– Derby time. Here is your annual required reading.

– For family and friends who have not had the pleasure of seeing me bearded, feast your eyes on this:

It’s from the America’s Future Foundation Valentine’s Day panel on courtship and dating (about internet dating, really). My comments on internet dating boiled down to: it’s just like regular dating, but with the internet. Anyway, ’twas fun. Also, here I am looking not at all lasciviously at the hot-but-anchor woman/Laura Bush-looking writer from the Washington Post. That would be the lovely Kelly Jane Torrance to my left. [In the picture at the link, not the one in this post.] And for the love of all that is holy, don’t look at this.

[Update: Oh, and here is a really cute one of Julian and my pal and housemate Kelly, no doubt being amused by my rapier wit. Or fart jokes. One of those.]

– I don’t understand this passage in the WaPo story about the accession of ex-communist countries to the EU:

“Fifteen years after the Berlin Wall fell, the eight — who will join with Cyprus and Malta — have traded the straitjackets of planned economies and one-party rule for the risky pleasures of democracy and capitalism.”

According to my understanding of the way the world works, anything BUT democracy and capitalism is risky, though not a pleasure.

– Don Boudreaux, of the fun, new Cafe Hayek, excerpts and comments upon a passage of Dave Schmidtz’s from Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility (a point/counterpoint affair with Robert Goodin) about income inequality. Dave asks an absolutely crucial question about the sources of income gaps that, astonishingly enough, very smart people often never ask.

– In light of this, I feel I must make some announcements.

I am not a very good driver.

I am no better than average at getting along with others.

I am about as moral as most people. (Better about some things, worse about others.)

I am not going to heaven.

If I believed in God, it would be because I found it a source of consolation.

My explanations of my behavior are inconsistent with my explanations of other people’s behavior.

But I admit it. So I’m more rational than you! (And probably better looking.)

– God, I just love this. It reminds me a lot of Mormon paintings of the Prophet translating the Golden Plates envisioning the exploits of the Lost Tribes in the New World. Or a Scientology tract.

– Googling Social Change Workshop faculty member Gerard Alexander for his email address, I ran across his recent review piece in the Claremont Review of Books on theThe Myth of the Racist Republicans. It’s a careful demolition of a persistent piece of conventional wisdom. Before this came out, I ran into Gerard in the politics section of Idle Times books in Adams Morgan and we had a fun conversation on this topic as he was searching out some of the books he discusses in the piece. Do check it out.

– Interesting short piece on rational irrationality by Alfred Mele. I had the good fortune of meeting and chatting with Prof. Mele at a small conference I helped organize for Mercatus on self-deception hosted by Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson. It was a really fascinating couple of days. In particular, I enjoyed meeting Bob Trivers, who is one of the weirdest, most fascinating people I’ve ever met. He said he liked my phenotype. I think because I gave him a George Mason ball cap. Thomas Schelling was also there. I just ran across Schelling’s lovely Tanner Lecture on self-control. There are few people who write as lucidly and engagingly as Schelling while maintaining as high a level of theoretical interest. You should read it.

– It was an amazingly lovely day yesterday in Annapolis.

– Trying to finish this damn Rawls paper. So, let me tell you, I think A Theory of Justice pivots on a pretty big weasel on Rawls’s part. He says that he’s involved in an exercise in ideal theory. What’s ideal theory? According to Rawls, it’s “strict compliance theory.” That is, we imagine the best set of principle by which to govern the basic structure of society on the assumption that everyone will comply with the requirements of those prinicples. You might think this is fanciful, and Rawls is worried that it’s fanciful, too. That’s why he spend basically the last third of Theory trying to show that it’s not just crazy to think there could be a society where everyone complied with almost all the rules almost all the time. So Rawls tries hard. He gives us a self-reinforcing feedback loop between the sense of justice — the moral capacity that disposes us to accept and adhere to the principles — and the basic structure. It’s an especially robust homeostatic mechanism because, under the right conditions, citizens recognize that their personal good is in part constituted by compliance with the prinicples of justice. Since people will tend to do what is to their personal benefit, they’ll be happy to comply with the principles, and thus, as a collectivity, will deliver a very sturdy kind of stability tending to correct short-term disturbances in the system.

Now, this is just great. But Rawls seems never to have REALLY believed in it. For one thing, if Rawl’s is hoping to demonstrate the legitimacy of the redistributivist welfare state, he seems to have badly overshot the mark. If the argument for the congruence of the right and good (for recognizing the virtue of justice as being supremely regulative of one’s good) is any good, then it looks like Rawls has a pretty impressive argument for the withering away of the state. If our sense of justice can become so well coached that we will all voluntarily comply with the principles, then what’s the point of state coercion? Then what’s the point of the state?

Right at the very end (has anyone ever really read Theory right through the end?), Rawls sounds a pessimistic tone about really full compliance and admits that its pretty likely that some people will still find that it’s not to their good to comply with the principles. Rawls then argues that, well, the state will just have to MAKE these people comply, since the principles overall will still be collectively rational as long as the principles aren’t out of synch with TOO many people’s good. So he brings in coercive mechanisms. But he tries to bring them while sort of not having to use them:

even in a just society it is reasonable to admit certain constraining arrangements to insure compliance, but their main purpose is to underwrite citizens’ trust in one another. These mechanisms will seldom be invoked and will comprise but a minor part of the social scheme. [TJ, 2nd ed, p. 505]

Rawls fudges on ideal theory as strict compliance theory rather earlier as well:

Thus under even reasonably ideal conditions conditions, it is hard to imagine, for example, a successful income tax scheme on a voluntary basis. Such an arrangement is unstable. The role of an authorized public interpretation of rules supported by collective sanctions is precisely to overcome this instability. By enforcing a public system of penalties government removes the grounds for thinking that others are not complying with the rules. For this reason alone, a coercive sovereign is presumably always necessary, even though in a well-ordered society sanctions are not severe and may never need to be imposed. Rather the existence of the penal machinery serves as men?s security to one another. This proposition and the reasoning behind it we may think of Hobbes’s thesis.

. . . It suffices to note that ideal theory requires an account of penal sanctions as a stabilizing device and indicates the manner in which this part of partial compliance theory should be worked out. [TJ, pp. 211-212]

The curious thing about the passage on taxation is that the way Rawls characterizes strict compliance theory, it’s not obvious why taxation is necessary at all. People will be so disposed to voluntarily contribute whatever is necessary to satisfy the difference principle. Rawls clearly has a problem with his own idea of strict compliance theory, and is really reading it as as something like “a whole lot of” compliance theory. Indeed, he NEEDS enough non-compliance to necessitate the state as a mechanism for solving assurance problems. Without enough non-compliance, there’s nothing for the state to do. But then there’s a BIG difference between strict compliance theory and “just enough non-compliance to need the state to get enough compliance for collective rationality” theory.

More on not-exactly-strict-compliance theory here:

The sense of justice leads us to promote just schemes and to do our share in them when we believe that others, or sufficiently many of them, will do theirs. But in normal circumstances a reasonable assurance in this regard can only be given if there is a binding rule effectively enforced. Assuming that the public good is to everyone?s advantage, and one that all would agree to arrange for, the use of coercion is perfectly rational from each man?s point of view. . . . The need for the enforcement of rules by the state will still exist even when everyone is moved by the same sense of justice. . . . In a large community the degree of mutual confidence in one another?s integrity that renders enforcement superfluous is not to be expected. [TJ, pp. 236-7]

But look how uncomfortable Rawls seems to be. You can’t justify the welfare state without the state. So he concedes the likelihood of enough non-compliance to give the state a theoretical purchase. But then he doesn’t really want to depend on state coercion to get anything done, because then his notion of ideal theory really does just fly out the window. So he tries to squeeze “penal sanctions” into ideal theory as a “stabilizing device.” So the coercive state just lurks in the background. It doesn’t actually DO anything: “…sanctions are not severe, and may never need to be imposed.” “These mechanisms will seldom be invoked and will comprise but a minor part of the social scheme.”

Why is this important? Well, I think Rawls largely evades classical liberal worries about state power by shifting back and forth between truly strict compliance theory and his just-enough-non-compliance theory. If he sticks with strict compliance theory, then he really can’t derive much more than voluntaryist anarchism. Yet if he’s really serious about the elements of partial compliance within ideal theory, he’s going to have to say a lot more about the way state institutions are structured in order to satisfy the substantive requirements of the two principles. But he seems to want to keep the door closed on these questions.

Nevertheless, if you’re going to get some non-compliance in general, then you’re going to get some non-compliance by the agents of the state. How are we going to account for this in the stability argument? And if coercion is necessary, even if only minimally so, then some citizens will have to be granted rights to coerce other citizens. And this brings in a form of inequality that is prima facie much more troubling relative to our considered moral judgments than economic inequality. The reason that we need coercion at all is because there will be some non-compliance. But then we should expect some non-compliance by those granted the power to coerce. But non-compliance with principles designed to prevent the abuse of coercive powers entails some abuse of coercive powers. Surely our considered judgments in reflective equilibirum require the minimization of the abuse of coercive powers. And this may require the minimization of opportunities for coercion, which may mean limitation of the size and scope of the state. These limitations may entail that state-coerced mechanisms for satisfying the difference principle may not be legitimate, although the difference principle may remains binding on us if other voluntary mechanisms are available. I think that given a mostly Rawlsian schema, we can avoid conlclusions like this (not saying that this one in particular actually comes through) only by whistling and conspicuously averting our gaze when Rawls does his fancy-but-sketchy footwork on what he really means by ideal theory.

– OK. I’ve been waiting for this study for years. Now we’re halfway home! I’ve had a hypothesis since my undergrad days that there was a distinct set of neural mechanisms responsible for the “Aha!” experience, and the linked study seems to show that. NEXT, they need to put people on LSD in the MRI (there are probably many good reasons NOT to do this, but bear with me). The hypothesis is that the LSD and other hallucinogens sometimes randomly trigger the “Aha!” experience for folks under their sway. Because there is no particular representational content leading to the “Aha!,” our ever integrative brain just seizes on what ever we happen to be paying attention to, and presents it to us as if THAT is the content of a profound realization. Of course, it rarely makes sense, but we’re subjectively sure that we’re really on to something, because we are having the experience we generally only have in the event of a real breakthrough. Hence statements like: “Have you ever really THOUGHT about your skin, man? I mean, REALLY? It’s like, dude, the ANSWER. Skin, man, I mean, holy shit. Skin.” Or “the moon” or “tree branches” or “blades of grass” or whatever. They can all be experienced alongside an “Aha!” but get integrated by the narrative mind (see Gazzaniga) as the content of insight.

– Pat Tillman, the NFL star who turned down millions of dollars to join the Army Rangers, has been killed in Afghanistan. I am deeply impressed by Tillman, and am grateful for his choice to serve. His family and friends have every reason to be profoundly proud.

I bring up Tillman, because it’s worth bringing up in its own right, but also because it bears on the conscription issue pursued below. Being killed in active military duty is not a little hitch in one’s life plan; it’s the conclusion. The taxes that finance our volunteer military are a burden, but a justifiable burden. Burdening young men involuntarily with the prospect of death in combat is unjustified, if not unjustifiable. Tillman’s choice to make military service part of his life plan was an expression of his autonomy that we have every reason to admire. And though his death is tragic, Tillman himself recognized and embraced the high risk of death inherent in service in the special forces. He would have preferred to live, but, judging from accounts of his character, he did not eschew the possibility of completing his life by dying in the service. On the other hand, men who are drafted and killed have had their lives stolen from them. Their deaths are unrelated to the ends they had chosen for themselves, and are the consumation of nothing but a moral crime.

– The conscription debate rages again. I pretty much agree with Julian and Tim. (I discussed the Posner/Galston debate, which Julian mentions, last summer. And I think I’m right about what I said there.) Matt, on the other hand, is off the rails.

Matt complains about the way Julian flogs him with wet Rawls:

At any rate, this is all by way of introducing the notion that the actual political tradition of actual liberal societies (as opposed to the liberal tradition inside philosophy departments) owes more to a rough-and-ready consequentialism than it does to these Rawlsian ideas. I would speculate, indeed, that the Rawls of Theory should be thought of as attempting to offer an ex post facto deontological justification for a set of emerging Great Society institutions that were, as a matter of fact, implemented for broadly consequentialist reasons. Political Liberalism then tries to re-think the theoretical underpinnings of Theory and ends up presenting a view that’s rather detached from the real world shape of things.

This is sort of right and mostly wrong. First, societies that we think of as liberal which require mandatory service are to that extent NOT LIBERAL. This, for instance, is a bad chain of reasoning: France is a liberal state. France bans headscarves in public schools. Thus, it is liberal to ban headscarves in public schools. Now, regarding Theory, only the aspects of that work which attempt to vindicate the liberal welfare state (e.g., difference principle, social bases of self-respect, etc.) could plausibly be seen as an ex post deontological justification for Great Society institutions. The aspects of Theory Julian deploys are a deep part of the broader liberal tradition from Locke down through Kant and Mill, and have nothing in particular to do with moves in American politics. Furthermore, it’s sort of weird to claim that the Great Society was not motivated by quasi-deontological theory/ideology about the dignity of each person and the respect and opportunity due to each of us in virtue of our humanity. Or was all that positive rights rhetoric just a veneer over the Johnson administration’s secret panel of Benthamite calculators? Bizarre.

Setting aside the conscription debate, let me address another claim of Matt’s:

Last but by no means least, all this talk of letting people work out the[ir] own life plans seems to me to demonstrate an all-too-typical libertarian sociological naivete. Life plans are, clearly, circumscribed by the economic circumstances into which people find themselves born. Julian and his co-ideologues don’t seem very concerned about this. In practice, many people might find themselves more capable of successfully executing their life plans if the service regime came with mobility-enhancing rewards (see, e.g., the GI Bill) and if service promoted a greater level of social equality. Relatedly, these “life plans” don’t spring from heaven, but are rather shaped by the expectations that are, in turn, shaped by social institutions. Talk of arranging institutions so as to not interfere with the plans treats them as though they had a great deal more independent existence than they’ve really got.

I think Matt is succumbing to welfare-liberal sociological naivete about market-liberal sociological naivete. Some us defend free markets, small states, and low levels of regulation on precisely the grounds that life plans don’t spring from heaven, but do spring from dynamic, open-ended commercial cultures. Matt is right that our plans are shaped by our expectations, and that these are shaped by our social institutions. It happens that dynamic market cultures with high rates of growth provide the broadest range of possible life plans, and tend to inculcate a sense of openness and the availability of alternatives kinds of lives.

This sense of openness is reduced by the culture of dependency created by ill-designed social welfare policy (but not all social welfare policy), and the ethic of hopelessness and non-achievement engendered in millions by failed public school systems. That is, the state has at times been very effective in helping to remove the social bases for self-respect that allow people to formulate life plans that will make the most of their capacities and engender allegience to society. Talk of “expectations shaped by social institutions” from welfare-liberals generally tends to naively overestimate the ability of state institutions to create positive expectations, and underestimate the ability of the system of voluntary institutions to not only shape positive expectations, but to lead people to search through the space of possible life plans, and present the best of these through the popular culture, in a way that enhances our abilities to forumulate a fitting conception of our good.

[UPDATE: Julian also has a response to Matt.]

I love it. It is hands down better than any other web-based email service, especially once you get used to the shorcuts, etc. I’m finding it much more convenient than my local email program, Thunderbird, and it does everything that I loved so much (categories/labels as opposed to folders; swift searchability) about my previous email program, Bloomba, without the sometimes ponderous feel. On the other hand, the Gmail spam filter is really suprisingly bad, and does not begin to compare favorably with, say, the Oddpost spam filter. Suprising, I guess, because one has come to expect Google to do everything better. The infamous ads are totally unobstrusive, and somewhat entertaining. (Need I mention that it is moronic to get upset about a machine matching strings of shapes [and maybe guesses about underlying syntactic structure] in your email to entries in a marketing database?)

– Cool, Blogger just let me sign up a g-mail account. Send your hahafunny messages about home mortgages and penis enlargment to willwilkinson *AT* gmail.com. I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE MACHINE!!!!