I’m worried that Tony Adragna may have misconstrued what I intended by “rational ignorance” when he links to my blurb about Eugene Volokh from his post on Leon Kass. I shudder even now to mention them in the same breath. (Volokh good! Kass bad!)

Rational ignorance, in the sense Volokh was talking about, has to do with the opportunity costs of thinking. This is a big notion in voting theory. The democratic ideal is full participation by a fully informed citizenry. However, gathering sound information about candidates and policies is expensive, requiring a great deal of time and mental energy (and critical thinking skills that are also costly to acquire.) Given that the chance that any one voter’s vote will decide the election is approximately zero, there is very little expected payoff in becoming informed. It is more rational to expend time and energy doing things that will have a payoff. Thus it is rational to remain ignorant of candidates and issues, and studies have shown that most eligible voters are indeed rational in this sense — they know next to nothing! (They might have a very nice lawn instead.)

At lunch, Volokh was using the notion to explain why citizens might be rational to consider existing policies to be well-considered, and thus biased to accept new policies that extend the principles of present policies. It’s cognitively economical to defer to experts, and legislators seem (to the folk) to be experts, so the fact that something is a law creates a rational presumption in its favor, which may then extend to new but similar policies. And that’s how (very crudely put) you get on a slippery slope. He’s not saying this is a good thing; it’s just what one might expect on an assumption of rationality.

Kass’s “wisdom of repugnance” isn’t about ignorance at all. He’s saying that our feelings are sources of knowledge about ethical matters. You might say that Kass has a theory of rational passions — a theory that our visceral gut feelings are reliable guides to rational action. Now, I happen to think that this view is ignorant, but it’s not about ignorance.

Probably I completely misunderstood what Tony was thinking, but it’s a hoot to expound on rational ignorance anyway.

Not only are the military tribunals bad justice, but they’re bad tactics and bad politics too.

Oh the irony! Ashcroft won’t release a list of the detainees because that it would “violate their rights. As Lucas Guttentag, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said (to WashPost):

It is ironic that the government is now concerned about rights when it has arrested and jailed hundreds of people without giving the American public any proof that the detainees are being treated fairly.

Indeed.

Whatever his weaknesses, Bush has no difficulties in categorical moral pronouncement. The War Against Terrorism has prompted from Bush the most exhilarating restoration of manichean language to the public forum. God bless Bush for being able to say ‘evil’ without irony, because it’s certainly nothing to be ironic about when it’s staring you in the face. However, it’s pretty aggravating when you’re on the wrong side of it.

“The use of embryos to clone is wrong,” Bush said. “We should not, as a society, grow life to destroy it, and that’s exactly what is taking place.” Ari Fleischer, WaPo reports, says that “the President has drawn a strong ethical line in the sand and said that line should not be crossed.”

In reply, one could say trivial things like, “I grow cucumbers, which are forms of life, just so I can eat them.” But Bush means human lives. There is no doubt that cloned embryos are humans. To be human is to have human DNA. However, having human DNA is far from sufficient for moral standing (unless you think there’s a special moral magic in some molecular configurations.) The point at which clusters of cells do acquire moral standing is a vexed question. Which is why Bush’s otherwise praiseworthy moral certitude is so chafing on this issue. Especially when you just think about it for a second. The lives that will be saved by stem cell research are the real deal: full-fledged men and women, boys and girls with hopes, dreams, fears, loves and conscious inner lives. People have been talking about “moral equivalence” lately. To morally equate bunches of insensible human cells to bona fide laughing, loving human beings is to assert a false equivalence of the cruelest kind.

Today was the day of high-powered libertarian law professors. Had a fun lunch with Eugene Volokh of UCLA (visiting at George Mason this semester) who wanted to talk about… blogs! He’s a huge fan of my blogging hero Instapundit! (I think he knows Prof. Reynolds from the 2nd Amendment lit.) After blogs, nice chat on the logic and psychology of slippery slope arguments. (Hint: It’s all about rational ignorance!)

Then, in the afternoon, a fantastically stimulating lecture by Randy Barnett of Boston University on the legitimacy of the Constitution. I cannot recommend Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty highly enough. (Follow the link for free excerpts.) Anyway, in today’s lecture (from a forthcoming book), Barnett went through the various arguments for constitutional and state legitimacy — consent of the governed; benefits received; hypothetical consent; you haven’t moved yet, have you? — and blew each of them up. His positive contribution was, among other things, that a constitution is likely to be legit just in case a law’s passing constitutional muster reliably conveys information about the genuine moral bindingness of the law. (Yes, that’s right, no existing constitution could pass this test.) At the banquet after, we chatted about the relevance of his ideas to civil disobedience. (Not all that relevant.)

Cool day. The GMU Law School’s not a bad place for a libertarian to be.

More on AmeriCorps. Fun-filled takedown by James Bovard on the often acidic Ludwig von Mises Institute Website. Highlight:

In Buffalo, N.Y., AmeriCorps members helped run a program that gave children $5 for each toy gun they brought in. In Lone Pine, Calif., AmeriCorps members put on a puppet show to warn four-year-olds of the dangers of earthquakes. Elsewhere in California, AmeriCorps members busied themselves foisting unreliable “ultra-low-flush toilets” on poor people. . .

Lenkowsky [Bush's appointee] told AmeriCorps recruits last month that their “daily duties” will be “helping to thwart terrorism itself. . . . Terrorists sow the seeds of distrust. You sow the seeds of trust, at a time your nation badly needs them.” Perhaps Lenkowsky believes that nothing would intimidate Al Qaeda more than a doubling in the number of puppet shows performed in America.

To be honest, I’m scared shitless by puppet shows.

Good! Ashcroft is getting heat. Sen. Leahy is pissed. He says, Ashcroft, “Owes the country an explanation” for his “ad hoc, outside the justice system tactics. I’d say. Undoubtedly, some my-country-right-or-wrong war groupies will be dismayed that Leahy is criticizing the administration, but at this point Leahy has a fair bit of war on terrorism street cred, having been the recipient of an anthrax-packed letter potent enough to kill thousands.

In any case, he’s absolutely right that we have to be an example of the rule of law right now, as always. It doesn’t look good if we trample on our own ideals whenever it’s convenient.

Forget moral equivalence… America’s worse! Check out this interminable Chomsky lecture (RealAudio) made at the MIT Technology and Culture Forum. (Link from Backwash.) Chomsky, in his usual laconic, newspaper quoting fashion, enumerates America’s crimes against all that is true and good. We’re starving the Afghans. And our involvement in Nicauragua in the 80′s constitutes a lawless terrorist act with which 9/11 pales in comparison. At least on lone voice remains to speak truth to power!

Seriously, I’m no big fan of interventionist foreign policy, and some of what Chomsky says resonates slightly (e.g., I’m no fan of huge corporations either, though for reasons different from Chomsky). I do feel, post 9/11, that we need to seriously reassess our involvements and “entangling alliances,” as Washington put it. I think it is worthwhile to separate the idea of the nation — the American people and the ideals of the Founding — from the idea of the state — the actual government and its policies.

One can be pro-American, as I wholeheartdely am, in the sense that I love what this country is supposed to be about, and I love the way our people try to realize what this country is supposed to be about. And one can at the same time be anti-government, as I am, in the sense that I disagree with most of the overgrown state’s actual policies, and I’m pessimistic about the state doing much good in general. However, defense is an important exception, and I feel surprisingly good about how the war has been conducted thus far (though not on the Ashcroft front). Left libertarians like Chomsky seem to be entirely lacking in perspective, having vilified the U.S., both its ideals and its actuality, for so long that it is impossible for them to see when we’re by and large doing the right thing.

On Sunday, December 2nd, people around the world (108 cities) will Walk for Capitalism! Tired of clueless protests against liberty and prosperity? Check to see if your city is involved, and walk in celebration of freedom, markets and commercial culture! I’ll be joining Washington, D.C. folks at the Rosslyn Metro at 2:00 pm on Sunday, and we’ll stroll down to Iota in Clarendon and party like capitalists should. Should be fun!

Speaking of Randiana… learn how to get the Ayn Rand Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for your verifiably rational products.

Good piece by Will Thomas of The Objectivist Center on the perverse Atlas Shrugged-like parasitism involved in calls to break Bayer’s patent on Cipro.

Scientific American reports on the First Human Cloned Embryo. Reason Online prints a series of mini-essays by opponents to the ominous Left-Right coalition petition against certain kinds of genetic research.

Thankfully, Leon Kass has caught a lot of heat from the likes of Virginia Postrel and others for his retrograde views. Kass’s anti-science position flows from his curious conception of human nature and moral judgment. Kass thinks of human nature in strikingly static, essentialist terms, and he is happy to use his notion of a static human essence as a standard for moral evaluation. If something is inconsistent with our nature, then it’s morally out. That sounds OK, but Kass extends it to such vital matters as the right way to eat. Further, Kass thinks that our intuitive judgments of repugnance should be treated as morally authoritative. He recognizes that some folks have always been a little sickened by the shock of the new, and that we can’t let troglodyte sensibilities hold us back. Yet he thinks our visceral aversion to some things is so universal and deep-seated that it stands as a decisive objection against some things, and genetic manipulation is one of them.

My response to Kass is twofold. First, the argument from “it makes me feel funny” is a bit wanting in terms of rational foundations. We need an argument why our moral intuitions should be heeded. Incest makes us all feel pretty funny (the idea of it, I mean), and the Darwinian logic of that kind of aversion is easy to follow. But hey! With the advent of birth control, is there anything really wrong with loving your sister? Sure it’s gross, but once the natural necessity for that sentiment has been overcome by technology, is there any deeper argument against it? Likewise our feelings about cloning and such. Why not think that our repugnance is a vestige of an evolutionary environment that has no relation to our present situation.

Second, there is no essential human nature. We are products of evolution. Evolution works because of variation in populations. So we should expect quite a bit of difference between individual humans, and between human moral sensibilities. I for one have absolutely no bad feelings about cloning. Am I a deviant or is Kass? At best there are historically transient statistical norms; evolution continues apace. Additionally, few appreciate how close Kass comes to begging the question when the issue is genetic manipulation. Manipulation opens the possibility for changing human nature, including our moral sensibilities. If one proposes to change human nature, one can’t use human nature as a standard of judgment without begging the question. Conservatives like Kass may turn out to be a tricky kind of relativist according to which right and wrong are relative to the kind of psychological constitution you happen to have as a matter of evolutionary accident. But in that case, there is no way to rationally rule out proposals to modify our psychological natures, and then it’ll have to come down to force.

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg sensibly (thought weakly) opposes new calls for conscription, but he wrongly plumps for an enlarged AmeriCorps. It’s voluntary, and we can use it to reap some of the cohesive benefits of war time, he says. Weisberg’s all kinds of supportive for the McCain/Bayh bill that will quintuple AmeriCorps. He writes:

This approach avoids both the democratic problem of unjustified compulsion and the practical one of finding useful work for millions of young people in the midst of recession and war. At the same time, it points in the direction of national service one day becoming a kind of social norm and expectation.

I have two big problems with this: (1) Nationalizing voluntarism will have a degrading effect on the national ethos; (2) “National Service” does not require a collective, taxpayer-funded organization.

Concerning (1), US citizens already contribute enormous amounts of money and time to charity, more than any other nation, and it is used effectively. Americans tend to focus on actually solving problems rather than devising symbols, like AmeriCorps, that help wrap the state in the rhetoric of concern. Exactly what service does Weisberg think the AmeriCorpers are going to be providing? It’s funny how little he focuses on this. The value that Weisberg seems mainly interested in is a vague sense of national we’re-in-it-togetherness. He’s not thinking first about people on the ground getting help.

Americans in fact get helped through a multitude of decentralized charities and organizations. AmeriCorps will (a) be competing for these volunteers, (b) cause folks to think they don’t have to help because those kids from AmeriCorps will do it, and thus (c) degrade the spirit of charity and solidarity at the local level. Because people live at the local level, that’s where we need we’re-in-it-togetherness. If you’re in Mobile, Alabama, you’re not really in it with folks in Seattle any more than your in it with folks from Vancouver. What’s really the point of peacetime national solidarity and national service, other than the aggrandizement of the nation-state?

Concerning (2), it aggravates me that people working in the private sector aren’t understood to be doing a public service. Researchers at Human Genome Sciences who find the genes for certain medical disorders, or traders on Wall Street who help move resources to their most efficient uses, do much greater service to the nation than people who volunteer to clean up vacant lots or tutor kids. Yes, cleaning and tutoring is fantastic, and we should encourage folks to do it. But compared to the for-profit endeavors that make our country so enormously wealthy and secure, these are national service garnishes. And how about folks like me who work at privately funded non-profits. I’m not doing a national service by introducing hundreds of college students to the classical liberal political tradition?

So, we’re all doing “national service” anyway. But if national service has to be understood as something that flows from altruistic/nationalistic impulses, there’s no reason why it cannot be privately funded. Let Warren Buffet and Bill Gates team up to privately fund a public service organization. The problem with taxpayer funded adventures is that people are coerced into contributing — a kind of financial conscription, which is inconsistent with the spirit of benevolence and voluntarism. Being forced to fund Americorps is not so different from being forced to serve in it.

The coolest quiz on the web for determining your political orientation is Politopia.com. Politopia is an island where your political opinions determine where you live, and it’s not bound down by the tired one dimensional left/right model (represented in Politopia by the Old Main Stream). Look at the funny cartoons, take the quiz, tell a friend! Put in will@willwilkinson.net and find out where I live. And complain to the webmaster that Jesse Ventura is not a libertarian. (Full disclosure: Politopia is a production of The Institute for Humane Studies, my employer.)

Ken Layne mentions The Fly Bottle on his top-notch blog at KenLayne.com Thanks Ken! He labels us a “war blog” and well… it’s true! The Fly Bottle contains multitudes. And yes, Instapundit must be a twelve acre farm of networked massively parallel processing supercomputers, much as Kurt Warner (my University of Northern Iowa schoolmate — Go Panthers!) is an alien bio-agent for Gorzon the Inexplicable, Vizier Totipotent of the Galactic Hegemony, from the planet Mithrall. Any theory attributing mere humanity strains credulity.