Does the "Vintage Sedan" Commit Us In "The Envelope"?

2009-06-04T14:30:00.003-04:00

In his book, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence, Peter Unger seeks to show that by allowing people to suffer and die in the third world, we are failing in our moral duties. He offers an intriguing thought experiment, which has been called the case of the "Vintage Sedan":

Not truly rich, your one luxury in life is a vintage Mercedes sedan that, with much time, attention, and money, you've restored to mint condition... One day, you stop at the intersection of two small country roads, both lightly traveled. Hearing a voice screaming for help, you get out and see a man who's wounded and covered with a lot of his blood. Assuring you that his wound is confined to one of his legs, the man also informs you that he was a medical student for two full years. And, despite his expulsion for cheating on his second year final exams, which explains his indigent status since, he's knowledgeably tied his shirt near the wound as to stop the flow. So, there's no urgent danger of losing his life, you're informed, but there's great danger of losing his limb. This can be prevented, however, if you drive him to a rural hospital fifty miles away. "How did the wound occur?" you ask. An avid bird-watcher, he admits that he trespassed on a nearby field and, in carelessly leaving, cut himself on rusty barbed wire. Now, if you'd aid this trespasser, you must lay him across your fine back seat. But, then, your fine upholstery will be soaked through with blood, and restoring the car will cost over five thousand dollars. So, you drive away. Picked up the next day by another driver, he survives but loses the wounded leg.

Unger suggests that in such a scenario, it is natural for people to feel a strong commitment towards the idea that we would act monstrously by abandoning the hitchhiker. As many of the readers of this blog are libertarians who likely have stronger intuitions about the importance of self-determination than does Unger, it may be helpful to recast the illustration in order to make the danger to the hitchhiker more severe, or the cost to the owner of the vintage sedan less significant. The relevant point here is that most of us feel rather strongly that if the hitchhiker were in some real danger and if our actions could make the difference as to whether or not that danger were averted, we would have a moral duty to act to avert the danger even if doing so would require that we incur some costs ourselves.

Unger then offers an illustration that is referred to as "The Envelope":

In your mailbox, there's something from (the U.S. Committee for) UNICEF. After reading it through, you correctly believe that, unless you soon send in a check for $100, then, instead of each living many more years, over thirty more children will die soon.

Unger's intuition is that if we believe that we should help the hitchhiker in Vintage Sedan, then we should surely send the $100 in The Envelope, where the costs to us are so much smaller and where we would be averting so much more regrettable outcomes.

---
For a long time, I haven't known what to do with this argument. In another post, I agreed with the sort of intuition that Unger offers about Vintage Sedan, writing:

...the reason that we endorsed a broadly liberal approach to ethical reasoning in the first place was that we want to take proper account of the value of individuals. Wouldn't it seem odd if on one hand we were saying that individuals must be respected because their lives are important and valuable, and on the other hand we were saying that there's nothing wrong when people act as though others are irrelevant and worthless? I think so.

But I offered a vague defense against the sort of move Unger takes in extending the intuition produced in Vintage Sedan to The Envelope:

But in saying that, I don't mean to create the suggestion that we are "sacrificial animals" (to use the phrasing of the ever-abrasive Objectivists), required by morality to subordinate ourselves to others whenever they can coherently make the case that their needs and wants are "more important" than ours. An important part of what makes our lives valuable and worth respecting is that we can live them for ourselves. Another way to think of this is to say that even though we may have a peripheral or relatively unimportant interest in any particular activity we may be engaging in over the course of a normal day, we have an important or even basic interest in being able to plan and execute our lives according to our own plans, without having to think of ourselves as being at the beck and call of anyone who finds herself in a bind at any particular moment.

I continued that:

...because it's important to us that we be able to live our own lives, we have no duty to devote ourselves to empowering others. That's not to say that it is not virtuous to do so, or that we should not focus on the richness that helping others can bring to our lives. I only seek to suggest that if someone chooses to pursue his own dreams, living his life primarily for himself except where impelled by emergency to come to the aid of his fellow people, it wouldn't be fair for us to say that he has failed morally or behaved in an evil manner.

But to be honest, I haven't been totally satisfied with this argument. That is, I don't think it's wrong; I just feel like there's something missing. It seems to me that we don't have a duty to send the $100 in The Envelope, and it's not just because we don't have a duty to devote ourselves to solving world hunger. It seems to me that there's something importantly different between Vintage Sedan and The Envelope that could support a moral distinction between them.

---
For the longest time, though, I couldn't think of what the distinction might actually be; they just seemed totally different. Now, obviously there are differences between Vintage Sedan and The Envelope where Unger is going to get to laugh sinisterly if you retreat to them. These include appeals to the distance or anonymity of the people in The Envelope -- these are the sorts of things that don't seem like they can support the distinction we intuitively want to make. And it's going to be especially ugly if we try to go down the road that leads to, "Well the hitchhiker's suffering here is worse than that of the thirty people who will die for lack of basic necessities."

But now I'm toying with another sort of distinction, which I think may have at least some merit. In Vintage Sedan, it seems that the hitchhiker has found himself in an emergency situation. Something has happened to him that threatens the expectations that he very reasonably had about his future. If he is not taken to the hospital, he will need to make drastic adjustments in the way he thinks about his life and his future. In The Envelope, on the other hand, the people to be helped are "in trouble" simply as a result of the sort of lives they lead. To the extent that they are not in any particularly unusual circumstances given the sort of lives to which they are accustomed and acculturated, their fates will (at least as far as we know in the example) fall more or less within the range of the expectations that they could reasonably be expected to have. Surely we would want to acknowledge that these individuals find themselves in a rather regrettable lifestyle (given global standards), and that perhaps it would be nice if they had different and better opportunities available to them. But it seems to me that this is a very real and very significant difference between the people we are to help in The Envelope and the hitchhiker's situation in Vintage Sedan.

---
Now, Unger's point is that because we think that we should help the hitchhiker in Vintage Sedan, we are committed to sending the $100 in The Envelope. If, however, the difference I have outlined between Vintage Sedan and The Envelope really is significant, then Unger will be incorrect; our position in Vintage Sedan does not commit us to a particular stance on The Envelope. But it could still be true that this difference does not justify our failure to send the $100 in The Envelope -- it could be that Unger's conclusion is correct even if his argument is not.

So, then, what do we think about the idea that we have a moral duty to provide assistance to people who find themselves -- through no fault of their own -- in living situations which are (by current global standards) very dire? I'm not sure what I think. It seems to me that our obligation towards them is certainly not quite the same as the obligation we feel in Vintage Sedan, but saying much more would likely open me up to charges of begging the question -- that is, unless I were to here try to construct a theoretical defense of one conclusion or another, which isn't going to happen. I think this is an issue that requires a lot more thought, and that it would be premature of me to arrive at any definitive conclusion here. I guess I'll leave it at tentatively rejecting Unger's argument, then. I think I'm happy with that.

On the Two Functions of the Principles of Justice in A Theory of Justice

2009-05-24T22:12:00.001-04:00

So the other day I finally started reading Rawls' A Theory of Justice. I'm going to spend a lot of time trying to feel this book out, since it's pretty darn important that I get it right. In this post I want to trace a single stream of Rawls' thought, connecting the choice of the appropriate conception of justice to the determination of how we should conceive of the original position.

I

Rawls thinks that in evaluating political institutions, we must first focus on the question of whether or not they are just. He writes (3):

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

But whether or not we find that a set of institutions is just will turn on the conception of justice that we use to evaluate those institutions. He thinks that while people may hold different conceptions of justice, the concept of justice itself, where basic social institutions are concerned, is uncontroversial (5):

Those who hold different conceptions of justice can...still agree that institutions are just when no arbitrary distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties and when the rules determine a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages of social life.

So ignoring for now the question of whether or not we agree that this really is the concept of justice we all share in thinking about social institutions, we can see that for Rawls, the concept of institutional justice makes two demands of a social system: (1) Basic rights and duties must be assigned in a manner free of arbitrary distinctions; and (2) The rules adjudicating competing claims to the advantages of social life must produce a "proper balance." Our individual conceptions of the justice of social systems, then, will similarly need to do two things: 1) They need to specify what distinctions are significant in assigning basic rights and duties; and 2) They need to define what counts as a "proper balance" between the competing claims to the advantages of social life. Rawls writes (5):

Men can agree to this description of just institutions since the notions of an arbitrary distinction and of a proper balance, which are included in the concept of justice, are left open for each to interpret according to the principles of justice he accepts. These principles single out which similarities and differences among persons are relevant in determining rights and duties and they specify which division of advantages is appropriate.

II

So, then, how are we to decide which particular conception of institutional justice is right? Here Rawls seeks to utilize an intellectual crutch to help us think about the decision. He proposes that we imagine ourselves as people at a hypothetical negotiating table at the beginning of a society who are trying to determine what principles should govern the choice of institutions in the society. We are to imagine that we are all destined to be born into whatever social system is put into place on the basis of our decision, but we are deprived of certain pieces of information about who we will become. Rawls writes (11):

Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

But why should we think that the results of this thought experiment will be relevant? Who cares what people in such a ridiculous set of circumstances would think? And won't the conception of justice that we choose in such a situation simply reflect the choice of what information we were allowed to consider?

Rawls is quick to clarify. He acknowledges that clearly, the features of the choice situation are no small matter; in fact, the design of the "original position" is a critical part of the choice of the appropriate principles of justice. He writes (14):

...justice as fairness [the name of Rawls' theory], like other contract views, consists of two parts: (1) an interpretation of the initial situation and of the problem of choice posed there, and (2) a set of principles which, it is argued, would be agreed to.

The design of the initial position, he contends, is meant to help us abstract away the things that we think are morally irrelevant in choosing an appropriate conception of justice. We don't know who we're going to be when we're in the original position, or what we're going to value, because those sorts of things aren't supposed to matter in thinking about justice. Rawls explains (16-17):

One should not be misled...by the somewhat unusual conditions which characterize the original position. The idea here is simply to make vivid to ourselves the restrictions that it seems reasonable to impose on arguments for principles of justice, and therefore on these principles themselves. Thus it seems reasonable and generally acceptable that no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged by natural fortune or social circumstances in the choice of principles. It also seems widely agreed that it should be impossible to tailor principles to the circumstances of one's own case. We should insure further that particular inclinations and aspirations, and persons' conceptions of their good do not affect the principles adopted.

So, then, the way we are supposed to think about the original position is to first deprive all the people at the table of the information that we think is irrelevant to making their choice. We are then supposed to ask what kind of decision they would make.

III

Now, Rawls insists that we add a further condition: the people at the table in the initial situation are completely self-interested. He writes (12):

One feature of justice as fairness is to think of the parties in the initial situation as rational and mutually disinterested. This does not mean that the parties are egoists, that is, individuals with only certain kinds if interests, say in wealth, prestige, and domination. But they are conceived as not taking an interest in one another's interests.

Now, it's not clear to me exactly what Rawls means by this. Two possibilities come to mind: 1) People in the initial situation should not care about the other people in the situation; their focus should be entirely on the people who will be born into the social system that will be produced by their decision, each of whom they have a chance of coming to be; and 2) People in the initial situation should focus only on the self-regarding interests of the people who will be born into the social system that will be produced by their decision.

It seems to me that (1) is reasonably plausible. The initial position is just a thought experiment, and so the interests of the imaginary people in the initial position are irrelevant. So if Rawls means (1), then that's fine. But if Rawls means (2), then I can only ask...well...why? It seems like Rawls is going to talk about it later (he notes section 25, entitled "The Rationality of the Parties"), so I'll hold off on passing final judgment. But it does seem rather curious that we would want to ignore any interest that people have in the fellow members of their societies in thinking about what kind of society they would want to live in. For the time being, I'm just going to assume he means (1) until I see any indication otherwise.

IV

Here's something puzzling to me:

As we saw, the initial position is supposed to help us choose a conception of justice by abstracting away all of the irrelevant things we might otherwise consider in trying to make the choice. And remember, the conception of justice that we choose is supposed to do two things: 1) Assign basic rights and duties; and 2) Define what distribution of social advantages is appropriate. Is it really going to be the case that the relevant considerations for choosing the principles for (1) are going to be the same as the relevant considerations for choosing the principles for (2)? Are they at least not necessarily the same?

Here's why I ask:

It seems to me that when we think about assigning basic rights and duties, we think that there are very few distinctions between people that are really relevant. And Rawls seems to capture this intuition in all of the considerations he abstracts out of the initial situation. We don't think that rights or duties should depend on personal identity, social circumstance, personal interests, or our own conceptions of the good. These things aren't supposed to matter. And for assigning basic rights and duties, it seems like we would want to rule that these things are irrelevant.

But in talking about how the advantages of social cooperation are distributed, it's not entirely clear that these same considerations are irrelevant. Imagine that Mark, Rita, and Beatrice are the only three people in their society, and they all live as subsistence farmers. They honor the boundaries of their respective plots, and the third party is always relied on to settle disputes. They are generally pretty happy with their peaceful coexistence. One day, Beatrice invents a new game and sets to work in her scant spare time producing the equipment to play it. She then insists that Mark and Rita pay her a small bit of what they produce if they want to play the game. They happily oblige, and inequality is born. In this illustration, it's clear that we have a situation where everyone is being made better off by their social arrangement; Mark and Rita gain because they get to play a game that they enjoy, and Beatrice gains because she gets to enjoy their company as well as the payment they provide.

But now imagine that we turn to the question of whether everyone is getting an appropriate share, and we use Rawls' tool. We think of Mark, Rita, and Beatrice all at the beginning of their society, trying to decide what rules to adopt for distributing the advantages of social cooperation. Is it really true that the personal identity of these three is irrelevant for thinking about who should get what? Should we expect Beatrice to agree that the appropriate way to settle the issue is to pretend that all three of them had an equal chance to be her, and that she could just as easily be the one paying? I at least don't think it's obvious that Beatrice should be willing to grant this.

And even if Beatrice should grant this, is it really for the same reasons that she ought to grant the irrelevance of personal identity in assigning basic rights and duties? It just seems to me that if the considerations that are relevant in choosing each set of principles are going to line up, it's going to be a coincidence. But maybe Rawls defends this way of doing things later; we'll have to see. Maybe I've already missed something! If anyone's actually reading this post, do you know why Rawls structures things this way?

V

Something else that has me confused:

How does the original position contribute anything to the process of assigning basic rights and duties? Rawls tells us that our conception of justice is supposed to "single out which similarities and differences among persons are relevant in determining rights and duties" (5). And in designing the thought experiment that is supposed to help us decide how to do this, we are supposed to abstract away "those aspects of the social world that seem arbitrary from a moral point of view" (14). It seems to me that if we can design the original position, then we must already know "which similarities and differences among persons are relevant in determining rights and duties." So what are we gaining through the thought experiment?

VI

My notebook is riddled with nitpicks, reservations, and qualms about this whole thing, and I'm sure I could go on all night -- I'm equally sure most of my objections would be dumb. So I think that for now, I'm happy to leave it at this. I've at least gotten a post up about the book, which has actually been more difficult than you might imagine (this is the fourth try, if my memory serves me correctly). Believe me, there will be more.

Assorted Responses to Callahan on Value Theory

2009-05-21T16:20:00.001-04:00

I

In the comments section of my post replying to some of his earlier points, Gene Callahan advanced a number of counterarguments that I think are deserving of a response. Because Gene's comments are separate responses to specific points I made, this reply will itself be a little disjointed. Rather than introduce the points by way of introduction, I will simply direct the reader to Gene's post to get a feel for what issues he raised; this post will respond to several of them in turn.

II

The first point Gene makes is that economists, acting within their capacities as economists, shouldn't have anything to say about value theory. He writes:

For economics, it is sufficient to to posit that, whatever the nature of value in a metaphysical or ontological view, market prices are determined by what economic actors *think* things are worth. To understand how a price for some good emerges from the market process, it makes no difference whether or not there is any objective yardstick by which value judgments may be measured as better or worse.

He continues:

...economists "should" be concerned with how actors' actual evaluations bring about market prices. There is no reason for an economist qua economist to concern herself with the ontological character of value.

Look at it this way – there is no need for a chemist to question what matter “really” is – it just does combine in such and such ways, whatever it is.

I have no interest in arguing about this point; I don't care if economists want to be interested in value theory qua economists or qua something else. In passing, I will say that many of the most important figures in the history of value theory have been economists, and many economic doctrines have been severely hampered in both the past and present by their lack of a proper understanding of the nature of value (for one obvious and important example: Marxian economics). But it will suffice to point out that this entire argument was brought about by me saying:

...it seems to me that this way of thinking is not entirely correct, in much the same way and for much the same reasons as the "realist" theories of value in economics were both ubiquitous, unsurprising, and false.

If what Gene wants is for me to recant the inclusion of realist theories of value under the heading of "economics," then fine. It is done. I repose:

...it seems to me that this way of thinking is not entirely correct, in much the same way and for much the same reasons as the "realist" theories of value in value theory were both ubiquitous, unsurprising, and false.

Hopefully that will dissolve the problem.

III

Gene's next point is built on the idea that in the past, scientists postulated the existence of many entities or objects (i.e., phlogiston, caloric, ether) which we now hold to have represented mistaken understandings of the phenomena being investigated. Surely, Gene points out, this shouldn't lead us to reject realist theories of science, which claim that the objects we are investigating really do exist (though perhaps we might reject realism for other reasons). He then tries to draw an analogy between this intuitive notion and the idea that pluralism about values is evidence in favor of anti-realism.

To put Gene's point another way: In the past, scientists claimed that certain things exist, and we now no longer think that those things ever existed. This should not, however, lead us to believe that nothing exists and that our own ideas about what exists are necessarily mistaken. In the same way, people in the past have held certain beliefs about what is valuable, and we hold different beliefs. And in the same way, this should not lead us to believe that nothing is valuable and that our own ideas about what is valuable are necessarily mistaken.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that scientific realists hold the belief that there are mind-independent objects that produce the kinds of phenomena we investigate in the natural sciences, where as moral realists do not (or at least, hopefully do not) believe that there are mind-independent moral truths that we are seeking to "measure" and "discover" through our "moral senses" in the realm of ethics. It is simply the nature of value that it is nothing more than a mental phenomenon, and we have what I take to be compelling empirical evidence that different people's minds work in different ways (even if only slightly so) in evaluating objects. If this is true -- if we know that different people's minds evaluate the same objects differently as a simple matter of the way that they work, and not because some are "faulty" and others "sound" -- and if it is also true that there is nothing to value besides these evaluations, then the objectivist and realist theories of value simply cannot stand.

The reason that this doesn't apply to the natural sciences is that we do think that there is something to empirical phenomena besides the mental states we directly experience. We think that there are mind-independent objects out there that produce these experiences. If we didn't believe this -- if we believed that empirical phenomena were just in our heads -- it wouldn't make sense to be scientific realists. And unless Gene wants to defend the idea that value is an existential property of an object, or the idea that -- contrary to my argument here -- everyone's mind really does work the same way in attributing value, then I simply don't see how either objectivism or realism can possibly work.

IV

Gene's next point is an objection to Mises' argument that it is vain to attempt to argue about ultimate ends. Mises contended that there is no argument you can possibly offer against the value of an ultimate end, and Gene noted:

Isn't this obviously falsified by our everyday experience? Don't we regularly witness discussions about "ultimate values" in which one party succeeds in convincing the other that his initial value judgment was wrong? On a grander scale, doesn't, say, the triumph of Christianity over pagan values or the spread of Buddhism in Asia also demonstrate that one can successfully argue about 'ultimate judgments'?

I've been reading Rawls lately, and here I am reminded of his notion of "reflective equilibrium." In A Theory of Justice, Rawls uses the concept of reflective equilibrium in talking about the design of the thought experiment involving a hypothetical "original position," where people are to imagine themselves having to decide on the principles by which basic rights and duties will be assigned and by which the advantages of social cooperation will be distributed. In the original position, we are supposed to imagine ourselves behind a "veil of ignorance," where we are deprived of certain knowledge, and the knowledge of which we are to be deprived is supposed to be determined by what we think should be irrelevant in determining the principles that we are to choose. Rawls says that we take it for granted that personal identity, social circumstances, etc., should not be taken as relevant in choosing a principle of justice, and so we should therefore imagine ourselves in the original position as not knowing who we will end up being, or in what social circumstances we will find ourselves, etc. In the context of that discussion, Rawls writes (18):

In searching for the most favored description of this situation [the original position] we work from both ends. We begin by describing it so that it represents generally shared and preferably weak conditions. We then see if these conditions are strong enough to yield a significant set of principles. If not, we look for further premises equally reasonable. But if so, and these principles match our considered convictions of justice, then so far well and good. But presumably there will be discrepancies. In this case we have a choice. We can either modify the account of the initial situation or we can revise our existing judgments, for even the judgments we take provisionally as fixed points are liable to revision. By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted. This state of affairs I refer to as reflective equilibrium. It is an equilibrium because at last our principles and judgments coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation. At the moment everything is in order. But this equilibrium is not necessarily stable. It is liable to be upset by further examination of the conditions which should be imposed on the contractual situation and by particular cases which may lead us to revise our judgments.

In thinking about Rawls' point, consider the concept of the "reductio ad absurdum" in moral philosophy. In using this technique, we show that a principle, if followed consistently, leads us to conclusions that we find unacceptable. This, we take it, is evidence for rejecting the principle. But why? Why shouldn't we just accept the conclusion that we find unacceptable?

Rawls' point is that our judgments and principles can be revised from both sides. When our principles lead us to conclusions that we judge as extremely worrisome, we sometimes revise our principles so that they produce "better" judgments, and we sometimes revise our judgments -- we come to see that we are committed to things that we might have initially thought to be untrue. So it is that when we point out to the slave owner that he considers himself -- and all men -- to have rights, and that he has poor grounds for making the claim that his slaves are less human than the rights-bearing non-slaves, we force the slave owner to make a choice. He can reject the view that all people have rights, or he can reject the view that he is justified in keeping his slaves.

Mises' point is not that this sort of thing doesn't happen (or "can't" happen). His point is that there is no valid argument that will enable us to critique the principles in question so far as the holder of those principles is legitimately comfortable with the conclusions to which they lead. To use Rawls' language, Mises is saying that a person in reflective equilibrium will be satisfied with the principles that they have adopted (and have no reason to be unsatisfied!), and that it is possible for people to achieve different states of reflective equilibrium. This, I think, is at least in principle true, and is probably most clearly true in light of the kinds of problems that Gaus points out about prioritization.

V

Gene moves on to note that even if there is no definite knowledge of the true nature of eudaimonia -- the Aristotelian conception of an individual's ultimate good -- it would clearly not be irrelevant whether or not people are correct in their beliefs or quests towards it. He writes:

If I admit that there is no widespread agreement amongst scientists as to whether or not the universe will expand indefinitely, reach a stable sate, or begin to contract at some point, does that render it 'irrelevant' as to whether one of those views is objectively true? Should the scientist convinced of the first view just give up, shrug, and say, "Well, I guess those other views are just as good as mine!"

Gene's point seems to be based on the idea that if there is no way to objectively say what is best, then everything is just as good as everything else. But this seems clearly false. For one thing, people's views could be inconsistent. These views would clearly be wrong, even if we couldn't say that there was a single correct view. Also, going back to Rawls, we could note that some people's views commit them to conclusions that they would find unacceptable, so that if those people knew about those conclusions, they would want to reject their own views. That would also seem to count as a bad sort of view, even if there were no objectively right answer.

But if we were to find ourselves in a world where everyone was in reflective equilibrium, and no one was inconsistent or unaware of the full entailments of their views, but there was still pluralism that simply could not be resolved (by the nature of such a situation), then it wouldn't be relevant if (unbeknownst to them all) there were actually a truth about the matter that none of them could see. When I say that it's not relevant, I don't mean that the truth wouldn't be relevant if they knew it. I mean that since they don't and can't know it (again, but stipulation), it has no bearing on the situation.

Here's an illustration off the top of my head that will probably be open to a host of objections not relating to my point: Imagine that there's one group of people convinced that Blue God exists, and that what Blue God wants is for people to wear blue all the time; if they don't, Blue God will send them to Hell to suffer for eternity. And imagine that there's another group of people convinced that Red God exists, and that what Red God wants is for people to wear red all the time; if they don't, Red God will send them to Hell to suffer for eternity. Now, let's imagine that there's no good way for any of them to actually figure out whether it's Blue God or Red God who exists, but actually it's Red God. In this world, would it be constructive in any way for a member of either group to start calling all the members of the other group Heathens, or trying to convince them to convert? I don't think so. It may be true that both groups think that they're right and that the other group will be going to Hell to suffer for all eternity. And if any of these groups had any good reason for believing that their position was more plausible than the other group's position, then it would make sense to try to convince people. But they don't have any reason like that in support of their position (remember, we're comparing this to a world in which everyone is in reflective equilibrium).

Now, an obvious counterargument would be that actually, we can know the true nature of eudaimonia, and therefore it isn't irrelevant to get all worked up about it. Ultimately, I just don't think this is true, and I think that all the attempts I've seen at working towards such an understanding are clearly wanting (admittedly, though, I have not sat through many; most often, the fatal problem is that they fall victim to the kinds of concerns raised by Gaus -- they identify stuff that we all generally think is valuable, but they fail to give a compelling account of how we should weigh each value against other values). But if I'm wrong about this, then clearly I'd also be wrong about thinking that the concept is irrelevant. I'm okay with that. If there's an Aristotelian out there who would like to explain to me exactly the manner in which she proposes that we might go about determining what value system is objectively most appropriate for human beings, then I'm open to hearing about it, but until then, I'm just going to stick to the assumption that reflective equilibrium is as far as we're going to get, and that reasonable pluralism will continue to be the name of the game.

VI

Here's a quick one. Gene says:

If the procurement of an object *really* makes its acquirer better off, isn't that evidence that it *really* was valuable, rather than evidence for the contrary?

If by this Gene means, "If acquiring an object really did promote a value upheld by the aquirer, isn't that evidence that it *really* was an appropriate means for promoting that value," then yes. If, however, he means, "If acquiring an object really did promote a value upheld by the aquirer, isn't that evidence that the aquirer ought to have upheld that value," then clearly no. The value subjectivist is comfortable with this.

VII

Gene's final point is, again, that no experience is purely subjective. But this time he takes it in a different direction:

...every experience is intrinsically an experience *of* something, and that *something* must be, to some degree *objective*.

I take it to be objectively true that one directly experiences one's experiences, and therefore the phenomenal nature of one's experiences is directly accessible. But what does it mean for a phenomenal object to be "objective"? If I draw a picture of a dragon, it is a picture of a dragon, but what does it mean to say that the dragon is therefore "objective"? Are we saying that "the picture of the dragon" is objective -- that it exists? That seems okay -- and so too is it okay to suggest that we experience moral sentiments. But I don't see how moral sentiments entail the existence of moral truths (even though they are, in a sense, experiences "of" those moral truths) any more than a picture of a dragon entails the existence of a dragon (even though it is a picture "of" a dragon). This sounds like the "We can have a concept of God, so therefore God must exist" line of argument. But perhaps I misunderstand what Gene is trying to say...

VIII

In any case, I think that about does it. As I mentioned in my response to Roman yesterday, I'm going to be trying to shift my focus away from metaethics and onto Rawls where I think it belongs. But thanks go to Gene for his thoughtful comments, encouragement along the way, and enthusiasm about carrying on this discussion. It's really been a fantastic learning experience and a lot of fun as well. Of course, this doesn't mean that the conversation needs to end, and I'll do my best to track down any future posts on this subject on other blogs and post links to them here.

Priorities Call: A Response to Roman Pearah

2009-05-20T17:02:00.000-04:00

I

I got a copy of A Theory of Justice the other day, and it has wrenched my attention rather thoroughly away from the metaethical debate that's been going on here lately. I really hate to walk away from a conversation, especially one that is as fascinating as the one we've been having here. But as might be apparent, I've put a whole lot of time into thinking about this, and if I continue to engage the subject with as much vigor as is my style, I know that I will continue to spend my time on metaethics, at the cost of not devoting my full attention where it probably belongs: political philosophy. Accordingly, this will be my second-to-last super-long post on this subject (unless someone totally blows my mind; I also have to respond to Gene Callahan's latest comments...but that's it!).

Over at the Instead of a Blog unblog, Roman Pearah wrote a very interesting and thorough critique of my arguments, and it deserves a careful response. With the focus that I have accorded to Rawls over the last few days, though, I haven't gotten a chance to read or listen to the resources to which he linked in his post. Without having gotten through those materials, I can only respond to the passages he quoted at face value, and therefore I may miss something critical in the justification of his points. Accordingly, although I believe I can defend myself successfully against his critique, I will necessarily be vulnerable to the possibility that I have not properly understood the full force of his arguments.

Roman organizes his critique into two main parts, one addressed at Vichy and one at me. I will discuss only the points that are directly focused on my arguments, though his comments towards Vichy may be relevant to me as well. Within the part of Roman's post directed at me, there are five sections. In the first, Roman discusses the difficulties associated with interpreting moral claims as psychological statements, and suggests that this poses a difficulty for my position. In the second, he notes that my conception of value is built on a certain kind of rejection of the concept of intrinsic value, and proposes an alternative that he believes to open an avenue to ascriptions of intrinsic value without being vulnerable to the arguments that I used to arrive at my position. In the third section, Roman argues that my rejection of morality runs into trouble through begging the question in my characterization of the issue at hand. In the fourth section, my move from explanatory value subjectivism to normative value subjectivism is called into question. And finally, in the fifth section, Roman suggests that my account of a reasonable fictionalism sounds like indirect utilitiarianism, and that I might therefore be vulnerable to all of the criticisms that come along with that view.

I will address each of these points in turn, with one exception. In my last post, I discussed the subjectivity of value at length in a response to Gene Callahan. The fourth section in Roman's critique contends that I have not offered a compelling reason why I accept normative value subjectivism. Since Roman wrote his post before I finished that reply to Gene, and since I believe I substantiated my views in that reply (particularly in section III), I will not endeavor to restate that argument. The other parts of Roman's critique, however, will be addressed below.

II

In his first line of argumentation, Roman points out that there is an inherent problem with translating moral statements into statements about our psychology. He illustrates this problem with the following example (which I'm slightly altering to make it valid without a bunch of jumping through hoops):

1. Any person who kicks the baby acts wrongly.
2. Ludwig kicks the baby.
3. Therefore, Ludwig acts wrongly.

Clearly, statement (3) is logically entailed by statements (1) and (2). But now consider this second example (again, rewritten slightly for clarity):

1'. When I think about the abstract idea of someone kicking a baby, I feel like there's something wrong.
2'. Ludwig kicks the baby, and I see him do it.
3'. Therefore, I feel like there's something wrong.

We should be able to see that statement (3') does not follow from statements (1') and (2'). It simply is not the case that feelings are logically entailed by other feelings. It could be that we would expect that if I were the sort of person for whom (1') was true, and I were in the situation described by (2'), it might come to pass that I would feel like there was something wrong. But this is no longer the kind of logical relationship that we saw when we looked at statements (1), (2), and (3).

For this reason, Roman resists what he takes to be my assertion that moral claims can be properly translated to statements about psychological states. If (1) and (2) entail (3), and (1') and (2') do not entail (3'), then it simply cannot be true that (1), (2), and (3) can be properly translated to (1'), (2'), and (3'). Up to this point, I am in full agreement. The problem is, I didn't ever claim that they could be. What I claimed was that moral claims are false, and that they were projections of our attitudes onto reality.

To help illustrate this difference, let's start with (1'): "When I think about the abstract idea of someone kicking a baby, I feel like there's something wrong." For a normal person who believes that moral intuitions can tell us about morality, this is pretty much taken as clear evidence of claim (1): "Any person who kicks the baby acts wrongly." But this step is clearly not truth-preserving.

Remember, my argument for fictionalism is basically this:

a. (1) is not literally true.
b. A typical person comes to believe (1) because (1') is true of her and and she unconsciously projects her attitudes onto reality.
c. Because (1') is true of basically all typical people, and because it's very natural for typical people to project their attitudes onto reality, (1) can be a useful fiction.

Roman's argument is predicated on the idea that I want to defend the view outlined in (1), (2), and (3), when my entire position is predicated on the rejection of that view. Accordingly, it won't be a problem for me that (1), (2), and (3) don't translate to (1'), (2'), and (3'); if anything, that's the whole point!

III

Roman next moves on to call into question a distinction I draw between value theories that see value as arising from one's personal response to objects, and those seeing value as arising from the nature of the objects themselves, such that we simply come to "recognize" or "discover" their value. Roman offers a third alternative, which he characterizes as Wittgensteinian:

It simply seems incoherent to say that something called “money” could ever not be valuable as a means of exchange; that’s just what “money” means. Something that had all the characteristics of money except for value just wouldn’t be called “money”.

Roman's point can be illustrated in the moral realm with the idea of "murder": The definition of "murder" (in its verb form) is "to kill or slaughter inhumanly or barbarously." It is, one might notice, simply not possible for an act to be murder and for it to simultaneously not be morally objectionable. Morally permissible murder isn't murder at all; it's killing. And so, going back to the example Roman offered, money that is not valuable is arguably not money at all, but rather merely paper and disks of metal.

It seems to me that Roman is right, and to the extent that we accept the claim that "money" is a value-laden term, then it will need to be allowed that I spoke imprecisely. But although I hadn't thought about this alternative when writing my discussion of value theory, it's not because I have some problem with the concept; in the initial post in this discussion, I even cited a few lines by David Hume making roughly the same point:

When a man denominates another his enemy, his rival, his antagonist, his adversary, he is understood to speak the language of self-love, and to express sentiments, peculiar to himself, and arising from his particular circumstances and situation. But when he bestows on any man the epithets of vicious or odious or depraved, he then speaks another language, and expresses sentiments, in which he expects all his audience are to concur with him. He must here, therefore, depart from his private and particular situation, and must choose a point of view, common to him with others; he must move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string to which all mankind have an accord and symphony.

So I agree that there are value-laden terms, and that we cannot use these terms independently of the value statements they imply. But why is this important? It seems like what Roman's trying to do is to suggest that there are certain objects of which we cannot conceive without imputing moral judgment. This, I think, is a mistake. For every value-laden term available to us, I take it that there is a value-neutral term that describes the same object without the moral connotations. The person who does not value what other people call money can simply say, "I don't care for your paper and metal disks"; the moral nihilist can say, "There's nothing inherently wrong about killing."

The problem with this line of attack is that it passes the buck from "is X wrong?" to "are we justified in describing this object as being X?" It's true that if the thing is money, then it's valuable, but the value subjectivist will simply say that the thing's "money-character" is not an inherent quality; so too will the nihilist say that the thing's "murder-character" is not inherent to it. And within the fictionalistic paradigm I try to establish, we can see that saying that something "is" money functions as a useful fiction; so too does the claim that something "is" murder. All is still accounted for. Accordingly, it seems to me that this line of argumentation falls a little short of creating significant problems for my position.

IV

In Roman's next section, he suggests that I beg the question in rejecting morality by ruling out "the alternative that we all share the same ultimate end." This, he claims, would lead us to the idea that "Rather than a prudential should or a moral should, there is just should." There are two ways that I would want to dispute this line of argumentation.

First, Roman builds on Dr. Long's view that the sorts of ends that Isaiah Berlin would want to call "ultimate ends" would more appropriately be called "constitutive" components of a single ultimate good -- an idea that Long at least probably gets from Aristotle. But Long seems to think that the ideal constitution of one's ultimate good is something that can be determined through logical or conceptual analysis. And in this point, Roman is taking this a step further and saying that everyone's ultimate good might be the same. If Roman wants to seek out such an analytic truth about "The good of a human," then I say, good luck. I am not aware of any plausible analytic account of my ideal ultimate good, or of anyone else's, much less an account which demonstrates conclusively that everyone's ideal ultimate good is actually the same. And I am skeptical that there could ever be such an account; it seems to me that the telos of an object simply is not a matter of objective fact that is amenable to exploration and systematization, either analytically or otherwise. But to avoid igniting an argument on this point, I will propose that at least as a useful approximation of the state of our current understanding, it at least makes sense to be agnostic about the possibility that we can know the objective ideal ultimate end of a human being, and to agree that at least for now, we must treat the plurality of conceptions of the good as at least potentially irresolvable -- at least by us.

Second, even if there really were an objective account of the ideal good of a human, such that the constitutive goods to be pursued were a matter of scientific discourse, it would still be the case that the reason we should pursue these goods would be prudential, and not moral. As I said in my comments to Stan:

What is the difference, then, between the enlightened, egoistic moral nihilist and the moralistic humanist? In his essay, "Deception and Reasons to be Moral," Geoffrey Sayre-McCord notes (114):
People may have dispositions that give rise to moral behavior without being moral people. They might, for instance, be so carefully watched that temptation always gave way to fear of detection and punishment. We could certainly expect such people to behave morally; but they would be behaving morally by default, and not because they are moral. What sets the moral apart from the enlightened egoists is (at least in part) their willingness to act on considerations other than those of self-interest; unlike enlightened egoists, those who are moral constrain their pursuit of personal benefits on moral grounds.

To Sayre-McCord's fear of detection, we could add the value of future interactions, the personal pleasure received from the approval and trust of others, the sense of satisfaction that comes with having a "virtuous" character, and the personal displeasure that one might experience as a result of sensitivity to the harms inflicted on others by one's own actions. Each of these factors would be perfectly accessible to the moral nihilist, and provide reasons in themselves to act in much the same manner that morality would prescribe. But as Sayre-McCord points out, these are not moral reasons.

V

In the final section of Roman's critique, he expresses puzzlement over my claim that we have "good reasons" to accept fictionalism, and suggests that my account sounds a lot like the "indirect utilitarianism" proposed by Leland Yeager (which itself appears to just be a rule utilitarian view with a different name). I will not here get into all of the reasons why I find rule-utilitarianism to be a suspicious ethical view. Instead, I will focus only on what I take to be a very important difference between my argument for my fictionalist position and the kind of argument a rule utilitarian would offer in favor of adopting the same position.

According to a rule utilitarian, the appropriate method for deciding between alternative attitudes or rules is to inquire into the overall consequences of those attitudes or rules being adopted and to evaluate them in an aggregative way to determine which consequences are more desirable on the whole. On this account, the attitude or set of rules that would produce the best overall consequences (in terms of human well-being) is the one we should all adopt.

In defending my own position, I too suggested that the consequences of adopting alternative attitudes should be instrumental in informing our decision about whether to adopt them. So I can see why Roman might have made the connection between my view and rule utilitarianism. However, where the rule utilitarian is concerned with aggregate outcomes, I am only concerned with personal outcomes. The account of why I think fictionalism is an appropriate paradigm to adopt had nothing to do with what would happen to society if everyone adopted it; it had only to do with what would happen to the individual making the choice.

I certainly wouldn't want to rule out the idea that rule utilitarian considerations should also play a role in informing that decision; if I found out that my fictionalism would cause the downfall of society two years after the death of the person adopting it, I would think that to be somewhat relevant as well. But it's important to see that my argument for fictionalism was not based on those kinds of considerations; the point was that it would be personally beneficial for people to adopt the paradigm.

VI

So that about does it, I think. Hopefully this response has sufficiently answered the questions Roman posed and clarified my position for those who might have shared some of the same concerns. I thank Roman for his thoughtful comments, and hope he got as much out of formulating his questions as I did in answering them!

Check Out Roman Pearah's Critique of My Metaethical Views!

2009-05-17T23:09:00.002-04:00

[This post is part of The Morality Debate]

Over at the Instead of a Blog unblog, Roman Pearah wrote an incredibly kind critique of the arguments I've offered over the last week or so in defense of moral fictionalism. Roman's arguments are built on a collection of papers and lectures by Roderick Long, to which links are conveniently provided in the post. I've read through Roman's post, but want to hold off on responding until I've had a chance to read and digest Dr. Long's pieces and Roman's arguments in their light. In the mean time, I encourage everyone to check out Roman's critique as well as the rest of his blog. Roman is one of an unfortunately small group of truly intelligent, nice, and sophisticated thinkers in the world of philosophical blogging (or un-blogging as it may be in his case), and he deserves every bit of your attention.

Value Subjectivism Isn't A Mistake: A Reply to Callahan

2009-05-17T16:32:00.006-04:00

[This post is part of The Morality Debate]

I

In the comments section of a post over at the Crash Landing blog, I drew a parallel between moral nihilism and the subjective theory of value in economics:

It's my contention that the conclusion in question [moral realism] is a very natural one to believe, given the very human propensity to project evaluative attitudes onto objective reality. Accordingly, it's not surprising at all to me that most thinkers throughout history believed it. But it seems to me that this way of thinking is not entirely correct, in much the same way and for much the same reasons as the "realist" theories of value in economics were both ubiquitous, unsurprising, and false. Just like it's not the bread that is valuable, but rather I who values the bread, so I claim that it's not the act that is morally objectionable, but rather I who takes moral exception to the act. It seems to me that morality, as commonly conceived, is built on a framework of attributions of intrinsic value, and that these are literally false. This doesn't mean that the attributions capture nothing true -- surely when we say that money "is" valuable, we are saying something that makes a great deal of sense even though it is literally not true -- but I think it does mean that moral claims are, strictly speaking, false.

Gene responded:

Danny, you've made a mistake here. Economics can in no way show that 'realist' theories of value are false. How in the world could it possibly demonstrate this, since the question is philosophical? What Menger pointed out was that, for the purpose of economics, the question of the 'real value' of something does not arise -- the price is determined by what people think something is worth, whatever its 'real' worth may be. Menger explicitly acknowledged that the value someone places on something may be incorrect.

It was a terrible mistake on Mises' part to try and turn Menger's correct theory of economic value into a metaphysical doctrine about the 'purely subjective' nature of value. In fact, nothing whatsoever is or ever could be 'purely subjective' -- both subjective and objective are abstractions from any concrete experience, and neither can exist on its own.

Now, Gene makes several points in this comment, and I think each of them is worth discussing. As I understand them, Gene's contentions are:

Economics cannot demonstrate that realist theories of value are false because the truth or falsity of those theories is a philosophical matter.

Menger's view on the subjectivity of value was a methodological position; he believed that in fact, people could be wrong about the value they placed on objects.

Value cannot be purely subjective because it must have an objective component. Mises thought otherwise, and this was a mistake.

I will address each of these points in turn.

II

Economics cannot demonstrate that realist theories of value are false because the truth or falsity of those theories is a philosophical matter.

It's conceivable to me that Gene could mean either one of two things with this point:

The truth or falsity of realist theories of value is a matter that falls outside of the field of economics. Accordingly, economics has nothing to say about it.

The philosophical nature of value theory means that the truth or falsity of realist theories of value cannot be demonstrated.

If Gene meant the first thing, then I don't really want to go to battle over the point. I would hope that economists wouldn't want to say, "We're economists, not philosophers; value theory just isn't our thing," since...well...it should be. But if this is an issue, then I'll gladly take off my economist hat and put on my philosopher hat for the point of discussion. My philosopher hat is way more comfortable anyway.

If he meant the second thing, then I disagree, The value subjectivist is contending that realist theories of value commit a category error by claiming that objects can have intrinsic value. It should be possible, then, to demonstrate analytically whether this is the case.

III

Menger's view on the subjectivity of value was a methodological position; he believed that in fact, people could be wrong about the value they placed on objects.

In order to discuss this claim, it will be valuable to see what Menger himself had to say about this. Since my exposure to Menger's work is rather limited, I will base my discussion on what he has to say about this at the beginning of Principles of Economics, but I will be happy to be corrected if Menger changed his view or expanded on this discussion elsewhere.

Menger's theory of "goods-character" is built on four conditions (PoE 1.1):

A human need.

Such properties as render the thing capable of being brought into a causal connection with the satisfaction of this need.

Human knowledge of this causal connection.

Command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the need.

On the possibility that someone might be mistaken about an object's goods-character, Menger writes (ibid):

A special situation can be observed whenever things that are incapable of being placed in any kind of causal connection with the satisfaction of human needs are nevertheless treated by men as goods. This occurs (1) when attributes, and therefore capacities, are erroneously ascribed to things that do not really possess them, or (2) when non-existent human needs are mistakenly assumed to exist. In both cases we have to deal with things that do not, in reality, stand in the relationship already described as determining the goods-character of things, but do so only in the opinions of people. Among things of the first class are most cosmetics, all charms, the majority of medicines administered to the sick by peoples of early civilizations and by primitives even today, divining rods, love potions, etc. For all these things are incapable of actually satisfying the needs they are supposed to serve. Among things of the second class are medicines for diseases that do not actually exist, the implements, statues, buildings, etc., used by pagan people for the worship of idols, instruments of torture, and the like. Such things, therefore, as derive their goods-character merely from properties they are imagined to possess or from needs merely imagined by men may appropriately be called imaginary goods.

In order for Menger to truly be an objectivist about value, he would need to say that there is an objective truth about what it is that humans need. This would allow him to run through the entire value proposition without any reference to opinions -- the human need would be objective, the properties of the object that allow it to meet that need would be objective, the human awareness of those properties would be objective, and the command of the object sufficient to use it to satisfy the need would be objective.

But there is, I think, a good reason to be wary of this step (with apologies to the vulgar Aristotelians and, as is redundant to note, the Objectivists). As Isaiah Berlin pointed out in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (79-80):

There are many objective ends, ultimate values, some incompatible with others, pursued by different societies at various times, or by different groups in the same society by entire classes or churches or races, or by particular individuals within thm, any one of which may find itself subject to conflicting claims of uncombinable, yet equally ultimate and objective ends.

It is on the foundation of this basic idea that Mises writes, in Theory and History (1.3):

What the theorem of the subjectivity of valuation means is that there is no standard available which would enable us to reject any ultimate judgment of value as wrong, false, or erroneous in the way we can reject an existential proposition as manifestly false. It is vain to argue about ultimate judgments of value as we argue about the truth or falsity of an existential proposition.

Now, Mises takes this idea to a rather limited conclusion, noting that (ibid):

We may, for instance, try to show a Buddhist that to act in conformity with the teachings of his creed results in effects which we consider disastrous. But we are silenced if he replies that these effects are in his opinion lesser evils or no evils at all compared to what would result from nonobservance of his rules of conduct. His ideas about the supreme good, happiness, and eternal bliss are different from ours. He does not care for those values his critics are concerned with, and seeks for satisfaction in other things than they do.

But an even more important problem can arise even if people agree about what is of ultimate value. As Gerald Gaus writes in his essay, "Liberal Neutrality: A Compelling and Radical Principle" (22):

The crucial problem is the ranking of values...According to Milton Rokeach, a psychologist, Americans agree in affirming a set of thirty-six values; what they differ on is "the way they organize them to form value hierarchies or priorities." If so, our main disagreements about the good are not about what is of value, but the relative importance of values. After all, what is a ranking of values but a "conception of the good?"

He notes, for example, that "...even if everyone agrees that smoking causes cancer, rational people clearly do disagree about whether the pleasures are worth the risk of death" (ibid).

I take it that even if there is, unbeknownst to us, an objectively true account of the value system that humans ought to follow in order to achieve eudaimonia (which I sort of doubt), it is clearly not the case that we are currently at a point where we could say what it is with any degree of confidence that would enable us to plausibly claim that all dissenters are wrong. If this is true, then the objectivist conception of value is at best irrelevant and at worst completely false.

But there is a further problem for Gene in bringing in Menger's theory: Menger's characterization of goods-character is manifestly egoistic. This leaves no clear avenue for establishing attributions of intrinsic value which do not make reference to an object's capacity for satisfying some need of the valuer. Even if we take a valuer's needs in the broadest possible sense, this view is completely compatible with the moral nihilist's view, and incompatible with the moralist's understanding of moral values.

IV

Value cannot be purely subjective because it must have an objective component. Mises thought otherwise, and this was a mistake.

Here it will be important to understand what the value subjectivist means when she claims that value is subjective. Clearly, the things that we value are objects, and we take the nature of at least some of these objects to be a matter of objective fact. The subjectivist would be stupid to deny this. She would similarly be stupid to deny that the capacity for certain objects to be brought into causal connection with the production of certain consequences and outcomes is a matter of objective fact, or at least of empirical discourse.

What the value subjectivist is saying is that the attributes and capacities of an object are only valuable insofar as the ends which they promote are valuable. And further, that there is no truth (or at least no truth accessible to us) about what ultimate ends are the appropriate objects of value and how we should rank those ends relative to each other. The relevant "subjectivism" is based on the thesis of reasonable and potentially irresolvable pluralism about this issue -- the value of ultimate ends, on this view, will come down to subjective opinions, tastes, or biases (though this doesn't need to be a pejorative claim as the terms might connote).

Now, Mises actually went a step further and argued that valuing was a voluntary thing -- the product of action. In Theory and History, Mises writes that "Judgments of action are voluntaristic" and "Judgments of value are mental acts of the individual concerned" (1.1). And I think that in this regard, he was not correct (or at least not completely correct. The problem arises from his definition of "action," offered in Human Action (1.1):

Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.

If action inherently aims at ends, and the selection of ends is an action, then we get turtles all the way down. But one need not adopt Mises' conception of the voluntary nature of attributing value in order to reach the subjectivist's conclusion. One needs only acknowledge that there is no objective conception of the good that we can know, and therefore opinions about ultimate ends are all we have to work with.

Personally, I find this position to be extremely compelling. The ball's back in your court, Gene!

Check out Gene Callahan's Post on the Morality Debate!

2009-05-15T21:38:00.003-04:00

[This post is part of The Morality Debate]

Over at the Crash Landing blog, Gene Callahan added some thoughts of his own as part of the debate that's been going on around here for the last week or so; check it out! As of this writing, my response was under moderation, but by the time you read this you might be able to see it in the comments section of the post.

Why Fictionalism?: A Reply to Stan

2009-05-14T16:27:00.002-04:00

[This post is part of The Morality Debate]

If you haven't noticed, for the last few days this blog has basically been dominated by a debate about metaethics, the likes of which have never been seen before around these parts. It's been pretty fascinating, and I've learned a whole lot in the process; I definitely recommend checking it out -- I've labeled all the posts as "The Morality Debate." This post is a continuation of that discussion, and probably won't make sense if you haven't been following along. (Also, I should point out that this is my second posting today; the first is here)

An alternative perspective to my fictionalist view was offered in the comments section of the initial post in this discussion by a fellow named Stan. In this post, I will sketch out the idea suggested by Stan's comment, identify the core difference between that system and the one that I have been discussing, and then explain why I think that my view still makes sense even granting Stan's central point.

II

If I understood him correctly, Stan suggested that rather than fictionalistically adopting a literally false humanistic attitude, we should acknowledge that cooperativeness and trustworthiness are actually more effective strategic attitudes for securing one's own well-being than is an attitude of short-sighted maximization. This would help us to avoid the pitfalls of a vulgar nihilistic attitude so that we didn't end up ruining a whole lot of everything on account of our movement away from a moral attitude. In his book, Elements of Justice, David Schmidtz made an observation that seems clearly relevant here (171):

Unconstrained maximizers, by definition, optimally use any resources to which they have access, including their neighbors’ organs. To get good results in the real world, though, we need to be surrounded not by unconstrained maximizers but by people who respect rights, thereby enabling us to have a system of expectations and trust, which allows us together to transform our world into a world with greater potential (a world where delivery companies are willing to serve the hospital [because they don’t fear that their delivery men will be killed in order to harvest their organs for needy patients]). When we cannot count on others to treat us as rights-bearers with separate lives, we are living in a world of lesser potential.

Schmidtz continued (173):

When doctors embrace a prohibition against harvesting organs of healthy patients without consent, doctors give up opportunities to optimize – to hit the ceiling [of possible utility outcomes] – but patients gain opportunities to visit doctors safely. They gain a world with a higher ceiling. Such utility comes from doctors refusing even to ask whether murdering a patient would be optimal.

I think that this touches on something very important, and which Stan was focusing on: we can actually get better results if we adopt strategies that lead us away from approaching every situation with the goal of getting the best possible results. The momentary success of the "rational maximizer," in this view, is a Pyrrhic victory: by maximizing in the single instance, the agent destroys his opportunity for the greatest possible overall outcome. Along these lines, David Gauthier even went so far in his book, Morals by Agreement, as to try to establish a theory of morality based on this sort of thinking about rationality.

And indeed, this approach to game-theoretic thinking seems on its surface to rationalize a lot of our moral norms: we see that the anti-social, predatory behavior forbidden by our morals is not just "depraved" and "vile," but also irrational in a sense. And this makes us feel good about our norms -- we have good reason to uphold them independently of our moral views about the behaviors they prescribe. In seeking to understand why the moral nihilist will not go around stealing, raping, and killing people, one needs only to appreciate the force of this game-theoretic point: even if those actions might be best in a short-term sense, they would likely be disastrous to one's overall prospects for fulfillment and well-being. The sophisticated nihilist will point out that morality is inherently problematic, but the prescriptions of morality are quite often perfectly sensible, and so we shouldn't expect that things would change very drastically if we went along with a sufficiently nuanced nihilistic position instead of a distinctively moral view.

III

What is the difference, then, between the enlightened, egoistic moral nihilist and the moralistic humanist? In his essay, "Deception and Reasons to be Moral," Geoffrey Sayre-McCord notes (114):

People may have dispositions that give rise to moral behavior without being moral people. They might, for instance, be so carefully watched that temptation always gave way to fear of detection and punishment. We could certainly expect such people to behave morally; but they would be behaving morally by default, and not because they are moral. What sets the moral apart from the enlightened egoists is (at least in part) their willingness to act on considerations other than those of self-interest; unlike enlightened egoists, those who are moral constrain their pursuit of personal benefits on moral grounds.

To Sayre-McCord's fear of detection, we could add the value of future interactions, the personal pleasure received from the approval and trust of others, the sense of satisfaction that comes with having a "virtuous" character, and the personal displeasure that one might experience as a result of sensitivity to the harms inflicted on others by one's own actions. Each of these factors would be perfectly accessible to the moral nihilist, and provide reasons in themselves to act in much the same manner that morality would prescribe. But as Sayre-McCord points out, these are not moral reasons. Amartya Sen provides some insight into the shape of this distinction in his essay, "Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory" (326):

...we must distinguish between two separate concepts: (i) sympathy and (ii) commitment. The former corresponds to the case in which the concern for others directly affects one's own welfare. If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, it is a case of sympathy; if it does not make you feel personally worse off, but you think it is wrong and you are ready to do something to stop it, it is a case of commitment. I do not wish to claim that the words chosen have any great merit, but the distinction is, I think, important. It can be argued that behavior based on sympathy is in an important sense egoistic, for one is oneself pleased at others' pleasure and pained at others' pain, and the pursuit of one's own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action. It is action based on commitment rather than sympathy which would be non-egoistic in this sense.

It is, I take it, when people act out of commitment that they act in a manner that is distinctly moral. And as should be clear to anyone following this conversation, non-egoistic commitment is only comprehensible through a mindset which projects evaluative attitudes onto objects -- declaring them "intrinsically valuable" instead of merely "personally valued" -- and then disciplines one's own behavior to take account of those objects as a matter of normative integrity.

IV

The coherentist moral nihilist points out that these projections are worrisome and deceiving: there are no "intrinsically valuable" objects, and the idea that you should be non-egoistically "committed" to something that you value for reasons other than its reflection of your own personal desires is accordingly incomprehensible. A properly coherent view would refrain from projecting and seek to understand one's values as being matters of personal desire instead of some kind of mysterious "response to intrinsic value."

And within this mindset, we need to take Stan's point very seriously. It's not that our projections are completely baseless; there are a whole host of reasons we might offer for doing many or all of the same things as a nihilist that we might have done out of commitment while in a moralistic mindset. We could point out that we are drawn to virtue for aesthetic reasons. We could notice that we are better able to achieve our personal goals when we are cooperative, trustworthy, honest, and sensitive. We could recognize that our personal values and desires do not extend only to things that "make us feel good" or "give us a sense of well-being," but also include the range of values we would like to see pursued, advanced, and instantiated in the world. We could "be the change we want to see in the world" not because we ought to, but because it's the change we want to see in the world.

V

I get it. And no, it's not wrong.

But for me, I don't want to have to go through the hassle of correcting myself every time I project my values onto the world. I don't want to say, "Hey don't do that; that's wro- I mean, that fails to reflect the choice that would accord my personal values and the values that I think most people share, and I imagine that most people (myself included) would prefer to see it not happen; I suspect that if you came to truly understand the nature of your actions, you would feel the same way." I want to say, "Don't do that; that's wrong," and to have people basically get what I'm saying.

And aside from the simple ease of speaking and thinking this way, I also think it helps to avoid the risk of what I take to be a very serious mistake in reasoning: moving from the idea that something is not intrinsically valuable to the idea that there is no reason to value it. I think it's far too easy to jump from "There's nothing wrong with doing that" to "There's no reason that you shouldn't do that if you feel like it." And the latter view is characteristic of the vulgar, overly simplistic, and inherently flawed nihilistic viewpoint that comes to mind when most lay people think about moral nihilism.

I take it to be a natural feature of the way that my mind works that I project my values onto reality. I also take it to be a natural feature of the way that my mind works that it would require a bunch of extra effort to translate all of my projections into the more accurate subjective-value-statement forms that the coherentist moral nihilist demands. And I also think that if I tried to do this all the time, I could potentially end up confusing myself and doing a much worse job of promoting my own values than I would if I simply continued to project them onto the world and keep in the back of my mind that my projections were generating a paradigm that is literally false, but still basically in line with the truth. And that's what my fictionalist stance does. Hopefully that makes sense! (Yea, like I should really expect that now people will agree...ha!)

Inside a Fiction: Even More on Metaethics

2009-05-14T14:06:00.002-04:00

[This post is part of The Morality Debate]

I

In the comments section of my previous post, Roman Pearah directed some attention to a similar discussion on Charles Johnson's blog. He wrote:

...I'd like to direct everyone's attention to a similar discussion over at Rad Geek's blog. You can some comments left by Rad Geek and Roderick Long (both Greek-type coherentist virtue ethicists).

Just so any third parties reading this don't become confused, I should make it clear that my position doesn't fall easily within the bounds of coherentism -- it could probably be better called a sort of contextualism. This will be important for anyone trying to compare my ideas to Long's and Johnson's. In order to explain why, I'll first try to flesh out a few elements of my view a little more than I have in the previous installments in this discussion. I'll then identify what I think makes my view somewhat difficult to fit into a coherentist mold.

II

My view hinges on the idea that when we say "It's wrong for you to kick the baby," we think that it's wrong at least partly because of what happens to the baby, and not just because it reflects undesirable or ill-advised character traits in you, or because your life will actually end up worse, all things considered, if you kick the baby. The baby's pain, I take it, is seen as being the sort of thing that is bad (as opposed to just being something we find distasteful), and what's wrong with kicking the baby is that you wouldn't do it if you acknowledged the significance of what you would cause to happen to the baby if you went through with it.

This, I take it, is literally a projection of our evaluative attitudes towards the kicking of the baby (and its results) onto objective reality (as I argued in the comments section of the previous post). But because it's a projection, we think, "It's wrong to kick the baby," and not, "The idea of kicking the baby makes me feel like something's wrong." I contend that rather than trying to prevent ourselves from making these kinds of projections, which are intuitive, easy to work with, and make us feel good about ourselves and other people (as I argued in the initial post in this discussion), it makes more sense to maintain a fictionalistic mindset that continues to project evaluative attitudes onto reality while acknowledging that the claims generated by the projections are not literally true but rather reflections of our (subjective) evaluative attitudes.

III

As is the case with all fictionalist paradigms, though, there will be a universe of discourse involved. When we talk about morality within the fiction, we use language and terminology in certain ways that wouldn't make sense if we used them the same way outside of the fiction. Saying, for an example, that the baby's suffering is "morally objectionable" makes reference to a quality of the baby's suffering that doesn't literally exist. But within the fiction, we say that the baby's suffering is morally objectionable.

We might compare this manner of speaking to the way that we talk about certain goods as being "valuable" for much the same reasons, even though we acknowledge that value is subjective. The view that money "is" valuable involves a projection of one's own evaluative feelings about money onto the money itself. It is not literally true that the money is valuable, but it is nevertheless comprehensible to talk about money as "being" valuable, and in fact this is a useful fiction to have -- it seems to me that this is similarly true about the moral fiction. To the extent that we are able to reach some level of agreement (or at least some limits on the range of disagreement) about "moral facts," we can safely talk as if our evaluations are "impartial," and therefore effectively the same as "normal reactions to intrinsically valuable objects."

But this manner of speaking will only work within the fiction. Because our moral claims will not be literally true, they will be technically incompatible with our claims about some other things, like most notably, our value theory. The claim, "Capricious killing is bad," and the claim, "All value is subjective and there are no intrinsically valuable objects," are technically contradictory. Accordingly, we will need to be vigilant of the fact that "Capricious killing is bad" is only true in the context of the moral fiction, and not true outside of it, while "All value is subjective and there are no intrinsically valuable objects" is false within the fiction and true outside of it.

IV

Someone with a coherentist view of the world, if I understand it correctly, would be uncomfortable with this sort of thing. The coherentist would seemingly want to find a way to eliminate the use of the fiction in order to create a system of beliefs that is all-encompassing and internally consistent. Mutually incompatible statements like "Capricious killing is bad" and "All value is subjective and there are no intrinsically valuable objects" would, for the coherentist, demand some sort of redress. "Capricious killing is bad" would need to be rephrased or rejected, or else "All value is subjective and there are no intrinsically valuable objects" would have to go.

In doing this, the coherentist would need to reject all literally false statements that are inconsistent with the literally true statements that make up the rest of her beliefs. Since I have stipulated my fiction to be a fiction, this would seem to commit me to either throwing out my fiction or throwing out the demand that it is desirable to have a fully coherent, internally consistent, all-encompassing set of beliefs about the world. Coherentism, as I see it, works when I step out of the fiction, but seems to suggest that I should not step into it. And since I want to step into it, I must reject the idea that what's best is to have a completely coherent view of the world.

It should be reasonably clear, then, why I don't consider myself to be a particularly good coherentist. Instead, I'd rather call myself a contextualist: my view is based on the idea that it can make sense to adopt certain sets of mutually incompatible beliefs in different contexts, even though this will mean that my views technically lack coherence. Coherence can, of course, be regained at any point by setting aside the fiction and applying the non-moralistic paradigm to the moral realm. So my view does not run afoul of the very plausible coherentist claim that there's some problem with not being able to make consistent, coherent sense of things (it's not particularly clear to me what it would even mean to "make sense" if you couldn't do this). But insofar as the coherentist position contains a value judgment about the desirability of maintaining a coherent, internally consistent, all-encompassing set of beliefs about the world, I reject coherentism by rejecting the value judgment.

More on Metaethics: A Reply to Callahan

2009-05-12T12:19:00.005-04:00

[This post is part of The Morality Debate]

I

In the comment section of a previous post on moral nihilism and existentialistic fictionalism, Gene Callahan came to the defense of moral realism with a list of important moral theorists who have argued for his position:

See Pythagoras, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Isaiah, Anixamander, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Plotinus, Augustine, Avicenna, Aquinas, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Voegelin, et al. (2500 BCE - 1950 CE) "Why Moral Nihilism Is Booshit," The Journal of the Perennial Philosophy, Vol. α No. ω.

Ευγενοσ

I pointed out in response that a) many those thinkers held mutually incompatible positions, b) many of those thinkers defended morality on religious grounds which I don’t find reasonable to believe, c) those philosophers’ moral views are not necessarily consistent with Gene’s own libertarian views, and d) the argument as offered is technically fallacious. Gene responded:

An argument from authority is bad form only when the person you cite is not an authority in the area you cite him! But in any case, this wasn't an argument, it was a citation.

And, no, I really don't see that much disagreement between them. We even have a straight line of descent running Pythagoras-Socrates-Plato-Plotinus-Augustine that then rejoins the Aristotle-Avicenna branch with Aquinas.

It seems to me that continuing this debate in the form of short comments is not likely to lead anywhere. So let me try to sketch more clearly the problem I have in mind, cherry picking from the beginning of Gene’s list. I'll then offer some thoughts about my own view, and attempt to show why Gene's line of argumentation does not succeed in what it appears to set out to achieve.

II

I haven't had the opportunity to fully explore Laozi's moral thinking, but it's not clear to me what happens to the concept of ziran if you divorce it from the religious sense in which the Daodejing was advanced. It's surely different to say, "That action is inconsistent with the aim of integrating yourself properly into the natural flow of reality," than it is to say, "It would be morally wrong to fail to integrate yourself properly into the natural flow of reality." And without the religious imperative, it's not clear how we would get from the first to the second. It would seem to me like the best arguments for acting based on the first would be prudential, which would be consistent with moral nihilism.

I've similarly had limited exposure to Confucius' thought, but if I've understood correctly, he places a heavy emphasis on tradition, wisdom, and moral intuition as the sources of ethical norms. To the extent that these things are prudential to adopt and adhere to, the moral nihilist will have no problem. And again, I haven't heard a Confucian metaethical argument that would create real problems for moral nihilism.

Siddhartha's moral thought was, according to the traditions I find most interesting, explicitly fictionalistic. The idea wasn't that morality was important for itself, but rather that leading a peaceful, harmonious life would be useful in the quest to achieve satisfactoriness. This would be perfectly compatible with moral nihilism.

It's been a while since I read Isaiah (or that is, the parts of the book that were supposedly attributable to him), but I don't remember any substantive arguments for moral realism in there -- just a lot of arguments about what people ought to do based on God's law. The significant ethical point in the book, if I remember it correctly, was that God would not accept the praise of those who acted badly (that is, contrary to The Law), and that the mere fact of the covenant would not guarantee protection from God's punishment. Without the religious element, though, it's hard to see how you would get to the same moral conclusions.

Socrates' morality was a hybrid of virtue ethics (which, depending on how one conceives of virtue, can be consistent with moral nihilism) and religion. So far as we ought to do what's "morally right" because it's best for us, the nihilist is going to agree, pointing out that to call that morally right is a bit misleading. So far as we ought to do what's right because of what the Gods will do to our souls, that's just not going to win any arguments.

Plato's account of morality was built on an idea of moral forms which I don't take anyone to seriously accept as true anymore. Accordingly, I don't see why the nihilist would need any response besides, "But Plato was wrong."

Like Socrates' virtue ethical ideas, Aristotle's moral theory was completely compatible with moral nihilism, being based on individuals' pursuing the good life for their own sake. The nihilist would again want to say that the use of the term "moral" here would be a bit misleading.

III

I could go on, but hopefully the point is clear by now. Moral nihilism is not built on ignorance of past philosophy; it's built on disagreements with certain elements of some philosophers' thought, and built to incorporate other elements of those ideas. Surely the nihilist is not going to say that we ought to simply act according to our unconsidered caprice, or that we should go around killing people. You can still talk about living a good life and living peacefully with others without talking about distinctly moral reasons for doing those things.

The point is just that it's not clear what a plausible moral reason can be based on besides the identification of the implications of one's actions for something that one values. And if one values that thing, then it makes sense to act accordingly -- that has nothing to do with morality. Distinctly moral problems (as opposed to prudential problems) arise only when one tries to make the claim that someone ought to value something that they don't value. Since value is subjective, and since ultimately the universe is just a bunch of stuff in different configurations, it's going to be difficult to ground such an "ought" claim in something “objective” or “objectively true.” As Vichy might put it, all value is ultimately just bias for one sort of thing over another. And the idea that there can be no literal truth to the matter of what one “ought to value” is basically moral nihilism.

But that doesn’t rule out moral argumentation or the adoption of moral attitudes. As I argued, we can have good reason for adopting moral attitudes. And if we acknowledge that our values transform when we recognize certain connections between things, then arguing about values can make sense -- if I lead a supporter of slavery to understand just how much like him are the slaves, he may be led to value them in a way that would make him not want to see them treated without regard for their interests. So as far as moral theories are fictionalistic road maps that show us how our values will change in light of certain features of a situation, they can be perfectly consistent with moral nihilism. It’s only when moral theories try to argue that there is something objective or objectively true about our values (as opposed to their being “impartial” or “natural for humans to accept”) that they run into trouble.

Ultimately, our moral sentiments are rooted in our psychology. Again, moral nihilism does not involve the denial of the fact that we have moral sentiments, that our moral sentiments affect our values, and that there are definite patterns in the way that these sentiments work. It similarly doesn’t exclude the possibility that we might want to choose to adopt certain attitudes that roughly capture those patterns so as to avoid having to fight them. But it does assert that aside from people attributing value to certain things, and aside from the inherent capacity of certain objects to produce valuing reactions in normally functioning human beings, there is no sense in which we can say that they are valuable in themselves. And I think that that’s true.

So I guess my point is that if you want to dispute what I’ve said, it won’t do to say, “Well there were a lot of really smart people who didn’t think that way.” I know that, and I disagree with them. Accordingly, if you’re going to change my mind, you’ll either need to offer a particular argument that I have not considered, or engage what I think. Basically saying, “Go learn about the history of philosophy” is, I think, pretty unfair given my background. That’s not to say that I fully appreciate what everyone has ever said, or that I am not totally ignorant of critically important figures or ideas. I undoubtedly am. But I’ve spent a fair bit of time developing my own views, and I think they’ve at least reached a point where they warrant a response on their own terms.

Lighting Authoritarianism Is Hilarious

2009-05-11T10:43:00.007-04:00

It appears that the European Union is set to ban certain energy-inefficient light bulbs, "forcing consumers to buy more energy efficient alternatives." First to go will be conventional 100 and 60 watt pearl bulbs and frosted 25 and 40 watt bulbs; the rest of the inefficient bulbs will be "phased out" (i.e., prohibited by force of law) by 2012.

Do I care? No. But I did find one part of the article to be utterly brilliant. According to the owner of the British lighting chain Ryness, "We are seeing people coming in and bulk buying. People like frosted bulbs because they have a softer light." But according to a spokesman for The Lighting Association, a European Trade Association, "Consumers will realize in the end that the alternatives provide substantial savings and have equivalent light quality to incandescents." Sends chills down your spine, doesn't it?

For the uninitiated, the problem with the spokesman's statement is not that "They're regulating light bulbs! Communism is right around the corner!" The problem is that this guy has an opinion about the quality and value of these products that is very clearly not shared by a lot of people. And these people are apparently willing to spend a whole lot of extra money in order to have light bulbs that this guy finds to be equivalent to the cheaper ones. So could it be that the fluorescents have yet to prove their value to some people?

I personally use compact fluorescents in my home. They work just fine, and I'm very happy to save the money, energy, and space it would take to maintain a supply of incadescents that would match the life of the fluorescents. But the light bulbs are very much not the same. Fluorescents take time to heat up, they look funny, and they emit a decidedly different quality of light. Maybe I will "realize" that this wasn't true after I haven't seen an incandescent light bulb for a while, but while I still see the differences every day, it's pretty difficult to come to that "realization." Again, I don't mind the differences, but some people might. And if they're willing to actually pay money in order to not use fluorescents, then why on Earth would I want to forcibly stop them from doing so?

One possible answer might lie in the fact that the European Union is trying to limit CO2 emissions. Using energy inefficiently, then, is not just a waste of money -- it's a contribution to global climate change. I may be reading into this too far, but it seems to me that what's happening here is a proclamation that "The differences between fluorescent and incandescent bulbs are not important enough to justify allocating a portion of our CO2 budget to allowing consumers to use incandescents." But this is exactly the kind of mindset that market-based policies are designed to avoid! The whole point of a market-based policy is that you increase the price of the thing you want to avoid, and people cut back wherever it's the least uncomfortable for them to do so. The policy is specifically designed to make it so regulators don't have to decide where those cuts will take place; that's the problem with centrally coordinated programs!

According to the owner of Ryness, if you watch what people are doing, you will clearly see that switching from incandescent light bulbs to fluorescents is not the least uncomfortable thing to do. The fact that people are motivated to actually go to the store and buy massive quantities of light bulbs suggests that they are quite uncomfortable indeed with this switch, and are willing to significantly go out of their way to avoid it!

And so in conclusion, facepalm.

Adventures in Moral Nihilism and Existentialism

2009-05-08T00:12:00.006-04:00

[This post is part of The Morality Debate]

Update: See the comments section of this post for further discussion, and Gene Callahan's post on the ThinkMarkets blog for more.

I

So I've been having a sporadically ongoing argument with a friend of mine about the plausibility of morality, and I think I've gotten to the point now where I'm happy enough with my position to warrant saying something about it here. In order to understand the argument, though, you'll need some background about my friend. So first, I will offer that background, and then explain why I think Vichy's position is reasonable in light of that background. I will then turn to my own position and attempt to show how it can function even without rejecting Vichy's position.

II

Vichy has Asperger's syndrome, which manifests in her case in a number of ways, notable among which is an apparent incapacity for a certain range of feelings (whether this incapacity is rooted in emotion or some higher cognitive process is not clear). I am no expert in psychology -- especially moral psychology -- and so I haven't been able to understand the consequences of Vichy's condition with as much depth and clarity as I might like. But through speaking with her on a number of occasions I have uncovered two things which I take to be of extreme significance: first, that she is incapable of directly experiencing sensitivity to consequences that obtain for others, and second, that she is incapable of feeling indignation. In light of these two facts about Vichy, it may be unsurprising that she is not a humanist, and that she is a moral nihilist. But some clarification may be in order here in order to establish why I think these are perfectly reasonable positions for her to take.

Humanism is the view that individuals have some sort of intrinsic value such that they deserve to be treated according to certain minimal standards simply because of the kind of thing that they are. As many people have pointed out at least since Hume, it is simply impossible to derive from the objective nature of a human being a categorical normative claim of any sort, much less an entire moral system. And hopefully, it isn't necessary to attempt to demonstrate why the idea of mind- and moral agent-independent "objective moral facts about reality" should be rejected. So, then, the modern humanist needs some other way to establish the intrinsic worth of human beings which does not depend on trying to squeeze an "ought" from an "is."

III

It seems to me that the most obvious way to do this is to appeal to introspection -- to establish humanism through some claim of intuitive self-evidence. The shortest path to this conclusion is through the phenomenon of sensitivity to others. It is a natural human propensity to experience positive or negative feelings in response to perceiving or conceiving of certain consequences obtaining for other people: if I saw someone savagely beating a child, I would find myself awash in thoroughly terrible emotion -- I would long for the abuse to stop, or even to be somehow negated. And I would not attach these emotions to my personal aesthetic preferences, my perception that the beating was doing more overall harm than good, or any view that the abuser was making a poor decision, given the alternatives available to him. Rather, I would attach the emotions to what I perceived the child to be going through.

If I were to try to give proper credit to the way that I felt, it would not do to merely say that I would prefer the child not be beaten (though surely that would be true); I would naturally appeal to what was done to the child in order to point out what I perceived to be the true source of my distress. And insofar as my psychological disposition powerfully impelled me to believe that the child ought not to be savagely beaten, and insofar as I believed that other people shared my basic psychological disposition, it could be perfectly reasonable for me to think that other people should feel the same way. David Hume captured this sort of idea when, in Chapter 9 of An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, he wrote:

When a man denominates another his enemy, his rival, his antagonist, his adversary, he is understood to speak the language of self-love, and to express sentiments, peculiar to himself, and arising from his particular circumstances and situation. But when he bestows on any man the epithets of vicious or odious or depraved, he then speaks another language, and expresses sentiments, in which he expects all his audience are to concur with him. He must here, therefore, depart from his private and particular situation, and must choose a point of view, common to him with others; he must move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string to which all mankind have an accord and symphony.

If we think it true that some objects (in the grammatical sense) have the capacity to inspire these sorts of evaluative reactions across people, and that these reactions are rooted in what happens to other people, then it seems like we could find some basis for the view that we are all presuppositionally committed to the idea that there is something wrong with treating people in certain ways -- that people inherently deserve to be according some minimal amount of dignity. For someone to fail to behave this way would seem to demonstrate that they had taken "improper" account of what would happen to the child in deciding whether or not to go through with the beating, and that if they did, then they would be impelled to agree that the beating ought not to happen.

But this approach runs into serious problems when we acknowledge that some people may not feel these same kinds of impulsions. It is not literally true that there is something about what happens to the child that automatically impels all rational beings to feel like that shouldn't be happening. It is, rather, only a normal human reaction to our own capacity for sensitivity that makes us feel this way. My friend Vichy, as I mentioned earlier, lacks the capacity to have that sort of reaction. It will not, then, be coherent for us to argue that based on our psychology, she should feel a certain way about the child being beaten. She simply can't feel that way about the child. So while this approach may go some way in grounding a humanistic attitude for normally functioning humans, it will literally have no bearing on Vichy -- it simply can't.

IV

Another approach to grounding humanism is similarly grounded in our own psychology. Most people naturally think of themselves as having the sort of value required to sustain the humanistic view. This, I take it, is best illustrated by the entirely nature propensity for humans to feel indignation when others treat them with complete disregard for their interests. If someone randomly walks up to me and punches me in the face, I do not merely resent the pain that she has caused me or wonder if that was really the smartest thing for her to have done. I feel that she has treated me unfairly. As was the case in the example of the abused child, this feeling attaches to what happens to me, so that I end up thinking that the fault in the aggressor's action lies in the fact that she did not take "proper" account of what her actions would do to me in deciding whether or not to punch me.

If a person thinks of himself as having this sort of value, then the humanist needs only to point out that others are relevantly like him in order to establish her position. But once again, it should be clear that if someone doesn't feel this way about himself, then this approach will have no force. If someone's reaction to being punched in the face would truly be to merely resent the pain and to wonder about the wisdom of the other person's choice, then we will not be able to appeal to this reaction in order to ground any sort of normative view. And as I said before, Vichy is apparently incapable of feeling indignation. So again, this will make it impossible to ground a humanistic attitude this way for Vichy.

V

I find myself, therefore, out of bullets. I cannot offer Vichy any grounds for accepting humanism, and I do not find any other moral view plausible. Accordingly, I seem to reach the conclusion that for Vichy, anti-humanistic moral nihilism is not only a coherent position, but actually the only reasonable position for her to adopt. It surely isn't the case that there is objectively something about what happens to the child when beaten, or what happens to you when you are punched in the face, that makes it "improper" to take no account whatsoever of anything that does not happen to matter to Vichy for one reason or another. And there is no reason accessible to her that she should nevertheless believe that people are intrinsically valuable and that there are consequently such things as "morally improper" ways to account for people's interests.

What does this mean, then, for my own humanistic moralism? I seem to be committed to the view that it is literally false. But does that mean that I should be an anti-humanistic moral nihilist? I don't believe so. I will therefore offer an argument in defense of my moralistic humanism that could be appropriately classified as broadly existentialistic and fictionalistic.

It seems to me that the anti-humanistic moral nihilist position seems to entail a sort of egoism. If others have no intrinsic value, and there are no moral reasons for acting in any particular way, then the only thing left would seem to be to act for self-regarding reasons. I think it will be useful to think about this position as arguing that we should do whatever we think will allow us to live a life most in accordance with our own values, with no framework for evaluating the values we choose to pursue that are separate from our own value systems -- I don't know if that's a proper formulation, but hopefully it's close enough.

Where Vichy lacks a capacity for a certain range of emotions and reactions, I do not. I feel discomfort when others are treated without regard for their interests and I feel indignation when I am treated that way. If this is a natural way for my mind to work (and others' as well), then humanistic moralism will provide me with an excellent intuitive tool for knowing how these feelings are going to play out -- a sort of automatic navigation system. And because our reactive responses are attached to our conceptions of things -- my response to thinking about "a child being beaten" is different from my response to thinking about "me thinking from a humanistic moralist perspective about a child being beaten" -- I will only be able to use the humanistic moralist navigation system from within the humanistic moralist mindset.

If humanistic moralism is an effective tool in this sense, then it may be that I would live the better life if I adopted the humanistic moralist perspective. Further, it seems to me that there are other effects of adopting a humanistic moralist perspective that are quite desirable. One of the most valuable, I think, is the attitude of self-worth that comes along with it. It is quite easy to slip from "I have no worth" to "I am worthless," which is problematic for much the same reason as slipping from "The cup is empty" to "There is emptiness in that cup." It's no good to think of oneself as "worthless," and a great way to protect against feeling this way is to think of oneself as "having worth."

Another benefit of adopting the humanistic moralist perspective is the capacity to experience irrational feelings of attachment to people (i.e., in loving relationships and loyal friendships) that would be inaccessible to someone consistently and consciously adopting an egoistic mindset. Where conscious egoism would suggest the virtue of constant personal cost-benefit analysis, it seems to me that we can have better, happier, healthier relationships if we don't constantly evaluate things in this way, and if we instead allow ourselves to slip into a humanistic moralist mindset.

Also beneficial is the mindset which enables me to live in a world full of valuable individuals who are worthy of respect and love, rather than a world full of creatures who can do cool stuff. The same is true of the mindset which allows me to speak to "normal people" without having to translate back and forth between manners of speaking.

If these points are legitimate -- if there are considerable and potentially irreplacable benefits to being a humanistic moralist -- then it could be incompatible with the tenets of the anti-humanistic moral nihilist's egoism for me to adopt anti-humanistic moral nihilistic egoism. In other words, consciously adopting egoism personally would commit me to saying that "I ought to believe that I should do whatever is best for me, even if believing that I should do whatever is best for me would not be best for me." This, I think, would be clearly ridiculous. Accordingly, to the extent that I am capable of maintaining the humanistic moralist perspective, it might be reasonable for me to do so.

And luckily, I am quite capable of doing this. I am here reminded of something that Hume says in section VII of A Treatise of Human Nature:

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any farther.

And so, after laboring to show why anti-humanistic moral nihilism is a reasonable and compelling position for Vichy, I hope to have made it equally clear why I don't believe it to be a reasonable position for me to adopt for myself. Perhaps it will frustrate some people that I am choosing to adopt such blatant fictionalism, but I defy them to come up with any reason that I shouldn't which wouldn't immediately flip around into a reason that I should.

Beaten to the Punch

2009-05-07T19:14:00.002-04:00

Darn...it looks like my outreach project has already been done for me!

The only thing left is to spread the word!

Summer Plans...

2009-05-04T11:21:00.003-04:00

May 15th will be my last day as a cubicle jockey...maybe ever? I'll be at the IHS seminar on Liberty and Society from May 30-June 5, and I'll be at FEE's Applying Liberty seminar from July 6-10, their Young Scholars Colloquium from July 13-17, and their Advanced Austrian Economics seminar from August 3-8. I'm also going to Israel at the end of June for my dad's wedding, and I'm going to try to go to Madison for a week after Young Scholars in July. So that's a pretty busy summer, but there are some big gaps that are thus far unfilled. Accordingly, I'm thinking I should figure out how to make myself useful during that time.

So here's what I'm thinking:

I really don't like the way that the libertarian movement has digested the ideas of its luminaries and presented them to the public. I really don't like the way that a lack of nuance has become the mark of the "true libertarian," so that people who actually understand what they're talking about end up either having to say that they're "Liberals who are sympathetic with Libertarianism" or spending an obscene amount of their time explaining, "Well no, I don't believe that; my position is..."

I've said all this before on this blog here, here, here, here, and here (and probably other places, too). But since obviously no one really pays attention to what some kid blogger says, the impact of this proselytizing has been approximately zero.

Meanwhile, people actually watch this and come to believe that it is worth spreading:

That video has almost 150,000 views on YouTube and is available in 19 other languages. I can't make this stuff up.

This is, I think, an unfortunate state of affairs. Accordingly, my goal for this summer will be to produce a series of pamphlets and videos that actually do justice to libertarian ideas in their plausible forms. I acknowledge that this is an ambitious project, but I think it'll be a fun and interesting one. I certainly welcome offers to help out with any aspect of this, and I'll try to post more specific descriptions of what people can do as I get a better idea of what that would involve. For now, though, it's back to cubicle work for me!

Did I Mention How Excited I Am?

2009-04-30T00:02:00.002-04:00

I know I'm a little late in reading this, but still...I don't think I've ever been this eager to start something in my life! Check it out -- "Philosophy of Freedom: Creating a World-Class Center at the UA."

Collective Responsibility Progress Report: Part I (Methodological Individualism)

2009-04-26T12:40:00.000-04:00

I

So I've recently been thinking a lot about issues relating to collective responsibility, and it occurs to me that I haven't posted very much about the issues. Accordingly, I figured that it might be worthwhile to provide something of an overview of where my thinking has gone on this issue. In what follows (including subsequent parts), I will include citations that often come from Larry May's and Stacey Hoffman's edited collection, Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics; I will designate these with the letters "CR".

The first thing that will be necessary to deal with in any discussion of collective responsibility is methodological individualism -- the idea that all statements about collectives are in principle reducible to statements about the individuals who compose those collectives, and that if we wanted to be really precise (allowing, of course, for the idea that sometimes we don't), we would want to only use statements and terms that referred to individuals, and not groups. If methodological individualism is a plausible approach to thinking about the sorts of issues that raise questions about collective responsibility, then it would seem that talking about collective responsibility as being somehow separate from individual responsibility would be a mistake. Collective responsibility would be at best shorthand for certain (reducible) matters of individual responsibility, and at worst the fabrication of nonsensical (that is, non-reducible) attributions of responsibility to entities that don't really exist.

Accordingly, I will direct my attention towards this idea in this post, and leave discussing other issues for later posts. I will first address methodological individualism broadly, and then focus my discussion on the subject of moral responsibility. I will then address the idea of holding groups accountable for wrongs that cannot properly be distributed across the membership of the group. Finally, I will offer a few concluding thoughts about whether methodological individualism really makes sense in thinking about collective moral responsibility.

II

So what, then, of methodological individualism? Is it true that statements about collectives are really reducible to statements about the individuals who compose those collectives? I don't think so. In his essay, "Collective Responsibility," David E. Cooper writes (CR 37):

Very often the person who ascribes Responsibility is not willing or able to mention, explicitly, individuals. Nor, if he could, would his statements mentioning individuals be equivalent in meaning to his statement about the collective. This is because the identity of a collective does not consist in the identity of its membership. The local tennis club is the same club as it was last year, despite the fact that new members may have joined, and old ones departed. The expression 'the local tennis club' does not, except in rare circumstances, refer to a determinate set of individuals. So it is absurd to equate the meaning of a statement about a collective with the meaning of a statement about a number of individuals.

Cooper continues (CR 39):

When a person says 'My stamp collection is very old' he may well agree to the set of statements, 'stamp X is old; stamp Y is old; stamp Z is old…etc.'. Here we may say that the predicate used to describe to collective is 'divisible'; that is, it is applicable to the members of the collective taken singly. Contrast the above case, though, with the following; A person states that the stew is delicious, but he certainly does not think that any of the ingredients, taken singly, are delicious. The stew’s being delicious is, of course, the result of the ingredients having the qualities that they do; but not one of them need be delicious. Here we say that the predicate used to describe the collective is 'indivisible' over the field of its members.

I think that these observations are correct and fatal to the methodological individualist position. I also think that Cooper's identification of "indivisible predicates" is particularly important. Where there are "divisible" predicates, it seems to me as though we could follow the individualists in saying that to do so would bring about more precision. But it seems rather clear to me that there are instances where there are "indivisible" predicates (whether because of persistent collective identity that's independent of membership flux, or because of emergent phenomena that arise from components' interrelationships, or whatever), and that in these cases we must abandon the reductionist mindset and understand what we are looking at as a uniquely collective phenomenon.

III

It should here be noted, however, I am not in this post supposed to be discussing collectives in a completely broad sense -- I am discussing them in the context of ascribing moral responsibility. And while the reductionism of methodological individualism is not well suited for all discussions of collectives, it may be that reductionism makes sense when discussing issues of morality. In his essay, "Collective Responsibility" (yes, everything ever written on this subject is in the form of an essay entitled "Collective Responsibility"; get over it), Jan Narveson writes (180):

The question for morals is always and fundamentally cast in individual terms: what is this, that, or the other person to do? If we think that there are things which groups should do, those claims will say nothing to anyone unless there is some way of understanding that individuals, such as members of that group or persons affected by its behavior, have duties or rights or some other moral status in relation to it.

I think that this is an important point. Even if we want to somehow argue that collectives can bear moral responsibility for things as collectives, it ultimately won't matter at all unless we translate that claim into some notion about what the member individuals are responsible for. Narveson conveys this well when he writes (185):

...given irreducibility, you can infer no individual responsibility at all, whether equal or otherwise. If no individual did this thing, no individual is responsible for it...

IV

It may here be objected that just because collective responsibility may be non-distributive, that wouldn't mean that we couldn't hold the members accountable through some distribution of "blame." And I agree that as a practical matter, this may make sense. H.D. Lewis offers what I take to be a perfectly reasonable discussion of this issue in his essay, "Collective Responsibility" (yes, really) (CR 24):

Normally, the purpose served by the imposition of penalties require [sic] the penalties to be inflicted on persons presumed to have offended, and on no others. For if punishment were meted out without discrimination, its deterrent effect would be substantially lessened and, for the most part, reversed. For punishment would then have to be regarded as sheer injury or as "an act of God" unrelated to our own volitions, and, while thus little able to hinder crimes, it would often provoke them. But there are, however, exceptional cases where expediency requires proceedings to be taken against a group as if it were an individual entity. No account will then be taken of the guilt or innocence of individual members of the group. It is in this way that a teacher punishes a class of unruly children when he is not able to discover the real offenders, or when a meticulous apportionment of blame is not practicable. Such procedure may have effect in two ways, either by (a) directly deterring the main offenders or (b) by inducing the class to deal with them in ways not feasible for the teacher himself.

He continues (CR 24-25):

...as a device for the achievement of practical ends, we have sometimes to accept collective responsibility [in a distributed sense]. This is fully acknowledged in law, where a parent may in some respects be held to account for the conduct of children, or where a society or corporation may be proceeded against as a single entity or person. Extending our canvas still wider, we have the imposition of sanctions against a whole nation in the interest of international order, although it is plain that this involves quite as much suffering for the innocent as for the guilty, the former, in a case of this sort, being probably in a very great majority. Reparations and similar measures adopted against an aggressor among nations may also be mentioned here. Such measures may be needed both in the interest of immediate discipline, and as a part of political education, and they may provide means of redress to victims of aggression. But they will involve a great deal of suffering for person who could not, by any streak of imagination, be held accountable for the culpable acts of the nation, most obvious in the case of infants and babes unborn.

Obviously, some people will take moral exception to the idea of holding people accountable in this way. But the point that I'm trying to capture by quoting Lewis is that where we hold collectives responsible for non-distributive wrongs in a distributive way, we will be doing so for pragmatic reasons, and this will not reflect any appropriate distribution of the wrong in question.

V

So far, I have argued that methodological individualism is a flawed doctrine in light of the existence of "indivisible" predicates that are important for our ability to understand phenomena. I have suggested that in spite of this, moral responsibility must be conceived of as relating to individuals, even if for pragmatic reasons we sometimes hold groups accountable in ways that we aren't properly distributive to their members. But does that mean that when limiting ourselves to thinking about moral issues, methodological individualism is the right way to go?

I don't think so. It seems to me that even if morality applies to individuals, it doesn't follow that the things we talk about in moral discourse have to be stated only in terms of individuals and never in terms of groups. If in thinking about the moral actions of an individual, we must deal with a situation in which an emergent or collective phenomenon is morally relevant, then the methodological individualist approach would be fundamentally flawed.

To illustrate this point, consider this quotation from R.S. Downie's essay, (you guessed it!) "Collective Responsibility" (CR 50-51):

In the first place, the rules which constitute the collective have been created or accepted by the decisions of individuals, who therefore bear moral responsibility for their decisions. If a collective tends to produce actions with a characteristic moral quality this will be partly because the decisions of the individuals who created the collective are to be morally praised or blamed. (Compare, for example, the moral decisions of those who created the collective 'The Gestapo' with those who created 'Oxfam.') In the second place, whether or not the actions of a given collective tend to produce praiseworthy or blameworthy actions some individual person freely decided to become a member of that collective. The morality of 'role-acceptance' is, of course, complex—all sorts of pressures may force a person to join a certain collective—but we can still maintain that the decision to act as a member of a collective is basically an individual decision which carries moral responsibility with it. And a person can resign if he disagrees violently with the actions he must take as a member of the collective. Finally, a person can bring various moral qualities of his own to his actions as a member of the collective. Thus the collective 'The Home Office' has often been morally criticised for the behaviour of its Immigration Officials. This is because some of them are alleged to bring their actions as members of the collective undesirable moral qualities—rudeness and so on.

It may be that ultimately, we will always want to think about moral responsibility in terms of what individuals ought to do or refrain from doing. But it seems clear to me that it would be unwise to take this as support for the methodological individualist paradigm. In moral theorizing, we will need to be able to discuss collectives as well as individuals, and it will therefore be critical that we not hamstring ourselves by accepting the implausible restrictions of methodological individualism.

Rather Than Say This Myself...

2009-04-25T11:24:00.004-04:00

It's generally been my policy to avoid posting things on this blog that relate to my personal matters outside of the world of philosophy. And I'd like to keep things that way. But recently, I wrote a critique of Stefan Molyneux's book, Univerally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, which was met with a response that I can only call unbecoming of a group of people who claim to be interested in participating in philosophical discourse. Airing my personal grievances would be an uncomfortable use of this space, and so I will not do that. I will instead acknowledge the feelings of another person, YouTube user LibertyIsNotGiven (Eugene on Freedomain Radio), as discussed in his video, "Freedomain Radio - This Train is Bound for Bullshit" (the embedding feature on YouTube has been disabled for the video, so you'll need to click on the link to see it). I think that Eugene's comments should more than suffice to give you a basic idea of what I think about all of this.

Paul Krugman is Right About Something

2009-04-24T11:57:00.003-04:00

I think we sometimes get so caught up in our disagreements with people that we forget that they can sometimes have really valuable opinions. Paul Krugman is one person for whom that's sometimes true with me. I know that Krugman is an intelligent person, but sometimes it can be so difficult for me to get past my fundamental disagreements with him that I approach everything he says with the prejudice that he's going to be egregiously and unacceptably wrong. And that's not fair.

Yesterday, Krugman wrote a really good column. It had (almost) nothing to do with economics or the bailout -- it was about the need to hold the Bush administration accountable for the injustices that occurred under their leadership. Krugman said:

...there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. "This government does not torture people," declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

I agree. I agree completely and wholeheartedly. So for a moment, I just want to enjoy this moment of giving credit where credit is due.

Paul Krugman is absolutely right.

Don't You Wish It Could Really Be This Way?

2009-04-23T23:45:00.002-04:00

Earlier on the Wonkette blog, Ken Layne posted this piece of hilarious anti-libertarianism:

I'm sure that the majority of libertarians who watch the video will be vaguely offended, or even seriously offended, and will think that Layne is just an idiot who has bought into the propaganda of mainstream politics. "Clearly he doesn't understand libertarianism; he's just a statist parrot!" Yea, yea.

But I want to take a moment to offer an alternative perspective. I'll start with a pair of observations. First, Layne is advocating on behalf of secessionism. That's not to say that he thinks it's a good idea; he seems to think that it's a really stupid idea and that only really stupid people (like we friendly libertarians) would want to do it. But he does seem to think that if a group of people really wants to leave the larger group of which it is a part, and that there doesn't seem to be a basis for resolving the disagreement at the root of that desire, then it would be appropriate for the groups to part ways in peace (though perhaps not in friendship).

Second, he seems to be on board with the idea that if a group of people wants to organize themselves according to their own views about what would be best, then they should be free to do so. Of course, he's saying that as if he thinks that he knows better, but he's not suggesting that the people in question be prevented from following their own plans.

So I guess the point I'm making here is that even though Ken Layne apparently thinks libertarians are dumb, he's actually vaguely libertarian himself. He's just vaguely libertarian while apparently wanting to live in a society run by an enormous, bloated, overreaching bureaucratic monstrosity with its hands deep in other countries' business and a penchant for getting involved in citizens' lives far beyond the point that could be reasonably seen as necessary to ensure that social interrelationships can occur in a safe and equitable environment. And he apparently doesn't understand why anyone would think that his way is a dumb way to live. So be it.

If anything, it seems to me that this sort of thing represents a problem with the way that libertarians have gone around marketing their ideas. Instead of being a philosophy of mutual respect, self-determination, and decentralization, libertarianism has been sold as what basically amounts to "a more consistent conservatism." If people like Ken Layne can go through the hassle of producing an elaborate anti-libertarian screed that is based entirely on a fundamentally libertarian argument, it means that we've screwed up somewhere along the way. That's our argument. Let's make that clear.

This Blog to be Featured on LeftLibertarian.org!

2009-04-23T13:59:00.003-04:00

I'm very pleased to announce that this blog will henceforth be featured as part of the LeftLibertarian.org blog aggregator. I will choose to believe that this means that I've officially made it, and that a big truck of money is on its way to my doorstep. Of course, if it doesn't arrive, you can rest assured that I will demand a massive government-led investigation to get it back, and lobby for a taxpayer-funded bailout if the money isn't found.

My Apparently Vicious Work Covered on YouTube

2009-04-23T09:14:00.005-04:00

Maverick YouTube channel-haver ReIgNoFrAdNeSs ("Reign of Radness" for those who refuse to read Alternatingcapsese) has released a video entitled "UPB's Recent Testicalectomy" in a transparent attempt to have me labeled as a depraved murderer...of Stefan Molyneux's ethical theory. Thanks are due for the press! Here's the video:

And here's a link to the critique.

Happy Earth Day!

2009-04-22T10:22:00.009-04:00

From its inception, Earth Day has been a political event, designed to "raise awareness" about environmental issues and encourage us to be more responsible stewards of our planet. A lot of libertarians bristle at this sort of thing, and perhaps understandably so -- after all, most of the environmentalist rhetoric out there comes tied to demands for increasingly centralized "social" control of the natural resources we need to lead our lives. As many have pointed out, freedom in the absence of the freedom to make use of material goods is not freedom in any effective sense. And it is freedom that allows us to prosper and flourish, not simply existence in a rich natural environment. Jan Narveson put it well in his essay, "Collective Responsibility":

...the idea of collective ownership of the earth is, really, a myth, a dish of romantic political nonsense. And like almost all romantic myths when they are politicized, the results of taking it seriously are inevitably evil. Some general story of the Lockean stripe is all there is, because it is all there can be. Individual people pick fruit from individual trees, dig up particular patches of soil, kill particular deer, grow particular pigs, and the rest of it – up to and including inventing the digital computer and putting on productions of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs. That is how mankind is fed, and clothed, and entertained, because there is no other way. To "collectivize" agriculture is not, because it cannot be, to cause the plants to grow in some other way; it is, instead, to force people to work differently: to work under the direction of others who need pay no attention to the worker’s interests, and to disconnect those workers from the incentives and disincentives that have always impelled people to work. It is not surprising that it does not work very well, but it is important to appreciate what it is and that it cannot be what it appears to pretend to be.

But in this post, I want to briefly consider another side of the issue, which some libertarians seem to overlook in their antipathy towards collectivist environmentalist propaganda. Just as we need freedom in order to plan and lead our separate lives, and just as this freedom is essential to our wellbeing so that taking it away for the sake of the natural world would be a worrisome proposition, so too do we depend on the natural world to make our lives rich and worthwhile. If the freedom to use resources is essential for our effective liberty, it's because resources are such critical elements in the production of our material lives.

David Schmidtz writes, in his essay "On the Institution of Property":

Original appropriation diminishes the stock of what can be originally appropriated, at least in the case of land, but that is not the same thing as diminishing the stock of what can be owned. On the contrary, in taking control of resources and thereby removing those particular resources from the stock of goods that can be acquired by original appropriation, people typically generate massive increases in the stock of goods that can be acquired by trade. The lesson is that appropriation typically is not a zero-sum game. It normally is a positive sum game. As Locke himself stressed, it creates the possibility of mutual benefit on a massive scale. It creates the possibility of society as a cooperative venture.

And Dr. Schmidtz is absolutely right. But so too can we waste resources unnecessarily, and this impoverishes us all. The view that celebrates humanity's capacity to transform the natural environment in awe-inspiringly productive ways must be understood against the backdrop of an appreciation for the role that the environment plays in all of our lives. And it's that backdrop that seems to be missing from so many libertarians' worldviews. (Of course, I don't mean that Dr. Schmidtz is guilty of this, for obvious reasons.)

Another troubling phenomenon that I've observed is a seeming lack of appreciation from libertarians for the value of the natural environment itself as a beautiful and enriching thing in itself. This vulgar-Randian "I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline"-times-one hundred attitude is embodied in George Reisman's (I think incorrect) intepretation of Menger in his essay, "Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises":

The goods-character of natural resources, according to Menger, is created by man, when he discovers the properties they possess that render them capable of satisfying human needs and when he gains command over them sufficient to direct them to the satisfaction of human needs.

He continues:

...what nature has provided is matter and energy--matter in the form of all the chemical elements both known and as yet unknown, and energy, in all its various forms. I call this contribution of nature "the natural resources provided by nature.

Consider this in light of a different view from Aldo Leopold:

Only those able to see the pageant of evolution can be expected to value its theater, the wilderness, or its outstanding achievement, the grizzly. But if education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.

This, I think, is absolutely right. Our natural world is not just matter and energy; it is a beautiful and astonishing treasure that we must treat with the care that it deserves. And if libertarians forget this, then it's everyone's loss. So on this Earth Day, let's forget for a moment about the vulgar collectivism that so often comes from the environmentalist movement, and instead take the day to look around and appreciate the incredible gift that has been our birthright: the Earth and its natural environment, in all of its diversity and elegance. We can be libertarians and environmentalists at the same time -- and to be honest, I think we should be.

A Critique of Stefan Molyneux's Ethical Theory of Universally Preferable Behaviour

2009-04-20T13:12:00.012-04:00

So in case anyone (or everyone) has forgotten, in the early days of this blog I went through Stefan Molyneux's book, Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics. My goal was to figure out whether there was really anything to all the fuss that had been made about Stefan and his site, Freedomain Radio, but also to win a bet that I had made with Stefan about the claims that he made about the book. After wrestling with the project for a while, I concluded that Stefan's ideas were troublesome for a rather large number of reasons, and tossed out a rather slipshod overview of some of the things that were wrong with the book. By that time, Stefan had lost interest in continuing to speak with me about the subject, and I was sort of bored with the whole thing anyway, so I was mostly glad to just be done with it.

Recently, however, and for reasons that are not known to me, Stefan's ideas have re-entered the limelight. Perhaps most significant in my world has been Alex "Brainpolice" Strekal's recent involvement in a recorded debate with Stefan that was subsequently plastered all over the internet. But in any case, I thought it might finally be time to actually finish what I started in the form of a systematic critique of the book. So here's that effort.

I. Introduction

Stefan's project is an audacious undertaking. He describes his task as a battle against the "beast" of folk morality -- a view that he defines as "...the superstition that, without the tirades of parents, the bullying of gods or the guns of government, we cannot be both rational and good" (7) -- and contends that "Of course, if I have failed, I have at least failed spectacularly, which itself can be both edifying and entertaining!" (10). In this critique, it will become clear that I believe that Stefan has failed. But I am somewhat inclined to agree that his failure was rather spectacular.

In his book, Stefan boldly attempted to address a wide swath of philosophical disciplines, ranging from metaphysics to the philosophy of science to ethics -- all in less than 150 pages and without a single footnote. So it should surprise no one that he may have left a little bit to be desired in his handling of each subject. But because Stefan's discussion is so wide ranging, and because I don't have the time, energy, or interest to dissect Stefan's metaphysical or scientific views, I will limit my critique to Stefan's handling of ethics. After all, this book is supposed to be a rational proof of secular ethics, and if it fails at that, then the other problems with the book will be irrelevant.

In this analysis, I will rely on a certain interpretation of Stefan's approach in the book which suggests that there are actually at least two separate kinds of arguments that are being used. I proceed this way because there are elements of Stefan's approach that don't necessarily work together and which can be isolated into coherent and separate arguments. I will defend this interpretation with extensive reference to the text of the book, but there will nevertheless remain the possibility that I have misunderstood Stefan's intentions at some point along the way. So keep in mind that while I do think that my accounts of Stefan's arguments are accurate and that my critiques effectively demonstrate what is wrong with Stefan's arguments, it is still true that I am only attacking one interpretation of the text, and that interpretation may be wrong.

This critique will involve three steps. First, I will show that Stefan's terminological choices don't work, and that the first line of argumentation (which is built on this terminology) is non-functional. Second, I will show how Stefan's second line of argument works. And finally, I will explain what's wrong with this second line of argument.

II. Preferable...For What?

The first strain of Stefan's argument is the one that gives the book its title, and deals with the idea that certain behavior can be "universally preferable." The meaning of this term is likely not immediately clear, so it will be necessary to spell out what Stefan means by it.

[Added later: Some people have expressed frustration at the following paragraphs, calling them "nitpicky" as a way of dismissing them as unimportant. But what could be more important to a theory of universally preferable behavior than the definition of universally preferable behavior? In what follows, you will see that I think that the examples which Stefan uses to illustrate his definition contain some errors. These errors may seem small -- indeed, I think they are small -- but nevertheless, they are errors in illustrating the definition of the concept upon which the entire theory is based. I think that I would be doing a disservice to the reader if I simply allowed them to stand without explaining why the examples that Stefan uses are not examples of universally preferable behavior. So I hope that you will bear with me through a tiny bit of nitpicking, since at the other end will hopefully be a clearer understanding of what Stefan's theory looks like than is conveyed by his own examples.]

On page 30, Stefan writes:

When I speak of a universal preference, I am really defining what is objectively required, or necessary, assuming a particular goal. If I want to live, I do not have to like jazz, but I must eat. "Eating" remains a preference - I do not have to eat, in the same way that I have to obey gravity - but "eating" is a universal, objective, and binding requirement for staying alive, since it relies on biological facts that cannot be wished away.

It should be immediately clear that "eating" is not the best example, because you could stay alive by drinking smoothies, injecting yourself with nutrients intravenously, or whatever. But it shouldn't be too difficult to understand what Stefan means; here's another statement from the same page:

If I say that it is preferable for human beings to exercise and eat well...What I am saying is that if you want to be healthy, you should exercise and eat well.

Again this is potentially a bad example, but that's beside the point. What we need to get from this is that the word "preferable" means "required in order to achieve some end." We also need to acknowledge that the claim that something is preferable demands that we identify the end for which the preferable act is required. It isn't enough to simply say "it is preferable to eat"; we need to say, "it is preferable to eat because you want to live." And Stefan acknowledges this, writing:

Naturally, preferential behaviour can only be binding if the goal is desired.

The term "universally preferable behavior," then, could coherently be used in two senses. The first sense, which I will call the "weak" sense, would be to identify something that is required for all people to achieve some end, without claiming that it's actually going to be preferable for everyone. So, for example, you could say that "not killing yourself" is universally preferable for "living," in the sense that anyone who wants to live must not kill herself. But you could allow the possibility that some people wouldn't want to live, and so it wouldn't be preferable for them to not kill themselves. The second sense, which I will call the "strong" sense, would be to identify something that is required for all people to achieve some end that they all actually want to achieve. So if it were true that everyone on Earth actually did want to live, you could say that it is universally preferable that they all not kill themselves, because that would be incompatible with their ends.

So let's see this in action. On page 34, Stefan says:

...if a man wants to cure an infection, he should take antibiotics rather than perform an Aztec rain dance. The preference for taking antibiotics rather than doing a rain dance is universal, since dancing cannot cure infections. Thus, although there is the occasional madman who will try to cure himself through dancing, it is still universally preferable that if a man wants to cure himself, he must take antibiotics.

Here (again in spite of the bad example -- there might be other ways to cure an infection) we can directly see the weak sense of the term being used. It's not necessarily true that everyone actually wants to cure their infections, but if they did, then Stefan is identifying what would be required for them to achieve their ends: taking antibiotics. I hope that this will be sufficient for establishing that this is how Stefan is using the term; if not, I can find some other examples.

But now it's time for the first bit of that spectacular and entertaining failure that I promised at the beginning. On page 33, Stefan writes:

When I say that some preferences may be objective, I do not mean that all people follow these preferences at all times. If I were to argue that breathing is an objective preference, I could be easily countered by the example of those who commit suicide by hanging themselves.

What do we make of this? Let's try running it through our two senses of the term "universally preferable." According to the strong sense, arguing that breathing is objectively preferable would mean that breathing is required for some end that everyone shares, and since he gives suicide as the example, we might presume that the end in question is something like "living without the aid of life-support machinery." But I would imagine that someone who commits suicide probably does not want to live (with or without life-support machinery), and so it simply wouldn't be true that breathing is universally preferable in the strong sense.

In the weak sense of the term, we can say that breathing is universally preferable for living without life-support, since anyone wanting to do that would need to breathe. And since we're only using the weak sense of the term, we acknowledge that if the suicidal person doesn't want to live, it won't be necessary for her to breathe: it's only preferable to breathe in order to achieve the end in question, and she doesn't want to achieve it. So this makes sense.

But in the next paragraph, Stefan writes:

Thus when I talk about universal preferences, I am talking about what people should prefer, not what they always do prefer.

Now if we were using the strong sense of the term "universally preferable," this would make sense: because everyone shares the end in question, we can say that everyone should do what is universally preferable. But in this example, we're forced to use the weak sense, since it's not the case that everyone shares the end in question. Accordingly, it simply isn't true that by this line of thinking, we would arrive at the conclusion that the suicidal person should breathe. In fact, the suicidal person's goal is to suffocate: for people with that end, it is actually universally preferable (in the weak sense) not to breathe.

Okay; back to business. Now that we have an understanding of what Stefan means by "universally preferable," we can turn to his theory of ethics. First, we need to get a bit of confusion out of the way. On page 30, Stefan writes:

Ethics as a discipline can be defined as any theory regarding preferable human behaviour that is universal, objective, consistent - and binding.

But later in the book, Stefan uses a much more restricted definition of the discipline of ethics. On page 48, for example, he writes:

In general, we will use the term aesthetics to refer to non-enforceable preferences - universal or personal - while ethics or morality will refer to enforceable preferences.

And he continues:

Ethics is the subset of UPB which deals with inflicted behaviour, or the use of violence.

Throughout the book, Stefan uses this second, more restricted sense, and not the first sense, to talk about morality. For example, on page 76 he writes, "...morality is defined as an enforceable subset of UPB...," and in Appendix A on page 125, he writes, "The subset of UPB that examines enforceable behaviour is called "morality." He explains this shift on page 48 by explaining that "Although we first focused on UPB in the realm of ethics, UPB can now be seen as an "umbrella term"..." Fair enough; it just seems like it should be explicitly acknowledged here.

So, then, how would we use the concept of universally preferable behavior to think about "inflicted" or violent behaviors? To use the strong sense of "universally preferable behavior," we'd need to think about a kind of situation where all people need to use violence in order to achieve their ends. But given the vast diversity of ends, it would seem sort of odd to suggest that everyone is going to be required to do a particular sort of violent action in order to achieve a particular end that they all share. I mean, maybe there's a way to make that work, but I'd be sort of surprised.

What about the weak sense of the term? It seems rather clear that there are at least some ends that would require the use of violence, no matter who was trying to achieve them, and in these cases we'd want to say that it was universally preferable to use violence in order to achieve those ends.

But notice that so far, we're not talking about morality at all. We're pretty much talking about prudence -- that is, what you should do in order to achieve your goals. And this makes sense, because as Stefan said, "Naturally, preferential behaviour can only be binding if the goal is desired."

So, then, it's interesting to see where Stefan goes next. He writes:

Any theory that justifies or denies the use of violence is a moral theory, and is subject to the requirements of logical consistency and empirical evidence.

But what does he mean by "justifies" and "denies"? The idea of "justification" usually has to do with the idea that someone ought to be able to provide certain defenses of the choices he or she makes. But if we're just talking about ways of achieving our goals, the only justification we would need would be to a) identify what our goals are, and b) show how our chosen behaviors are consistent with achieving our goals.

It's this feature of the meaning of "universally preferable" that proves to be the fatal flaw in this line of argumentation. As long as we understand "universal preferability" in the terms that Stefan outlined in the beginning of the book, we will never be able to use the term to establish anything beyond the fact that something is necessary in order to achieve certain ends. So, then, it cannot be on the basis of universal preferability that we condemn the rapist, the murderer, or the thief -- that is, unless we somehow want to argue that rape, murder, or theft are somehow incompatible with the desires of the rapist, the murderer, or the thief, and our condemnation is simply one of taking exception to their stupid and ignorant choices. But Stefan doesn't argue this way, and that's good, because if he did it would be disastrous.

To illustrate this point, let's run the example of rape through our two senses of the term "universally preferable." The strong sense of universal preferability relies on the idea that everyone shares a certain end, and that there is something that is universally required in order to achieve this end. But it should be uncontroversial that neither raping nor non-raping is necessary for any end that everyone shares (after all, there are rapists, and presumably it will help them achieve their goals if they rape). So it simply would not be true that in the strong sense of "universally preferable," it is universally preferable for people to either rape or not rape.

And in the weak sense of "universally preferable," we can surely imagine that there are some ends that would require rape to achieve. For example, we might imagine that someone wants to achieve the end of "Having sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with them, and who won't be amenable to being convinced or bargained with." In order to achieve this end, it would seem that rape would be required, no matter who was trying to achieve the end. So in the weak sense, rape would be universally preferable for anyone trying to achieve this end. And the same sort of thinking would apply in the cases of murder and theft.

So the concept of "universally preferable" behavior is simply not going to get Stefan to where he wants to go. He's just defined it in a way that makes it incompatible with the kinds of things he wants to establish -- among them that rape, murder, and theft are (thankfully) not moral. Accordingly, we'll turn to the next kind of argument that Stefan offers in his book.

III. A Maxim-Based Approach

Stefan's second line of argument is also built on the vocabulary of "universally preferable behavior," but seems to use the term in a way that's very different from the way that it is defined at the beginning of the book. In this other sense, "universally preferable" no longer means "required in order to achieve certain ends," but instead takes on a role in what I will call a "maxim-based" approach to ethical reasoning.

Because Stefan's words are tied up in the flawed terminology of "universally preferable behaviors," it will be necessary to find another way to interpret what Stefan is talking about. As we saw in the previous section, Stefan tells us that moral theories identify inflicted behaviors that are either justified or unjustified. We saw that when we think about this in terms of a behavior's being "universally preferable," this doesn't make sense. But it seems to me that we can proceed if we just cut out the "universally preferable" terminology altogether and just use terms like "morally required" or "morally unjustified" in their stead.

So for example, when Stefan is talking about the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) on page 54, he says:

The NAP is basically the proposition that "the initiation of the use of force is morally wrong." Or, to put it more in the terms of our conversation: "The non-initiation of force is universally preferable."

As we saw in the last section, calling the non-initiation of force "universally preferable" doesn't actually mean what Stefan seems to want it to mean. But if we just ignore the term "universally preferable" and substitute "morally required" in its place, then the statement is basically a tautology (which is what we want). It would now say:

The NAP is basically the proposition that "the initiation of the use of force is morally wrong." Or to put it more in the terms of our conversation: "The non-initiation of force is [morally required]."

Now that we have figured out a way to interpret Stefan's ideas without being hindered by his terminology, we can turn to the question of how he's using the term in order to build a moral framework. I said that the way he goes about doing this is through a "maxim-based" approach. So what is a maxim-based approach, and how does it work? The fundamental building block of such an approach is -- unsurprisingly -- a "maxim," which is a principle on which a person bases her decisions. The form of a maxim is as follows:

"In circumstances C, I will do X."

The role of C is to tell the actor when the rule is supposed to apply by describing the sorts of situations in which the action is to take place, and the role of the X is to describe the action that this person is supposed to be doing. So for example, we might offer the maxim, "When I am outside in the rain, I will cover myself with an umbrella." The C in this case would be any set of circumstances in which I am outside in the rain, and the X would be the action of covering myself with an umbrella. Clearly, when it is not raining or when I am inside, the maxim will have nothing to say; it only applies when the situation I face matches the circumstances set out in C. But we can say that I am always following this maxim if whenever I'm outside in the rain, I cover myself with an umbrella.

Stefan's approach to moral theorizing looks at maxims in order to determine whether they can be morally legitimate as guides for action. We can see the maxim-based approach most clearly on page 44, when Stefan is considering whether a soldier could ever be justified in killing. After first dismissing the possibility that murder is always morally required (a bold stance!), he introduces another possibility by saying:

If, to save the virtue of soldiers, I alter my theory to argue that it is moral for people to murder if someone else tells them to...

We can translate this proposed maxim as saying, "In circumstances where I am told to murder, I will do so." Stefan goes on to dismiss this maxim, and for reasons I will discuss in the next paragraph. But for right now, the thing to understand is how Stefan's approach can be understood as being based on evaluating maxims. The question of whether the soldier's killing is morally justified is answered by first figuring out what maxim the soldier would be following in deciding to kill, and then considering whether or not that maxim is an acceptable guide for the soldier's action.

So how does Stefan determine whether or not a maxim is acceptable? The first step that he takes is to suggest that we ought to consider what would happen if everyone followed the maxim in question. Stefan uses this approach to dismiss the maxim we just discussed:

If Politician A can order a soldier to murder an Iraqi, then the Iraqi must also be able to order the soldier to murder Politician A, and the soldier can also order Politician A to murder the Iraqi. The application of this theory results in a general and amoral paralysis, and is thus proven invalid.

If we generalize this idea, we can arrive at the following rule, which I think is foundational to Stefan's argument:

Claim 1: If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action.

How does this fit in? It seems clear that the problem that Stefan is identifying with the maxim in question -- "In circumstances where I am told to murder, I will do so" -- is that it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow it as a "rule to live by." It is on this basis that Stefan is claiming that it is defective as a guide for action.

But why should we accept Claim 1? Stefan offers the following explanation on page 43:

...the first test of any scientific theory is universality. Just as a theory of physics must apply to all matter, a moral theory that claims to describe the preferable actions of mankind must apply to all mankind. No moral theory can be valid if it argues that a certain action is right in Syria, but wrong in San Francisco. It cannot say that Person A must do X, but that Person B must never do X. It cannot say that what was wrong yesterday is right today - or vice versa. If it does, it is false and must be refined or discarded.

When I first read this, I was a little confused, since this isn't obviously how all theories in physics actually work. That is, the theory of gravity may apply to all matter, but other theories (e.g., theories about black holes) clearly don't apply to all matter (though they presumably apply to all black holes). What physical theories do follow is something like a principle that things that are identical in all relevant properties must be treated in the same way by a theory -- so a theory of matter would apply to anything that is matter, and a theory of black holes would apply to anything that is a black hole.

But are people identical in the senses that would be relevant for ethical theorizing? I think that's a sort of complicated question, and an overly simplistic attempt to answer it sets up for the next episode of "Stefan's spectacular and entertaining failure" (this time from page 44):

Since all human beings share common physical properties and requirements, proposing one rule for one person and the opposite rule for another is invalid - it is like proposing a physics theory that says that some rocks fall down, while others fall up. Not only is it illogical, it contradicts an observable fact of reality, which is that human beings as a species share common characteristics, and so cannot be subjected to opposing rules.

Really, Stefan? So do you pee sitting down, or does your wife pee standing up? Or do you both pee in your diapers (holler back, baby Molyneux)? *Rimshot!* But I don't actually want to object to Claim 1, so we can move on while leaving it intact. I personally think it's sort of reasonable (though perhaps not as solid as Stefan seems to think), and there are much bigger fish to fry. [Added later: For those interested in thinking more about the moral equality of humans, a classic piece is Bernard Williams' essay, "The Idea of Equality." Taking the discussion a step further to ask how humans can be morally equal and morally unequal from animals is Bonnie Steinbock's excellent piece, "Speciesism and the Idea of Equality."]

The next step in Stefan's ethical theory is a bit more troubling, but ultimately can be repaired to make sense. On page 66, Stefan writes:

The opposite of "virtue" must be "vice" - the opposite of "good" must be "evil." If I propose the moral rule "thou shalt not steal," then stealing must be evil, and not stealing must be good.

It should immediately be recognized that "not stealing" is not the opposite of stealing, but is rather the negation of stealing. To illustrate this point: Most people would say that the opposite of "black" is "white." But "not black" is not the same thing as "white." "Green" is "not black," but it isn't "white."

Unfortunately, if we try to repair Stefan's point by changing the word "opposite" to "negation," then the point becomes false. The negation of "virtue" isn't "vice," and nor is the negation of "good" "evil." A person can lack virtue without displaying vice, and a person can be not good without being evil.

But Stefan does not recognize this problem, and so adopts something like the following:

Claim 2: If adopting a particular maxim would be virtuous or morally good, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be virtuous or morally good.

This is embodied rather clearly on page 66 when Stefan writes:

If "rape" is a moral good, then "not raping" must be a moral evil - thus it is impossible for two men in a single room to both be moral at the same time, since only one of them can be a rapist at any given moment - and he can only be a rapist if the other man becomes his victim.

It should be uncontroversial that rape is not actually a moral good, but for our purposes this is beside the point. I use this example only to demonstrate how Claim 2 is being used in Stefan's theory. Presumably, the maxim that Stefan is discussing here is something along the lines of "In all circumstances, I will rape," and the question appears to be what would follow if we said that adopting the maxim is morally good. Applying Claim 2, Stefan arrives at the conclusion that failing to adopt the maxim would be morally evil.

But where Stefan has introduced Claim 2 as if it were simply a logical truth, the disconnection between the concept of an "opposite" and a "negation" eliminates this defense of the claim. Accordingly, Claim 2 is a rule in search of a justification, and as far as I can tell, Stefan doesn't offer another argument for it.

So what do we think of Claim 2? Personally, I think it depends on what we mean by "morally good" or "virtuous" When we normally talk about morally good or virtuous actions, we mean things that speak highly to a person's character, but which it would not necessarily be evil for me not to do. Charity is a great example of something which most people find to be morally good, and helping my sister with her homework is seemingly virtuous. But I wouldn't obviously be evil if I didn't do those things. If this is how we mean "morally good," then Claim 2 is clearly going to be false. We can only save Claim 2 if by "morally good," we mean something like "morally required." Rephrased this way, we get:

Claim 2': If adopting a particular maxim would be morally required, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be morally required.

And Claim 2' seems obviously true. If we interpret Stefan's example with this altered terminology, we can see that things make a little more sense: If rape were morally required, then not raping would be evil, and Stefan's concerns would seem to apply.

So to summarize, we thus far have two more-or-less plausible claims underpinning Stefan's maxim-based approach:

Claim 1: If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action.
Claim 2': If adopting a particular maxim would be morally required, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be morally required.

The third step in Stefan's theory is even more troubling, and will ultimately lead to the objections that we will see in the next section. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Recall that on page 48, Stefan defined "ethics" as "the subset of UPB which deals with inflicted behaviour, or the use of violence," and said that "Any theory that justifies or denies the use of violence is a moral theory, and is subject to the requirements of logical consistency and empirical evidence."

This realm of "ethics" is distinguished by the presence of violence, and is contrasted by Stefan against the realm of aesthetics, which involves behaviors that are not "inflicted" on others (for our purposes, we can ignore the potential difficulties of distinguishing between behaviors that are "inflicted" and those that are not). The distinction is illustrated on page 50:

If I accept your invitation to a dinner party, but find the conversation highly offensive, I can decide to get up and leave - and I can also choose to never accept another invitation from you. This capacity for escape and/or avoidance is an essential characteristic differentiating aesthetics from ethics.

If, however, when I decide to leave your dinner party, you leap up and chain me to my chair, clearly I no longer have the free choice to leave. This is the moment at which your rudeness becomes overt aggression, and crosses the line from aesthetics to ethics.

We see, then, that when we're trying to determine whether something is a moral question or not, we need only establish that there is violence involved, or that something is being inflicted on someone else.

So then let's jump forward to page 69, where Stefan is trying to determine whether we can think of rape in terms of personal preference. He writes:

If we propose the moral rule: "personal preferences must be violently inflicted upon other people," how does that stand up to the framework of UPB? (Note that I cannot propose that personal preferences may be violently inflicted upon other people, since that is a violation of UPB, which states that moral rules must be absolute and universal - if they are not, they fall into APA [aesthetically positive action] territory, and so cannot be inflicted on others.)

There's a lot wrong with this statement, particularly since Stefan seems to be confused about his own distinction between ethics and aesthetics -- he now seems to think that it would be wrong to impose aesthetic matters on people, but any imposed behavior has already been defined as falling within the realm of ethics, and not aesthetics.

However, what I want to focus on for the moment is another idea captured in this statement: that moral rules can't be optional. What Stefan seems to be saying is that we must accept either that "personal preferences must be violently inflicted upon other people" or that "personal preferences must not be violently inflicted upon other people." Otherwise, we would need to say that "personal preferences may be violently inflicted upon other people, or they may not be," and Stefan has ruled out this possibility. To more explicitly phrase this issue in terms of the maxim-based language, Stefan is posing a choice between "In all circumstances, I will violently inflict my personal preferences upon other people" and "In all circumstances, I will not violently inflict my personal preferences upon other people."

If this is how Stefan wants to structure his theory, then we get a third claim:

Claim 3: For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, it is either the case that everyone is morally required to follow that maxim all the time, or that everyone is morally prohibited from ever following that maxim.

And we can see this claim at work, for example, on pages 79-81 where Stefan uses an illustration involving the theft of a lighter in order to argue that stealing must be universally prohibited, since it would be ridiculous to think that everyone could possibly be morally required to steal all the time.

At this point I think we have a pretty clear understanding of the substance of Stefan's second line of argument. The argument is based on a maxim-based approach, and involves at least three central claims:

Claim 1: If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action.
Claim 2': If adopting a particular maxim would be morally required, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be morally required.
Claim 3: For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, it is either the case that everyone is morally required to follow that maxim all the time, or that everyone is morally prohibited from ever following that maxim.

Now there's a fourth claim that is implied in Stefan's argument that I want to eliminate right away for being too dumb to even consider. The claim is this:

Claim 4: For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, the set of circumstances to which the maxim applies must be "where the action in question will be inflicted upon a human being."

Stefan introduces this idea on page 73 when he considers the maxim "I can shoot a man anytime I want" (or to use the more precise form we've been using, "In circumstances where my shooting will be inflicted upon a person who is asleep, and I want to engage in the shooting, I will shoot the person"):

The problem here is not only the sleep that Bob will lose based on his universal premise, but also the logical impossibility of reversing moral propositions based on the differences in the states of sleeping and waking. Biologically speaking, a man does not become the opposite of a man when he falls asleep, any more than gravity reverses when he blinks.

Since a man remains a man when he falls asleep, it cannot be the case that opposite moral rules apply to him in this state. Thus to say that it is immoral to murder a man when he is awake, but it is moral to murder a him [sic] when he is asleep, is to create a logical contradiction unsupported by any objective biological facts. A physicist may say that a rock falls down, but a helium balloon rises up - but that is because a rock and a helium balloon have fundamentally different properties. No credible physicist can say that one rock falls down, but that another rock with almost exactly the same qualities falls up. The same is for moral theories - no credible philosopher can say that morality reverses itself when a man is asleep, since a man's nature does not fundamentally alter when he naps.

The number of things wrong with this argument is utterly astonishing; I won't even begin to address them all, since to do so would require an analysis all its own. But what's important to pay attention to is the last sentence, where Stefan says that we can't draw moral distinctions that make reference to the fact that a man is asleep because a man's nature does not fundamentally alter when he naps. To see why this is dumb, consider the following: In the game of hockey, a goal is scored when a puck goes into the net during a legal play. A goal is not scored when a puck does not go into the net under such circumstances. What Stefan is suggesting basically amounts to saying that we logically can't differentiate a goal from a non-goal because a puck's nature does not reverse itself when it goes into the net. This is dumb, and I don't even want to try to think about what kind of nonsensical ethical theory we would get from accepting it.

[Added later: It occurs to me that the hockey example is a rhetorically weak one, regardless of whether or not it captures the conceptual point well. To see why this sort of claim is a problem for Stefan's theory, consider the case of self-defense. When we are put in a position where we must defend ourselves, most of us think that we are justified in taking measures against our attackers which would be unjustified under other sorts of circumstances. So, for example, it would be okay for me to punch Albert in the face if he were assaulting me, even though it would normally not be okay to punch Albert in the face. However, notice that Albert's nature as a man does not fundamentally change when he attacks me. Thus if we accept what Stefan says here, then I should not be able to justify treating Albert differently when he is assaulting me than when he is leaving me alone. This seems silly to me. Of course it would not take a fundamental change in Albert's nature as a man to justify treating him in ways that are normally unacceptable. We could justify different treatment for far less.]

Accordingly, I will do my best go on as if Stefan never said this. It will come up again a little later on, but I'll do my best to minimize the importance of this error. So setting aside Claim 4, we can now proceed to the critique.

IV. What's Wrong With This Structure?

I want to argue two things about the structure I discussed in the previous section (ignoring Claim 4). First, I will show that even if we accept the maxim-based approach and the three claims, we will not be able to generate satisfying conclusions for moral problems. And second, I will contend that it leaves out an important component of ethical thinking that makes the resulting structure very awkward to work with.

My argument that Stefan's theory will not generate satisfying conclusions focuses mainly on Claim 3. The first thing to notice about the Claim is that Stefan applies it in such broad strokes that it seems to be rather implausible; the example on pages 79-81 (where Stefan attempts to show that theft must always be evil because it couldn't possibly be morally obligatory to steal all the time) illustrates this point well.

In order to see why this is an implausible way to apply the Claim, we must remember that Stefan's approach is based on evaluating maxims, and not actions directly. Claim 1 was "If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action." Accordingly, the fact that "In all circumstances, I will steal" is unacceptable as a maxim does not demonstrate that stealing is wrong, as Stefan seems to think it does. It only demonstrates that the moral rule, "In all circumstances, I will steal," is unacceptable.

In order to use Claim 3 coherently, we would need to focus on the C term in the maxim-based framework (remember, the form of a maxim is "In circumstances C, I will do X"). Stefan's discussion focuses on maxims where the C term covers all possible circumstances, so that the maxim is prescribing a particular action all the time. But if we changed the C term to say, for example, "When I will die if I don't steal an object, and I can be reasonably certain that the victim will not miss what I took very much, and I want to live" we would seemingly be able to avoid the problems that Stefan presents. Phrased this way, the maxim would be, "In circumstances where I will die if I don't steal an object, and I can be reasonably certain that the victim will not miss what I took very much, and I want to live, I will steal the object." And it seems rather clear to me that everyone could follow this rule all the time without any horrible problems arising (even though it would only prescribe that the follower take a particular action in a very limited set of circumstances). Accordingly, this maxim would be able to get past Claim 1 intact.

Stefan seems to think that this is not acceptable because of Claim 4. But remember, we're not going to pay any attention to Claim 4, because it's dumb.

It is important, though, to see how this works with Claim 1, which we are paying attention to. Remember, Claim 1 was that "If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action." This claim was not built on the idea that maxims must prescribe actions that must be carried out by all people at all times; it was built on the idea that it must be possible for all people to follow the maxims at all times. And in fact, he actually provided an example in the same place where he introduced the universality requirement with such a limitation: "In circumstances where I am told to murder, I will do so." Clearly, this maxim would not instruct someone to murder in circumstances where no one told them to murder, but Stefan doesn't raise any objections to this feature of the maxim in his discussion. Remember, we got Claim 1 from his objection that it would be ridiculous for everyone to follow this maxim all the time, not from any claim that it would be ridiculous for everyone to murder all the time -- that was an objection raised to a different maxim.

What implications does this have for the theory's capacity to generate satisfying conclusions? Remember, Claim 3 says, "For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, it is either the case that everyone is morally required to follow that maxim all the time, or that everyone is morally prohibited from ever following that maxim." So Stefan's approach rules out maxims, and not actually the action prescribed by the maxim (remember, the X component). Accordingly, we can see that what Stefan's system requires us to do is to figure out ways to justify our inflicted behaviors so that the maxims we follow could be morally obligatory for all people to follow all the time (this is not true if we accept Claim 4, which essentially rules out adjustment for circumstances, but remember, Claim 4 is dumb).

This would still mean that "In all circumstances, I will steal," would be problematic (because of Claim 1), but we might be able to make something out of "In circumstances where I will die if I don't steal an object, and I can be reasonably certain that the victim will not miss what I took very much, and I want to live, I will steal the object." It will at least be true that if we want to object to this latter maxim, we won't be able to effectively do so on the basis of the three Claims that I offered without begging the question. Again, they were:

Claim 1: If it would be impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow a particular maxim all the time, then that maxim is not morally legitimate as a guide for action.
Claim 2': If adopting a particular maxim would be morally required, then failing to adopt that maxim would be evil. Likewise, if adopting a particular maxim would be evil, then failing to adopt that maxim would be morally required.
Claim 3: For any maxim that involves an inflicted behavior, it is either the case that everyone is morally required to follow that maxim all the time, or that everyone is morally prohibited from ever following that maxim.

Subjecting our maxim to Claim 1, it doesn't seem like we would be able to mount any conclusive attack on the basis of it being impossible or unreasonable for everyone to follow it all the time. Claim 2' wouldn't be a problem for our maxim, since it's just sort of a formal requirement for how we think of morally required behaviors and evil behaviors. And Claim 3 would just say that either people are morally required to follow the maxim all the time (since it involves an inflicted behavior), or they're prohibited from ever following it. But there's nothing about the maxim itself that makes it clearly true that either one of these would be true and the other false; to rule in favor of one side over the other would simply beg the question. This, I think, is very unsatisfying.

The second thing I wanted to establish about this system is that it leaves out an important component of ethical thinking, and that this makes the whole theory a bit awkward. The component I have in mind is the idea of a behavior that is morally permissible, but not morally required. In most moral theories, there are three kinds of actions (even ones that involve violence): things you must do, things you may do if you want, and things that you may not do. Stefan rules out the second category with Claim 3, which claims that moral behaviors must either be obligatory or prohibited. But this would seem to mean that you could never have a choice about whether to act violently where you wouldn't be evil for choosing one of the alternatives. Surely this would be implausible.

In order to save the theory from being dismissed out of hand, the personal choice has to be snuck back in through the C component of the maxim. So for our maxim, "In circumstances where I will die if I don't steal an object, and I can be reasonably certain that the victim will not miss what I took very much, and I want to live, I will steal the object," we should immediately notice that "and I want to live" is a critical part of the idea. Without it, we would need to be saying that it would be evil for the person in question to choose to simply die rather than steal. And surely someone who thinks that stealing in such situations would be okay would not want to imply that not stealing in that situation would be evil if the person didn't want to do it. This, I think, makes the theory very awkward to work with. You end up saying that people must do things in circumstances where they want to do them (and, presumably, that they must not do things in circumstances where they don't).

V. Conclusion

In this critique, I have attempted to establish three things. First, I have argued that Stefan's choice of the term "universally preferable behavior" simply doesn't work with the rest of his theory; the way he defines the term makes it completely incompatible with the sorts of things he wants to argue for. Second, I have attempted to build a coherent way of evaluating moral propositions based on a maxim-based approach to ethical reasoning that involves three central claims about maxims. And third, I have tried to show that (without the ridiculous and implausible Claim 4) the resulting theory is incapable of generating satisfying answers to moral questions, and is awkward to work with. The system is unsatisfying because it does not offer us a way to determine definitively whether certain actions are morally required or not as long as the maxims being followed are sufficiently specific. And it is awkward because it requires us to twist ourselves into weird shapes in order to accommodate the idea of morally permissible behaviors.

If these arguments hold, it would mean that Stefan has not only failed to "slay the beast" and deliver us with the salvation that he promises in the beginning of the book, but that he has also failed to even provide us with a coherent ethical theory. This is an important "if," I will admit: the amount of conceptual reconstruction that I've had to do in order to put together this critique almost ensures that the resulting structure is about as much Stefan's as it is my own. And if Stefan rejects that his argument is based on maxims, or that the three claims I've offered are actually indicative of his arguments, then I may have attacked a straw man.

It should be noted that I justified each step of my interpretation with direct evidence from Stefan's book, and so in order to reject my interpretation, Stefan would need to explain how my interpretation doesn't actually capture what's being said in the passages I cited. But I don't dismiss the possibility that this can be done.

With this, I think we can finally consider The Molyneux Project to be a success, though it will not be truly complete until all objectors are satisfied. I hope that this has been instructive for any of you who have been keeping up, and that those who are interested in Stefan's ideas will take seriously the need to respond to what's been said here.

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P.S. Yes, I know that my critique can be answered by insisting that Claim 4 is true. But Claim 4 is so obviously ridiculous that this would be a pretty troubling defense to offer. Advance it at your own risk.

P.P.S. I've added a few clarifications. The first is at the beginning of section II where I discuss the definition of universally preferable behavior. Some people had focused their responses to this critique on that discussion, and so I added a note giving it a little bit more context. Hopefully that will address the criticisms. The second clarification is in my discussion of Claim 1 in section III, pointing to some further reading on the issues raised there. I added the note because I sort of made light of Stefan's discussion of Claim 1, but then just moved on without really offering any other explanation for why it makes sense. While I don't think that hurt the critique, I do think it was a bit unhelpful for people who might have been reading through it and who might have wanted more. The third clarification was in my discussion of Claim 4 in section III. I think that it adds an important element that was absent before, so hopefully others find it a worthwhile addition.

The Yin and the Yang: An Approach to Publicizing Broadly Libertarian Ideas

2009-04-14T23:15:00.003-04:00

I had an idea today for a new way that one might go about spreading some of our (well, at least my) ideas to the public. The idea is to use the familiar imagine of the Taijitu -- the yin yang symbol -- to offer a nuanced articulation of difficult concepts that sometimes end up being articulated sloppily with other approaches. The concept of yin yang is that mutually opposing forces can be seen as interconnected and even as interdependent, so that each gives form and substance to the other. I can immediately think of two examples of how this approach would be useful:

Unity and Separateness

On one hand, we need unity in order to have things like property rights, right-of-way conventions, procedural rules, and arguably collectivized programs where burden-sharing is important to us. On the other hand, we need separateness in order to plan and lead our own separate lives according to our own values and goals. But sometimes our best successes as communities come from living and letting live, and sometimes our best successes as individuals come from putting aside our own interests and being good neighbors. When we understand unity in the light of separateness, and separateness in the light of unity, we can achieve each more fully than we could if we pursued either on its own.

Knowledge and Ignorance

We know a tremendous amount about the world in which we live, and our knowledge can enable us to do wonderful things. But one of the most important things that we know is just how ignorant we are. A little bit of knowledge can be an extremely dangerous thing, and sometimes the wisest action is to admit that we not know for sure what would be best. Sometimes when we allow for an open-ended result, we find out that we end up with something better than we would have been able to design ourselves.

These are just two examples, and both are clearly in need of development. But I'm finding this way of thinking to be very satisfying and elegant; you pose two seemingly conflicting values against each other and show how each helps give the other its shape. And I think that as a vehicle for getting people to think about complicated philosophical issues that are integral to the advancement of liberty (like the knowledge problem, reasonable pluralism, the separateness of persons, the nirvana fallacy, etc.), it might be helpful to use this tool to explain things in a way that can resonate with anyone. Plus, I think it opens the door for a libertarianism or liberalism that is softer, more understanding, and more reflective than the kinds of views that so often come from our camp. Leave it to the notoriously wishy-washy, hand-wavy guy to come up with something like this...but I like it.

Might Our Moral Views Underdetermine the Demands of Justice?

2009-04-11T12:23:00.005-04:00

Update: It appears that I've misrepresented Dr. Long's position in this post. With due apologies, please see the comments section for his clarification.

I

Congratulations are due to Jerry Gaus, my professor-to-be at Arizona, for winning the Gregory Kavka Prize in Political Philosophy for his essay, "On Justifying the Rights of the Moderns: a Case of Old Wine in New Bottles." In my perpetual state of playing catch-up, I'm only now reading the essay. And so far, I'm enjoying it a lot.

In this post, I wanted to hammer out some thoughts on a point that Dr. Gaus raises about reasonable pluralism about morality and justice. This point particularly caught my attention because of a conversation that I had with Roderick Long last summer about this exact subject, where Dr. Long expressed reservations about the idea that people could reasonably disagree about the demands of justice. If I recall correctly, he fully acknowledged that individuals disagree about what constitutes a good life or what values are worthy of pursuing, and that there is often no impartial way to proclaim one person's views to be "correct" or "better" than others' conflicting views. But I recall Dr. Long being skeptical of the idea that this sort of reasonable pluralism in views could extend to the realm of morality. He contended that where it can be perfectly reasonable to disagree about what constitutes "the good life," it is not reasonable to disagree about how others ought to be treated.

II

So it was with this backdrop that I wanted to discuss Dr. Gaus' arguments in "On Justifying the Rights of the Moderns." On page 94 of his essay, Gaus puts aside the idea that we can reasonably disagree on the kinds of normative considerations that are important in justifying moral claims, in order to focus on problems that arise when agree about these things. He points out, on pages 94-95, that even if we agree on what is morally relevant, we may still disagree on the relative importance of these different considerations.

If I understand him correctly, we might illustrate Gaus' point with the example I used in my essay on the rich victim problem. In that essay, I set up a scenario in which a poor guy, Jerry, needed to make a phone call in order to secure a life-changing job, but his own phone had been disabled by a fallen branch. The only way for him to get the job would be to break into his neighbor Lucy's house by smashing one of the windows in order to use her phone. But in the example, Lucy was incredibly wealthy, and while her windows were not of enormous importance to her, they were so expensive that Jerry would never be able to afford to replace them, even with his new job. The question I raised was whether Jerry would be justified in breaking in.

And in the paper, I argued that he would be. Jerry's need for the job, I took it, was of moral importance, as was Lucy's legitimate claim to her property. But I suggested that because it was critically important to Jerry to break the window, and because it would harm Lucy very little if he did so, that it would be morally permissible for Jerry to break in. But since writing that, I've spoken to a lot of people who disagree. Jerry ought not to break into Lucy's house, according to these people, even in his situation. Maybe, some of them concede, he would be justified in doing so to save his life or preserve some basic functioning, but in my story Jerry would have been fine if he hadn't been able to get the job, and so he had insufficient justification to break in.

I'll immediately point out that my argument in that paper is nowhere near as developed as it would need to be for me to go to battle on this point. I don't, for example, talk about what sort of compensation Jerry would owe (if any) even if he couldn't pay the full compensation. And that seems pretty important. But for our purposes, it'll only be important to note that in my paper, I posited a sort of "priority principle" about how moral claims should relate to each other, and other people disagreed with that priority principle even though they agreed on a basic level with my attribution of moral importance of both Jerry's need and Lucy's property claims.

This raises the possibility, which I interpret Dr. Gaus to be discussing in his paper, that perhaps even if we agree on what kinds of things have normative significance, there can still be reasonable pluralism about morality if we can reasonably disagree on priority principles.

III

But it seems like one would immediately want to say, "Well yes, there are disagreements about priority principles. But no one is denying it. No one is saying that there is no pluralism about morality; the issue would be whether or not that pluralism is reasonable. Someone like Dr. Long (if he wanted to maintain the position that you've attributed to him) would want to say that when people genuinely disagree about priority principles, it's because at least one of them is wrong." Accordingly, I'll need to provide some reason for thinking that pluralism about priority principles can be reasonable in order to settle this issue.

And here it is: I take it that the objects of our moral concern are seen as being valuable in themselves (otherwise, they would not directly be the objects of our moral concern; they would be means towards something else or "proxies" for the true objects of our moral concern). And yet, I take it that there is no objective or impartial way to determine just how valuable an end-in-itself is that would allow us to objectively or impartially compare its moral significance with other ends-in-themselves with any manner of precision (I don't claim that we can never make impartial inter-value comparisons, but only that there will almost necessarily be hazy areas -- the existence of reasonable pluralism does not entail that all pluralism is reasonable). If this is all true, then at least some reasonable pluralism about priority principles seems inevitable.

Some Thoughts on the Cost of a Carbon Tax

2009-04-10T15:59:00.002-04:00

Lately I've been hearing a lot from some people on the Right about potential climate change legislation and why it's going to be horrible. The idea from some of these people seems to be that whether we have an auction-based cap and trade system (which would be relatively imbecilic but seems more or less inevitable) or a carbon tax system, the end result is going to be that we end up paying a whole bunch of money, and we're all going to go straight to the poor house as a result.

Since I think that auction-based cap and trade systems are excruciatingly dumb, I'll focus my comments on a carbon tax system. If this gives anyone an ulcer, I'll be happy to explain how these thoughts can apply to a cap and trade regime, but I'd rather not have to do those gymnastics if no one's ultimately going to care. The subject of this post, then, is whether or not a carbon tax should be expected to force us all into poverty. I will avoid here the question of whether or not such a policy would be advisable in an all-things-considered sense, since that's a question far too big for this post. Suffice it to say that I don't think the necessity of such a policy is as obvious as some people make it out to be. But that's a conversation for elsewhere.

So here's how an effective carbon tax (in the sense of mitigating contributions to climate change) might be expected to work. The government slowly phases in a tax on things like coal, natural gas, and petroleum which are cited as sources of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other influences on the climate system like agriculture, land clearing, etc. The revenues from the tax are used to finance a tax cut (ideally structured to cancel out some of the potentially worrisome distributive effects of the tax) or to finance some government expenditure that otherwise would have resulted in a tax increase (i.e., paying for the preposterous stimulus programs). The goal of the policy is to increase the price of energy-intensive goods with the tax, and to use the revenues to ensure that people do not lose overall purchasing power. Accordingly, people would have an incentive to shift their consumption away from energy intensive goods and towards non-energy-intensive goods. And while those who purchase disproportionately energy-intensive goods would be expected to suffer, those who purchase disproportionately non-energy-intensive goods would actually be expected to benefit.

Let me illustrate this in action. Let's say we have an economy with two goods: rocks and rubber balls. Producing and using rocks, in our example, does not involve any net impact on the climate system, whereas producing rubber balls involves the use of a substantial amount of fossil fuel. Rocks and rubber balls both cost $5 before the tax. Now let's imagine that every year, Xavier typically buys three rocks for $15, and three rubber balls for $15. And imagine that Cynthia usually purchases five rocks for $25 and only one rubber ball for $5.

Now we implement a carbon tax of $1 on rubber balls, so they now cost $6. The argument from some on the Right says, "Well look; now Xavier's consumption would cost $33 and Cynthia's consumption would cost $31, instead of both costing $30! This is a tragedy!"

But watch: let's say that Xavier and Cynthia don't change their consumption patterns in light of the tax. Xavier ends up paying $3 more in taxes to finance the purchase of the rubber balls, and Cynthia ends up paying $1 more. The government now uses its $4 to finance a $2 tax cut for both Xavier and Cynthia. So now Xavier ends up paying $1 for consuming a disproportionately high amount of rubber balls, and Cynthia actually gets paid $1 for consuming a disproportionately low amount of them.

In such a scenario, we might expect that the parties would see an opportunity to benefit from shifting their consumption away from the more expensive rubber balls. And the extent to which they were doing this before others or to a larger degree, they would benefit. Those who stubbornly insisted on consuming rubber balls, the argument goes, would simply be forced to pay the price for their anti-social behavior.

Things are a little more complicated with real governments who never actually do things like returning all the money, and where there are costs associated with implementing and enforcing the tax. But at least that's the idea. If the tax is revenue neutral, the only people who go to the poor house are the people who have a far greater impact on the climate than everyone else. And when those people go to the poor house, everyone else gets paid for being more responsible. So yes, some people would lose, but it seems like the advocates of this policy would want this sort of thing to be happening. Accordingly, the argument from some on the Right -- which focuses not on how we wouldn't want to trust the government with this policy, and not on how expensive it would be to implement, but only on the fact that it involves an increase in prices -- seems to me to be an utter failure in its current form.

Accordingly, it seems to me that this argument should be abandoned. There are other more plausible arguments that could satisfy the Right's thirst for some reason to oppose climate change legislation. They could question the ethical basis for such a policy, arguing that cost-benefit analysis (by which the policies are typically justified) are not ethically legitimate grounds for the kind of intervention that would be involved in the policy, and that the philosophical groundwork that would be necessary for an alternative analysis has not been satisfactorily settled. They could voice doubts about the government's ability to implement a policy like this in any way that wouldn't be a disaster more morally questionable than letting climate change happen. They could argue that given the amount of restructuring that will be necessary to substantially decrease our contributions to climate change, the resources we use to mitigate climate change could be better used fighting malaria around the world, bringing clean water to those who don't have it, researching cancer and AIDS, or any number of other things. But this overly simplistic argument about costs is misguided, and should be trashed.

Disproving Deterministic Incompatiblism

2009-04-09T16:30:00.004-04:00

I'm sick of having this conversation, so look. An exercise:

Put a cup on the table in front of you. Now if you want to, say the following out loud:

"Right now, I am reading this sentence."

Now look away for a few seconds and then look back. Back? Good. Now for the next exercise, you're going to have to choose whether or not to pick up that cup that's on the table; you should decide whether or not you are going to do it. Got it? Now read the following out loud and either pick up the cup at the end or don't:

"I am going to count to five. When I finish counting to five, I can either pick up the cup or not. One. Two. Three. Four. Five."

See? Okay, now was that so hard?

Look. If deterministic incompatiblism is true, then it's not only true in the past; it's true in the present and the future as well. And yet you just made a bunch of choices. Right? So drop it already.

See how I can tell you to drop it, and you can decide whether or not you're going to do that? Good. We're done here.

Finally! The Government is Getting Serious About Climate Change Policy!

2009-04-01T21:20:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure if any of you were paying attention, but Congress has just released a draft of its new energy policy, and all I can say is: Wow! It has everything I could have hoped for! It's so nice to see that our leaders have finally decided to move past the skeptics' obstructionism for long enough to save the world from the toxic climate polluters and actually start committing to clean, renewable energy so that we can get off our dependence on foreign oil. It's times like this that make me so glad we finally have someone in the White House who cares more about the people than the corporate fat cats and special interests in Washington!

Follow This Blog!

2009-03-31T20:01:00.000-04:00

Hello loyal readers and not-really-loyal-stumblers-upon-this-blog! I figured out how to add a funky follower thing to the right-hand panel of this blog. I'm not sure what it does, but if you do, then you should totally add yourself!

Redistribution and Organizations

2009-03-30T15:46:00.006-04:00

[Update: I rewrote the piece so that it would actually be readable by financial people, and have replaced the earlier version of this post with the even more overly-simplistic (and not even necessarily historically accurate) version that appears below.]

Today my boss came in to work with a smile on his face, telling me he had a project for me. This is the result of that project. It draws a lot on this previous post, and admittedly oversimplifies some of the issues at hand. I didn't mean it to be a thorough examination of the issue, but I figure it might be somewhat interesting to some of you folks. So here it is:

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Introduction

[My boss] asks, “Is it consistent to think that wealth should be redistributed from rich individuals to poor individuals, but not from rich organizations to poor organizations?” To answer this question, I will explore the reasons that one might advocate redistribution from wealthy individuals to poor individuals, and then ask whether those reasons apply to organizations as well. In doing so, I will not address important objections to wealth redistribution policies, and so this discussion should not be seen as a defense of implementing them. The goal here will only be to establish whether someone who accepts the legitimacy of redistributions from wealthy individuals to poor individuals would be committed to being in favor of those arrangements between organizations as well.

Why Do We Care About the Distribution of Wealth?

Typically, redistribution of wealth is justified on the basis of empowering the poor. This seems simple enough. But if we are to try to apply this thinking to other areas, it will be important to understand how the argument for redistribution is supposed to work, and what moral problem the redistributive policy is supposed to fix. I will therefore offer a brief overview of where the argument for redistribution comes from, and how it responds to some of the ideas that have underpinned our society from its birth.

Our society is built on the foundations of classical liberal philosophy, which is itself built on the idea that we should treat freedom as a value in itself. It is second nature to think of the ideal America as a “free country” dedicated to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These are values that are taken directly from the classical liberal movement, and which still form the backbone of our worldview today. But why should we (and why did the classical liberals) care about freedom? Today’s political discourse has turned liberty into a buzzword, and has masked the connection between exaltation of liberty and the ideas that motivate redistributive policies. So in order to understand why redistribution is not just a matter of expedience or charity to its intellectual defenders, but is rather a matter of principle in their eyes, I will start out by setting the record straight on this issue.

Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson and the other liberal thinkers of their time observed that human societies are elaborate and dynamic systems, and that no individual (or group of individuals) could effectively design and operate a complex society according to a rational plan. The problem of society was, according to these thinkers, too complex for any mind to solve. Accordingly, the liberals postulated that successful societies would need to rely on mechanisms like the market system to produce “spontaneous” order – that is, to allow individuals to live together peacefully and productively without a comprehensive plan of action. A spontaneous system of producing social order would allow societies to function without all-knowing, benevolent rulers who would produce order and prosperity in accordance with their divine insights. And this was particularly important to the liberal thinkers, as it was painfully apparent to them that such rulers were generally not forthcoming, and attempts to produce a rational order in their absence were universal failures. The market system, then, could substitute for the benevolent and all-knowing ruler, producing prosperity and order as if by an invisible hand.

But the classical liberal defense of freedom extended beyond the simple idea that freedom tends to produce desirable social systems. The liberals argued not only that freedom promotes prosperity, but also that freedom is an essential component of human well-being. People, according to the liberals, can only realize themselves as individuals in an environment in which they are free to design their own lives, make their own choices, and live according to their own plans. And we still generally believe this today, which is why we care to live not only in a wealthy country or an advanced country, but also in a free country.

It was through the desire for mechanisms for spontaneous ordering and the belief in the importance of self-determination that the classical liberals came to be advocates for institutions of private property. By securing our possessions, property rights enable us to plan our separate lives without having to fear the arbitrary authority and incursions of other citizens or government agents. The classical liberals recognized that our lives are built in the outside world, and not just within ourselves, and that we therefore need security in our property in order to live full, meaningful lives. Property rights also set rules that allow us to interact in peaceful and productive ways without the need for social planning and all-knowing, benevolent rulers.

But a number of different groups of thinkers saw a flaw in the classical liberal argument defending individuals’ rights to their property. If property rights are a core element of liberty, and individuals need liberty in order to live good lives, then what about the people who do not have any property? Critics of the classical liberal position pointed out that the property-less, talent-less individual may have liberty in the sense of being free from the incursions of others, but she sure didn’t have much leeway to live her life according to her own desires or to be the master of her own fate. The impoverished man faces a choice between submitting to labor for someone else on one hand, or death by starvation or exposure on the other. Only in a technical, abstract sense could someone in such a situation be called “free.” And this, the critics held, was unfair.

The argument for redistribution, then, is that by redistributing wealth to those without access to it, we ensure liberty for all members of society, and not just those who can empower themselves through luck, talent, or the generosity of their benefactors. Such a policy, it is held, takes full consideration of everyone’s interests and needs in order to foster the conditions under which all individuals can pursue their own happiness, free (to some extent) from the concerns which might lead us to object to the circumstances faced by the property-less proletarian.

Empowerment and Organizations

When [my boss] asks about the potential for extending this line of thinking to organizations, it should be more or less clear at this point what he has in mind. Like individuals, organizations can have or lack the resources necessary to pursue their own goals. As is the case with individuals, a wealthy organization has more than enough resources available to it to meet its basic needs, and accordingly has more of a say in its fate than an organization which struggles simply to remain in operation. As we have seen, it is out of a desire to provide for the effective freedom of all individuals that the advocates of redistribution seek to transfer resources to those who lack property of their own. But does arguing this way commit them to the position that “needy” organizations should also be empowered in order to promote their abilities to plan their own “lives”?

In order to answer this question, it will help to ask why it is that liberty is morally important in the first place. The classical liberals thought that freedom was valuable because it could produce spontaneous social order and because it was a component of human wellbeing. But why should we attribute moral significance to order and wellbeing?

According to one very simplistic view, moral concern is built on the idea of promoting the interests of entities that have “goods of their own.” Each of us clearly has a good of his own, and our interests are promoted by living in orderly, peaceful, and prosperous societies in which we can pursue our own happiness. And similarly, our interests are promoted by having access to resources that enable us to make freer choices. But organizations can have “goods of their own” too. A University does well when it is able to sustain a thriving academic community, play an important role in its community, and operate with a strong budget. A corporation does well when it is able to generate income for its stakeholders, or when it successfully expands its operations into a new market. And in order for organizations to pursue their interests, they need access to resources just like individuals do. So if it is for the good of individuals that we enact empowering redistributive policies, then it seems like a similar line of thinking could lead us to advocate empowering organizations.

But one might object that moral concern should not attach simply to anything with a good of its own. We might notice that where we actually experience our own goods, organizations (that is, conceived of separately from the people who make up the organizations) do not. Whether or not a person’s interests are promoted actually makes a difference to that person. But except in a metaphorical sense, an organization is not the sort of thing to which something can make a difference. And this seems like a very important distinction.

To be sure, the individuals who compose the organization and who are impacted by its success have an active interest in its wellbeing. However, it is critical to notice that the interests of the individuals who make up an organization are not the same as the interests of the organization itself. If we are going to empower an organization because of the organization’s interests, then we need to separate the organization’s interests from the interests of the individuals from the organization. And if we deny that an organization’s separate interests can be morally significant because organizations cannot experience their own goods, then it appears that we would want to reject the analogy between the moral significance of an individual’s need for empowerment and an organization’s need for the same.

One might still want to argue that empowerment of poor organizations should be justified not on the basis of the organization’s own need for liberty, but rather on some need possessed by the individuals constituting the organization or by those with a stake in the organization’s performance. That is, by empowering organizations, we can indirectly empower individuals. And because we care about individual empowerment, we might be able to achieve our goals through the empowerment of organizations. But notice that this would not be an extension of the ethical argument in favor of empowering individuals to cover organizations. Rather, it would simply be an alternative way to carry out the redistribution called for by the original argument.

Ultimately, I am not convinced that we can coherently extend the moral concern which motivates redistribution to empower individuals to cover needy organizations. This can perhaps be supported best by comparing the way that we think about the death of an organization for lack of resources to the way that we would think of an individual’s death due to the same causes. When organizations fail or struggle, it seems like our proper concern should be focused on the individuals whose lives are worsened or constrained by those processes, and not on the organizations themselves which fail to live up to some constructed conception of their good. Accordingly, where redistribution is to be justified in order to empower those in need, I think it should be individuals to whom resources are allocated, and not organizations.

A Tentative Plan for an Overly Ambitious Climate Change Project

2009-03-29T21:08:00.002-04:00

Anyone who's been following my work will know that a main focus of my research is global climate change, viewed from an ethical and political perspective. In this post, I want to sketch out where I'd like to go with that research and how I'd like to compose a complete product. These will only be sketches, and only working sketches at that; I imagine things will change rather dramatically as I move forward. But hopefully they'll help me to organize my thoughts. And if anyone out there is interested in helping me work on some of this stuff, I'd really love to know. It would be amazing to be able to finish this project for a dissertation, but I don't know if that will be possible if I have to do this all alone... Anyway, here it is (as usual, the mainstream scientific standpoint is taken as a premise for the first parts):

1. Collective Action Problems and Coercion

Climate change is a problem that, on its surface, seems to fit right into the model of a public goods problem. People acting on their own independent interests are collectively producing something that appears to be bad. If we were to desire to prevent this bad thing from coming about, we would either need to alter the set of incentives facing the relevant agents (in this case, basically everyone) so that they would adjust their behavior, or perhaps we would need to take steps to mitigate the effects of their actions.

When we talk about an appropriate response to climate change, however, we don't have in mind a sort of Buchananite consensus-building endeavor in which we try to get everyone to agree to a system that would uncontroversially represent an improvement over the current one. Rather, we intend to coerce people -- that is, to influence them to follow plans besides their own by force if necessary -- in order to bring about the desired outcomes.

But we can't just go around coercing people whenever we think we could bring about "better" social outcomes by doing so -- we need some justification for infringing upon individuals' rights to self-determination. Accordingly, this section would attempt to sketch the kinds of reasons that one might offer in defense of an infringement of someone's right to self-determination, all focusing on duties held by the individual whose rights are being infringed.

I will discuss self-defense briefly, acknowledging Roderick Long's contributions in thinking about dealing with climate change from this paradigm, but ultimately conclude that it doesn't make much sense to approach the issue of climate change in this way. I will therefore sketch out two alternative sources of duties which might help us to justify coercion: the duty to show appropriate respect for others' rights and the duty to attempt to mitigate tragic or catastrophic consequences. The next two sections will be elaborations of these issues.

2. Climate Change as an Infringement Upon Rights

This section will draw heavily on my paper, "Justice and Climate Change: Towards a Libertarian Analysis," which will be coming out in The Independent Review in the Fall. It will outline the foundations of a duty to respect others' rights, and explore the ways in which we might think of climate change as infringing upon rights. I will build upon my earlier paper to address some of the issues that were left undiscussed there.

One way in which I will go beyond that paper in this section will be to discuss the question of whether these infringements upon rights would constitute rights-violations. I will predicate this discussion on the premise (which I will challenge in Section 4) that individuals who contribute to global climate change are responsible for the rights-infringements, and search for ways that those individuals might try to defend their actions. The purpose of this discussion will not be to reach any definitive conclusions, but rather to give us a starting point for thinking about these questions in Section 4 when we try to pin down exactly what individuals are responsible for, and how we should think of their duties in light of such an analysis.

3. When Are Consequences Correlative?

This section draws its inspiration from the concept of correlations between duties and rights, observing that some intuitively plausible kinds of duties don't seem to correlate with rights. Some of these duties which are non-correlative with rights seem to make reference to things that we owe to ourselves or to ideals to which we are committed. But others seem to have to do with our duty to promote "the good," or at least refrain from promoting "the bad" or destroying "the good."

In this section, I will attempt to approach the impacts of climate change from this sort of consequentialist perspective, trying to decide when consequences correlate with duties to act in certain ways. I will initially focus on impacts on groups of humans and on cultures, but I will attempt to expand my discussion to incorporate a consequentialist theory of environmental ethics. Much like in the previous section, my discussion in this section will be structured so as to rely on a set of carefully chosen suppositions about individuals' responsibility for bringing about these consequences that will be challenged in Section 4, but not in a way that makes the discussion here useless. Again, the purpose of the discussion here will be to create a starting point for the analysis in Section 4.

4. Collective Responsibility and Individual Duties

This section will bring into focus the emergent nature of the climate change problem, and attempt to engage the literature on collective responsibility in order to understand how we should approach this problem. I will focus particularly on Virginia Held's discussion of the responsibility of "random collections" to organize themselves to address faults corresponding to non-distributive predicates like "caused global climate change." I will draw attention to Held's reservations about the choice of a proper decision-making procedure and search for a resolution to this problem in the literature relating to the selection among sets of alternatives that are impartially reasonable to prefer to inaction.

I will also use this section to directly engage the idea of the social provision of public goods, wondering whether we can think of the ideas presented in this section as justifying or demanding this practice, or if we should rather treat the discussion here as suggesting serious limitations on the extent to which we should be looking to social decision-making mechanisms to fulfill this capacity. I will attempt to show that in certain situations, the line of thinking introduced here can be used to support social measures aimed at providing public goods without relying on perfectionist ideas. But I will also show how these arguments do not establish the sort of paradigm that perfectionists would want, and that my view cannot therefore be seen as a reconciliation between liberalism and perfectionism.

5. Justifying the Enforcement of Duties

In this section I will discuss the jump from the idea that individuals have certain duties (as discussed in the previous sections) to the idea that we could be justified in coercing these individuals to act in the manner prescribed by their duty. I will need to explore the sorts of considerations which justify the enforcement of duties and use them to try to distinguish cases where intervention is justified from those where it is not. Here I will flesh out the questions introduced in Section 4 relating to reasonable pluralism and impartiality, expanding my discussion to cover all duties. I will also explore a dialectical approach to thinking about the justice of coercive enforcement of duties. This section will set the stage for Section 6 and Section 7 by arguing that certain kinds of answers to the questions posed in those questions would make coercion unacceptable.

6. Centralized Policy-Making in a World of Reasonable Pluralism

This section will explore the foundations of political authority outside of voluntary associations. I'm really not sure how I want to approach this section, but a coherent place to start seems to be with the philosophy of Joseph Raz. I'm very much over my head in even trying to imagine what sorts of things I'll want to discuss in this section, but it does seem like I'll have to address this issue. I guess this is what grad school will be for! Hopefully by the time it's ready to actually start writing this, I'll have done a whole bunch of work on the issues raised by this section and will have something worthwhile to say.

7. Finding an Appropriate Role for Uncertainty

Everything that will have been said to this point in the project will have been predicated on the idea that global climate change is undeniably happening in the way forecasted by the IPCC. This section will question this premise and introduce some of the uncertainties involved in the mainstream scientific analysis. It will also introduce the concept of storyline uncertainty and discuss the degree to which we can be comfortable with our predictions about the future.

I will then try to think about how uncertainty should play into our thinking about this issue. I will discuss the precautionary principle and the principles of procedural justice which are enshrined in our current legal system, as well as concerns about the burden placed on victims by standards of proof. I'm not entirely sure where I'll want to go with this, but I think I'm attracted to the idea of some kind of middle ground. I'm not sure, though, so don't hold me to it!

8. Pulling It All Together

In this final section I will attempt to put together all of the pieces discussed in the previous sections in order to compose a coherent answer to the question of how we should think about the justification for a coercive and centralized policy aimed at addressing global climate change. I will highlight areas where I think that reasonable people might find room for disagreement, and where I think my discussion here could be expanded or improved. I will also voice any doubts I have about my conclusions and attempt to identify some avenues for rejecting them. Finally, to the extent that I can do so coherently, I will offer some closing thoughts about the ways that my arguments might be engaged by the policymaking community and the general public.

Left-Libertarianism Is Not Communism: A Reply to Joel Davis

2009-03-24T23:47:00.008-04:00

It appears that over at Reddit.com, a fellow going by sblinn decided to share one of my previous posts on resource-egalitarian left-libertarianism with the rest of the Reddit community. So a big thank you goes out to sblinn for checking out my work and posting it over there! I received some criticism, though, in the comments section of the listing by someone named Joel Davis, who appears to be a communist [edit: later in the comments thread, Joel claims not to be one, so I'm not entirely sure what to make of the fact that he defends points he calls communist throughout his reply...]. Joel clearly put a lot of time and effort into his comments, and so I wanted to try to think about some of his points here.

First, Joel wonders:

Isn't "property" itself a system? Can't we solve this "problem" by just choosing not to enforce property, thus securing egalitarian conditions through a net decrease in coercive authority?

I do agree that property -- or more specifically, any society's set of conventions for recognizing claims to possessions and adjudicating disputes arising over those claims -- is a system of social organization, and that such a system could be dispensed with if a society so chose. And I can see why Joel would conceive of such a move as involving a net decrease in coercive authority. After all, by abandoning a set of social conventions for dealing with property claims, we would seem to dissolve the mechanisms by which those conventions were enforced, and also the mechanisms by which those kinds of conventions were formed in the first place. And that seems like a curtailment of a certain kind of authority.

But it's less clear to me why Joel thinks that such a move would bring us closer to egalitarian ideals. It seems like in the absence of a property system, there would either arise a set of social relationships that were substantially similar to a sort of property system, except without any unifying set of conventions (since that would seem to be a property system itself), or else there would be a system in which claims over possessions were not widely recognized and protected.

In the former case, we seem to wind up right where we started. I don't see why having a pluralistic system of property rights would militate against inequality any more than a more universal system of property rights would. To defend this, one would only need to point out that whatever possession-respecting manner in which some members of a pluralistic society related to each other with egalitarian results could simply be practiced on a society-wide scale. And by doing so, we could coherently claim to have instituted a sort of property system, though it would likely need to be different than the sort of property system we generally see in practice today.

In the latter case, where there is no generally accepted set of cultural institutions regarding possessions, and where individuals have not created a similar -- though pluralistic -- system to put in the place of one, it would seem like the only remaining alternative would be to not recognize claims to property at all (since doing so would seem to involve one of the two possibilities already discussed). But such a system would be anarchy in the pejorative sense of the word. People would simply do whatever they wanted with other people's property -- remember, if they restrained themselves from this, we would be dealing of an example of the sort discussed in the previous paragraph. If this would bring about egalitarian consequences, it would only be in the sense of mutual destruction. But more likely, egalitarians would be angered to find that the strongest could exercise their power over the weakest, generating a different sort of inequality, but inequality nonetheless.

So I really can't see why Joel would think that the abandonment of property altogether would tend towards egalitarian goals. It must be noted here that I have spoken of property in a broad sense, and many people have historically talked about the elimination of capitalistic standards of property as if they were talking about dispensing with property altogether. But presumably, there would still be a desire to kick trespassers out of one's house in the communist utopia, and to have the trespasser seen as the morally faulty party in such a scenario. And one simply can't make sense of this besides through an appeal to something like a right relating to one's own house, which would be a sort of property right. A property right of a different kind, to be sure, than the one which enables the capitalist to bequeath access and title to the means of production to his children, but a property right nonetheless.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the latter sort of system would not be something that left-libertarians would want to endorse, at least as far as I can discern. Most left-libertarians seem to be in favor of property rights of some kind, though they might be open to the second sort of set-up in which there is no property system as such, but rather a kind of pluralistic, decentralized approach to dealing with these rights. And the reason it makes sense that left-libertarians favor these rights is that left-libertarians believe in self-ownership partly because they want people to have the freedom to "do what they want with their own." Hence Peter Vallentyne began his entry on Libertarianism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy with the claim that "Libertarianism holds that agents initially fully own themselves and have moral powers to acquire property rights in external things under certain conditions." So in summary, I agree that one can abandon a property system if one wants, but I don't see why this would tend to encourage equality, and unless the alternative to a property system were substantially like a property system, I don't think a left-libertarian would want to endorse it (remember, my post was about left-libertarians, and so might not respond to other sorts of views).

Joel's next substantive point is this:

It (obviously) doesn't follow that just because there will be some inequality that we need to endorse a system of property as it exists today.

And this is undoubtedly true. I certainly didn't mean to suggest in anything that I said that the only alternative to the left-libertarian views I challenged in my other post involved a wholesale endorsement of today's property norms. Even the most right-wing libertarian views don't entail that. So to the extent to which my previous post suggested anything like this, I apologize for the confusion.

The point I had been trying to make starts with the claim that with an egalitarian initial allocation of resources, differences in luck, effort, and ability would eventually bring it about that some individuals would end up with more than others. This would not be the case because of any defect in the initial distribution's fulfillment of egalitarian ideals, but rather because it would simply be impossible to engineer an egalitarian distribution such that the tendencies towards movements away from equality would be preempted indefinitely. This is not a point that I introduced, and is accepted by both right-libertarians like Nozick and egalitarians like Cohen. I didn't think it particularly necessary to defend it in depth because...well...very few people disagree with it. But I again apologize if I didn't articulate the point as clearly as I might have.

This is important in the context of our discussion of left-libertarianism because the reason that the left-libertarian wants the egalitarian distribution of resources in the first place is because she wants there to be equality without the kinds of coercive redistributions that I and others have claimed would be necessary to preserve equality, even with an egalitarian initial distribution. That the left-libertarians in question want this can be easily evidenced by Michael Otsuka's somewhat recent choice to name his excellent book Libertarianism Without Inequality, and I think you'd be rather hard pressed to find one of these people who would disagree with that characterization. Accordingly, my argument is that if it isn't true that an egalitarian initial distribution would ensure equality over the long term, then the left-libertarian argument would essentially just be an objection to the mere fact that there was not an egalitarian intial distribution -- that is, that a society did not have the right kind of history.

Joel's next point is:

...if [by "self-ownership"] you mean control of your body, then most communists would agree with that as a human right. If you mean it (as is often the cause) already-bundled with private property, then they would disagree, but only for the propertarian aspects. If "property" isn't legitimate in the first place, then denial of it can't be an infringement on self-ownership. Just like a person who dies can't claim that the still living "stole time" from him. The time wasn't his, he has no natural or moral claim to it, and he's just being an obstinate spook.

The problem here is that what communists think is entirely beside the point. A left-libertarian is not a communist, and vice-versa. So it may be true that one can save self-ownership by making it purely formal, as Joel suggests, but this option is not open to the left-libertarian, and so this point is a non-sequitar.

This applies to a number of Joel's next points, which I will not address here. The problem appears to be that Joel thinks that I was trying to engage with communists, when I simply was not. The article was about a very particular approach to political philosophy, and I think I made that very clear.

A point that I will address, however, stemmed from my claim that there would not be any objectively acceptable way to implement the left-libertarians' principles even if we accepted them at face value. Joel responded that all moral codes suffer from the same problem of non-objectivity. But I think that Joel misunderstood my point. I didn't mean that the left-libertarians' moral principles were not objectively true, and that this was a problem for them. If I had argued this, then Joel's criticism would be a good one.

But my argument was that even if we grant the left-libertarians their point, and accept that what one needs to do is perform an egalitarian distribution of resources that ensures that everyone gets their fair share, the left-libertarian would have no way to carry out such a plan. It simply doesn't make sense. Accordingly, they'd need to construct a somewhat ad hoc system to approximate their ideal. And this would be fine except for the fact that their approach to political philosophy is a rationalist one, and not an instrumentalist one. This, I think, creates a tension for their view, since on one hand they seem to want to set the conditions that would allow for an impartially legitimate society, but on the other hand it wouldn't be strictly possible to determine how to set those conditions. That seems like it's a problem to me.

I guess having gone through this, all I can say is that I don't really know what Joel was trying to accomplish here. He very rightly showed that my critique of left-libertarianism is not a very critique of communism, and basically tried to show that my points of contention with the former view can be avoided by taking a position incompatible with that view. And in some cases, I haven't disagreed. But I don't really

[Hmm...I'm not sure what happened here, but it looks like the end of this post got chopped off. Oops!]

Quibbles and Minutiae: Some Thoughts for Brainpolice

2009-03-13T22:15:00.005-04:00

Over at the Polycentric Order blog, Alex "Brainpolice" Strekal posted the beginning of a project he has undertaken to hopefully bring some order to the haphazard jumble of ideas currently living under the broad umbrella of "libertarianism." In this post, I just wanted to write up a few comments on the early goings of Brainpolice's work in hopes that they may be of some use for him.

Brainpolice has some interesting stuff to say about the history and genealogy of libertarian ideas. Since I'm not the most qualified person to give my opinion on those matters, I'll ignore many of them in these comments. But I will note that the account would benefit substantially from the inclusion of citations and references to other discussions which have come before his (i.e., Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, Boaz's Libertarianism: A Primer, Murray's What It Means to Be a Libertarian, and Hamowy's The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism). I'm sure Brainpolice doesn't intend to write his whole book about the history of other people's attempts to talk about the history of the movement. But when trying to argue that a lot of people have gotten it wrong, it would be nice if he showed us a little more, instead of just told us. One particular instance where the conversation could seemingly benefit a lot from bringing in outside sources is the discussion of the early history of the liberal movement, where a connection to Hayek's discussions in "Individualism: True and False" and The Constitution of Liberty would make sense to me.

The first substantive issue I can take with Brainpolice's account is in his claim that liberalism and libertarianism are somehow built around the idea of "maximizing" liberty. This claim stands in opposition to the now foundational conception of liberalism and libertarianism as having at least something to do with rights which act as boundaries, rather than as goals to be maximized. I don't mean to suggest that I know that Brainpolice is incorrect about the origin of the term "liberalism" or "libertarianism," but it seems like it needs to be demonstrated that these terms have to do with maximizing liberty. And unfortunately, there is no such demonstration (yet!).

Moving on, an issue that strikes me as somewhat worthy of an expanded handling is Brainpolice's discussion of the roots of socialism. As I understood the history, Marx's thought was a direct outgrowth of the classical economists. And it seems clear to me that Marxism is more different from recognizably "liberal" or "libertarian" perspectives in its conclusions than in its foundations. As Cohen points out in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Marxism is built upon something very much like the notion of self-ownership, and as I've discussed elsewhere on this blog, some of the core components of the Marxian system can be seen as the outgrowths not of a rejection of liberal ideas but rather Marx's acceptance of the labor theory of value.

Another issue arises from Brainpolice's claim that "...it is true that anarchism of some sort is the radical conclusion of libertarianism." Without agreeing or disagreeing with this statement, I just think it's obvious that justifying this claim would require a much more significant argument than the mere assertion offered here. That seems especially important in order to avoid making the paragraph sound like it's saying, "Some libertarians think anarchism is the real libertarianism, and others think that minarchism is the real libertarianism. Anarchists, though, can't reasonably kick out the minarchists due to popular usage of the terminology, even though anarchism is clearly the real libertarianism and minarchism is stupid."

Finally, I'm not sure if I'm the biggest fan of the structure of the chapter/essay/whatever it is. I think it initially comes off as being the very introduction that it claims not to be at the end, and might do better by moving some of the concluding material to the beginning, or moving some of the beginning material to later parts of the book where the lineages of specific ideas are discussed more in depth. If the purpose of putting some of the historical anecdotes in this portion is to illustrate how now-clashing ideas have been related to each other in the past, I would suggest that perhaps using more modern examples and ideas would better accomplish this goal (i.e., Murray Rothbard vs. F.A. Hayek or Ayn Rand, David Friedman's consequentialism, or Roderick Long vs. Walter Block), as people might be less hesitant in such cases to say, "Well sure Marxism is based on many of the same 18th century ideas as libertarianism, but that doesn't mean they're connected now," than they would be to say, "Well sure Block's thin libertarianism is based on many of the same 20th century ideas as Long's thick libertarianism, but that doesn't mean they're connected now."

But all in all, I think this was a good start, and I'm definitely excited to read more. I also want to commend Alex for starting this project; this is quite the undertaking, and I think it's fantastic that someone is trying to do something like this. Hopefully these comments will be of some help!

Wait, Since When? (Update: Oh. Since Never.)

2009-03-13T15:40:00.006-04:00

Update: I take it all back. See the bottom of this post.

In my current line of work (energy industry research), I come across quite a few government research reports, and generally I need to suspend my Austrian-ness and libertarian-ness as I read them in order to avoid getting frustrated. It's not that they're poorly written; in fact, they tend to be really well researched and thought out, and it's incredibly valuable to have access to them. But as one might gather from this post, there are sometimes little tidbits in them that make me want to pull my hair out. Moreover, they almost never make it a point to mention things like government failure, and are very often ignorantly perfectionist and guilty of the nirvana fallacy.

So I was very surprised to stumble across a report from the Congressional Budget Office, The Economics of Climate Change: A Primer, which described the problem facing policymakers like this:

The Earth’s atmosphere is a global, open-access resource that no one owns, that everyone depends on, and that absorbs emissions from an enormous variety of natural and human activities. As such, it is vulnerable to overuse, and the climate is vulnerable to degradation—a problem known as the tragedy of the commons. The atmosphere’s global nature makes it very difficult for communities and
nations to agree on and enforce individual rights to and responsibilities for its use.

With rights and responsibilities difficult to delineate and agreements a challenge to reach, markets may not develop to allocate atmospheric resources effectively. It may therefore fall to governments to develop alternative policies for addressing the risks from climate change. And because the causes and consequences of such change are global, effective policies will probably require extensive cooperation among countries with very different circumstances and interests.

However, governments may also fail to allocate resources effectively, and international cooperation will be extremely hard to achieve as well. Developed countries, which are responsible for the overwhelming bulk of emissions, will be reluctant to take on increasingly expensive unilateral commitments while there are inexpensive opportunities to constrain emissions in developing countries. But developing nations, which are expected to be the chief source of emissions growth in the future, will also be reluctant to adopt policies that constrain emissions and thereby limit their potential for economic growth -- particularly when they have contributed so little to the historical rise in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and may suffer disproportionately more of the negative effects if nothing is done.

The bolding in the above is mine. I honestly don't think I can think of another example of a central government publication being so good about acknowledging the power of spontaneous order and the need to avoid the Nirvana fallacy. So kudos goes to Robert Shackleton of the CBO's Macroeconomic Analysis Division, who wrote the study, for not sounding like someone who's ignorant of economic theory! I'm just starting to read through this report, but I'm already looking forward to hearing what he will have to say.

Those who have followed my work will be aware that I am generally hesitant to endorse the approach to the issue of climate change which treats the problem as a question about the most efficient allocation of social resources. It seems to me that efficiency considerations can only justify coercive and centrally organized social engineering in rather extreme situations, and I am not fully convinced that the specter of climate change qualifies (or that if it did, the currently popular policy approaches would be the appropriate way to handle the problem). And looking through the table of contents in Shackleton's report, it doesn't appear that he considers these issues. But this is typical in the mainstream discourse, and I am not entirely surprised -- I can't hold it against him.

However, I can hold it in favor of former CBO Director Peter Orszag, who mentioned my point of view in a presentation at Wellesley College in October. On the 13th slide of his presentation, Orszag wrote:

Alternative view: Valuation of future benefits should be viewed primarily as a decision about equity rather than as a traditional investment decision.

But viewed as an equity issue, inconsistencies arise relative to how other intergenerational trade-offs are analyzed

Of course, I don't think Orszag is right to brush aside my approach in such a cavalier manner. And I certainly think that if "inconsistencies arise" when policies are considered from the standpoint of equity, then that seems like a problem for the views which are made inconsistent, and not the idea that policies should be based on equity. But the greater point is that at least Orszag is aware enough of what's going on to bring up this issue.

And this concludes my statist love-fest. You can all go back to your various degrees of distrust, dissent, and anarchist tendencies now.

Update:

Ugh. I take back all my love for Shackleton. Way to break my heart, man! Enjoy:

The atmosphere and climate are part of the stock of natural resources available to people to satisfy their needs and wants over time. From an economic point of view, climate policy involves measuring and comparing the values that people place on resources, across alternative uses and at different points in time, and applying the results to choose a course of action. An effective policy would balance the benefits and costs of using the atmosphere and distribute those benefits and costs among people in an acceptable way.

And by "Enjoy," I mean, "Try not to break something. It'll be okay."

An Aside: Someone Needs to Write a B.I.V. Song

2009-03-13T14:49:00.002-04:00

...and it needs to include the following eloquent and poetic verse (which I thought of this morning in the car on the way to work):

Nozick was right and I wish it were real
But you’re in control, so you know how I feel
Please don’t unplug me, I’m doing just fine
It’s not lonely alone in my mind

How about it, philosopher-musicians of the world? If you need a guitarist for the final product, I'm so down.

Another Great Moment in the History of Unintentionally Hilarious Comments

2009-03-11T23:29:00.005-04:00

My critique of Stefan Molyneux's theory of Universally Preferable Behaviour has been cited on the message board operated by the Sense of Life Objectivists (SOLO), a group dedicated to providing an alternative to the "cultism, censorship, heresy-hunts, emotional repression and robotic "Randroidism"" which founder Lindsay Perigo sees as characteristic of other Objectivist groups. As someone who was introduced to philosophy through the work of Ayn Rand, and who has since moved away from Objectivism due in part to the refusal of members of that camp to critically evaluate their own views, I very much appreciate what Mr. Perigo is trying to do, and encourage anyone interested in the philosophy of Ayn Rand to check out his site. I can't vouch for the content, as I haven't read much of anything from the site, but the site's "Credo" sounds like it's at least a lot closer to being on the right track than most of the other Objectivist writings I've come across. (Of course, I would be remiss not to also mention a fascinating counterpoint in Dr. Nathaniel Branden's The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand: A Personal Statement, which every Objectivist simply must read.)

But that's all beside the point here.

My critique was cited by a fellow going by Gregster on the SOLO forum, who simply said in reference to Molyneux:

One person's critique of his "ideas" on morality.

What followed, care of a poster named Sharon, was one of the greatest marginalizations I have ever come across in my life:

LOL. You are too much, Gregster. Did you even bother to read his book on ethics—or this critique for that matter? Probably not, and yet you have "scare" quotes here. You know, Rand has her share of critics as well. So what?

If you don't see why that's a genius thing to say, then it probably wouldn't help if I explained. Suffice it to say that I'm very pleased with this statement, and wanted to share. Rock on, Sharon.

A Little Bit of Blasphemy: A Reply to Onorati

2009-03-11T21:26:00.004-04:00

Over at the FreedomWorks blog, my good friend Joseph Onorati wrote a post in condemnation of protectionism and in favor of free trade. As you can guess, I am in general agreement with Joseph on this one. But because I am a wicked troll, I had no choice but to post a scathing counterargument on the blog. I figured it might be of interest to some of you, and I'd love to help draw attention to Joseph's work and the FreedomWorks site. So check it out!

I also wanted to offer a few counterarguments to the counterargument I presented on the FreedomWorks blog in case anyone suddenly feels uncomfortable about free trade in light of something I said there (I wouldn't want to actually make someone advocate protectionism, of course; I was just poking fun at Joseph!). So here are, as I see them, the three points which together make liberalizing trade a coherent position to advocate for in national policy debates:

1) The particular values which we might seek to promote through protectionist policies are not universally shared across the country. In fact, it's not even close. A respectful society would not impose coercive policies which are inescapably designed in a way that impoverishes the general populous in order to promote goals which are not necessarily supported by those who will be affected.

2) As Joe correctly noted, the free market -- with its power to spontaneously coordinate the pursuit of constantly changing and often competing ends without the direction of a conscious designer -- is the most powerful mechanism we know of for creating wealth and prosperity. Nothing else even comes close. So by allowing the market to function, we can be relatively confident that people will be generally better off than they will be under more consciously coordinated regimes which aim to mold society to a particular static vision.

3) Centralized decision-makers are ill-suited to making effective protectionist policies. They are subject to lobbying pressure and a set of incentives which often lead them to make decisions for reasons other than their beliefs about what would be in the best interests of the people, and even when they are acting on good intentions, they often lack the knowledge and understanding that would be necessary to carry out their plans with any degree of precision and effectiveness.

For those three reasons (and not only one of them by itself), I think it's reasonable to support free markets in national-level policy discussions. To be clear, I don't always think that's the right call for more localized and tightly unified policy-making groups. But where policies are going to be imposed in broad strokes on a country of over 300 million people, I can't bring myself to support putting any power of that sort in the hands of any bureaucrat or politician, no matter how much they want the best for the country.

Some Hayekian Bathroom Reading: A Reply to Farrell

2009-03-07T11:03:00.005-05:00

Yesterday over at the Crooked Timber blog, Henry Farrell wrote a post about an idea introduced by an airline executive which would have forced passengers to pay for their use of airplane toilets. He uses this example as a dig against we zany libertarians:

I’ve always thought that the social expectations associated with Ryanair flights are a microcosm for a certain kind of gung-ho libertarian ideal of market society, in which every possible social interaction is conducted through the cash nexus (if Michael O’Leary thought he could get away with charging you for the attendants’ smiles, he would). There are some quite clear efficiency benefits to this – externalities are internalized, and if you are determined just to travel (and to carefully work around their ways of squeezing you for extra cash) their flights are very cheap indeed. But you can also expect that they will charge you for everything that they possibly can, and take full advantage of every bargaining asymmetry going.

I agree that this sort of thing is unattractive, which is why I wouldn't expect that many airlines would get away with it for very long (though in the mean time it would be a source of irritation, and I would think it reasonable if they were required to disclose their policy very explicitly to potential customers in order to avoid legal ambiguity). Charge toilets might be a more efficient policy if allocating toilet use were at issue, but when your business depends on customer satisfaction, it seems dubious to me that the few dollars you would make per flight by charging for bathroom access would justify alienating and frustrating an enormous majority of your customers.

In any case, though, what we gung ho libertarians favor is letting people have the choice to try new things. As Farrell rightly points out, maybe there are some people out there who want to travel at the lowest possible expense, and are willing to put themselves in situations where they may be forced to pay out the nose for any amenities they wish to consume. We certainly wouldn't want to ban anyone from serving these odd folks. The issue gets complicated when access to the airline industry and to flight routes are restricted by another set of government policies, thereby reducing the opportunity for competition and making it so airlines have a privileged position in negotiating with their customers. But it still seems like no one is forcing you to fly with Ryanair, and what people should do is to choose the airline with policies they support (or are willing to accommodate for some other convenience or benefit).

The upshot of organizing society that way is that you never know what may come from toll toilets. Maybe people learn to accept paying for toilets, and that makes it possible for some entrepreneurial airlines to offer separate premium bathroom services (much like how when airlines started charging extra for food, the food got way better). The current incentive structure encourages airlines to go for the bare minimum. Maybe the best policy would be to charge for the nice bathrooms and have free ones that are poorly maintained. Maybe the best policy would be to only have nice bathrooms, charge for them, and brag about how your charge toilets are better than the other guy's charge toilets. I don't know.

And obviously, this isn't just about airplane toilets. The (good) libertarian argument was never that whatever happens in the market is desirable, or that we should never lament the elimination of services that we all enjoy. I would personally rather have free airline toilets, and I would gravitate flying on an airline that didn't fleece me at every available opportunity (perhaps even if I ended up paying more in the end!). But by legally prohibiting people from trying alternative policies, we entrench current tastes and prejudices and prohibit people from trying new things which may open up possibilities we haven't thought of before.

So while I join Farrell in finding the Ryanair suggestion to be unattractive and ridiculous, I don't think I would support the prohibition of such a policy which he seems to favor. If anything, that's because I would want to see competitors advertising with "Fly British Air. We don't make you pay to use the bathroom like those tits at Ryanair. Seriously, who makes their customers pay to use the bathroom on the airplane? What is this, France?"

You Say This Has Been In Print For How Long?

2009-03-01T22:25:00.004-05:00

From The Constitution of Liberty:

Just as a group may owe its rise to the morals which its members obey, and their values in consequence be ultimately imitated by the whole nation which the successful group has come to lead, so may a group or nation destroy itself by the moral beliefs to which it adheres. Only the eventual results can show whether the ideals which guide a group are beneficial or destructive. The fact that a society has come to regard the teaching of certain men as the embodiment of goodness is no proof that it might not be the society's undoing if their precepts were generally followed. It may well be that a nation may destroy itself by following the teaching of what it regards as its best men, perhaps saintly figures unquestionably guided by the most unselfish ideals. There would be little danger of this in a society whose members were still free to choose their way of practical life, because in such a society such tendencies would be self-corrective: only the groups guided by the "impractical" ideals would decline, and others, less moral by current standards, would take their place. But this will happen only in a free society in which such ideals are not enforced on all. Where all are made to serve the same ideals and where dissenters are not allowed to follow different ones, the rules can be proved inexpedient only by the decline of the whole nation guided by them.

You'd think that 49 years might be long enough for people to absorb things like this. But...nope.

Best weekend ever! My climate change paper is being published!

2009-02-22T16:18:00.004-05:00

So on top of getting admitted into the University of Arizona PhD program on Friday, I just received an e-mail from Dr. Robert Higgs informing me that my paper, "Justice and Climate Change: Towards a Libertarian Analysis," has been accepted for publication in The Independent Review (tentatively in the Fall issue)! So all of you loyal readers out there (do I have loyal readers?) should watch out for that to come out!

Thanks are due especially to my senior honors thesis advisor Dr. Harry Brighouse, Dr. Daniel Hausman, and Dr. Lester Hunt, without whose endless patience and availability the paper would not have been possible. Thanks also go to Dr. Jack Williams for helping me to understand the science behind the climate change issue, to Gene Callahan, Dr. Anthony Carilli, and "Anonymous Referee #2" for their comments in helping me to revise the paper, and to Geoffrey Lea, Joseph Onorati, and Tom Duncan for being excellent resources on economic theory as I worked towards a finished product. And thanks particularly to my wonderful friends who managed not to strangle me to death while I was researching and writing the paper, and droning pedantically about climate change the whole while.

Walter Block on Sexism: Straddling the Line Between Thin Libertarianism and Vulgar Libertarianism

2009-02-21T14:16:00.000-05:00

Introduction

Dmitry Chernikov left a comment on an earlier post directing my attention to an essay by Dr. Walter Block which basically just railed on several thinkers with whom I identify for various reasons. The essay appears to be a work in progress, as Dr. Block's typically clear and thorough writing style is conspicuously absent, but as the main points seem to be there, I think it would be fair to critique them. The essay covers a wide array of topics and it would not do to address them all here. I will focus here, therefore, on Dr. Block's response to Dr. Roderick Long on the issue of feminism.

In piece cited in the essay, Long's main point is built on the idea that treating women differently than men simply because they're women fails to give them their due, and that where we can see sexism embodied in wage structures, we should decry it. He engages an objection to this view which he attributes to Austrian economists and particularly Block himself, which is that the free market naturally ensures that women are not mistreated, since their wages would naturally be brought into line with their marginal productivity by the workings of the market process.

Long argues that in spite of the equilibrating tendency of the marketplace to bring wages into line with workers' marginal productivity, we cannot say with any degree of certainty that prevailing wages at any particular time will actually satisfy that equilibrium condition (e.g., because of imperfect knowledge, lack of entrepreneurial actions, etc.). Accordingly, even if employers were solely dedicated to maximizing monetary profit, there would be no guarantee that wages would equal workers' marginal productivity.

He then argues that on top of this, there are many reasons to believe that employers are not perfectly rational monetary-profit-maximizers, acting on influences like prejudices, presumptions, etc. So even if the market were providing an incentive through the profit motive to bring workers' wages into line with their marginal productivity, other factors could be providing a skewing counterweight that would make markets tend towards unfair wages for women.

So essentially, Long is saying that it simply isn't true that the free market naturally ensures that women are paid their fair wages, and that in fact we have good reason to believe that women are not being paid fairly. Therefore, he concludes that one can't create problems for the claim that there are sexist wage structures, and that they should be condemned, by arguing that the market naturally eliminates sexist wage structures.

Block offers no less than nine objections to this argument, which I perceive to take three basic forms: 1) Long's economic arguments are incoherent and there is evidence that he happens to be wrong; 2) The wage structures to which Dr. Long objects are not coercive, and therefore are not unjust and have nothing to do with libertarianism; and 3) There is no reason to object to people paying women differently than men, or to cultural institutions that demean women. I will discuss each of these objections in turn.

I. Are the economic issues discussed by Long dealt with improperly?

Block's first question is:

But why would there be a bias in the market such that entrepreneurship necessarily results in lower female wages in disequilibrium? Why not wages higher than MRP when the market is not in its equilibrium or evenly rotating state? Long, let alone not furnishing us with an answer to this absolutely crucial implicit claim of his, does not even seem to recognize that there is a need to do so.

In passing, I should note that budding young philosophers out there should be aware of what's about to happen here. Block has engaged in some very clear PhilosophyFTW!! If he is wrong -- and I think he is -- then this will be embarrassing for him, whereas if he had been nice about his objection, it would be totally okay for him to be mistaken. So here's the tip: If you're going to argue that someone made a very obvious mistake, don't be a jerk about it.

And here's Long furnishing us with just such an answer, quoted from Block's own paper:

Even if women are not generally less productive than men...there might still be a widespread presumption on the part of employers that they are, and in light of the difficulty of determining the productivity of specific individuals, this presumption would not be easily falisified, thus making any wage gap based on such a presumption more difficult for market forces to whittle away.

And:

But there is no reason to rule out the possibility of deliberate, profit-disregarding discrimination either. Discrimination can be a consumption good for managers, and this good can be treated as part of the manager's salary-and-benefits package; any costs to the company arising from the manager's discriminatory practices can thus be viewed as sheer payroll costs. Maybe some managers order fancy wood paneling for their offices, and other managers pay women less for reasons of sexist; if the former sort of behaviour can survive the market test, why not the latter?

Now, Block disagrees with the attribution of the wage gap to these phenomena, but that doesn't mean that Long does too. Clearly, Long believes that the answer to the question of why the wage gap favors men (even when productivity differences are taken into account) lies in some combination of unfortunate social stereotypes and sexism. Not only does Long apparently recognize that one would need to explain this, but he basically devotes 2 paragraphs of a 9 paragraph argument to doing so. So I don't think that Block's criticism is on the mark here.

Block's next piece of evidence that Long's economic reasoning is bad is to point out that lesbians apparently make more money than straight women. The article Block cites is no longer at the linked location, but I would have to wonder...aren't there a lot fewer lesbian housewives and stay at home moms? And is it impossible that lesbians -- who have often had difficult, character-building upbringings -- are typically more productive than straight women? I'm not saying that this isn't evidence against Long's point, but it seems like more needs to be said.

Block moves on to suggest that Long is on a slippery slope that will commit him to suggesting that minimum wage laws are not all bad. But Long specifically said that he didn't necessarily support government intervention, and concluded his argument with the claim that the wage gap is:

...no reason to gripe about 'market failure.' Such failure is merely our failure. Instead, we need to fight the power - peacefully, but not quietly.

So Block seems to miss the mark here as well.

Block's next point is that Long's argument sounds like the "cluster of error" of Austrian Business Cycle theory, and:

...as we know from our study of business cycles, any such conglomeration of error cannot long endure without continued statist interference with markets. It would be dissipated by the market's profits and loss weeding out process.

Now, anyone who's been paying attention will realize that Block has objected to Long's critique of a particular argument by simply reiterating that argument. Accordingly, the best response would be to simply reiterate Long's critique: A) The market's "profits and loss weeding out process" is a process and can be hampered by a number of factors which appear to be at work in this instance (e.g., entrenched prejudice, a lack of clear information about the marginal productivity of individual workers); and B) There are other examples of unprofitable business strategies that have survived the market test (e.g., fancy wood paneling in managers' offices), and the market is not a perfect mechanism for weeding these strategies out. I would beg the question if I suggested that this rebuttal wins the point for Long, but it is at least clear that Long has a response which this particular objection does not preempt. So again, Block somewhat misses the mark.

Block's final objection to Long's economic arguments is that he simply doesn't believe that sexism operates in the way that Long suggests: he thinks that sexism may actually benefit women where it does occur. He suggests that:

...when it comes to pay, my own informal assessment is that it works mainly in the direction not of increasing the pay gap between men and women. Rather, it is all in the direction of paying attractive women a beauty premium.

He goes on to suggest that:

...if they [men's tastes] are in opposition to anyone, it is to other males who are seen as competition.

Now I don't have the empirical evidence to go to battle on this point. So it will have to suffice to say that it seems very unlikely to me that the underlying productivity difference between women and men is being underrepresented by the existing wage gap because hot women are being paid more than their labor is worth. I mean think about it: Long is saying, "Women make 75% as much as men for the same work," and Block is saying, "And lucky them! They'd be making even less if they weren't so damned cute!" Ummm...somehow that seems...just...no. I could be wrong to think that negative sexism plays a more significant role than positive sexism, but...well...I just don't think I am.

For one thing, many beautiful women will tell you that it can be difficult to be taken seriously for top positions as an attractive woman because many managers believe that beautiful women have only gotten to where they are on the basis of their looks. Beauty premiums, then, may well be counterbalanced somewhat by beauty handicaps. And even if beauty premiums really did outweigh the lower wages generated by demeaning sexism, that wouldn't mean that we should call the whole thing a wash. Surely Long would object to sexism in the workplace even if it didn't show up in aggregate wage statistics.

II. Is sexism an issue on which libertarians should opine?

This brings us to the next kind of objection that Block raises to Long's argument, which is that sexism embodied in wage structures and social conventions is not coercive, and therefore is not an appropriate domain for libertarian inquiry. Block writes:

Of course, there are other problems [besides coercive violence] that libertarians are involved in combatting: bad breath, the heartbreak of psoriasis, losing chess games, cancer, the list goes on and on. But here, libertarians who do so are not acting qua libertarians. This is a distinction that is crucial for a clear understanding of this philosophy.

This objection is an instantiation of Dr. Block's longstanding argument against so-called "thick" libertarianism, a view which holds that libertarians ought to be concerned not only with matters involving coercive violence, but also a wide range of other issues which are in one way or another connected with their views on coercion. Block's argument is that these other issues are certainly important and worthy of discussion, but they have nothing to do with libertarianism, per se. Libertarianism, according to Block, is a philosophical view which is directly concerned with opposing coercive violence, and that's pretty much it.

Now, at first glance, this would seem to be an argument about semantics. If it's really such a big deal for libertarians to talk about other issues "while wearing their libertarian hats," then for the sake of discussion, Dr. Long could just say, "Fine. I'm not talking about sexism as a libertarian. I'm talking about it as a feminist who happens to be a libertarian as well." But more substantively it seems like we should ask why Dr. Block is objecting to the use of the term "libertarianism" in talking about things like sexism, and try to decide whether there's really a deep difference between, say, being a libertarian and being a feminist.

What Dr. Block seems to have in mind is that libertarianism is, at its core, built around the concept of "justice," where justice is defined as turning on the legitimacy of initiation of coercive force. This seems to me like a naked move to entrench the non-aggression principle in a piece of terminology by warping the normal meaning of justice to conveniently allow for a clean distinction between coercive and peaceful behaviors to be labelled "unjust" and "just," respectively. But no matter; that's how Dr. Block seems to want to use the term, and we can grant it. On this view, then, we should notice that the fact that something is "just" need not mean that it is desirable, aesthetically pleasing, reflective of what people deserve, impartial, or even morally acceptable. It just means that no one has "thrown any punches" yet in a way to which we object, and therefore there cannot have been any injustice.

If we define libertarianism as a school of thought focusing on "justice" as defined above, then we will be led to the position advocated by Dr. Block:

Why is this [inequality in wages for equivalent work] unjust is this unjust from a libertarian perspective? It is not.

That is not to say that individuals who are libertarians have no business objecting to these inequalities. To reiterate Block's point, quoted above:

Of course, there are other problems that libertarians are involved in combating: bad breath, the heartbreak of psoriasis, losing chess games, cancer, the list goes on and on. But, here, libertarians who do so are not acting qua libertarians.

The point is, these things are objectionable for reasons which have nothing to do with justice, as defined above. Therefore, they have nothing to do with libertarianism, which is a philosophy that deals only with justice.

I think that this view is mistaken. To see why, we should note that in the above, I did not say anything about what position libertarians actually take on positions of justice (as I defined it); I only said that Block's view limits libertarianism to matters of so-called "justice." If my familiarity with Dr. Block's views serves me correctly, I believe that he would want to say that the libertarian view of justice has something to do with the non-aggression principle, such that initiating coercive violence is "unjust," and anything else is "just." Since I don't believe that the non-aggression principle is correct, and I want to be charitable to the libertarian position (particularly since I consider myself to be a libertarian), I will rephrase this position to say that the initiation of coercive force is prima facie unjust, and that (to the extent that we accept the definition of "justice" with which we are working here) anything that does not involve an illegitimate initiation of coercive force is just (for a discussion of this view, check out this post). If I'm wrong, and the non-aggression principle is true, then we can simply say that only illegitimate initiations of coercive force are unjust, but all such initiations are unjust. In other words, coercion is prima facie wrong, and there are no considerations which would cause us to find it legitimate. The way I've phrased it, we just get to include more views under the umbrella of "libertarianism" (most importantly, mine).

But libertarianism would be an empty shell of a position if it were simply a vague claim that "If and only if a view has only to do with the initiation of coercive force and views it as at least prima facie wrong, then it is a libertarian view." It would seem to behoove us as libertarians to say that a part of libertarian philosophy has to do with explaining why people should hold that kind of view. That is, it should explain why we should care so much about the initiation of coercive force, and why we are generally disposed to object to it as a matter of principle.

Now a complication arises here because (again if I correctly recall his views), Dr. Block believes that the initiation of force is unjust as a matter of undisputable logical fact. His view, following in the tradition of libertarian thinkers like Dr. Hoppe, is that one cannot advocate, condone, or engage in the use of coercive force without committing oneself to a contradictory position. The only position that one can reasonably defend, according to this view, is the libertarian view that the initiation of coercive force is incorrect. The reason that this is a complication is that for reasons I have discussed here and here, I think that this position is flat wrong (as was brought to my attention after writing those pieces, Dr. Bob Murphy and non-quite-Dr. Gene Callahan made some similar arguments as well). It is simply not true that any other position besides the non-aggression principle is incoherent.

But other libertarian views, including the one to which Dr. Long ascribes as well as the one to which I ascribe, resist coercion because of a fundamental belief that each of us is a valuable individual with his or her own life to lead. We suggest that it would therefore be disrespectful and unbecoming of us to force others to live according to plans that are not their own or to destructively interfere with their ability to pursue theirs. We see ourselves as having moral significance, and we acknowledge that the things that make us important also make others important. It is out of this deep appreciation and respect for individuals -- and the separateness of individuals' unique lives -- that we demand justification from those who would interfere with their neighbors' lives (or condemn them out of hand, for those libertarians accepting the non-aggression principle).

If we accept that something like this is at the root of the libertarian position on the issue of justice (still within our provisional definition), then it seems reasonable to say that an inherent part of libertarianism is an attitude of respect for individuals. And it is for this reason that I believe Dr. Block to be in error. If libertarianism is built upon a foundation of respect for others, then it would seem that libertarians would be committed to opposing any view which contradicts that paradigm of respect. And what Long is doing in leveling this argument is contending that sexism against women is indeed at odds with a view which sees all people as worthy of respect, as it is built upon subordination and dehumanization. So by incorporating feminism into libertarian philosophy, Long seems to be contending that feminism represents the position which follows from the consistent application of the ideas that make coherent the libertarian position on so-called "justice". In my opinion, this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a libertarian to be saying qua libertarian.

So what, then, of Block's point that:

Of course, there are other problems that libertarians are involved in combating: bad breath, the heartbreak of psoriasis, losing chess games, cancer, the list goes on and on. But, here, libertarians who do so are not acting qua libertarians.

This point seems intuitively right (except for the part about losing chess games; surely Block doesn't think that the world would be a better place if all chess games ended in stalemates). But whereas there is a reasonably strong connection between the ethical underpinnings of libertarian political philosophy and feminism, there is no such connection with bad breath, psoriasis, or cancer. The analogy simply doesn't work, and for reasons that I believe vindicate Long.

III. There is nothing wrong with sexist wage structures or demeaning social conventions

There is a third sort of objection appearing throughout Block's argument which basically suggests that beyond being a non-libertarian issue, Long's objections speak to a problem that isn't a problem. In doing this, I believe Block skirts the line between merely "thin" libertarianism and "vulgar" libertarianism.

The term "vulgar libertarianism" can best be understood by going back to our distinction between "just" and "unjust" from earlier, which defined as "just" anything that doesn't involve illegitimate coercion. Recall that we said that just because something is "just" by this definition does not mean that it is good, or even morally acceptable. Vulgar libertarian views, we will say, function essentially as "capitalist apologetics" by jumping to the conclusion that because something does not involve the illegitimate use of coercive force, it is not objectionable. The vulgar libertarian is the sort of thinker who, when presented with a lamentation about the outcomes generated by a free society, automatically reacts by saying, "Oh, but here's why that outcome isn't lamentable at all!" The vulgar libertarian, for example, might put down Dr. Block's Defending the Undefendable and proceed to argue that actually, the man who cheats on his girlfriend with a prostitute is doing nothing wrong, since no one has been coerced and the transaction was actually beneficial to both parties. Or that all poor people deserve to be poor, since they haven't produced anything for society that others have found to be worth paying any more to obtain. Or that the pervert who seduces the child is blameless, as both parties are simply doing what they want to be doing.

Let me be clear: I do not believe that Dr. Block is a vulgar libertarian. It is because I do not believe this that I am even making the argument that his views here seem to border on vulgar libertarianism. If Block were a vulgar libertarian, it would surely do little good to show that his arguments indeed sound like those that a vulgar libertarian might make.

So what in Block's paper am I talking about? Block first writes:

Perhaps most important, we must hark back to the biblical story where people are paid different amounts of money for doing precisely the same job; or what is the same thing, the same compensation for doing very different amounts of work...These disparities can be interpreted as a differential gift giving. That is, the employer pays everyone equally for equal productivity, but then makes a freely given donation to some but not to others.

For those not familiar with the story, there's a story in Matthew 20 about a vineyard owner who hires a group of workers to work at his vineyard, promising them a fair wage. Later in the day, he sees another group of workers who have not found any work for the day, and hires them to come help as well. At the end of the day, he pays all of the workers equally, to the consternation of the workers who had worked all day. Block's implication is captured by the differentially-paying vineyard owner in Matthew 20:13-16:

Friend, I am not treating you unfairly. Didn't you agree with me to work for the standard wage? Take what is yours and go. I want to give to this last man the same as I gave to you. Am I not permitted to do what I want with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?

The first thing that one should notice is that in the vineyard parable, all of the workers were paid at least the "standard wage." A controversy might be raised, then, about whether the parable would apply to situations where capitalists were levering their advantaged position in negotiating with applicants to drive their wages below "fair" levels, which is presumably what Long thinks is going on when women are paid "unfairly." But even broaching the subject of "fair" wages opens up a can of worms all on its own, and the issue here is about sexism, not some form of wage egalitarianism.

The more substantive point is that when we consider the action of the vineyard owner, we see that he has acted out of generosity towards the late-coming workers. In the story, the reason for the generosity is not suggested to be some sort of prejudice against the early-coming workers, nor is the account stated in terms of some kind of malice, scorn, dismissiveness, or ill-will towards the early-comers. If these factors were involved in the story, then presumably Dr. Long would be uncomfortable with this example as well.

It seems pretty clear to me that when employers pay their male employees disproportionately higher wages, they are not doing so out of the generosity that the vineyard owner showed towards the workers who had not been able to find work. For that reason, I think that the analogy somewhat fails, though it is a valuable insight that unequal treatment does not necessarily have to objectionable. It's unequal treatment because of prejudice or sexism that should draw the ire of feminist, not unequal treatment as such.

Hopefully it will be clear, then, why I find this argument to be at risk of vulgarity. The feminist complains that sexist or prejudiced employers treat women badly by paying them less, and Block responds with an example of seemingly legitimate differential pay, with the implication that sexist and prejudiced employees are in the clear on its weight. In doing so, he conveniently defends the status quo and the employer, while comparing the feminists to grumbling and envious characters in a well-known story. But as the principle of charity compels us to assume that Dr. Block didn't perceive the disanalogy we discussed above, and did not intend vulgarity, we must keep in mind that we are not trying to argue that Dr. Block is a vulgar libertarian, but only that this particular position seems like it is wrong for reasons that are reminiscent of the vulgar paradigm.

Dr. Block's next point is entwined with the "thin" libertarian view discussed in the previous section:

...Long is going to have to decide whether his primary allegiance lies with feminism or libertarianism. This author does indeed touch on one aspect of this when he discusses the possibility that the wage gap between males and females might be due to in effect employer consumption [sic]: paying males more than females just for the sheer joy of doing so. If so, is this not the employer's right? And if so, from whence springs any possible libertarian objection to the wage gap?

That this argument borders on vulgarity can be seen by examining the first sentence. Remember, Block's argument for "thin" libertarianism is that the kinds of issues that concern the feminist here have nothing to do with libertarianism, and that the libertarian cannot talk about them qua libertarian. But why, then, would Dr. Long have to choose between these positions? If these are issues which really have nothing to do with libertarianism, then one should be able to be a libertarian while holding substantively any view on the issues that concern the feminist in this instance.

What seems to be going on here, as evidenced by the accommodating tone that Dr. Block takes in talking about "paying males more than females just for the sheer joy of doing so" is that Dr. Block has gone beyond his "thin" libertarianism in favor of a "thick"-er view in the opposite direction. That is, it's not just that sexism is not violent, and therefore is not "unjust," but rather, it seems like Block is flirting with saying that there is nothing wrong with sexism. But this is not thin libertarianism. It is vulgar libertarianism.

This sort of thing vaguely seems to reappear when Dr. Block writes:

What is this business of criticizing the freely made decisions of women to stay home and take care of babies? It matters not one whit that this is done "on moral grounds (or) prudential grounds." The libertarian qua libertarian simply has no business in criticizing "women's (choice of) greater responsibility for household work." It is no business of the libertarian, none whatsoever, to "combat" the "sexism" implicit in "the cultural expectations that lead women to assume such responsibility."

I don't want to get involved in saying something like "Well no, he didn't say that there is nothing wrong with these cultural expectations, but don't you think that's what he meant?!" But I do want to point out that if this argument is intended to promote "thin" libertarianism and not "vulgar" libertarianism, it seems like one would expect some kind of qualification along the lines of, "Of course, none of this is to say that these cultural norms should be embraced or even countenanced silently. They are simply not within the providence of libertarian discussion." And yet not only is such a disclaimer not offered, but what is written seems like it could be easily interpreted as an argument that "criticizing the freely made decisions of women to stay at home and take care of babies" "on moral grounds (or) prudential grounds" would be misguided, even if done from outside the realm of libertarian theory. Such an interpretation would be vulgar, even though it is not at all entailed by what Block actually says, and I think offers another example of Dr. Block straddling the line between thin and vulgar libertarianism, even if it does not technically cross it.

Conclusion

Having evaluated all three kinds of objection raised by Block to Long's discussion, and found each of them somewhat wanting, I think that a few closing words are in order. It will surprise no one to discover that I sided with Dr. Long in this argument before reading Dr. Block's piece, and therefore my response must be taken in that light. Further, there is no reason to expect that Dr. Block would have nothing to say to the points that I have raised here; this debate has been going on for a very long time, and presumably Dr. Block has heard most of the objections that can be offered against his position. Accordingly, it may well be that my points here have missed their mark.

That being said, I do think that I have raised some important questions here about Dr. Block's position and arguments, and that my analysis was both thorough and fair. Dr. Long's arguments cannot, I think, be dismissed as easily as Dr. Block's piece makes it sound.

Hopefully this has been as valuable and interesting for you to read as it was for me to write!

Arizona Here I Come!

2009-02-20T22:47:00.003-05:00

I just got a phone call from Dr. Richard Healey of the University of Arizona offering me admission into the philosophy graduate program there. The world is a beautiful place. Thanks goes to my family, my philosophy professors at Wisconsin -- especially Harry Brighouse, Dan Hausman, and Lester Hunt, my amazing friends who have somehow managed to put up with my ramblings all these years, my FEEple, and all of the folks on the internets who have helped me develop into who I am today. And the academy. And whoever else people thank. Am I supposed to even be thanking people? Whatever, I'm happy and want everyone who made this possible to know that I appreciate everything you've done for me and that I love you. Time to celebrate!

On the "Other" Kind of Left-Libertarianism

2009-02-18T17:37:00.003-05:00

Update: See the bottom of this post for further discussion.

So earlier today I wrote a post about why consider myself a left-libertarian if I disagree with the views of some of the most prominent thinkers who call themselves left-libertarians, and a fellow named Dan Waxman asked:

I'd be interested to know your rationale for rejecting the Steiner/Otsuka/Vallentyne style left-libertarianism (i.e. self-ownership coupled with a very stringently egalitarian proviso regarding the initial acquisition of external worldly resources).

I feel as though temperamentally I am in a similar position to you - I also have a problem with oppression and mistreatment, and I think that in a libertarian society - including (especially?) the ones which reject common world ownership - these evils would be far less common. But I don't think I have worked out a satisfactory answer to my own conflicted intuitions about the initial acquisition of property, and, to be perfectly honest, I don't think it helps that the literature is notably thin on actual *arguments* either way. At most we get a bald assertion that the earth is originally unowned from Nozick and co, then we get people like Cohen and Otsuka complaining that this assertion is 'blithe,' without putting forward any argument whatsoever for their alternative! So like I said, I'd be interested to know your thoughts, especially if you've come to some kind of stable reflective equilibrium on the issue

I think that's a great question, and want to take the opportunity to post a few thoughts in rejection of the resource-egalitarian liberarian point of view (though in actuality, it is not a single point of view; these objections may variously miss the mark when applied to specific views which preempt them). I might try to flesh these objections out a little bit in a future post (or series of posts), but for now I just want to put them out there. If they don't make sense, I'll be happy to try to clarify. I'm going to put off for now the task of trying to justify a particular alternative view of property rights, and confine this post to attacking this view. Without further ado:

1) Freedom disrupts patterns. The point of an egalitarian distribution would be to secure liberty for all, but it seems clear that any kind of real, effective liberty would produce inequality. In order to maintain equality, constant coercive redistribution would be needed. If the resource-left-libertarian is truly committed to liberty and effective self-ownership, then she must countenance the inequality that would result even if there was at one point an egalitarian distribution of resources. This was Cohen's argument in Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality. But if the resource-egalitarian libertarian is comfortable with this, then her position seems to reduce to some claim that the thing that's wrong with our property regime is merely that it doesn't have the right sort of history. Is this a reasonable basis for a political philosophy? Is the problem with our society really just that a hundred years ago, things weren't alotted equally? I just don't think there's anything there.

2) Society is not like a situation where everyone comes to a negotiating table to claim their fair share, or where we all move away from a starting point to pursue our individual lives. The system of resource ownership is a dynamic and evolving system, with new participants coming and going all the time and different allocations of resources every day. If we wanted to ensure that everyone got a particular share of natural resources (regardless of what rule is used to determine what kind of share it would be), and we refused to engage in coercive redistribution (as this would seem to impinge upon effective self-ownership), we would seemingly need to have coercive enforcement of use limits. But these measures would require us to make projections about the future which we simply cannot make, and to make assumptions about the availability of natural resources which can't be based on anything besides speculation. The resource-egalitarian libertarians want this to be a rationalistic framework, but there's simply no objective way to do anything like this. Do we save a bunch of the gold for future generations? How much? Are we sure that someday people won't be able to make gold out of other stuff, making our non-use unnecessary?

3) Value and wellbeing do not come from access to natural resources. The value of natural resources is subjective, changes over time with different circumstances, and is not directly related to the value of the things that are made with those resources. Treating them like a commodity with timeless value doesn't make sense. And if they lack this special kind of status, then it's not clear why we should focus our entire political theory on them as if a proper way of dealing with them would fix all of our problems.

4) The original objection to the appropriation of the natural commons was based on the idea that natural resources provided the means for production. In today's society, the means of production are increasingly detached from natural resources. The lack of access to the means of production is not a lack of access to natural resources, and most people complaining about the former would look at you pretty strangely if you "solved their problem" by dealing with the latter. If lack of access to the means of production is a problem, then the solution will not be found in an egalitarian resource distribution.

There are probably other reasons I could offer in favor of rejecting this view, but I think those four will do for now. Hopefully that helps! [Note: I apologize for the sloppiness of this post; I wrote it right after I finished work...can you tell? If something is confusing in an interesting way, please let me know.]

Update:

Please see Joel Davis' critique of this post, as well as my reply.

Why Do I Call Myself a Left-Libertarian?

2009-02-18T09:06:00.006-05:00

I received a very fair comment on my previous post, "On Distributive Justice and the Indeterminacy of the Market Process," from an anonymous reader, asking:

Reading this post, I am quite baffled why you name your blogspot libertarian-left.blogspot.com. How can you say that you work in the Left Libertarian tradition, when in this post you completely reject the ideas of all the most famous Left-Libertarians including Henry George and Steiner and Otsuka and Vallentyne? How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework? I cannot find aything leftist about your ideas. Exactly what distinguishes your beliefs from Right-Libertarianism pure and simple?

I thought it might be worthwhile to give that question a thorough answer, since I anticipate that it may come up again, and others might find this answer interesting.

There is definitely a tension within the world of libertarian thought regarding the meaning of the term, "left-libertarianism." One school of thought identifying itself as left-libertarian describes its ideas as upholding the libertarian conception of self-ownership while insisting that a just society would distribute worldly resources according to some egalitarian principle. This is the tradition into which writers like George, Steiner, Otsuka, and Vallentyne fall. As you rightly notice, I am clearly not a part of this camp [Update: I discuss this position in this post].

The other interpretation of the term "left-libertarian" has been offered by Roderick Long, building on Rothbard's (and later Samuel Konkin's) idea that libertarianism is more naturally allied with the political left than with the right. Dr. Long gives a really good explanation of his views in this interview. And as you might have gleaned from my description of this site on the sidebar, I basically agree with his approach.

I've been very conflicted about using the term "left-libertarian" to describe myself, as it's unquestionably true that the first meaning is more widely acknowledged and used today, and I'm not a big fan of inherently confusing terminology. But I'll offer two points in my defense. The first is simply that I chose the name for my website before realizing how deeply I disagreed with the folks in the Steiner camp, and the status quo has thus become somewhat entrenched.

But secondly, and more substantively, I don't think that left-libertarianism of the Steiner mold has much to do with leftism, except to the extent that it has something to do with egalitarianism and, in some sense, it views a non-egalitarian property regime as oppressive. The bread and butter of the left, I think, has always been to root out oppression and mistreatment in society and demand its rectification. And that has been my concern as well, as I search for different ways to think about the respect to which people are due and build ideas about living together that try to embody that respect.

Now, an important part of the commenter's question was this:

How can you say that you "attempt to incorporate concepts such as equality, opportunity, and need into my framework", when this post seems to be arguing that they cannot be incorporated to your libertarian framework?

This, I think, is a somewhat unfair reading of my earlier post. In the last section of that post, I wrote:

Perhaps it is the case that, as individuals who appreciate each other's value and moral worth, we owe it to each other to lend a helping hand in times of need. And if we did not lift a finger when others were facing crisis, that we would be failing to uphold our duties as morally responsible people. To say this implies no injustice in the market system which brings about unfortunate outcomes, nor does it imply that somehow we need to find some point in the past to serve as a "source" of injustice. Rather, we can think of distributive injustice as a recognition that in a community or society where so many live free of need, there are individuals among us who struggle to survive, without so much as a helping hand from their neighbors.

Of course, the mere existence of need and want surely cannot entail the presence of injustice. The same respect for the value of life which commands us to care about our neighbors also commands us to recognize the importance of living our own lives according to our own goals and desires. Earlier, we noted an idea from F.A. Hayek that coercion is evil because it "eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another." We suggested that the tragic need which drives individuals into exploitative labor relationships is evil for this reason as well. But we must now acknowledge that the attitude which places on the successful individual the burden of caring after the world's needy is evil for exactly the same reason (I discussed this in a previous post). Addressing one evil through the introduction of another seems like a questionable way to proceed. But it does not seem that either extreme -- ignoring the suffering of others or sacrificing oneself for the good of those in need -- is the correct one. What is needed is a balance between the two.

In saying this, I had hoped to address what I felt to be some of the important and relevant concerns that people on the left might have had in response to my argument. And I certainly didn't mean to suggest that other leftist concerns (e.g., about the proper social response to inequality, oppression, lack of opportunity, etc.) "cannot be incorporated into my libertarian framework."

My point was that these concerns cannot coherently be levelled as a moral objection to the market process itself. It was my hope to convey that a just society would not simply accept the often arbitrary, sometimes lamentable, and always sub-utopian products of the market process, insensitively brushing the unpleasant bits under the rug. The market process, I think, is just, and cannot be condemned wholesale because of its inherent potential to generate undesirable outcomes for some people. But I think that there is more to living together than the market process, and that the concerns of the left are valid reasons for searching for solutions outside of the typical consumeristic market paradigm. That, I think, is where the "left" in my "left-libertarianism" comes through.

An Introduction to Economics and Political Philosophy

2009-02-11T09:39:00.006-05:00

So a number of people have recently asked me about a reading list to get better acquainted with economics and political philosophy, and I've thus far had quite a difficult time responding. There's just so much to read, and it's sort of hard to say where to start! Accordingly, I think I'd like to try to maintain a list on this blog, changing it as I read new things and become exposed to new ideas, with the intention of appealing to the non-philosopher and non-economist who wants a background in those areas, but doesn't have the time or the interest to read everything that anyone has ever written.

I'm going to approach this project somewhat differently than I think a lot of other people might, in that I'm going to leave a lot of history unexplored in favor of getting people up to speed on the current state of discussion (as I understand it). Though a lot of people might immediately understand why I'm doing this, it will be worth explaining the choice for the sake of those who don't. Those who don't care about my life's story should just skip down to the list.

I taught myself guitar, and I have been playing since I was 13. Some of my friends who took up guitar around the same time took formal lessons, where they learned scales, chord structures, proper strumming technique, and all the rest. Most of them quit, and those who still play are permanently scarred by the passionless regimentation that characterized their musical upbringing. They know the techniques, but they don't feel the music. I, on the other hand, learned power chords and palm muting and spent the first few years of my playing career thrashing out punk rock and generally having a fantastic time. 9 years later, I still hold the pick wrong, my thumb doesn't rest properly on the back of the neck, and there are a number of techniques I can't do with even average proficiency. But I love the music I play, and I defy you to find me a guitarist who will scoff at my capabilities.

I also taught myself economics and philosophy before I started taking substantive classes in those subjects in college. Even though I no longer believe almost anything that I held to be unquestionably true in those early days, I maintain the passion and excitement for the subject that the experience ingrained in me. I can't imagine that I would feel this way if my introduction to philosophy had been in the History of Philosophy courses I took in college, where most of our time was spent determining what someone important said once, what they meant, and why they were wrong. Even with my existing foundation in philosophy and enthusiasm for the subject, I often found those classes soul-deadeningly boring and difficult to stomach (though in retrospect, I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity to have taken them; they were invaluable). I won't inflict that on someone else, even if it is technically the "ideal" foundation. Just like an understanding of all the scales is the foundation to proper soloing, and yet (I think) is the wrong thing to learn first, a deep familiarity with the history of philosophy is indispensible for proper philosophical though, and yet should be left for later.

So with that in mind, here's the list, along with notes explaining why everyone should read these things.

-------------------------------------------------

Part 1: Honing the Instincts, Libertarian Style

1. Anthem by Ayn Rand

The first book clearly needs to be a dystopia, and anyone who doesn't see why needs to get a life. The choice of Anthem was a tough call, because I'm pretty sure that I don't think that Anthem is the best dystopia. But where Anthem's preachiness makes it a worse book than some of the others in the genre, I think it makes the book better as a tool for philosophy. It's super short and pretty well written, so it should be easy to get through quickly.

2. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

This is another short book, but it's definitely a little drier. Nevertheless, I think it remains one of the most powerful cases for liberty that has ever been made. It deals with a lot of issues that are immediately relevant in thinking about life, and is generally a good starting point for political thinking. This book is important historically, and Mill's ideas will come up in later readings, so it will be helpful to have read this book. But it also stands on its own as a worthwhile introduction to political philosophy.

3. Gorgias by Plato (Socrates)

*Whew!* You made it! Your reward is a thoroughly entertaining and worthwhile jaunt even further into the past, where Socrates takes on a number of interesting characters in one of the most educational (and in my opinion, entertaining) conversations ever had. This is another short, quick read.

4. The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality by Ludwig von Mises

After Socrates' distinction between what's good for people and what they think they want, it seems appropriate to move on to a book which argues that what people think they want is actually bad for them. Anyone on the Left will rightly consider this book to be the king of bourgeois apologetics. And I agree. But whereas the reasons why Mises' analysis falls short are complex and require a great deal of nuance, the reasons why Mises is right are simple and immediately recognizable. This book will take you from an appreciation for the value of individual liberty to a celebration of the power of the free market to promote that liberty, as well as the prosperity that goes with it. Again, it's not that long, so it shouldn't be too hard to get through.

5. "A Petition" by Frederic Bastiat

This essay is near and dear to the hearts of many economists, and for good reason. It is entertaining and relevant, and makes its point quickly and accessibly. You'll be glad you read it. If you hate it, then there's something wrong with you.

6. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

Put simply, this book is awesome. By the end of this reading, you will have a very good claim to having a bona fide understanding of libertarianism, and a solid foundation in free-market economics (assuming you've read the above recommendations as well). Hazlitt's writing is fantastic, and there's a reason for the title. It really is that good, and it's a pretty quick read (I think).

Part 2: Building a Foundation in Economics

7. "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read

This essay is one of the most famous in the history of popular economics, and deserves every bit of its reputation. It's written in a lively manner and makes its point with incredible effectiveness. Best of all, it can be read easily in one sitting without breaking a sweat.

8. "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by Friedrich Hayek

This essay takes the points made in Read's essay a few steps further, and presents them in a way that's slightly more rigorous. Some people find Hayek's writing to be dry, but this is unquestionably one of the most important essays in the history of economic thought. I think that it is indispensible for a thorough understanding of economics and political philosophy, so just get through it; it's not that long!

9. Animal Farm by George Orwell

Your reward for finishing Hayek's essay is a book you may have seen before, Animal Farm. Even if you've already read it, going through it again with the level of insight which you have obtained from the previous readings will be valuable. Plus, it's an awesome book. Enjoy!

10. "Public Choice" by William Shughart II

This brief introduction to the Public Choice school of economic thought helps to give form to Orwell's story, and provides a balance for the knowledge problems discussed by Hayek. Where Hayek's analysis shows why governments fail even when they try to do good, Public Choice economists point out that it's not even always true that governments are trying to do good. At this point in the reading list, you should be noticing that you understand a whole lot about economics and public policy, and it wasn't even really that hard to learn. This calls for a celebration, I think.

11. Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy by Daniel Hausman and Michael McPherson

Having gotten this far, though, I think it will be worthwhile for you to commit to an all-out assault on economic philosophy. This book is the motherlode, and after reading it, you'll be better versed than anyone you know who hasn't reached the graduate level in economics (and many of those who have). I know it's a lot to get through, but the writing is good, and it really is worth the effort. Plus, Dr. Hausman was my professor at the University of Wisconsin, and he's the man.

To be continued! Get started on this stuff, and by the time you're finished, there will be more. Good luck!

Mankiw's Decentralized Approach to Stimulus

2009-02-06T15:47:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, Greg Mankiw pointed out that perhaps the federal government is not the right entity to be charged with repairing the diverse and complex system of interrelationships that is the national economy:

When designing a fiscal stimulus, there is no compelling reason for one size fits all. Let each governor make a choice and answer to his or her state voters. It is called federalism.

After spending the last week or so despondently sifting through the House and Senate Stimulus Bills in search of energy industry-related cash, I almost stood up and cheered. But then I remembered that nobody listens to ethics-free Republican hacks.

*Sigh*