The Fly Bottle

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2007-07-26T11:58:00.001-04:00

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Moved to MT

2004-07-19T20:40:00.000-04:00

The Fly Bottle is no longer published with Blogger. You can find the old site, and the old archives, complete with old comments from this page. For the current MT-generated site, with recent posts, and so forth, go to the main page: willwilkinson.net/flybottle

For Aggregators / Newsreaders

2004-07-13T15:57:00.000-04:00

If you're reading The Flybottle through an aggregator, I've updated my site and my syndication address has changed. Try: http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/index.rdf or http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/index.xml Thanks!

Fetters and Fairness

2004-07-08T15:44:00.000-04:00

-- When will the left stop saying dumb things like this? The U.S. economic-policy debate is in fact dominated by the assumption that unfettered markets work best, a view that's applied to our domestic economy and to that of other countries through international financial institutions that the United States controls. John Kerry's recent statement that he is "not a redistributionist" indicates how dominant this view has become. That's Lawrence Mishel in TAP. If the economic-policy debate is in fact dominated by the assumption that "unfettered" markets work best, then why don't we see fewer fetters? Bush's shrimp tariff surely indicates how dominant this view has become. No? Or the US's continued attempts to stonewall the WTO on US free trade violations in order to protect inefficient domestic interests? Kerry's statement is just a lie, and, in any case, not being a redistributionist doesn't imply support for unfettered markets. One might be against redistribution but want fetters on the market in order to slow the rate of growth for ecological reasons, say. Mishel's concern, however, is redistribution. He's worried about inequality. The top 1% of families earned 19.6% of all income. That sort of thing. Yet that sort of thing tells us almost nothing interesting at all. But Mishel leaps forward: Because of the inequality in the United States, even though our per-capita income is higher than many countries, our low-income families are not better off than those in other places where per-capita income is lower. This is a confused sentence. He seems to imply that the fact that the income of American low-income families is lower than the income of low-income families in some other countries has some logical connection to inequality. But there is no logical connection. (If one guy, Rick, discovered a trillion dollars of unobtanium in a hole, it would skew the inequality figures, but wouldn't have anything to do with explaining why the least well-off have what they do.) And if Mishel's actually making sense, as opposed to positing dubious causal power to inequality, all he's saying is that given two sets of numbers, one set's having a higher average doesn't imply also having a higher lowest element, which is so trivial there's no point in mentioning it. More: The social class a person belongs to really matters -- it determines your health, how long you live, where you live, your exposure to crime, your success in school, and the likely success of your children. This is a bit much. Your class determines none of these things. It influences them. And "class" here just means something like "income bracket." Mishel is correctly saying that your health, longevity, lifestyle, safety and success will be improved by having more money. No doubt! Will the the folks at the bottom (and, ahem, that's me!), do better if we put more fetters on the market? It seems unlikely. It strikes me that Mishel is confusing matters of regulation with matters of distribution. Now, it happens that economic regulations are very often implemented in order to bias distribution in favor of certain interests over others. (Shrimp!) But suppose we had a clean slate and committed to restricting regulation to only those that are generally efficiency enhancing. This would mean wiping out almost all trade restrictions and huge swathes of the government bureaucracy. Such a system would surely count as "unfettered" in Mishel's terms. Now, suppose we set a tax rate sufficient to guarantee a minimum income sufficient to provide the means to develop human capital to a certain critical level. Now, this may or may not cause a reduction in the overall rate of growth, although some slowdown strikes me as likely. But, notably, this kind of guaranteed minimum within the context of a relatively minimal state does not seem to entail especially fettered markets. We haven't added any regulations on the market other than those needed for the purposes of our very streamlined tax system. This is in fact my big beef with economic egalitarians. Most of the time they aren't really talking about equality at all. They're talking about the poor getting enough. A society in which the top 1% has 50% of the stuff, but where the poorest person has a million dollars looks pretty great to me. A million dollars is enough. Who cares if someone else has a house made of diamonds? When the left starts wanting to actually help the poor, then maybe they'll start arguing for the de-fettering of the market in order to enable a truly efficient and effective redistributive welfare state. Mishel concludes: I daresay that there's no reason to believe that unfettered markets provide us with the type of society our faiths guide us to have in terms of the lives of the poor, the treatment of workers, and the solidarity of our communities. Well, I double-dog daresay that markets much more unfettered than ours would better serve the kind of welfare state Mishel professes to want.

GPI Field Dispatches

2004-07-07T18:22:00.000-04:00

-- I mentioned the Mercatus Center Global Prosperity Initiative Journalism Fellows a while back. GPI has now posted dispatches from the field from the intrepid fellows. Matt Welch in Romania. Melinda Ammann in Botswana. Mark Hemingway in Philippines. These aren't formal articles. They're dispatches. So they're breezy and chatty, which to my mind makes them even better reading.

Tragedy of the Bunnies

2004-07-07T17:59:00.000-04:00

-- Try this cute little game/economics lesson from IHS.

Negative and Positive Rights

2004-07-06T15:54:00.000-04:00

-- I started this long post a month or so ago when there was a bunch of talk about positive and negative liberty, etc. I found much of the discussion confused. I never finished this post, which ended up getting me confused, but I thought I would share what I had in any case. Comments welcome. ----- First, I don't think there are natural rights of any kind. Rights are conventional. If they are justified it is because they enable or otherwise contribute to a general system of mutually beneficial cooperation. Rights are a kind of action-guiding moral relation between persons. Negative rights and positive rights are different because they are different kinds of relations. All moral rights have a dual entitlement/obligation structure. A negative right is, from one side, an obligation to constrain one's own actions in certain ways, and, from the other side, an entitlement to constraint from others. Negative rights are negative not because they include no element of entitlement -- all rights do -- but because one is entitled simply to a sort of forebearance from others. One is owed a pattern of constraint, a series of omissions, the absence of certain kinds of action. A positive right is, from one side, an entitlement that certain actions be performed, and, from the other side, an obligation to perform them. Suppose there is a negative moral right to property. This means only that one is entitled to have one's property go unstolen (or not used without permission) by others, and that others are obligated to satisfy this entitlement. (Don't confuse the entitlement to constraint from other with respect to some things one has with an entitlement to those things. One may have a morally binding property right to something that one is not entitled to, in some senses of 'entitle'. But the fact that I am in possession of something I do not morally deserve does not imply that it is thus fair game for others. The system of useful constraints that defines our negative rights may tell us that that the best policy is to leave people with things that have fallen into their laps in certain ways, and so they are entitled to constraint from others with respect to those things, even if they are not in some sense entitled to them.) The negative right to property does not in itself imply a positive right to the provision of the enforcement of property rights. This would be a confusion. One is entitled simply to constraint from others, who are obligated to provide it. Or one might think. (As I am sometimes tempted to think.) If we do not meet our obligations, and there is consequently a general problem of predation, then we might think that this is an extra problem that will need to be addressed. Notice that if everyone voluntarily, by force of conscience, met their obligations of constraint, then there is no problem of providing a service or positively contributing to the provision of a good. Conceptually speaking, a negative right asks us nothing but forebearance. No labor. No money. No goods. No services. Just constraint. But this really is a simplification. Because individual reasons in contexts of collective action are to some extent interdependent, it may be that I do not have a reason (and thus obligation) to constrain my behavior unless others will. In which case, there is no right to property, say, independent of a context of general compliance. If most of us constrain ourselves voluntarily, then all of us have a reason to do so as well. But if enough of us won't constrain ourselves, then none of are obligated to. In such cases, the pattern of constraint we are aiming at may require a coercive element, and the existence of a coercive framework may be a necessary condition for our rights-defining entitlements and obligations. What's going on here? One might say that whether property rights are negative or positive depends on the mechanism of compliance and assurance. If compliance with principles of constraint can be generated internally, by sympathy, psychological sanctions, and other moral emotions (or at least through non-coercive social sanctions), then property rights are negative. If compliance must be generated externally through a system of publicly financed law enforcement, then property rights are positve. But I'm not sure that this is the right way to think of it. I think even under a system of coercive enforcement, we should want to say that property rights are negative rights. An interesting thing about the use of coercion to enable coordination is that the coercion, per se, does not provide most of us with our motivating reason for action. We need coercion to motivate people who wouldn't otherwise be motivated, and to publicly assure us that others are so motivated. Given this assurance, knowing that others will comply, we will have a reason to likewise comply. Our reason will be grounded in the expected advantages of cooperation, and this may move us totally independently from an expectation of coercive sanctions for non-compliance. So the coercion is creating a context in which we can be entitled to constraint from others and obligated to constrain ourselves. The right to property, as such, is negative. But, barring voluntary compliance, the right exists only when coercion solves the assurance problem.

Self-Promo

2004-07-05T22:00:00.000-04:00

-- My review essay on Brookhiser's and Adams's recent biographies of Gouverneur Morris are now online at Reason.

An Incredulous Stare

2004-07-01T16:17:00.000-04:00

-- Matt Yglesias says: "It strikes me as a tautology to say that coercion in the pursuit of the common good is justified, and, indeed, necessary, though as I say people disagree and I don't know how one could possibly resolve such a disagreement." Resolution might be forthcoming (some day, not soon) if Matt would take care to start making sense. It's strikes me as a tautology that a tautology just says the same thing twice. "X is coercion in the pursuit of the common good" and "X is justified" somehow do not strike me as redundant. Suppose I (or "we") believe that I will serve that common good by cutting off Matt's head on TV. Maybe it's me, but I'm not sure this gets me far toward justification. Maybe by "in the pursuit of the common good" Matt means something like "taking the necessary means to an objectively good end that everyone would endorse were we all fully rational and in posession of full information" or something like that, in which case justification may not seem wildly ridiculous. But of course, the counterfactuals leave us ignorant of exactly what would be justified, although we may be fairly sure that it differs from Matt's notion of the pursuit of the common good. I think that there are cases where coercion in pursuit of the common good is justified. But it is a very small class of cases. There are many cases in which coercion in the pursuit of the common good WOULD be justified if the consequence of applying coercion in pursuit of the common good was the common good. But very often, the consequence is the common bad, for coercion is often abused, despite the fact that we drift to sleep each night wishing, hoping, praying that men always do good and refrain always from evil. Whatever Nozick didn't exactly say to you, Matt, he was right. Don't be proud.

Puking

2004-06-29T16:29:00.000-04:00

-- Right now, as I write, there is a man in his mid thirties bent over puking on the sidewalk across the street from my window and desk. It's 4:30 in the afternoon. Evidence that gentrification is by no means complete.

Back from C'ville

2004-06-28T18:34:00.000-04:00

-- Hi everybody! I'm back from Charlottesville. The Social Change Workshop was I think a big success. Great students. Great faculty. Great week. So many people I want to keep in touch with. And the Mercatus manuscript discussion of John Nye's forthcoming this past weekend was outstanding. Chilled by the pool and played tennis with Brian, Frederic Sautet (who should have a Mercatus bio page by now... cough) and Courtney. It was fun to hear about the Copenhagen Consensus from Doug North. And I had an especially nice conversation with Barry Weingast Saturday night about endogenous preferences.

Gmail Sweepstake

2004-06-17T22:30:00.000-04:00

-- OK. The great gmail giveaway continues. Can't seem to get rid of these things. I've got six accounts to give away. If you want one, you got it. Email me willwilkinson at gmail dot, you know, com. [UPDATE: All gone! Thanks for playing.]

Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students

2004-06-17T13:46:00.000-04:00

-- You'll have noticed that I've been rather lax with the blog. Well, I've been busy organizing this year's IHS Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students. I'll be driving down to Charlottesville tomorrow to set things up, and then running the Workshop all next week. Check out the list of lectures, and seminar and workshop sessions. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a more intellectually stimulating week anywhere. This is where it's happenin', folks. After that, I'll be sitting in on a Mercatus Center Social Change Project discussion of John Nye's long-awaited manuscript on the War, Wine, and Taxes and the emergence of free-trade in the 19th century (it turns out that France is a better than you think, and England is worse). It has been one of the great luxuries of my short intellectual life to have the opportunity to hang out with Doug North, Barry Weingast, Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr and their ilk at these Mercatus workshops. I'll return in a little over week exhausted, but very, very intellectually satisfied.

Alternative History

2004-06-16T13:41:00.000-04:00

-- Reading about the 10 plane al Qaeda plot, I wonder what would have happened had AQ had their shit together. Imagine if the dome of the US Capitol had been imploded by a jetliner! I think this would have been the single most rousing target. The Capitol represents the American democracy, and hence the American people, far more vividly than, say, the White House (or the Pentagon or the WTC). I shudder to think of the vengeance we might have blindly wrought had the terrorists struck such a main nerve. Can you IMAGINE the truculence of Congress? Can you imagine what would have got in to the Patriot Act? Would Aghanistan exist?

GPI Journalism Fellows

2004-06-10T22:50:00.000-04:00

-- The Mercatus Center's Global Prosperity Initiative Journalism Fellows are a great bunch. Matt Welch, Mark Hemingway, and Melinda Ammann are some of my favorite people. Somehow, I've never managed to meet Matt, but we emailed back and forth when this blogging thing was starting (his wife said I was cute!), and I can't imagine not actually liking him. Matt's off to Romania with Mercatus's Dragos Aligica (also one of my favorite people!) and some Mason grad students. Mark is headed back to the Philippines for a second summer with Steve Daley, an Australian number-crunching machine from Mason, to get the human angle on microfinance and entrepreneurhsip in the slums of Manila. Mark is a great writer, a great talker, and, well, a decent drinker. And I knew Melinda back before there was an internet. I remember her talking about becoming a journalist her freshman year at Iowa, and I'm happy she's doing it (philosophy detour notwithstanding), especially in league with a program I helped get going. She'll be great in Botswana. Now that I've been away from Mercatus for half a year, and have a little more perspective, I find, rather modestly, that I'm pretty impressed with what we started and were doing with GPI. Read about this summer's field studies here. And check out GPI's public interest comment on the Millenium Challenge Account.

Reagan and Confirmation Bias

2004-06-07T13:25:00.000-04:00

-- I am fairly nauseated by the Reagan retrospectives, left and right. It's dispiriting to see that it apparently next-to-impossible for human beings to go beyond their ideological commitments and make a more or less objective assessment of a man's accomplishments. We see all the usual mechanisms of ideological insulation. Any good during Reagan's reign would have happened anyway. Reagan's scandals are justified by his larger visionary struggle against unfreedom. All our ills are directly traceable to Reagan's malign influence. All good is directly traceable to Reagan's forward-thinking moral clarity. It's really just too, too much. Why do we not see that there is no need to make devils or gods of men?

Klebold, Free-Will, and Responsibility

2004-05-20T11:55:00.000-04:00

-- In his column on the Klebolds, parents of Columbine killer Dylan, David Brooks writes: My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them. Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior. Brian Leiter rather uncharitably decides to read Brooks's comment as either an espousal of incompatibilist libertarian free will (nothing to do with political libertarianism), or an expression of ignorance. Regarding the latter option, Leiter sort of goes off his nut: Or maybe, just maybe, he hasn't thought about the issue at all, couldn't make a coherent argument on the subject if his life depended on it, but knows this is what his stinking right-wing sanctimony requires? He goes on to spout some Nietzsche psychology about our sad, sad motivation for believing in free-will. But what did Brooks do to deserve Leiter's tirade? There is no reason to read "self-initiating" as making any sort of strong metaphysical claim. It seems clear to me that Brooks means to say that Klebold was not being coerced, had not been brainwashed, or some such thing, that the influence of his school and parents was not sufficient to explain his behavior, and that he was in control of himself in the relevant sense of control for ascribing responsibility. How this is "stinking right-wing sanctimony" is totally beyond me. Some--I daresay MANY--left-wing folks think that persons can deserve praise and condemnation in virtue of their choices relating to their actions in the right sort of way. Is it "stinking left-wing sanctimony" to argue that, say, people who contribute their labor to the production of some valuable good or service deserve a fair portion of the value created? Who knows? It seems Leiter thinks it's misguided (or pathological, or insufficiently ubermensch, or something) to hold people responsible AT ALL! Here's Nietzsche: "Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work...: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wants to impute guilt...Men were considered 'free' so that they might be judged and punished--so they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within consciousness...." Maybe Nietzsche's right about this. Maybe the practice of holding others responsible is based on an illusion about some kind of mysterious, deep freedom, which we link in our minds to the idea of guilt. But you can give up on the metaphysical illusion and still see that our categories of agency, responsibility, desert, retribution, condemnation, etc. are part of a general scheme of concepts and behavioral dispositions that has developed to enable humans to coordinate our behavior to our mutual benefit. The "instinct to judge and punish" exists precisely because our existence as the kind of social being we are depends upon it. Dylan Klebold did make his choices and should be condemned for them. There were, of course, other important contributing causes of Klebold's actions. And we should try to understand them. If Brooks is saying that we shouldn't try to understand them, and should instead use our idea of responsibility as an excuse to ignore other contributing causes while we shake our fingers at the perps, then he's wrong. But he certainly didn't seem to ME to be saying that. And it's totally unclear to me how Leiter's argument counts as a blow against right-wing sanctimony, rather than as a blow against the idea of any sort of viable moral community. Bonus question: Is peaceful mutually advantageous coordination possible "beyond good and evil" (acknowledging that the relevant notion of "advantage" will be rather different)?

Consent & Legitimacy

2004-05-12T15:41:00.000-04:00

-- Very interesting post by Chris Bertam on the problem of intergenerational sovereignty. I agree with Jacob Levy in the comments that the problem basically tells us to pick only one: consent theory or the possibility of state legitimacy. (Not to say we HAVE to pick either.) I also agree that tacit consent is not consent. The best we can hope for is hypothetical consent. But then that's not consent at all. The idea of hypothetical consent boils down to the idea of what we would consent to if we were smarter, knew a lot more, were rational, and appropriately motivated. Which is to say, basically, we would agree to whatever would really be conducive to our lives going really well. So, a set of institutions is legit if it is conducive to our lives going really well. But we don't exactly know what it means for our lives to be going really well, either, although I assume there is some fact of the matter about what it means, and that we do know a lot about what it means. (Maybe, say, democracy leads to "suboptimal" results relative to an idealized version of human nature, but it turns out that real people need to feel like we have some sort of democratic voice in the system in order for our lives to go really well, and so we need democracy in order to satisfy this need to have a voice, although we'd be better off relative to some of our other needs and aspirations if we didn't have this particular need. Who knows!?) And this seems plausible. We're justifiably confident that some kinds of institutional forms aren't legit. Soviet Union. Taliban Afghanistan. Canada. (Just kidding!) But we don't really know enough about well-being and the possibilities for beneficial coordination to say whether or not fairly liberal democratic institutions like our own are fully legit.

Comments

2004-05-11T15:01:00.000-04:00

OK. So, I'm having trouble with the Blogger comments. The old system is back in its place of prominence.

Ayn Rand and Nation-Building

2004-05-11T14:39:00.000-04:00

Check out this this fascinating post by Chris Sciabarra over at Liberty and Power.

Scanlon on Objectivity

2004-05-11T11:15:00.000-04:00

-- In "Contractualism and Utilitarianism," and then again in What we Owe to Each Other, T. M. Scanlon compares the alleged objectivity of morality with that of mathematics. In fact, her writes: In moral judgments, as in mathematical ones, we have a set of putatively objective beliefs in which we are inclined to invest a certain degree of confidence and importance. Yet on reflection it is not at all obvious what, if anything, these judgments can be about, in virtue of which some can be said to be correct and defensible and others not . . . Second, in both morality and mathematics it seems to be possible to discover the truth, just by thinking about it. Experience and observation may be helpful, but observation in the normal sense is not the standard means of discovery in either subject. Scanlon goes on to plump for a Brouwer sort of mathematical intuitionism (a sort of constructionism, really), which he seems to think stands as a plausible third way between naturalistic nominalism and platonism in mathematics. He wants us to think of morality in the same way. Straightforward non-cognitivism is like nominalism, Moore/Prichard/Ross intuitionism is like Platonism, and contractualism is like Brouwerian intuitionism. He goes on to write, Neither mathematics nor morality can be taken to describe a realm of facts existing in isolation from the rest of reality. Each is supopsed to be connected with other things. Mathematical judgments give rise to predictions about those realms to which mathematics is applied. This connection is something that a philosophical account of mathematical truth must explain, but the fact that we can observe and learn from the correctness of such predicitions also gives support to our belief in objective mathematical truth. In the case of morality the main connection is, or is supposed to be, with the will. Given any candidate for the role of subject matter or morality we must explain why anyone should care about it, and the answer to this question of motivation has given strong support to subjectivist views [Emphasis added.] So, as Scanlon has it, in both cases, we take our intersubjective agreement to provide support for the objectivity of the relevant domain. Secondarily, we take the connection of math and morals to other things as evidence of objectivity. We think math is objective not only because we agree a priori on procedures of correct mathematical reasoning, but because bridges stay up and planes fly. For morals, there is some connection to the will. What might this mean? I want to play along with the analogy, but it's worthwhile to first point out the significant differences between math and morals. Scanlon is on firmest ground when he notes that math and morals are alike in the sense that they both seem more or less objective, but that it's not clear what mathematical and moral judgments are really about. Some of us get queasy when we start thinking about Numbers and Moral Properties. So, OK. But in much of math we have formal, mechanical, algorithmic decision procedures. We have PROOF. This is why we think intersubjective consensus is so hot in math. Morality is of course not at all like this. Moral reasoning is messy, often inconclusive, and subject to lots of disagreement about cases, even if there is agreement on principles, and also lots of disagreement on principles, even if there is agreement on cases. You cannot tell someone that it is incorrect to oppose free trade because they forgot to carry the one. Second, the way in which mathematics successfully and precisely describes real physical systems is EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE. The fact that bridges stay up, planes fly, and that I can be writing all this on a laptop, is to my mind the knock-down case for the objectivity of mathematics. If I was already a Kantian, then of course math would decribe the world, since math is in that case a bunch of very general relationships between the forms of intuition, from which, in the first instance, my mind "constructs" "the world." But I am not a Kantian. I think math just is an extremely abstract characterization of the world out there, and it's objective because the world is mind-independent. And morals has, what? A connection to the will. Let's take this seriously. Start with Kant. An action is right just in case the maxim of the action can be willed as a law of nature. What's this about? My somewhat anachronistic hunch is that Kant, in his talk about a Kingdom of Ends, is talking about a system of optimal social coordination. If you can will a maxim as a law of nature, you are conceiving of it as a viable part of a stable, harmonious, mutually advantageous system of individual behavior. A kingdom of ends has the same pleasing complex harmony of a natural, emergently ordered complex system. In the case of a natural system, the macro-level order is a function of the bona-fide natural laws governing the micro elements. In a kingdom of ends, citizens freely WILL maxims, but the system as a whole looks AS IF each individual was deterministically governed by natural law. That a certain macro-level social order is generally beneficial to its members is just a fact about the world. If we grant that that suitably universalizable maxims are consistent with that kind of objectively good order, and other maxims are not so consistent, then our moral judgments will have some kind ojective subject matter. The connection to the will, however, is obscure. Although an optimal social order will be by definition good for us, its realization often requires considerable forebearance on our part. If we attempt to locally maximize our well-being, and others do as well, we'll all do worse than we might. That's why we generally won't be able to universalize maxims based in present desire. But my ability to constrain maximization now requires an expectation of constraint in others. How do we ensure commitment to mutual constraint and mutual gains? Kant stipulates a thing called the good will, which, although not related to desire (it is part of the noumenal self) is able to motivate action according to qualifying maxims. It's not clear how this helps, though. It doesn't seem like it makes sense to do one's part in bringing about a kingdom of ends if not enough others will. Perhaps our interest in autonomy provides a compensating benefit. (NOTE: This is by no means Kant scholarship! This is a idiosyncratic pet quasi-Kant.) Scanlon, like Kant, takes the content of our moral judgments to be about a kind of social ordering. Instead of a good will, he posits a general desire to be able to justify our actions to others in terms they cannot reasonably reject ('reasonably reject' meaning something like "reject as part of an 'informed, unforced general agreement' about our terms of association"). Now, if you could catch Scanlon saying something about an optimal social order, you could take him to be saying that our judgments about what we could reasonably reject are really judgments about the kinds of prinicples that are consistent with an objectiviely optimal order. But Scanlon won't have that, since there is no clear, independent standard for optimality. That is, well-being can't be understood independently of our conception of ourselves as beings who act on reasons we could justify to others, and considerations of well-being is just one consideration in the fuzzy calculus of who could reasonably reject what. (E.g., Bob, Bart and Bill have a choice over two distributions of utils. Suppose that no transfer or redistribution is possible. A: Bob: 100; Bart: 200; Bill: 300, or B: Bob: 99; Bart: 200; Bill: 1000. Bob has a superficial reason to reject B because he gets one less util. [Indeed, maximin demands A.] But Bill certainly has a reason to reject A, because he gets 700 less. It's not really reasonable for Bob to deprive Bill of 700 utils just to get an extra one for himself. How do we know? WE KNOW!) But, if there is some objective fact of the matter about a really worthwhile social order, and our judgments about wrongness, and our dispositions to act consistently with out judgments, tended to track truths about the kind of actions consistent with this kind of social order, then Scanlon would have a strong claim to objectivity connected in the right sort of way with the will.

New Blogger

2004-05-10T19:35:00.000-04:00

-- The new edition of Blogger looks great. They now have a comment system!, which I am implementing. (Try it out! Needs some formatting...) The puzzle is how to keep my old comments in the archives. For now, I'll just have them both. The isolated number, like this [n], is the link to the old comments. The link that says comments is the new Blogger system. If anyone knows of a permanent fix, please let me know.

Oh, God!

2004-05-04T23:36:00.000-04:00

-- From Brio Magazine, it's Ask Suzie! ... Dear Susie: Brio gives me comfort and conviction in my relationship with Christ, and I'm so grateful for that! However there's one element that's bothering me. I have many non-Christian friends, and it frustrates me that you say they're sinners. Does that mean there will be billions of people who will be going to hell? This is such a bothersome thought to me, and I have difficulty believing it. I've invited my friends to church and offered them the New Testament, but they say they want to maintain their own respected religions (Judaism, Islam, etc.). These friends give so much to the community, possess sound morals and are genuinely good people. It saddens me to think they're going to hell. Is this really true, or am I worrying for nothing? Saddened From our e-mail bag Suzie's answer will make you rage with loathing for God. Let's hope Saddened's healthy moral sense pulls her out of this vicious nonsense. Enjoy!

Pancake Mountain!

2004-05-04T17:45:00.000-04:00

-- How is it possible that I was unaware of Pancake Mountain, a prototype of a surreal children's show featuring Ian MacKaye, Bob Mould, Thievery, Uncalled4 (a swell go go band, for you people who live in an actual state) and other "famous for DC" types? Do check out MacKaye's new endeavor, the Evens, performing "Vowel Movement" and Anti-Flag doing a quite rousing version of the Pancake Mountain theme song. Who wouldn't expose their children to luddish, anti-corporate propaganda if the music was this good? If Captain Planet had cameos by, say, Chuck Brown, I'd tune in.

More Human Bondage for the Public Benefit

2004-05-04T11:40:00.000-04:00

-- For a sec I though Matt was being facetious, until I got to the middle: And of course one should be honest. A big part of the notion here is a nefarious leftwing scheme that hopes to use mandatory service as a mechanism for producing social interaction across class, regional, and ethnic lines so as to produce a more solidaristic generation. The thought, both mobility-wise and solidarity-wise, is that the "greatest generation" of conscripts built a nice, relatively egalitarian, middle-class society on the backs of GI Bill benefits and a general sense of social cohension.* Of course, they had an apocalyptic war to create the need for conscription and we do not. Nevertheless, through a sick millenial perversion I (and others like me), believe the positive externalities of conscription justify re-implementing it anyway. Unfortunately, I guess Matt is being facetious about "sick millenial perversion." But there is indeed something, um, unwell, about Matt's thought here. I have grave doubts about his empirical claims about the potential net benefits from conscription, but I'll set them aside. What really offends against liberal sensibility is that Matt is clearly unimpressed by the fact that concription systematically denies entire classes of people their liberty and autonomy, and blithely assumes that this sort of mass revocation of fundamental rights may be justified by a balance of positive externalities. To make matters worse, the thing that makes Matt's externalities "positive" do not seem to be neutral to competing conceptions of the political good. No doubt Matt has a special penchant for "solidarity" and "relatively egalitarian" societies, as do "others like him." But it is distinctly illiberal to use state power with the specific design of inculcating a pet conception of the political good. And it is massively, DIZZYINGLY, illiberal to use state power to systematically strip citizens of their basic liberties in order to promote pet political values. I can imagine positive externalities that might ensue from a policy of identifying and preemptively imprisoning teenage boys statistically most likely to later commit crimes and disturb the peace. Should we do it? Matt's proposal is morally no better, and probably much worse.