The Fly Bottle has become Cloning Debate Central the last couple days. Sorry if this bores you.

John Weidner brings it again! He writes:

Okay, It seems like you are rejecting all arguments based on future developements. (Seems a bit extreme, most legal or moral prohibitions are somewhat like that. One dose of heroin won't hurt you at all. )

SO. just Wilk and mini-wilk. Hmmm.

1. Not good for Wilk morally and spiritually. The essence of being a parent is a sort of sacrifice of health, wealth and probably sanity (You think I'm kiddin', wait until YOU have 3 kids !!) in favor of future generations. By trying to preserve the you of here-and-now, you are rejecting an important human responsibility, to your spiritual detriment. (You probably have some argument why "morally and spiritually" don't really exist, but that's what gives philosophers a bad name.
Lke Dr Johnson, "I refute it thus!" Oooch, ouch, I think I broke my toe.)

2. Not good psychologically for mini-wilk. Part of the process of growth for chiildren is rebelling against parents, and rejecting their ideas to try one's own. Poor mini--you the "parent" will know his thought processes like they are your own, and he will never quite be his own person.

I'm certainly not rejecting all arguments based on future developments. I remain unmoved, however, by arguments based on extremely improbable future developments.

As to the Will/mini-Will arguments....

1. I don't really understand the argument (probably because I have yet to sire a brood.) Anyway, my intention in cloning myself is not self-preservation. I wish to conduct a fascinating experiment. I'd love to see just how much being me has to do with having my genes, and how much has to do with the totally unrepeatable particulars of my history and experience. And I promise to love mini-Will for his own sake. I certainly do not discount the moral and spiritual. No need to hurt your toe! Morality is about doing what you have to do to have a nice life, and I want a nice life! Spirituality has to do with the needs of a complex human consciousness. I like to tend to these needs through the satisfactions of art, love and intellection. (Religion and mysticism leave me spiritually cold, though.) I think raising mini-Will could be a spiritual experience.

2. Individuation is certainly key to maturation. But will I really know so much about mini-Will's internal world? From day one, he will inhabit a radically different developmental environment from mine, and so he will develop in response to a very different set of experiences. In the right circumstances, a Hitler clone could grow up to be a rabbi! In any case, the "too similar psychologically" argument could go either way. Perhaps I will be able to empathize with mini-Will in an unusually close way, and be able to offer him a kind of understanding and support that most parents can never manage with the aliens that are their children.

Thanks, John, for your thoughtful replies.

Dawson has taken the de-bait! He writes:

While I'm not certain I have the requisite skills to engage Will, (not to mention that I have several papers on film theory and lit. crit. to write in the next two weeks), I accept the challenge with the following caveat: Abortion=killing a viable human being. The argument would then be, "Is cloning abortion?". If we don't agree on that posit, we'll have to back up and debate the 'abortion is murder' posit before we discuss cloning. I will ask Will to formulate the argument, and will accept his challenge.

Dawson clearly has the required skills of engagement. But can he triumph?! Perhaps all that training in film theory and lit crit will develop fearsome skills of brilliant obfuscation.

First it isn't obvious what cloning per se has to do with abortion. If we are speaking of cloning for the purposes of creating stem cells, then I see it. But if we're speaking of me cloning myself for the narcissisitic enjoyment of raising mini-Will, then abortion is completely irrelevant. But let's see where this goes.

I accept Dawson's caveat with a caveat. Abortion is sometimes killing a viable human being. I accept that all embryos are in some sense human beings (having human DNA). I do not accept that all embryos are viable in the sense that they could survive outside the womb. But if by 'viable' all that is meant is 'could one day become independent,' then fine.

Next, not all killing is murder. Murder is wrongful killing. Now, persons are the category of beings that have full moral standing (that are subject to being wronged), but not all human beings are persons. Namely, clusters of 2,4,8,16,32, ..., n (choose your n) human cells are not persons, thus are not subject to being wronged, and therefore cannot be wrongfully killed.

Pre-emptive argument: Objection: But embryos are potential persons. Yes, and so they potentially have moral standing. And I am a potential airline pilot, but I am not therefore licensed to fly large aircraft. (Five year-olds are potential voters, but they are not allowed to vote, etc.) The difference between potentiality and actuality makes all the difference. To say that something is a potential x is to admit that it is not x.

As to the "Is cloning abortion?" question (assuming we're talking about cloning for stem cell harvesting) the answer is definitionally "no." Abortion is termination of pregnancy. There is no pregnancy involved in cloning embryos for stem cells.

In any case, we certainly won't be aborting mini-Will! The wee lad shall get nothing but the most vigilant prenatal attention from his amply-wombed, Mozart-listening, dietician surrogate mother. So what's the problem?

In response to my plea for better anti-cloning arguments, John Weidner of Random Jottings offers this:

I don't have a strong opinion on cloning people, but I can think of more arguments than your three that might be advanced against it.
4. Slippery Slope: Let 'em do this and talking dogs are right around the corner
5. Slavery: There are some people who are pliant and obediant by nature; and we all could use good domestic help.
6. Tyranny: Stalin finds "New Soviet Man;" makes 200 million copies.
7. Evolution: We are presumably still evolving, and cloning would interfere with that.

All right! Let's take these in turn.

4. It's not clear how this relates to cloning exactly. I suppose the idea is that cloning will lead to genetic manipulation, which will lead to talking dogs. But then we need an argument against talking dogs.

5. Slavery is a problem. However, pliant and obedient does not a slave make. Human clones, being human, would have the full complement of human rights. If pliant and obedient folks were mass cloned (a rather fanciful prospect), they would be treated with no less regard than natural-born pliant and obedient folks. You'd still have to pay them. If they were pliant, obediant and extremely smart, you'd probably have to pay them a lot.

6. Cloning, at this point, involves gestation in a real live woman's womb. So 200 million copies of anything is rather unlikely (that would be every woman and girl in the U.S. simultaneously pregnant.) However, there is a fascinating question here. If the New Soviet Man were developed (if even a possibility) what then would be the objection to communism for these folks? The main ethical problem of communism is that it is contrary and destructive to human nature as it is presently constituted. If human nature was different (this is about genetic manipulation now, not cloning), then the right political arrangement for humans would be different. (You'd still have economic calculation problems for communism, but that's a different issue.) The right way to live is relative to what kind of thing you are.

7. This assumes that evolution is a morally good thing, but it isn't. It's morally neutral. It's just something that happens, like the shifting of tectonic plate. And massive cloning wouldn't interfere anyway. It would just tend to replace natural selection with artificial selection (the process by which we get beagles from wolves.)

All of the objections are extremely fantastic; none is a plausible possibility given cloning. And even then, none approaches a compelling objection. The issues of genetic manipulation implicit in 5 and 6 are vexing and fascinating, but they are not problems for cloning.

Keep the objections coming!!!

Bob Barr has big balls! While most Republicans stand mute as the President cedes new powers to himself and the state and conducts the war like a benevolent despot, Rep. Barr tells it like it is on civil liberties issues.

Barr, unlike many in Congress, at least knows what his job isn't:

Most people up here, Republicans especially, don't like to make waves. They prefer to sit back and go with the flow, or they might not speak out because it might be contrary to what the Republican president wants. But I was not elected to represent the president.

In Praise of Bad Habits -- Text of fascinating lecture by Peter Marsh, a learned and even moving defense of hedonism and full living against the self-righteous ascetics and the health police. Highly recommended! I'm going outside to smoke a Marlboro!

Instapundit, with the lowdown on therapuetic cloning. And more from the always reliable Ron Bailey.

Philosopher John Kekes attacks the egalitarian tendencies of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin.

Since the name of this blog is taken from a Wittgenstein quote, I feel obliged to pass along good Wittgensteiniana. Try this fun excerpt from Wittgenstein's Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. The title refers to a celebrated, and much disputed, confrontation between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper involving a fire poker.

Although I doubt he is taking up my challenge to present a non-fluff argument against cloning, Dawson of dawson.com teases us with this:

Until I have time to expound, expatiate and yes, eviscerate, on the very real evils of cloning, I leave you this quotation from one of my favorite authors:
"A person is a person no matter how small." ~Dr. Suess

Dr. Suess's point is tautological. What does it have to do with the morality of cloning?

James Taranto of Best of the Web demonstrates mocking disregard for civil rights when he gladly cites poll data to show that people who care about liberty are out of touch with most Americans. The data show most Americans approving of such things as indefinite, secret state imprisonment for trivial offenses and the ability of the state to legally eavesdrop on conversations between the accused and their defenders. Taranto seems quite pleased that the populace's "overriding priority is to win the war." However, there is no clear indication that these policies are helping to win the war. And it is disturbing that an emergency can so easily cause so many Americans to disregard the importance of other people's rights.

From mensactivism.org:

The YWCA of Middle Tennessee recently ran an ad in both the Nashville Scene and Nashville's City Paper depicting the blurred image of a young boy walking up to his front door. The caption: "One day he'll own his own house...raise his own kids...beat his own wife."

It's part of an anti-domestic abuse campaign. Apparently the small print at the bottom of the ad explains "the cycle of abuse" and the ad is supposed to be about that. Sucks to be a boy these days. Saw an elementary school girl with this shirt on a while back: "Girls Rule, Boys Drool!" Yeah... that and they're destined to beat the living shit out of you.

Wendy McElroy discusses ceramic penises in Boulder and anti-male hate speech at I-Feminists.com.

I've been looking.... Is there an argument against cloning other than (1) We shouldn't be playing God, (2) It makes me feel really funny, or (3) It's not safe yet?

(1) and (2) are ridiculous, because there is no God (and if there were she'd want us to do it) and feeling funny isn't an objection to anything. (3) is a perfectly good argument, but without staying power; it'll be safe soon enough.

I'm interested in having a good debate about this, but there seems to be too little intellectual substance on the "neg" side to have one.

Okay, let me put out some argument bait. I'll even put it in terms prejudiced against my side (no parents desperate for children/organ transplant or die stuff). So... Suppose I want a clone of myself, just for kicks (I'd be a good dad and all), and I find a willing egg-womb donor. Why shouldn't I be able to do it?

Fire away.

Good article by Reason's Ron Bailey on Tech Central Station (thanks to Instapundit) about the smear campaign on Bjorn Lomberg. Lomberg is a ex-Greenpeacer statistician from Aarhus University who set out to show that there was something wrong with Julian Simon's anti-enviro-gloom research, only to find that most of it was right.

I went to see Lomberg speak on Capitol Hill a couple months back (it started late because the caterers were caught in post 9/11 security). It's clear why he's perceived by the enviro-left as a threat. He's a charming, articulate, attractive, liberal, gay, environmentally concerned, Scandanavian intellectual. By all indications, he should be on their side. But he's not. Instead, he's curious and intellectually honest.

For a long-time fan of Simon (God bless him), there was very little news in Lomberg's lecture. But messengers matter, and Lomberg is great messenger for those who don't think the world is falling apart. Simon was iconoclastic and could be dismissed as a crank (the left loved to mention that he wrote books on running mail a mail order business, as though grass roots capitalism is tantamount to Satan worship). But Lomberg, in his jeans and too-small black t-shirt, making a Simon-like case with mathematical competence, a young winning smile and charming Euro-cadences... that's just too much to take. The delight of the largely conservative and libertarian crowd is a sure indicator of left consternation.

The first U.S. combat death, Johnny "Mike Spann, a CIA agent, has been officially reported. First, it's just amazing that it took this long for an American death. Second, it's really amazing that your chances of dying appear to be higher if you're a journalist than if you're a U.S. combat troop.

In a comment on my blurb for Will Thomas's cipro article, my revered colleague, Damon Chetson, replies that intellectual property rights are a myth.

One of the interesting divisions among libertarians is the split between IP communists, like Damon, and pro-IP rights people, like myself. Some IP commies claim that the point of property rights is to create a system of efficient allocation for things that can't be used by everyone at once. There's no point in having a car, say, if you don't have a right to exclude others from using it whenever they want, because if they're using it, you can't. And if you don't divide up common areas into parcels of property, everyone will race to plunder whatever they can from the limited stock of resources. However, the molecular structure of cipro (or the sequence of words in a novel, etc.) is costlessly replicable. Thus allowing everyone to use it doesn't keep the inventor from using it. Therefore, there's no point in attributing a right to use that structure of molecules (or sequence of words, etc).

My reply is that property rights aren't based solely on the necessity of assigning entitlements of use to things that everybody can't use at once. We need to distinguish the moral basis of rights from the reasons we have for respecting other's rights. The basis for my right in my car is that I bought it from someone who had a right in the car. Your reason for respecting my right to my car is that we're all better off in a system that efficiently allocates entitlements of use for rivalrous goods. With IP, the basis of my right to a certain molecule is that I discovered it. Now, here's where the IP commie comes in... "But do we really have a reason to respect that right? Wouldn't we all be better off if we didn't?"

This, I think, is the hard question. John Locke, the ur-rights theorist, argued that you have a right of original acquisition if you "mixed your labor" with the thing, and if you "leave enough and as good" for others. The tragedy of the commons problems that show that property rights are required for leaving enough and as good (required, because if no one has rights to the commons, it disappears due to abuse and plunder), apply equally to IP, but in a different way.

Think of the land of ideas as an abstract commons -- everyone can wander in and explore. The problem here is that the commons is such a vast wasteland that it is incredibly difficult to find the oases of value in it. The tragedy of the intellectual commons isn't due to everyone racing to take what they can before others get to it, but due to no one bothering to go into it to discover its amazing treasures. If there are no IP rights, some people will go into the commons for fun (open source-like folks), and will be happy to share what they find. However, most people will be discouraged if they know that they won't have rights over what they find there. And so many amazing, life-enhancing things will be left unfound.

The question is: Under IP communism, will the value that comes from the public diffusion of the things that are found make up for the value that is lost from the things that are not found, due to disincentive? And would this be a good enough reason to override the basic moral rights of discoverers and creators? Not easy questions.

The IP commie argument that in an open source world people will simply respond to different incentives, and therefore gladly contribute their intellectual effort for the commonweal, smacks too much of the regular commie argument that the abolition of property altogether will only bring out the best in all of us, which will bring forth utopia. We all know how that worked out.

First the smoking idiocy, now this! These freaks in Montgomery County are making me glad to live in rather less chi chi Prince Georges County (for a change). If you can set the cops on your neighbor because you don't like the odor coming from their place, can't we in PG County do something about the odious smells coming from MoCo?

If you're so smart... why don't you write an encyclopedia entry! Go to Wikipedia, which is, naturally enough, a wiki and an encyclopedia. A wiki is a web page that can be edited by anyone who can view it. At Wikipedia, you can jump right into entries and improve them (although if it's not an improvement, someone else will soon change it back), or use your commanding knowledge of East Siberian hunting beavers to author the definitive article on the topic. The cool thing about Wikipedia is its anarchic, but stable and cooperative, open-source ethic.

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.

Fun interactive quiz at The Philosophers' Magazine on the nature of great art. You get to rate several criteria for aesthetic worth in importance, then you pick the two best artists (in your opinion) from a list (you can pick Britney!) Then, you rate your two using the aethetic criteria, and the quiz tells you who you should think is the better artist. For instance, I found out that I believe Shakespeare to be greater than Mozart. Lucky for Bill, I didn't put him up against Britney!