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

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

An Incredulous Stare -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 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 Check out this this fascinating post by Chris Sciabarra over at Liberty and Power.

Scanlon on Objectivity -- 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 -- 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! -- 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! -- 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 -- 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.

Capitalism, Fascism, and Democracy -- In this review essay on a book about fascism, Terry Eagleton concludes: The assumption that the free market and political democracy go naturally together was always pretty dubious, and fascism is one dramatic refutation of it. But we might now be moving deeper into a world where the two go together like a horse and cabbage. We do not expect much from Eagleton, so this isn't surprising. Now, the first sentence is a bit hazy on the meaning of "go naturally together." If Eagleton means "are rather often found together," there's nothing dubious about this. I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but I do remember seeing numbers somewhere that showed a strong correlation between liberal democracy and capitalism. The question is blurred by the fact that there's no universal agreement on the right way to use these words, but I take it that the liberal democracy/free-ish markets correlation is fairly conventional wisdom. It's clear, at least, that the sort of "democracy" where voters are frogmarched to the ballot-box to cast their vote for the resident autocrat tends not to be congenial to free markets. And we should probably expect a fully populist sort of democracy to feature plenty of redistribution from losing coalitions to winning coalitions, especially if the minority happens to dominates the market. (And we should also, I take it, expect violence in these cases. To put it in Scanlonian language, market dominant minorities have a "reason to reject" a system of principles that allows expropriation based simpy on numerical superiority, and they often express their rejection in not entirely peaceful terms.) So, yes, markets and democracy, per se, are not by their essence complements, like punch and pie. But, according to one sort of bourgeois liberalism, there is a deep logical-normative relationship between free markets and democracy. Suppose we take it for granted that it's better for people to realize their reasonable ends than to not realize them, and that there is such a thing as cooperation to mutual advantage, i.e., interaction by which the interested parties jointly advance their ends. In general, the best piece of evidence that an interaction is mutually advantageous is that the parties to the interaction have each agreed to its terms and have carried them out. If somebody had to be forced to agreement, or to compliance with it, that's evidence that it's not really mutually advantageous. Which means that somebody's ends are being frustrated, which is a bad thing. So unless we can't avoid it, the unanimity rule should prevail as our favored principle for collective decision. Anything less than unanimity tempts noncompliance by the overruled, which may in turn necessitate coercive means for gaining compliance, which, aside from moral qualms about coercion, is also expensive to those who have to pay for the mechanisms of force. Other things being equal, it's better to get things done voluntarily and cheaply rather than coercively and expensively. Does it require saying that, in general (negative externalities aside), the market is a system of unanimous decision, i.e., cooperation to mutual advantage? Yes, I suppose it does. Alas, there are collective action problems and public goods, and so we often need some mechanisms of coercion and public finance to best facilitate a general system of mutual advantage. How are we decide how to implement these? If unanimity is required, everyone has a veto. But someone always stands to lose relative to any particular coercive policy. So we need a decision rule short of unanimity. That is, we need some kind of majoritarian, or extra-majoritarian democratic principle. And each of us can see that this will be to our benefit. We might lose in certain cases, but we will win overall, assuming the system's a good one. Now, which system of collective decision principles, and which structure of public roles and institutions will best constrain and control the use of state coercion and facilitate an overall system of cooperation to mutual advantage is a damn hard problem. But it remains that the point of such a system just is to facilitate such cooperation, and to help us achieve our ends in concert with others. So it seems that the logic that governs the market is also likely to deliver democracy. Moreover, it is likely to deliver a democratic structure that will tend to minimize the ability of the ambitious to dominate the means of coercion in the manner characteristic of a fascist state. The generally negative-sum struggle for fascist state power is diametrically opposed to the positive-sum logic of cooperation that is the very heart of capitalism, and the justification of democracy.

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved -- Derby time. Here is your annual required reading.

Argh! Who Goes There! -- 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.]

Risky Pleasures -- 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.

Widening Inequality . . . It's Good for Everybody! -- 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.

Idols of the Tribe -- 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.)

The Great Chain of Ayn Rand -- 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.

Racist Republicans? -- 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.

Rational Irrationality, etc. -- 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.

Johnnies 4, Mids 1 -- It was an amazingly lovely day yesterday in Annapolis.

More Rawls Blogging: Fudging Ideal Theory -- 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.

Holy Fucking Shit, Dude. I Totally Understand EVERYTHING Now -- 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, RIP -- 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.

Conscription and Libertarian Naivete? -- 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.]

More Gmail -- 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?)

G-Mail -- 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!!!!

Metaethics: Internal and External [NOTE: The foregoing is excerpted from an online class discussion for Patricia Greenspan's metaethics course at the University of Maryland. This is out of context, but I thought some of you might find it interesting. The topic is whether we should consider the task of moral philosophy to be the systematization of our internal/first-person intuitions about normativity, or an external/third person investigation into the natural bases of our moral discource and activity. In a previous message I was, not unreasonably, interpreted as defending the external task, and a deflationary metaethics, and sent this clarification to the list.] I certainly don't wish to give the impression that I'm just ruling out the internal perspective from the beginning, or even from the middle, or at all. I think it takes a lot to get to the point where an attitude of skepticism toward the first-person perspective makes sense. At the point that it does make sense (if it ever does for a given individual), it's not really a last resort, but it's certainly a later resort, because we are right to try to preserve as many as the appearances as is possible within a good general picture of the world. An epistemological excursion may help me convey some of what I have in mind. Roderick Chisholm presents a nice distinction between methodism and particularism in epistemology. A methodist begins with a method or criterion for determining rational or justified belief, and then tests our commonsense beliefs against the criterion to see what lasts. The arch-methodist, Descartes, finds that nothing survives the method of doubt, save god and the self. Hume, trying to reconstruct everything according to the theory of ideas and impressions, finds that we can't really know some things that we think we know (that causal relations are necessary, for example). Reid, my particularist hero, in a proto-Moore's-hands move argues that our reasons for accepting Descartes and Hume's theoretical methods for determining justified belief are much weaker than our reasons for believing that the world exists independent of consciousness, that I really see a dog out there, and not just an internal representation of a dog, that laws of nature really are laws, and so on and so on. So the particularist just catalogs all the things we are sure that we know, including moral propositions. Beginning from our list of certainties, we try to construct a theory that unifies and systematizes them. In the process of theorizing, we find that items on the list come in conflict. How do we adjudicate the conflicts? Well, first, we note that every item on the list doesn't get equal weight, and that we'd be perfectly willing to give up one item to save another. But our weightings (the "prior probabilities" we assign to items) can be idiosyncratic. So we try to devise a method for determining rational beliefs that will deliver most of the list, but will be useful for helping us assign weights and adjudicating conflicts in a non-idiosyncratic way. Our initial standards of reason and evidence when applied over time helps us to erect general scientific methods, which we discover to have the capability of adding new items to the list that are weighted with very very high probabilities. So, although we didn't start out with the propositions of the bacterial theory of infection, say, we find that they come to have a fairly priveleged place on the list (to be near the center of the web of belief, in Quine's terms.) Now, if one keeps going in this way, one finds that the methods one has devised to unify and systematize the list end up pushing us to radically revise the list, perhaps assigning low probablities to certain theological and ethical propositions that had begun with very high probabilities. As a matter of fact, there is no way to get everyone to converge on a list (well, Bayesians tell us we should, but we don't--we don't update probabilities in the "right" way), because of differences in priors [and differences in techniques of updating]. And some people may choose to reject the methods rather than some items on the list (one man's modus ponens...), which may or may not be rational (I'm not sure). The charge of "scientism" I think applies to a priori scientific methodists who just begin with the standards of science and see what survives scientific scrutiny, much as Descartes begins with the method of doubt and sees what's left. This is I think quite different from a naturalism wherein scientific standards emerge through a reflective process of attempting to unify and systematize the materials of common sense over time. The reason I have come to be a bit skeptical of the internal perspective is that I've come to put higher weights on the work in psychology that tells us that we are very often victims of self-deception, systemic bias, and unreliable introspection than on my own (and others') first-person judgments about, say, the nature of agency and moral obligation. As a consequence, I assign a higher weight to the existence of curved space-time, something that I don't directly experience, than to the existence of supremely authoritative, rationally binding moral imperitives, something I do find some basis for in my first-person experience. Now, I agree that it would be dogmatic and premature to simply rule out the existence of moral reasons that are normative in just the way it seems to us that they are. I think it is rational and extremely worthwhile to attempt to preserve these appearances within a theory that relates well with our best overall picture of the world. But it happens that I find the external explanatory task, that of making sense of the empirical grounds of our moral experience, to also be extremely useful and interesting. And it's possible to do both at once, I think. One of Rawls's points in "The Independence of Moral Theory" is that metaethical questions are hard, and that throughout a very long history of inquiry, we haven't nailed down the answers, but we still need to figure out how to live with each other, so we mustn't wait on the metaethics to get to the practical ethics. Rawls seems to think we can build something useful largely out of the matter of our standing first-person moral conceptions. He does say that science comes in during the process of wide reflective equilibrium, and that the "theory of human nature" places constraints on our ideal of the moral person/citizen of the well-ordered society. However, I don't think he takes these constraints seriously enough. This is what really motivates me to follow up on the "external" project. But I really don't mean to disparage the aims of traditional metaethics. I do find that I sometimes have trouble remembering what set of questions I'm trying to answer, and so I'll slip into external/descriptive mode when the question at hand is internal/normative, and so I'll seem to be debunking when I don't really mean to be.

Fitter, Happier, More Productive . . . -- Tyler Cowen points to Michael Sandel's Kass-like essay on the perils of genetic enhacement in the New Atlantic. Tyler makes a good point: if you're worried genetic engineering will indirectly imperil some social value, like solidarity, say, you can always solve the problem by directly engineering a better sense of solidarity. Sure, but I think Sandel may be worried that it may take a while to learn how to rejigger our sense of solidarity while the ability to build in a few extra inches, or a few points of IQ, purple eyes, or whatever, is coming soon. So we might get a solidarity problem in the interim. Anyway the prospect of genetic engineering raises all sorts of interesting moral puzzles. Does hedonic utilitarianism imply that we ought to re-engineer people to find breathing, say, especially pleasurable? If I propose that some aspect of our existing moral sensibility be re-engineered, does any argument against my proposal based in our existing moral sensibility beg the question?

Wonk'd -- Judging from this NYT Fashion & Style piece, Ana Marie Cox is all the rage. (Nice dog!) I just want to point out that the Gray Lady failed to note my attendance at the Peter Bergen party. (I was the guy in the burlap thong.) And for that matter, they missed, Matt "Baby" Yglesias (who is, thanks to AMC, "famous for DC.")

Technical Difficulties -- The Fly Bottle and related pages may suddenly go down today or so as I switch webhosts. Thank you for your tolerance. Oh... and my willwilkinson.net email will also be temporarily unavailable. Try my gmu.edu, umd.edu, or yahoo.com email address. If you don't know any of these addresses, then I guess it can probably wait. [Update: Seems to have been pretty painless. Now I need to figure out how to get my obsolete commenting system to work. Hope I didn't lose all the comments!]

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year -- Julian has announced the next Blogorama. Thursday, April 8, 7:00-ish, Rendevous, Adams Morgan, 18th & Kalorama. No longer a novelty, the Blogorama on Kalorama is now a Washington institution, albeit a pathethic and low-rent institution.

Liberalism and the Closed Society -- I'm with Tyler on this one: So that is a significant reason why I am not a [modern] liberal. I prefer high growth, minimum domestic transfers, and a higher rate of immigration. Growth plus resource mobility is the best anti-poverty strategy we are likely to find. And this recipe is closer to classical liberalism than to modern liberalism. I might also add that the United States, through immigration, satisfies the Rawlsian formula better than does Western Europe. Regarding the "Rawlsian formula," the difference principle, it's worth noting that one of Rawls's many idealizing assumptions in Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism is a "closed society" assumption. That is, we are to think about the principles to govern the basic structure of society on the assumption that there is no immigration or emigration, or even trade between the citizens of separate states. So, on Rawls's own terms, immigration can't possibly satisfy the difference principle, since the difference principle is formulated to serve a state that, ex hypothesi, has no immigration. (And neither can international trade.) That said, the "closed society" assumption is just wild, even as a helpful simplification. If the "fact of reasonable pluralism," that is, the fact that under a liberal democracy the "burdens of judgment" will lead to a plurality of conceptions of the good, requires a major revamping of Rawls's system, then surely the "fact of national porousness," that is, that fact that under any genuinely liberal state, people and goods will cross boundaries, requires a similar revamping--especially considering the fact that traffic of people and goods across boundaries tends to be good for everyone involved. Furthermore, if our natural talents are arbitrary from a moral point of view, and we do not strictly deserve the fruits of our contingent abilities, then surely state boundaries are arbitrary from a moral point of view, and citizens of states do not deserve benefits simply in virtue of having been born a citizen of one state rather than another. I don't think the closed society assumption can be justified either in substantive terms--it is not in reflective equilibrium with our considered judgments about the moral arbitrariness of borders, the importance of exit to justice, and the inevitability of international trade in liberal regimes--or in pragmatic theory-building terms--it seriously distorts more than it helpfully simplifies. A better Rawlsianism would dispense with the closed society assumption. One very dumb way of trying to solve this problem is just to retain the assumption, but simply move the boundaries out until everyone on earth is included. The smart way to solve this problem is to recognize the moral importance of various levels of association, and work out a theory of justice assuming a structure of nested and overlapping jurisdictions. (Rawls's centralist/nationalist assumptions are also out of reflective equilibrium with our considered judgments about the moral and political importance of local governance and voluntary associations.) In this sort of cosmopolitan theory of justice, the nation state loses its preeminence as the subject of political philosophy, and becomes but one jurisdiction among others whose legitimate powers are a function of its role relative to other associations and jurisdictions in meeting the requirements of justice.

Justly Married -- Being a moral person, a good person, is not about having an ideology, or the ability to deploy arguments in justification of what one has done, or what one believes. It is to a large extent about feeling the right thing at the right time. Look at these pictures of couples recently married in San Francisco. Look at the love and the joy in these people's faces. Now try to tell me--try to tell yourself--that this is wrong, that these people are wrong. If you can do it, then there's just something wrong with you: you're morally broken.

Law & Aesthetics -- So, from Volokh, I see this announcement of the Law & Aesthetics fiction contest. For those skeptical about the intellectual laugh riot that is the Social Change Workshop, I remember having a somewhat drunken conversation about just this idea with what must surely be one of the Boalt organizers. And now it's a reality! Don't you want to come?! Notes for law and aesthetics.... - Significant formalism - Could Baumgarten and Blackstone have met? Shared a mistress? - The Bloomsbury judicial intuitionists - Legal neutrality and disinterested contemplation - Penumbras and emanations - Weimar School of interpretive absurdism - Cruel, unusual, and sublime punishment

I (Heart) the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students -- [Warning: I'm trying to sell something here. But only because I care.] So, I've been busy creating marketing materials for the seminar I've run for the past two summers for the IHS, the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students (the theme this year is "Rationality & Institutions"), and I found that I'm a bit frustrated by the process because it's just impossible to convey why I love this seminar so much, and why I think its really worth it for grad students to take a week out of their summer to come to UVA and listen to lectures, and talk about their research with a bunch of brilliant strangers. But I've got a blog, so I think I'll just use it to say my piece, and try to convey what gets left out of the usual marketing stuff. If you're a grad student, or about to be one, you should apply. You should come. I should mention that it's free (except for travel costs). [Here's a copy of the email invite to apply; consider yourself invited.] Let me start here... I got an email a while back from one of last summer's faculty--it was her first time teaching at the workshop. She told me that the workshop was like she'd always hoped grad school would be, but sadly wasn't (having gone to Harvard for grad school and Berkeley for law). And that's really it. That's why I love it. At the Workshop you're surrounded by brilliant people. It's like the united nations of smart. Chinese students from Yale, Russians from Chicago, Poles from Oxford... Africans, Mexicans, you name it, and from some of the best grad programs in the world. (Interestingly, most of the european students come from central/eastern post-communist europe, and not France, Germany, etc, although we get those too.) There are as many perspectives as people, and somehow everybody manages to get along, to talk and argue at an extremely high level about amazingly interesting and important things: why the rich are rich and the poor are poor, globalization, democracy, justice, religion, methodology, war. And for a week at least, ennervating grad school specialization goes by the board, and everyone talks about everything. One thing you almost never see in grad school are philosophers arguing with economists arguing with historians arguing with anthropologists, and so forth. Some students are inevitably stunned to find out that people in other fields have been talking about exactly the same issues as in their field, and have really useful and insightful thigns to say about it. Data sets get traded. Economists ask political scientists to read dissertation chapters. Ideas are everywhere, and it can be intoxicating. If I actually manage to write my dissertation, it will have a lot of the workshop in it. That's the students. The faculty is simply stellar. I was looking at the list of faculty, and it occurred to me that if we were going to be ruled by Philosopher Kings, we could do a lot worse. Not only are these guys amazing intellects, they're wonderful people who love to talk ideas with students. You eat lunch with them, play soccer, chess, whatever. You drink with them at the socials at the evening, bouncing ideas off each other. They seem to enjoy themselves as much as the students. I consider everyone on the full-time faculty--Schmidtz, Tomasi, Nye & Munger--to be friends. I know Mike least well, but he's a riot, and razor sharp. Dave and John T. are in my biased opinion two of the best political philosophers of their generation. But I not only admire what they do, I admire how they do it. John N. is a jocular, larger-than-life compendium of knowledge, able to speak about classical music, WWII tanks, and economic history with equal brilliance. I can't wait to spend another week with them. And the visiting faculty (who pop in and out over the week) are nothing to sneeze at. Doug North and Barry Weingast will stop by. The dapper and brilliant Jack Goldstone will be around much of the week. Melissa Thomas, from IRIS at Maryland, will grace us with her amazing poise and clarity. My man, Pete Boettke, will entertain while explaining his latest heroic theoretical synthesis. UVA's own Gerard Alexander will squeeze more argument in an hour than you thought possible. I'm still working on James Buchanan, Vernon Smith and Avner Greif (who doesn't have a Nobel Prize... yet.) Seriously, there's more than a semester's worth of good stuff, and a lifetime's worth of amazing people, in a week. It's a genuine intellectual adventure. I really can't adequately convey the social atmosphere--the evening socials, the trips to the bars on "the Corner" in Charlottesville. All I can really say is that I've met people at the workshop who I am sure will be lifelong friends. Workshop friends come to stay at my house in DC, and I seem to have standing invitations to stay with folks in at least two dozen countries (and they always try to say that they're not just saying it.) Preparing for the workshop is a pain in the ass, yes. But when it gets into June, and the workshop is only a week or two away, I really do get excited at not just the possibility, but the certainty, of forging a few genuine friendship with some of the smartest, most interesting people I could ever hope to meet. [Update: If I'm marketing, I might as well be marketing... Here's a page of student testimonials. Here's a page of video clips from past seminars. Here's what to do if you want to present your work at the workshop. Here are some papers and articles from some past students.]

Epiphanies -- When do you stop taking them seriously? It's been a few years for me now. Same with breakthroughs, flashes of insight, and the like. I remember when I would have a little breakthrough, and become very excited, as if this, this new insight, completes me. Now I know. Everything's different now. It all makes sense. I am whole. When I was in college, all my short stories were about a sensitive, intellectual college guy ending in an epiphany. I remember one--it was called "The Conceptual Analysis of the Term 'Love'"--in which a young man, much like myself, ends up wandering through an old college hall in the process of being remodeled, and has an epiphany while sitting at an old fashioned wooden desk watching asbestos motes in a sunbeam. The epiphany was, what? I don't remember. It had to do with love. Or rather 'love'. I think he runs back to his estranged girlfriend and tells her that he "blorgs" her. Of course it's all bullshit. Either I was wrong about the ultimate nature of myself and my relationship to the universe, or I wasn't, in which case I made some marginal adjustments and everything was otherwise the same. Why am I talking about this? Well, I just noticed that I never had an epiphany about the basic uselessness of epiphanies. I seem to have just given them up. I suppose its like infatuation. It hits you, but you stop being fooled by it. You just accept it, like indigestion, or enjoy it, like a good movie-musical, knowing it to be orthogonal to your deeper concerns.

The Shining Pony City on the Hill -- Since I consider non-utopian libertarian-ish political theory my niche in the world, I figure I should mention the hoopla over the Epstein, Friedman, Barnett (and Pinkerton arguing about something else) debate. Belle Waring is all "pony pony pony!" Sasha defends ideal theory, but falls short of defending ponies. I want to comment on this proposition about ideal theory: Ideal theory is useful because it helps us to guide reform. You need to know where you're trying to go in order to know whether the next step is in the right direction. Comment: Quite true! However, the point I insist on emphasizing is: There is no way to pick out the ideal (call it "the target") in abstraction from the status quo. Two reasons, descriptive and normative. Descriptive: if the putative target really is the target, then you can get there from here. Ideal theorizing is utopian in the pejorative sense (rather than utopian in Rawls's sense of "realistic utopianism" -- although he ends up utopian in the pejorative sense despite himself) when it just picks a target out of the air without paying any attention to whether there is any mechanism of social change that could plausibly cause us to arrive there. Normative: and the target is a pony (is pejoratively utopian) unless it is possible to get there from here in a way consistent with the values that led us to pick THAT target to begin with. If hitting the target is possible, but requires a vast system of re-education camps, killing half the population, or what have you, then it's not really the target, assuming a liberal target. So while ideal theory is just fine, the problem with the Epstein, et al. debate is that it's not clear they meet either the descriptive or normative conditions for acceptable ideal theorizing. I think they're ponytalking! It's not enough to be told that a society with such and such attributes is not an empirical impossibility and that if it were realized, it would be a morally good thing. We also need to be told that getting there from here is not an empirical impossibility, and that if it is possible, that the route is morally acceptable. Comment on the Comment: OK! But then look. Initial conditions plus mechanisms of social change, plus normative constraints pare down the space of acceptable targets. But within THAT space, how can you know which of the possible targets to pick other than by comparing it to, you know, a REAL full blooded ideal, a shining city on the hill. You pick the one within the domain of acceptability that matches most closely the sweetest dreams of philosophers, no? Comment on Comment on Comment: No! Don't want to kick a dead pony, but we have to have some independent reason to believe that the shining city of ponies REALLY would be worth having, and that short of having it, we'll have to settle for some pale, less shining imitation. The shining city of ponies can only have a normative gravitational tug if it really is what we should be aiming at. But what I'm saying is that there is no knowing what we should be aiming at independent of the constraints we actually face. So we pick our target by browsing through the set of feasible alternatives, and then just pick the one that best satisfies our normative desiderata. You don't design a house by drawing a blueprint of the bestest mansion ever, and then pare it down until it fits the budget. That's insane!

Bush Hatred in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 .... -- Now that Bush has come out decisively in favor of an amendment to the US Constitution that constitutes both an assault on states' rights and an assault on the moral rights of same-sex couples, I am finally pissed off enough to agitate actively in favor of the election of John Kerry (or whoever) for President. (Not that I will vote, DC being a foregone conclusion.) I don't believe any such amendment could be passed, but any President who would push it deserves to be ejected forcefully from office. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hate Kerry. But where can I get a Kerry button? [Update] ... Andrew Sullivan says it best: WAR IS DECLARED: The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens - and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth. NO MORE PROFOUND AN ATTACK: This president wants our families denied civil protection and civil acknowledgment. He wants us stigmatized not just by a law, not just by his inability even to call us by name, not by his minions on the religious right. He wants us stigmatized in the very founding document of America. There can be no more profound attack on a minority in the United States - or on the promise of freedom that America represents. That very tactic is so shocking in its prejudice, so clear in its intent, so extreme in its implications that it leaves people of good will little lee-way. This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations - and rightly so. I knew this was coming, but the way in which it has been delivered and the actual fact of its occurrence is so deeply depressing it is still hard to absorb. But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He's a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans - and their families and their friends - his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.

Bias, Blah, Blah -- Jim Henley's meditation on the leftist academic bias controversy is by far the most interesting thing I've read on the matter. By the way, I think that a lot of the leftish academic bloggers are simply in bad faith on this one. They know. But they LOVE things they way they are. They're at home. They don't want it to change. They like it. But if they really admitted how systematically shabbily and disrespectfully non-left students are treated, they know they'd have to change. I don't much blame them. But they know. I've heard professors discuss techniques of subtle psychological manipulation to shame students out of their bourgie prejudices. They know that the cartoons they plaster on the office door make conservative students uncomfortable, and that's part of why they do it. I mean, it's hard to resist. When I was TAing for Intro to Phil, and we were doing theism vs. atheism, it was all I could do to not make faces of exasperation and disapproval at the nuttily religious students. Now and then I caught myself doing it. It's hard work to treat people with respect and to scrupulously address what they've said, even if its a crock. That is, to actually teach them something, and to be an example of clear thinking, and not just emote at them when they run afoul of your little community's norms. I love philosophers because for the most part they feel bad when they fail to be fully respectful and rational. And lots of non-philosophers are like this too. They know it's their job. But they mess up from time to time. And because most academics believe much the same things politically, their mess ups contribute systematically to an atmosphere that is unfriendly to students (and faculty) who believe quite different things. They know. Of course they do. And if I knew a job candidate liked the same music that I did, I'd probably feel just that much better about her, even if I knew that to be an irrelevant consideration. If several of us felt just that much better about her, it could swing a toss up her way, because we might not know why we felt a bit better about her. It's just impossible that people with detectable politics of which most faculty disapprove don't in general tend to do worse at the margin. I find it just surreal that anyone would bother to deny it. Also, just curious, does ANYONE really believe that IQ or academic achievement reliably tracks moral or political truth? Because I sure don't!

Disinfopedia -- I just ran across the Disinfopedia. It's a wiki apparently published by the Center for Media and Democracy, the sort of left wing organization dead sure that there is indeed a vast right wing conspiracy (and of course there is!). Anyway, Disinfopedia collects info on corporate shills, PR firms, think tanks, and other sundry sources of "disinformation". Now, this is all fine and good. But I wonder how they think this is going to work well in the long run. Wiki pages can be edited by anyone who looks at them. It's hard to believe that wingers won't soon enough start edit wars. Surely some conservative would love to have a crack at the Ronald Reagan entry. I just edited a paragraph in the think tank page, for the fun of it. See if you can spot the bit I changed (if they haven't already reverted to the previous version). Wikipedia works because of its ethos of neutrality on contentious issues. If somebody writes something biased, somebody comes along and balances it out. It will be interesting to see if an overtly ideological wiki can survive.

Bitter Much? -- This is slander! Want to know Victoria's Secret? I'll tell you. It might be especially interesting to men shopping for Valentine's Day gifts, like those widely promoted push-up bras. You know them from the ads showing skinny models with spherical breasts that appear to float in skimpy lace cups. With their shoulder straps thin as ribbon and narrow back bands, the cleavage-baring bras resemble two clam-shell halves looped together with string (similar to what the heroine wears in "The Little Mermaid"). So what's the secret? It's all a sham. The bra is useless for supporting anything of amplitude for more than a few minutes. The breasts are fake — buoyed from within by implants — because women without enough fat for hips or behinds also don't have much in breasts. Perhaps the embittered author, Jessica Seigel, should consider an alternative explanation: These women are incredibly wealthy professional underwear models because they are genetic anomalies! I for one do not doubt the provenance of Tyra's or Giselle's disproportionate amplitude, although Stephanie Seymour lives under a shadow of suspicion.

Coaching Common Sense -- In Ed Feser's interesting but rather overwrought dissertation on the academic left, we get this defense of common sense: Now where phenomena remote from everyday human experience are concerned -- the large-scale structure of spacetime, the microscopic realm of molecules, atoms, and so forth -- it is perhaps not surprising that human beings should for long periods of time have gotten things wrong. But where everyday matters are concerned -- where opinions touch on human nature and the facts about ordinary social interaction -- it is very likely that they would not, in general, get things wrong. Biological and cultural evolution would ensure that serious mistakes concerning such matters would before too long be weeded out. The details of why this is so need not concern us here -- they comprise the conservative justification of tradition and common sense associated most closely with Burke and Hayek, which I have defended elsewhere. Suffice it for present purposes to note that there are powerful reasons to be skeptical of the skepticism about commonsense and traditional attitudes that so permeates modern intellectual life. I wonder what Feser could possibly be thinking here. Take a random sample of the socially prevalent beliefs about the correct principles of social interaction from the set of human cultures across time and space. We can even limit ourselves to those societies that persisted for some considerable amount of time. My bet is that most of these societies were governed by principles of social interaction that Feser would find... questionable. Exotic patterns of sexual and family relations, bloody competition for social status, approval of the murder of out-group people, etc. Conservative Hayekians, like Feser, badly overestimate the efficacy of cultural evolution in eliminating awful social systems. Because we don't now live in small bands in conditions of irremediable scarcity half-naked on the savanna, it is very likely that we WOULD, in general, get things wrong about ordinary social interaction. The principles of mutually advantageous coordination that I believe must govern a good society are just about as obscure and counterintuitive as the principles that govern the behavior of atoms. Hayek himself recognized the highly counterintuitive nature of spontaneous orders, and recognized our natural but incredibly dangerous disposition to think of the extended order in terms of the family or tribe. Consider the prevalence of atrociously bad thinking about "offshoring." Most people are intellectually crippled by a zero-sum tribalism, which comes naturally, if anything does, and strikes everyone as "common sense" unless you've been coached out of it by economists. Even if Feser is talking about more mundane social interaction, there is still plenty of reason to belief that we make systematic errors about out own and others' motivations, intentions, beliefs, and so on. So I disagree with Feser. I think that the major goal of education should be to break down some parts of common sense, and then to rebuild it so that our intuitions about cases better reflect the reality of things. This is why I think everybody should be trained to some degree in logic, statistics, and economics, and beginning at a much earlier age.

Libertarian Ideal Theory -- I liked Tyler Cowen's Volokh post on Dan Klein's theory of "The People's Romance." Here's most of it: Klein writes from a libertarian point of view, asking why people are so attached to government, even when the record of government in an area is a poor one. He suggests that the desire to be part of a collective movement motivates much support for government, that the state is uniquely suited to satisfy such collectivist urges, and that we should resist our psychological tendencies in this direction. This essay is part of Klein's broader research program of developing a sociology and psychology of why libertarian ideas have not met with greater success. Indeed for any libertarian this should be a central question. I find Klein and Jeffrey Friedman (of Critical Review) to be the two most important thinkers on this topic. While I consider myself a "small l" libertarian, my perspective differs from Klein's in a number of ways. For instance I tend to take "The People's Romance" as a constraint to a greater extent than does Klein. I see politics as a question of trading in one "mythology" for another, but a mythology of some kind is always necessary. This will constrain our ability to attain superior solutions, yet it is a constraint that typically receives little attention from economists. On net, I suspect that our American version of The People's Romance does more to support liberty than damage it. I wonder whether bad policies are often not the price of our highly valuable macro-myths. Klein and I discuss these topics frequently, read his whole essay to see his take on what has gone wrong in Western societies. I think Tyler is right that our mythologizing is more of constraint on political and economic change (and on good theorizing) than many assume. Libertarians tend to be infatuated with what Rawls called "ideal theory," with conjuring pictures of the best society in abstraction from the "noise" of historical and sociological contingency. (The exchange in the new not-yet-online Reason between Epstein, Barnett, and Friedman brought this home to me. [Addendum: Oh, it's here.]) But, rather like Rawlsian liberals, libertarians often mistake fairly indelible features of social reality for contingencies, thereby overshooting anything that might serve as a feasible ideal. The result is a kind of unwitting utopian theorizing. But no one should be convinced that anything approximating a Nozickian or Randian minimal state, much less, Rothbardian anarchocapitalism, is worth taking seriously unless it can be shown that these theories are compatible with what we know about history and social psychology. Debating whether voluntary mechanisms can or cannot solve all the important collective action problems, or whether there could be a positive net benefit to empowering the state to provide for public goods, given public choice assumptions, is not totally unlike arguing about whether it is possible for the People's Revolution to draw its energy directly from an agricultural rather than an industrial underclass. Much libertarian ideal theory proceeds on something like the assumption of a entire society of convinced libertarians (or at least the weaker assumption that it is possible to come to the kind of consensus necessary to install a libertarian constitution or basic structure). But this is the same mistake, more or less, that Rawls recognizes he made in Theory of Justice in basing the argument for the stability of "justice as fairness" on the assumption of a fairly universally shared quasi-Kantian conception of personhood. The fact of pluralism is a fact indeed. One of Rawls's most valuable insights is that there is no way of securing homogeneity of fundamental moral world views in a liberal society. Any mechanism likely to produce this kind of thoroughgoing consensus would be coercive and thus illiberal. So we've got to start with the assumption of pluralism. One can dream of an ideal technology of persuasion that would enable voluntary mass conversion. But this is fanciful, too. And there is no reason to believe that any such technology could be sprung on a society and bring about happy consensus on libertarian essentials before others could also begin using the technology to inculcate contrary ideals. If libertarian ideals are to become more broadly accepted, it may be in part because of more savvy on the part of libertarians in intentionally undermining widespread collectivist impulses. (Don't stop donating to IHS.) But I think it is more likely that success in this direction, insofar as there is any, will have more to do with the amelioration of the social and economic conditions that have fueled collectivist ideals. In this sense, we've got to already be libertarian enough for the dialectic between socio-economic conditions and belief systems to produce more libertarianism. Still, much of the impulse toward collectivism, and toward positing superspecial agentive powers to abstractions like the state, probably runs pretty deep in human psychology, and there is no ameliorating that, short of genetic re-engineering. So what we need is a theory of just how libertarian a particular society could possibly get, given human psychology, the set of social and economic relations, the available mechanisms of persuasion, and the set of belief systems or "macro mythologies", at a given time, plus the dynamics that govern changes in these things. My guess is that for US society starting today, it's possible to get significantly more libertarian, but not radically more libertarian. What might that society look like?

Boobs n' Beards -- What are you looking at? Janet's feigned expression of horror? Her bizarre nipple accoutrements? Not me! The most interesting thing about this picture is . . . J. Tim's "beard"! Timberlake is but one data point in my embodied argument that the beard is now the height of fashion. Start yours now or be like the guy who finally decided the goatee is "cool" some time in 2002 and ended up looking like some jackass relief pitcher for the Astros.

Reading is Fundamental; Buying is Holy -- Please note some updated books advertised at your bottom right. Though I've just cracked it, the new Gibbard seems outstanding. I'm very much on his wavelength. The Adams bio of Gouverneur Morris so far is also excellent. (G. Mo is a stud!) More comprehensive, but therefore less breezy, than the Brookhiser. I'm excited by the Skyrms book on the Stag Hunt, but it has yet to arrive. And I'm learning a lot from Samuel Bowles's Microeconomics. I bring this to your attention because, apparently, I have earned seven whole dollars through the Amazon Associates program. However, they don't send the money to my bank until I hit $10. So I'm hoping a couple folks who happen to want some of the books down there will click through and put me over the top. So I'm happily offering this editorial service (I have excellent, I won't myself say "cutting egde," taste) to relieve your anxiety of choice. I'd like to buy a couple pints.

Designated Reading -- I'm happy to see that my former advisor, Michael Devitt, has made his book, Designation, available on his website. Designation is one of the best works in the philosophy of language published in the 80's (perhaps the only systematic working through of the Kripke/Donnellan casual theories), yet has been out of print for a number of years, and is almost totally impossible to find through used booksellers. Check it out. Devitt is an exceptionally clear, even punchy, writer who is able to make a very dry subject matter come (somewhat) alive. Also, check out the many papers on his CUNY website. "There is No A Priori" is nice, and "Worldmaking Made Hard," which begins "In part I of this paper I shall demonstrate the horror of a doctrine I call 'Worldmaking'," gives something of the flavor of a Devitt seminar, wherein he rails against philosophers who would sacrifice the world of stones, cats, and trees for a world of words. (It's always "stones, cats, and trees." If in a more theoretical and scientific bent, we almost always get "electrons, muons, and curved space-time." This comforts me.)

Denis Dutton Fans Rejoice -- Good stuff from the our man at Arts and Letters Daily. A thoughtful discussion of the role of skeptical doubt occurs in Dutton's review of Jennifer Michael Hecht's The Great Doubters and Their Legacy From Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson. Besides being eminently sensible, Dutton slips in a few good swipes at Freudians and Marxists. This, also: "These days, except for a few aging professors who still teach postmodern literary theory, few skeptics reject the overall validity of science." Nice. And then there's this outstanding, appreciative, but critical, review of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment in the New Criterion.

Google me This -- I'm jacked about the announcement that Google plans to scan everything in the Stanford library published before 1923. That should make a huge chunk of the important (and unimportant) works in philosophy available for free. Go Google! This is, by the way, what Microsoft is really good for. It puts the fear of Jesus in the Googles of the world, and makes 'em hustle to make us happy. So what I'm really hoping for is that Microsoft comes close in the search war, and succeeds in creating a superfast integrated search in Windows that allows me to search my own measly 30gb hard drive at something close to the speed that Google manages to search the whole goddam internet, but falls short in the end because of all the glorious innovations the Google geniuses lay at our feet in order to keep us from straying. Who loves markets? I love markets!

Wittgenstein's Poker -- Was Googling my own blog, and found this picture titled "flybottle," which I assume is a depiction of Wittgenstein helping to show Popper the way out.

The Choices! THE CHOICES!! Tyler Cowen excerpts this NYT piece by Barry Schwartz on whether we have too many choices. I found titibits like this pretty damn obvious: • Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, psychologists at Columbia and Stanford respectively, have shown that as the number of flavors of jam or varieties of chocolate available to shoppers is increased, the likelihood that they will leave the store without buying either jam or chocolate goes up. According to their 2000 study, Ms. Iyengar and Mr. Lepper found that shoppers are 10 times more likely to buy jam when six varieties are on display as when 24 are on the shelf. If you're optimizing with respect to jam, then an increase in your number of choices increases your search costs. If it looks like the cost of sorting through all the jam is going to be fairly high, and your desire for jam isn't urgent, you're likely to just walk out jamless. You don't have to be optimizing, etither. More likely you'll be happy with anything that passes some threshold. But thresholds like these tend to be context sensitive (the worst jam at Whole Foods might be better than the best jam at Giant, but in both cases, you may aim for the middle of what's on offer), so you won't be sure where it is until you get a sense of your options. This, too, costs. Tyler presents these cases as "brickbats" for libertarians and economists. Well, OK. To me, this points to the economic importance of "editors". If people get turned off when the choice set gets too big, but people will buy something in the set if its smaller, then the money is in packaging smaller choice sets and knowing who to present them to (like the shoe salesman Tyler mentions). To some extent, this is precisely the difference between a boutique and a department store. Part of what you're paying for in a boutique is the editorial skill of the buyer & salesperson. The trim they choice set so you don't have to. Methodological digression: Schwartz's results point to an fascinating area of research for experimental economists. The establishment science fiction economics isn't happy to recognize the scarcity of computational resources, and so just assumes that everybody is able to costlessly and immediately represent the entire choice set and come up with some preference-ordering over all those choices. Of course, we don't do this. We represent a tiny fraction of the potential choice set, and the fraction that we do represent seems to be primed by context together with our belief systems (and other stuff). Somebody, please please tell us: HOW DOES THIS WORK?!

Hypothetical -- If today was my birthday, how old would I be? I'm going with K-Rad, Emilicious & the D.I.K., among others, to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Kennedy Center. Very exciting!

Ideology is Infrastructure -- My first, and I hope not last, Tech Central Station column is now up. It was inspired by my December post on the "hierarchy of public goods."

It's, like, the system, man -- Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber drips with disgust at Congressman Billy Tauzin's whoring: For the last couple of weeks, there’s been a bidding war between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) for Tauzin’s services. The MPAA had paid its outgoing head lobbyist, the unlamented Jack Valenti, more than $1 million a year. Apparently this wasn’t nearly enough for Tauzin, who held out for a substantially larger sum - and got it from PhRMA. As it happens, PhRMA is a particularly unpleasant organization - it played a dishonorable role in the AIDS drugs licensing for Africa controversy a few years ago, and has been up to its eyeballs in other controversies and backroom arrangements, up to and including the recent Medicare porkfest. Needless to say, Tauzin has been assiduous in his efforts to protect the interests of big pharma and the content industry over the last couple of years; it’s hard to believe that his grossly inflated salary is unconnected to services previously rendered. The phenomenon of Congressman-turned-lobbyist is hardly a new one; but the openness and extent of the greed on display is unusual, even for Washington. I agree: sickening. I do hope Henry will accept this as pointing to a general lesson about the deep structural relationship between the motivations of political leaders and very large governments with vast regulatory powers. I've noticed that some people seem to think that if only the leaders or the regulations were different, then all would be well. Which is, I guess, a cute idea.

Snap! -- Slate's Jack Shafer gleefully rips the asshole out of the New America Foundation's fundraising special in the New Atlantic.

Doing it First, Doing it Best -- Gawker Media has launched a new blog devoted to gossip about the Federal City side of the District. Despite their innovative reputation, let it not go unsaid that in this instance Gawker is derivative. Swamp City has been covering the same beat for some time now, with panache. You should add it to your blogrolls forthwith, so that the Swamp City chick will stop pestering me.

Vice Ain't Right -- Joanne McNeill has the lowdown on paunchy aging hipster Gavin McGinnes. His claim to be conservative was apparently a spoof. This supports my argument below that claiming to be conservative is likely to be cooler than actually being conservative. McGinnes does a great job of showing how very uncool conservatives are by showing us just how eager they are to associate themselves with anybody, ANYBODY, with a jot of hpister cred.

Bush Sully-ed -- It's not often these days that I say this, but I think Andrew Sullivan is spot on about the SOTU. If I didn't agree entirely with Chris Sciabarra about the irrelevance of the presidency given the structural immutability of the American political system (great post, read it), then I too would be shopping for a Dem to back.

The Littlest Matador -- Let's play a game! Guess the identity of this somewhat supercilious (but unbearably precious) bullfighter! The winner receives a good rodgering.

Burke is the New Black -- Despite the arguments set forth by Holiday Dmitri on NRO, conservatism is not now, and never was, cool. Indeed, anyone disposed to utter "young hipublican" without scare-quotes is immediately disqualified from the cool sweeps (unless of course the lack of scare quotes is itself part of an undetectably ironic performance of earnestness, which is cool.) As scientists at many of America's most prestigious research institutions have long noted, cool is the most elusive and indefinable of properties. Nevertheless we do have some intuitive grasp of the logic of cool, which enables us to evaluate the arguments Dmitri adduces in support of her counter-intuitive claim. Argument from the Existence of Cool Conservatives (1) Gavin McGinnes is editor of Vice (2) The editor of Vice is ipso facto cool. (3) McGinnes describes himself as a conservative. (4) The cool do not describe themselves as having uncool properties. Thus, (5) Being a conservative is cool. (2) is questionable (one might edit a magazine like Vice in order to create a perception of coolness in order to compensate for a deep lack), but let's grant it. (3) Is a problem if we interpret it as implying that being a conservative is cool just in virtue of the nature of conservatism, instead in virtue of the relationship between conservatism and other attributes, such as having an obscure record collection, or looking effortlessly fly. All we're really getting here is that conservatism does not necessarily rule out being cool. (3) has deeper problems still. It's false. There is nothing less cool than visibly trying to be cool. Ascribing to oneself manifestly uncool properties, like being conservative, mitigates the perception that one is trying to be cool, and therefore enhances one's coolness. So the cool are very likely to describe themselves as having uncool properties, such as being conservative. This fact leads to the necessity of distinguishing between those that say that they are conservative and those that are. To establish that it may be cool to say that one is conservative does not establish that it is cool to actually be conservative. Now, I believe the author implies that she is cool, although she is cool enough not to explicitly admit to her self-estimate. And she appears earnest in her self-description as conservative. She has gone so far as to write an essay on how it is cool to be conservative in a widely-read publication, which is evidence of earnestness. So let's take for granted that Dmitri believes in good faith that she is conservative. There are several possibilities here. (A) She is mistaken in her belief and is not conservative, but is in fact cool. (B) She is mistaken, but is not cool. (C) She is not mistaken, and is cool. (D) She is not mistaken, and is not cool. On the basis of my slim knowledge of Ms. Dmitri, I will assume that she is cool, limiting myself to options (A) and (C). To establish (A) we'd need to know what it is to be conservative. I believe there is much confusion here, and that conservative is a two-place, not one-place, predicate. One is conservative about ______, where the blank is to be filled in by some domain of life such as marriage, drugs, dress, constitutional interpretation, architecture, etc. If one is conservative about almost every domain, it may make sense to say that one is conservative simpliciter. But someone who is conservative in this unrestricted sense is necessarily not cool. If Ms. Dmitri thinks she is conservative in the unrestricted sense, then she is mistaken. But probably she does not believe that she is John Derbyshire, give or take a few secondary sexual characteristics. So (C) is most likely correct, given the restricted interpretation. It is possible for someone like McGinnes to be both cool and conservative only if we interpret conservative in the restricted, domain-relative sense. One may be conservative about, say, the interpretation of rights, free-markets, and affirmative action programs, but decidely not about porn, music, and gender role. But then we might suspect that McGinnes, or Dmitri, is not cool in virtue of of being conservative, but cool in virtue of NOT being conservative about the domains most relevant to being cool. But look. Then it's possible that I am both cool (just imagine) and conservative on the restricted interpretation, despite the fact that I am pains to not describe myself as conservative. The thesis that it is cool to be conservative is interesting only because it is counterintuitive given the unrestricted interpretation of conservative. But if the author of an article like Dmitri's then deploys the restricted interpretation in order to successful identify some self-avowed conservatives who actually are cool, then the thesis becomes fairly trivial. To get a taste of the triviality, notice that on the restricted interpretation it's possible to have two people who are both conservative in this sense, but who agree about nothing whatsoever. The Argument from college (little 'c') Republicans (i) More college students identify themselves as Republicans than as Democrats (ii) Large percentages of college students won't do something unless there is a common perception that it is cool. So, (iii) If a large percentage of college students identify as Republican, then there is a common perception that it is cool to be Republican. (iv) There would be no such common perception unless it was true. (v) Republicans are ipso facto conservative. Therefore, (vi) It is cool to be conservative. I think (iv) is just obviously false. The vast majority of college students have no or almost no cooldar, which is why so many try to be cool, yet fail so miserably, usually simply in virtue of trying. Just as one may infer the awfulness of the Dave Matthews Band on the basis of their popularity with college audiences, a consensus among college students that conservatism was cool, would constitute almost overwhelming evidence that it is not. The fact that students have had it up to here with the moralizing liberal self-love of the professoriate, establishes nothing whatsoever about the coolness of reaction. (v) is also clearly false. Being Republican and being conservative are independent properties. And this is exactly what makes it possible to jump around in the category of Republicans in the service of an argument to the coolness of conservatism. A Venn diagram will refute this argument: (a) Most Republicans are conservatives. (b) Some Republicans are cool. Thus, (c) some conservatives are cool. The cool Republicans may well be those who are not conservative. The Argument from College (big 'c') Republicans "Since 1999, the College Republican National Committee has tripled its membership and now holds claim to 1,150 chapters, with more than 1,000 student coordinators on campuses nationwide." Same analysis as above. What this has to do with coolness is anybody's guess. Julian suggests that Millenials are neo-fascist nationalists, which is not cool. Maybe that explains it. The argument from the coolness of the The Criterion (I)The editorial board of The Criterion are conservative. (II) The board of The Criterion are "fashion-conscious provocateurs who inject dirty humor and an in-your-face attitude into the pages of their publication" (III) It is cool to be a fashion-conscious provocateur, as is the expression of dirty humor and an in-your-face attitude. So, (IV) The board of the Criterion is cool. Thus, (V) There are cool conservatives. This argument very clearly implies that dirty humor and an in-your-face attitude account for the cool of The Criterion. But these attributes are unconservative in their domains. As is being "fashion-conscious" for a man who is conservative about masculinity. The argument gets us no further than we were. So, I think the best we can get out of Dmitri's analysis is that it is possible to be both cool and conservative, assuming that we interpret conservative in a limited, and domain-specific way. But this makes the argument trivial. Saying that you are conservative is clearly not inconsistent with being cool, because saying that you are conservative is an excellent way of pretending to not be cool, which is cool-conducive. Also, more college students are becoming Republicans, for some reason. The rhetorical thrust of Dmitri's essay is that if you were worried about it, it's OK to identify yourself as Republican or conservative, because it's now cool. This idea (dare I say "meme") seems to be getting around, and some people may even believe it. But it's probably self-defeating. The reason cool is elusive is that it flees as soon as too many people think they can see it and be it. The question is whether Dmitri cares more about cool or conservatism. If it's the latter, then she'll be happy to use the rhetoric of cool to nudge a few rubes into pulling the lever for conservatives, even if it ensures that conservatism will not in fact be cool. Anyway, gotta go: Star Trek's on.

Great Power, No Handling -- Nice anaylysis by Tim Lee on how the tech innovations of the Dean campaign got ahead of Dean's capacity as a candidate.

Leaps over Buildings in a Single Bound, Cries Like a Little Girl -- Don't miss this bizarre USA TODAY bar graph constructed from three of Superman's bodily fluids.

Keepin' it Real, but Not Enough -- I enjoyed Mia Fineman's perceptive but careful-not-to-make-too-firm-a-judgment essay on the paintings of John Currin on Slate. I find Currin excruciatingly boring, and technically just OK. Without the funky anatomical distortion (the creepy tiny extremities!), there's just nothing to take in. But do look at the slideshow which features some other decent neo-realist painters. Vincent Desiderio's Sleep (Slide #2) is just amazing, if only as a pointlessly showy and psychologically empty (I guess it is about unconsciousness) display of technique. Wade Schuman's Conversation (#3) has rather more to be said for it, but still strikes me as glib, mannered and flat. My problem with contemporary figurative painting in general is in the dreadful lack of psychological acuity among the leading painters. I will shout for joy from the mountaintops as soon I see a face that conveys anything like the fierce intelligence of Holbein's Thomas More, the eerily intense placidity of Durer's Durer, or the weary but habituated perceptiveness of Rembrandt's aging Rembrandt. The condition of contemporary figurative painting is a bit like MFA workshop fiction: dazzlingly closely observed and spiritually hollow.

Fargo: Den of Thieves -- Since my window for interest in Iowa-themed posts is now closing, let me just point out that Iowa comes out as the 47th most corrupt state in the union in this study. When I tell people Iowa was a good place to grow up, this sort of thing is part of what I mean. People with a conscience, unlike those shifty bastards up in North Dakota (#2)! But I guess my Saskatchewegian dad had to move to Nebraska (#50) to avoid the relatively malign nature of Iowa public life.

Big Fish, Bullshit -- Galen Strawson calls out the "narrativist orthodoxy" in his review of Jerome Bruner's Making Stories. Strawson argues, and he is right, that we are not "constituted" by the stories of our lives in which we cast ourselves as characters. While having a sense that one's life has gone well may involve seeing it as having had a satisfying narrative arc, the conditions for a satisfying arc are not something we are free to concoct from the abundant matter of imagination. Bruner never raises the question of whether there is any sense in which one's self-narrative should be accurate or realistic. Those who favour the extreme fictionalist or post-modernist version of the narrative self-creation view don't care about this, both because they don't care about truth and because a fiction isn't open to criticism by comparison with reality (it doesn't matter that there is no Middle Earth). But honesty and realism about self and past must matter. There are innumerable facts about one's character and history that don't depend on one's inventions. One can't found a good life on falsehood. Strawson's point should lead us to ask what makes a good story a good story. Presumably it has something to do with relating to the world, and to others, in the right sort of way. And the right way to relate is a fact about the world, independent of the stories we tell. Reason editors with degrees in literature or film eager to praise consumer culture for providing the stuff of narrative self-invention, take note. [Link via A&L Daily.]

French Silk -- For some reason I just love the fact that they're wearing the same socks. [NOT WORK SAFE. Link via Fleshbot.]

Baby it's Cold Outside, and... So what? Tim Graham of the NRO Corner get's it right. Take note all you Mid-Atlantic ninnies. UM...IT'S IOWA. [Tim Graham] Dumbest moment of the morning came on NPR, when Juan Williams was asked if the around-zero cold would keep Iowans home from the caucuses. This is IOWA, people. They're USED to these temps in the winter. Twenty below zero, that's a factor. But they aren't holding the caucuses outside... A twenty below Iowans will begin to get firm with you about wearing a hat.

In Defense of the Caucus! -- As an irrationally proud and defensive Iowan, I am annoyed by the headline of the top story on the Slate front page. It says: "The Phantom Pollbooth: Why You'll Never Know who won Iowa." (The headline over the story itself reads, cryptically, "The Vanishing.") The implication here is that there is something wrong with the caucus system, as if there is some one right, especially legitimate, way to choose delegates for a national party convention. There is no poll booth in a caucus, it's just a bunch of people hanging out in a room. And your first preference doesn't necessarily get registered (if your favorite candidate fails to cross a threshold, then you've got to wander over to some other more successful canidate's posse to be counted). And there is no simple constant relationship between the number of people who stand for a candidate at caucus and the number of delegates you finally get. This all seems to annoy Saletan and Schiller, who apparently think democracy essentially has something to do with adding up raw preferences in order to descry the ding an sich of the general will. They need to get over their journalist's fetishism for polls, and stop thinking democracy is the same thing as an especially big Zogby survey. We all should know by now that every voting scheme is arbitrary in its own way, and that there's no general will to be expressed. Democracy, if it's worth anything, is only secondarily about counting heads. First, it's about procedures for social choice that diffuse power, that citizens will regard as legitimate, and which contribute to the stable, predictable functioning of the social order. People in Iowa LIKE the caucus, which is a prima facie good reason to also like the caucus. Iowans like getting together with people in their neighborhood, and talking over issues, and standing for their candidates. And there is a perfectly good procedure for deciding the winner of the caucus, and most everyone thinks that's just fine, too. Delegates get selected. So it adequately serves the superficial democratic function. But the caucus is also a community experience that brings Iowans togethers, that provides them with a sense of choosing and governing together in a way much more intimate than the casting of anonymous ballots. And in this way, the caucus serves democracy's deeper purposes very well. Saletan and Schilller ridiculously compare what promises to be a very close caucus to the 2000 Florida presidential vote count: Everyone could argue about which ballots should count. But at least there were ballots to look at. In Iowa, there will be no ballots. This strikes me as dumb. Given the nature of the Florida debacle, shouldn't it have occured to them that this is a virtue of the caucus?

Anti-Maintenance Man -- In response to my claim that men have not yet figured out how best to be men in the post-feminist world, Kim "Rifleman" DuToit writes: Actually, we have figured it out, but I'm not so sure women are going to like the answer. We seem to have preferred to opt out of the whole Western female societal construct. To quote a friend: "Western women are just too high-maintenance." Which is why men are getting married much later than before, and why mail-order brides from overseas (ie. from "less-civilized" societies like Asia and Eastern Europe) have become such a growth industry. It's why "Women's Studies" is an object of derision; why young men have no compunction to scream "Show us your tits!" to total strangers; why men no longer treat women with respect. If women are going to be just like men, men will treat them like men. Other women, who prefer to be treated like ladies, will be treated as such. And if that's too "old-fashioned" for the New Woman or Metrosexual Man, so much the better for the rest of us. They can have each other, and welcome. Lovely. The problem here is not that Kim is being too "old-fashioned," its that he's being insufferably vicious. If demanding equal respect for equal intelligence and competence, for equal ambition and accomplishment, is just too much, "too high maintenance," for Kim, so much so that he is led to endorse the practice of seeking out "mail-order" brides who will acquiesce in subservience, then he has pretty much demonstrated the utter moral bankruptcy of his conception of masculinity. This strikes me as a confession of weakness at the deepest level. The argument that a woman with ambition, resolve, and a sense of independence is a woman who is trying to be "like a man" is of the same form, and elicits in decent people the same repugnance, as the argument that blacks who take their education seriously are trying to "be white". It's just sick. The "Western female societal construct" is an enormous triumph of civilization. Kim's inability to admire women in this mold, and to appreciate the way such women have successfully preserved their femininity while moving outside of traditional feminine domains, shows us exactly why his notion of masculinity is something no self-respecting man or woman could accept. Additionally, if screaming "show us your tits" is really Kim's idea of treating women "like a man," then his notion of the respect men owe to other men is also incredibly troubling. I think Kim thinks he's being iconoclastic, or charmingly curmudgeonly, or something. This metrosexual thinks he should try being a man, because whatever that is, Kim ain't it. Or he should stop trying, because if he is it, then it ain't worth being.

"Stories to Masturbate to" -- I'm proud to report that the Fly Bottle is #2 in this search on AOL, just after "A Special Weekend" by D. at Spinkle's Golden Showers! [WARNING: For the love of sweet Jesus DO NOT READ "A Special Weekend" by D. at Sprinkle's Golden Showers!!! Just don't.] [To National Review Readers: Sorry about this, didn't know you were coming. I repeat: DO NOT READ THE STORY. I mean it.]

State to You: "Tell me about your mother." This is just nauseating. The New York Times reports that the Bush administration is planning to provide "$1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain 'healthy marriages.'" This is apparently what compassionate conservatism comes to: the intrusion of the state in even the most personal spheres of life; social engineering through therapy. "We know this is a sensitive area," Dr. Horn said. "We don't want to come in with a heavy hand. All services will be voluntary. We want to help couples, especially low-income couples, manage conflict in healthy ways. We know how to teach problem-solving, negotiation and listening skills. This initiative will not force anyone to get or stay married. The last thing we'd want is to increase the rate of domestic violence against women." I'm sure the government will soon come around to the view that single people need listening skills too! And it's nice to be assured that the state will stay its healing hand and won't force us into riveting 50 minute sessions down at the community center with besweatered, milquetoast PsyDs anxious to tell us how to live our lives. Imagine: "In order to increase your compassion for one another, you need first to have greater compassion for nature. Try not eating meat for a week, and see if you don't find yourself more sensitive to your partner's feelings!" Or, worse: "The first thing we've got to talk about is Jesus. Is Jesus in your life? There's no reason NOT to beat your wife if you don't accept Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. I like to say that family that prays together stays together." Coming soon to a church basement near you. [Link from Tyler Cowen @ the Volokhs.]

The New Capitalist Man -- Terence O. Moore is worried that manhood is ailing, and that our culture now produces only barbarians and wimps. While there is some truth to his complaints, my issue with this kind of conservative social criticism is its utter lack of imagination. The world has changed, and despite Moore's loathing of whiners, all he seems to manage is a mannered, whining lament for classical "thumotic" masculinity. One hopes for more from social critics. Moore's essay is a perfect example of the kind of rote conservative judgment that I complained about yesterday in a post about the films of Whit Stillman. He just can't seem to accept that there are new conventions, for better or worse, and so cannot bring himself to think critically and usefully of what it means to live a life within those conventions, rather than bleat impotently about the lost world. Conservatives tend to see the feminist movement and the so-called sexual revolution as perverse, willful repudiations of the sorts of regulative convention that make civilization possible. Yet here we are; civilization remains. And they fail to relate these cultural shifts to the ongoing development of capitalism, which, in other moods, they are only too eager praise. The increased economic autonomy of women, of which the feminist movement is as much a response as a cause, fundamentally alters the terms of sexual and marital relations, and thereby fundamentally alters the social meaning of man- and womanhood. What we need is a rethinking of what it is to be a man when women don't need us economically, don't require our paternalistic care, don't conceive of themselves primarily as units for the production of babies, and thus look to relationships with men to meet human needs beyond economics, protection, and reproduction. We men haven't quite figured this out yet, and so, yes, we are a bit adrift about how exactly to express our masculinity in today's world. But it does no good to quote C.S. Lewis at us, and blame us for lacking sufficient martial virtue. Moore should make himself useful and think about what we men should be and do now given that our social role is irreversibly changed and women are never going back to the gilded cage. [Cross-posted on Liberty & Power.]

Giving a Whit about Convention -- Julia Magnet's thoughtful paean to the films of Whit Stillman moved me to dwell on tensions in my own character that reflect, I think, the uneasy integration of fairly traditional (read: conservative) values and the values of the "sexual revolution." Magnet enthusiastically approves of Stillman's rearguard defense of traditional conventions, and his indictment of the move to overthrow them in an attempt to, you know, liberate us from their strictures, to free us to strike out boldly on the journey of self-actualization. I too approve, sort of. But not at all enthusiastically. I am composed of too much of what they condemn. Despite my own selective conservative streak, conservatives often make me uncomfortable, because they so often lack the sort of discerning judgment they laud. (This is, needless to say, not a lack exclusive to conservatives.) In her discussion of the characters of Metropolitan Magnet writes: What really riles Charlotte is the fact that Alice still has standards, judges people, and rejects postmodern equivalency. "I'm sorry," Alice unhesitatingly pronounces, "but I don't consider the guy who did the Spider-Man comics to be a serious author." In Stillman's eyes, what makes Alice so attractive is just this refined capacity for judgment. Perhaps refinement is required to omit Stan Lee from the Canon. But this sort of judgment is very often rote, reflexive and unrefined, not unlike Magnet's casual use of 'postmodern' as an epithet. I've met enough St. John's and Hillsdale grads, quasi-Straussian pseudo-intellectuals, and martini quaffing, cigar puffing, Burke quoting suspenders-wearers, to see that, these days, endorsement of a conservative weltanschaung may be no more than a particularly luxurious form of transgression, and that the stoutly anti-postmodern judgments that Stillman and Magnet so admire may be simply what one says. It's true, conventions allow us to coordinate and constrain our behavior so that we are able to pursue our various ends without coming to grief. But it's also true that conventions retard, stultify, and oppress. The trick is judging which conventions do which, or if they do the latter, whether there is a compensating benefit. Such refined judgment is surpassingly attractive because it is surpassingly difficult. However, I worry that it is in the nature of conservatism to be indolent in judgment about the cultural patrimony. Some, perhaps many, of our conventions are worth defending, and so conservatives will often be right to defend them -- but right by default, and not by any discernment about the particular case. Yet some of our institutions are "peculiar," as they say, and demand our unreserved opposition. The Grimke sisters', for example, were not wasted lives. Discussing Stillman's lament over lost mores in The Last Days of Disco, Magnet write, The adherents of the sexual revolution presented a world without consequences. Freed from the restrictions of convention, we would satisfy our every desire and increase the store of human happiness. This proved to be a lie: sex has profound consequences--emotional, moral, and physical--as Stillman dramatizes in the final twist he gives to Alice's story. Her one encounter scars Alice for life--Tom gives her herpes. Though Tom imagines himself a critic of the sexual revolution, in this instance he embodies its wounding irresponsibility: he knew he had a venereal disease but took no precautions, assuming that Alice?s promiscuity excused his carelessness. This is a powerful, perceptive scene. But Magnet betrays a lack of refinement in her insistence on overstating its lesson. Convention as such was never abandoned. Traditional conventions were effaced and transformed to create new ones. That sex has profound emotional, moral, and physical consequences was never in dispute. The question is whether it's marriage or nothing. Few believe that wanton promiscuity adds to "the store of human happiness." But it's not clear that the loosening of sexual constraint has not. The emotional, moral, and physical consequences of sex on my life, and the life of most of my unmarried friends, men and women, has been far from disaster. I don't doubt that the transition to new conventions created human wreckage. I don't doubt that herpes got around. But I do doubt that we would be better off overall with the old constraints. Some of which, by the way, are with us still, and which, by the way, are cruel, demeaning, and immoral. Ask a couple of loving men or women who would like to be afforded the benefits and protections of a legal marriage. A conservative who has developed even a weak capacity for moral discernment and social judgment should see through to the logic of the institution and endorse gay marriage. But instead we get vehement, unrefined declamation of prejudice, which is not, I believe, the same thing as having standards. The point is that we should all be conservatives insofar as there are conventions and standards worth conserving. (There are.) And we should be hesitant to throw off norms we find inconvenient, because they may serve larger purposes we don't understand. But some of our conventions are perverse and wrong. So we've got to have standards that allow us to pass judgment on them, and we have to be willing to change the conventions and norms if need be. The choice isn't between the conventions history happened to pass down to us and the relativist abolition of all standards. The choice is between the intelligent application of social judgment and apology for injustice. So let us all abhor the cheap confession of low feeling, admire the stoic virtues, preserve the conditions for love and family, praise the ennobling and beautiful, love our freedom, hold one another responsible, and treat each other with respect, courtesy, and due deference. And then... screw like the end is nigh.

Spread Thin -- Well, very suddenly, I am teaching an introductory aesthetics course at Howard University, not far from my digs. I'm scrambling to prepare. In addition, I'm guest blogging over at Liberty & Power. And I'm still blogging at Radley's until, I guess, he tells me I'm not.

Oh, Please do Come in -- James Bowman in National Review writes: Pre-feminist common sense suggested that a woman who comes alone to a man's hotel room late at night has already consented to sex with him, but on the all-or-nothing principle so dear to ideologues everywhere, feminist orthodoxy insists that the adoption of this rough-and-ready but extremely useful guide would be tantamount to saying that a woman who has slept with other men not her husband, or even who dresses provocatively has already consented to sex. And the feminist interpretation of the law is now almost uncontested in the courts. No means no ? even though no one else hears it, even though everyone knows that it may mean yes ? because feminists want to reserve to women the right and freedom to be indiscrete. The brilliance at NRO continues to shine forth unabated. Perhaps there is a generation gap here. Or perhaps Bowman is so irreperably lascivious that he cannot conceive of the possibility of having a woman to one's hotel room late at night for the purpose of a conversation, splitting the cost of Titanic on pay-per-view, a drink, or just a little innocent positive-sum smashface. Bowman conjures in imagination this conversation: "Why don't you stop by my room for a drink? A little nighcap and a chat?" "Why yes. That sounds nice." . . . [Woman crosses threshold. Door closes. Man grabs blouse and yanks, sending buttons flying, exposing feminine undergarments. Pushes her on to bed.] "I know what you're thinking you dirty minx! Poppa's gonna give you the what for!" Yes, clearly, she's asking for it. We should thanks Bowman for his elegant reductio of "pre-feminist common sense," ably exposing it as a vehicle of a retarded moral and sexual sensibility. It is undeniable that "no" sometimes means "maybe," or "yes, but try harder." And that "yes" can mean "I'd rather not, but 'no' doesn't really seem worth the trouble," or "yes, but I've now changed my mind, so please stop." This can be confusing, no doubt, because sexual emotions and intentions can be confusing. Such is life. It's a matter of interpretative context, and our duty as morally decent human beings is to develop a sensitivity to context that allows us to understand the intentions of the speaker behind the utterance. If my wife of twenty years wants me, her husband, to pretend to be a burglar who breaks into the house and rapes her, then adamant and strenuous "no"s are required by the performance. And my husbandly duties in turn require I brazenly dismiss her protestations as I handle her roughly. On the flip side, if one's smitten, bashful, and drunken date tentatively, uncomfortably, and meekly assents to a sexual suggestion, then there's a good chance she'd say "no" under more chemically and emotionally favorable circumstance, and a gentleman will decline to press forward, despite her nominal consent. Even if she has come up to the room. This, I believe, is common sense, both pre- and post-feminist. Bowman should look under the cushions, or behind the dresser, because he's lost his.

The Deflationary Rawls -- It's a piece of received wisdom the John Rawls saved substantive political philosophy from the all-dissolving acid of positivism. However, I'm beginning to believe that Rawls is closer in sensibility to the positivists, who banished metaphysics from ethics and reduced all normative language to emotive exhortation, than most commentators have seen. I see Rawls as a sort of post-positivist, not unlike his colleague Quine, combined with a bit of late Wittgensteinian sensibility acquired from his teacher Norman Malcolm. Rawls normative metaphysics is very sparse indeed. He does not believe in moral properties, or any capacity to track objective moral truth. Rawls begins instead with moral conceptions, systems of beliefs about value, personhood, and social order. And Rawls is not concerned with the veracity of the elements of moral conceptions. He is simply concerned to tease out the structure of various moral conceptions--that's the work of "moral theory" as opposed to a comprehensive moral philosophy--and to analyze various formal properties of moral conceptions once their implicit logic is refined through a process of reflective equilabration. (The most he ever commits to by way of objective moral truth is that if it happened to turn out that all of our moral conceptions had a common core at the ideal limit of wide reflective equilibrium (which we will never achieve), then it may make sense to treat the common core as objective moral truth.) The point of a moral theory is, in the first instance, to characterize the moral sensibility of agents within a particular society. Here is a Wittgensteinian point. People are already acting within systems of norms, we already have a form of moral life, and that shapes our actions and determines macro-level patterns of activity. There is no point arguing whether our moral conception is true is a correspondence sense. Suppose we find out that it is not. What does this change? Social life will not therefore grind to a halt. We will simply go on as before. The best we can do is to figure out what "going on as before" really means--to attempt to refine the logic implicit in our forms of life to create an ideal of social order that will seem authoritative to us by our own lights. Our de facto, pre-reflective patterns of activity may contain pragmatically inconsistent elements that will ultimately undermine the stability of the very ideals to which we already subscribe, and so it is worthwhile to regiment and refine our conceptions. But we cannot go too far afield. Moral conceptions, such as utilitarianism, that are too remote from our habituated moral sensibilities will not sustain our allegiance and compliance (we DO NOT think of ourselves as containers of utility; we DO care about the distribution of goods), will thus prove unstable, and are, therefore, usuitable as ideals with which to regulate social reform. So, despite all the praise heaped upon Rawls for bringing back substantive moral and political theory, his own theory is amazingly deflationary--so much so that it is very hard to find the substance. Insofar as Rawls work is really substantive, all the substance comes from his clearly deeply felt commitment to Kantian ideals of the person. But this is precisely what Rawls had to jettison in his later phase, when he sees that all this substance is in principle inconsisent with his deflationary theory of justification based in the stability of refined moral conceptions. Once Rawls sees his way to the fact of pluralism in moral conceptions, he is faced with the problem of establishing compliance, and thus stability, given heterogeneity in moral conceptions. Thus only the normative substance that all reasonable overall conceptions could independently endorse is allowed to remain. This overlap in conceptions provides the substance of a fairly neutral "political" liberalism. This suggests to me a project like that of the later "minimalist" Chomsky. What is the minimal set of substantive principles necessary to produce willing compliance and thus stability (for the right reasons) in a pluralistic society? Next question: Is Rawls characterization of political liberalism bigger or smaller than the minimal set?

Wikipleadia -- If you are so inclined, please send a donation to Wikipedia to help them raise money for new hardware. In my opinion, Wikipedia is among the most impressive open source efforts on the web. Because it's a Wiki encyclopedia, anyone at any time can modify an entry. You'd think some of it would turn out to be trash, but quite the opposite. Wikipedia has developed a solid community of volunteers who write, edit and police entries, and the trend so far has been one of improving quality, drawing on the distributed expertise of folks all over the net. Wikipedia was founded by some old friends of mine, and I participated early on several years ago. It's fun to go back and look at entries you wrote, and see how they have and haven't changed. Once they get the server problems taken care of, I think I might get back in there. Nozick needs a lot of work, as does Gauthier. And Rawls, although much better, could use some help. And contractarianism is just some of Larry Sanger's old lecture notes. I encourage you to look at things you consider yourself in expert in, and see if you can improve on what's there.

Not a Good Reason, but a Reason -- Do you suppose this sort of thing is why terrorists wanted to crash a plane in Vegas.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Milkman -- This is a beautiful expression of the human spirit: I first became interested in male lactation in 1978 after reading Dana Raphael's book, The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding. Although Raphael only dealt with the subject briefly, she did say that men can and have produced milk after stimulating their nipples. My husband, David, and I were intrigued with the idea. We had just had our first unassisted homebirth and were excited about applying our positive thinking techniques to other aspects of our lives. Although Raphael had written about milk production through nipple stimulation, perhaps, we thought, David could do it simply through suggestion. He began telling himself that he would lactate, and within a week, one of his breasts swelled up and milk began dripping out. When we excitedly showed my father (a physician) David's breast he said, "Obviously there's something physiologically wrong with David." The fact that David had willed himself to do this, did not impress him. We knew, however, that this was yet another example of the power of the mind. Oh, please do enjoy the rest.

Deliberation Day -- A year or so ago, I took a great course on democracy with my advisor Chris Morris. Toward the end of the term we went through some works on "deliberative democracy." The deliberative camp colors themselves as adversaries of social choice theorists who emphasize the rationality of voter ignorance, the impossibility of constructing an unambiguous "will of the people" through voting mechanisms (different voting mechanisms give different results and none is the "right" result), and the manipulability of the democratic process by special interests. The deliberative democrats hold onto a strongly procedural conception of the legitimacy of government, democracy being the legitimating procedure. Against the social choice theorists, they argue that democracy is not simply a matter of adding up people's raw preferences and weighing them against each other. Rather, the ideal of democracy is one in which communities of citizens engage each other in conversations that shape their preferences. The expression of deliberatively shaped preferences through the democratic processes is what is supposed to give democratically chosen institutions a special sort of authority over us. Trouble is, just as social choice theorists would predict, we squander so much time working, shopping, and filching music from the internet that we leave little for mutually tailoring our policy preferences through painfully earnest civic deliberation. Solution? Deliberation Day! Deliberation Day is the brainchild of professors Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin. "Deliberation Day will, of course, be expensive," they tell us. So what can we expect to get out of it? (Will there be presents?) Well, Ackerman and Fishkin think voter ignorance is a huge problem, and it is, sort of. And they think paying folks $150 to spend two days in a middle school gym to talk it out with the neighbors will have a transformative effect on American politics. Our Deliberation Day gift is an informed electorate, and more enlightened and just policy. I'm doubtful. I think I want what we'll likely get about as much as I want some shitloaf fruitcake. They cite experiments of Fishkin's in "deliberative polling" that show that people change their policy preferences after these little forums. The research that has come out of deliberative polls suggests not only that participants change their political attitudes but that these changes are driven by better information. It suggests not only that these changed attitudes generate different voting intentions but that these preferences become more public-spirited and collectively consistent. These changes occur throughout the population and aren't limited to the more educated. Finally, deliberation is intrinsically satisfying once people are given a serious chance to engage with one another in an appropriate setting. OK. I'm setting aside the imporant matter of how much these changes matter, given the overall structure of the system. So, that aside, is there any reason to expect an actual Deliberation Day to look like Fishkin's experiments? I can't think of any. The fact that his test polls are not actually a part of the institutionalized political process undoubtedly lends these mock proceedings with an unrealistically civil and pleasant tenor. Why not be nice? Nothing's at stake. However, instead of realizing the dream of ideal deliberation among inquiring citizens, a real, institutionalized Deliberation Day would quickly degenerate into a shrill cacophony of ideological strife. Here's how they set the thing up: In preparation for the event, the participants receive briefing materials to lay the groundwork for the discussion. These materials are typically supervised for balance and accuracy by an advisory board of relevant experts and stakeholders. On arrival, the participants are randomly assigned to small groups with trained moderators. When they meet, they not only discuss the general issue but try to identify key questions that merit further exploration. It is simply incoceivable that this process would not become a quickly politicized Pelennor Fields of ideology. Fundamentalist conservatives, leftist activists, and party operatives will battle to the death over control of the preparation of "briefing materials," over the constitution of the "advisory board of relevant experts and stakeholders," and over the training of "moderators." The Day itself will become one of mobilizing ideological interest groups to dominate the local forum, and discussion itself will devolve into heated argument between activists will incomensurable conceptions of the world. I can imagine few for whom this would be worth two days and $150. And as the Day becomes overrun by people with already deeply entrenched preferences hoping to propagandize or otherwise "raise the consciousness" of the masses, the people most likely to change their minds on the basis of informed conversation will stay away. Judge Posner, in his concise, spot-on critique spies what he thinks is the underlying motivation of Deliberation Day: I think that what motivates many deliberative democrats is not a love of democracy or a faith in the people, but a desire to change specific political outcomes, which they believe they could do through argument, if only anyone could be persuaded to listen, because they are masters of argumentation. I infer this secret agenda from the fact that most proponents of deliberative democracy advocate aggressive judicial review, which removes many issues from democratic control; are coy about indicating what policies they dislike but would accept; and are uncommonly fond of subjecting U.S. citizens to control by international organizations of questionable, and often of no, democratic pedigree. I sense a power grab by the articulate class whose comparative advantage is—deliberation. I think there's more than a little something to this. And this is precisely why Deliberation Day, if it should be realized, will simply become one more battleground of ideology and special interest. It is hard to believe that deliberative democrats are interested in the expression of deliberative preferences per se, rather than the expression of their deliberative preferences. Else, why is it that deliberative democrats are almost uniformly soft-socialist welfare state liberals? Where are the conservative and libertarian deliberativists? While I don't think it's all in bad faith, I think Fishkin and Ackerman at least hope that their people can control the process--control the briefing materials, the advisory boards, the moderators, etc.--and thereby induce preferences and votes that align with their own. I conjecture that they're frustrated at the left's failure to produce a more Swedish America, not to mention the failure of the people to demand it (it's for them, don't they see?), and so why not give this a try? At some level, I think they really must think that if people only understood, we'd all think more like Fishkin and Ackerman. But at another level, I think Posner must be right. This really isn't about a just procedure that confers legitimacy on whatever outcomes it produces. There is little reason to believe that a real Deliberation Day will nudge people toward more informed and reasoned preferences. It's hard not to see talk of deliberative democratic procedure as rhetorical veneer over ideological realpolitik. If social conservatives effectively co-opted Deliberation Day and "deliberated" their way to huge majorities in favor of the abolition of abortion, the Defense of Marriage Amendment, or the privatization of social security, I don't think the Ackermans and Fishkins of the world would rest content knowing that the deliberative will of the people, and thus justice, was done. [Cross-posted on The Agitator.]

Guest Spot -- I'm guest blogging at Radley's over the Holidays. So look for me over there, although I may be crossposting some stuff here, too.

The Natural Order of Sexuality, as if Nature Mattered -- OK, Jennifer Roback Morse is full of shit, and the National Review continues to demonstrate its status as a go-to source for scientific illiteracy. Morse deigns to relate to us the "natural, organic purposes of sexual activity." They are: reproduction and spousal unity. Well, OK. A more accurate term for "spousal unity" is "pair-bonding." You can't expect to taken seriously when you come right out of the gate, in a paragraph on natural purposes yadda yadda, implying the naturalness and non-historical character of the social institutions we associate with "spouses." But yes. Pair bonding. That's a function of sex. In the next paragraph she name checks "evolutionary psychology" as if she's read and comprehended some. Evolutionary psychology observes the survival value to spousal cooperation. Males and females who attach themselves to each other, have a better chance of seeing their offspring survive long enough to produce grandchildren. Science can now tell us how the hormones released during sex help to create emotional bonds between the partners. Yes. And science can now tell us so much more. Such as the fact that promiscuity and exotic patterns of sexual relations are damn natural, too. A Google search on "female promiscuity evolutionary" brings up such informative gems as this article, from which Morse might discover that Less than 50 years ago, Canela women, who live in Amazonian Brazil, enjoyed the delights of as many as 40 men one after another in festive rituals. When it was time to have a child, they'd select their favorite dozen or so lovers to help their husband with the all-important task. Even today, when the dalliances of married Barí ladies in Columbia and Venezuela result in a child, they proudly announce the long list of probable fathers. Further down, we get more technical meat: Physiological data supports the theory that women have been sleeping around for centuries. For starters, men have evolved to compete in their partner's reproductive tract. Human males have large testicles that manufacture plenty of semen, especially when they reunite with their wives after separation. Their sperm includes coil-tailed versions that block instead of carry the ball. Conclusion: Modern relationships are not all that different. High infidelity, remarriage and divorce rates may have less to do with modernity than with our collective sexual past. "It makes the variation we're seeing in modern society so much more understandable," Hawkes says. If the anthropologists are right, monogamy may well be counter-evolutionary or an adaptation to modern life. Or perhaps the nuclear family has always been more of an ideal than a reality. That was the FIRST ARTICLE to come up in my search. But of course, it's AlterNet, so Roback Morse surely couldn't have trusted the science. Now, for some reason, Roback Morse found it worth the keystrokes to tell us that "As far as I know, humans are the only animals that copulate face to face. Shakespeare described the sexual act as "making the two-backed beast." She doesn't know very far! A Google search on "face face copulation animal" [it takes, like, 20 seconds, Jennifer!] brings up, for instance, this page which tells us that "Orangutans engage in human like activities like face-to-face copulation, comprehension of speech, tool manufacturing, and imitation." Better yet, here's one with illustrations. "During copulation sharks meet face to face. As seen in this picture the male inserts one of his claspers into the cloaca of the female." Apparently the Stitchbird does it, too. Again, from the AlterNet article, this amusing bit: "This model of the death-do-us-part, missionary-position couple is just a tiny part of human history," says anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, who has spent years studying the foraging habits of the Aché, a Paraguayan people, and the North Tanzanaian tribe Hadza, who also celebrate a rich love life. "The patterns of human sexuality are so much more variable." It would be too easy to go on about the stockpile of errors that is Roback Morse's essay. Let it suffice to point out the extremely ambitious nature of her ignorance. If you're going to write such portentous things as, "Many people celebrate the uncoupling of sexual activity from both of its natural functions, procreation and spousal unity. But by doing so, we have capsized the whole natural order of sexuality," then you might want to know some small thing about the natural order of sexuality. It's unecessary to know a damn thing about biology or anthropology to discover that Roback Morse has NO IDEA what she is talking about. Google! Yet she has the gall, the temerity, the ova to assume an air of authority as she extrapolates her ignorance into an argument for using the law to reinforce the marginalization of homsexual fidelity. In the process of wrapping it up, she writes: Human sexuality has a specific nature, regardless of what we believe or say about it. We are more likely to be satisfied with the outcome, if we work with our biology rather than against it. We will be happier if we face reality on its own terms. Indeed. Now, go read a book or shut the fuck up.

Moral Competence, Compliance and Rawlsian Ideal Theory -- I'm in the midst of writing a fairly difficult paper on ideal and non-ideal theory in Rawls's moral & political theory, my ideas are rather inchoate, and I want to think "out loud" in hope of clarifying my understanding and maybe getting some useful pointers by those who know this stuff better than me. If you're not one of those people, be warned. I give thus one a black diamond. Ideal theory produces the principles of justice that the "artificial agents" occupying the "original position" would choose acting as trustees for the"citizens of a well-ordered society." Now, there is quite a cast of characters in Rawlsian constructivism. The citizens of a well-ordered society are not you and me. They too, like the ciphers in the original position, are artificial agents, or "agents of construction," which is to say, strictly delineated characters of imagination. The citizens of a well ordered society (let me just call them Citizens) are characterized by a conception of the "moral person," which is different from a theory of human nature. Moral persons (and thus Citizens) are taken to be possessed of a "sense of justice" that disposes them to comply with the principles of justice, whatever those might be, and to have a conception of their own good. And they are conceived as "free and equal" (about which I won't say anything here). Now, the structure of justification for Rawlsian theory is quite complicated, and I don't believe I've nailed it down to my satisfaction. For instance, the agents in the OP are subject to "reasonable" constraints on the choice of principles. These constraints are justified by reference to the imputed properties of Citizens. But why characterize the citizens like this. Because so characterized, the agents in the original position, subject to reasonable constraints, acting as representatives of the Citizens, choose principles of justice that produce a well-ordered society for the Citizens. And, so, why care about this? So far, we haven't said anything about the actual world. This is a toy world, a figment of the imagination. Why do these principles have a claim on us? Well, they do in case they are in "reflective equilibrium" with our "considered judgments." Now these are our actual considered judgments--the judgments of you and me. OK, and why does this have any justificatory force? Well, we are alleged to have a sense of justice, too. Now insofar as our sense of justice plays a justificatory role in Rawls's theory, it is that a sense of justice is a part of our best theory of human nature. You and I aren't part of a model, so we aren't subject to the stipulations of the model conception of the moral person. Indeed, Rawls's model conception of the moral person is an acceptable part of the larger modeling device only if it agrees with our real-world considered judgments about our moral personhood. And it can't be just that our actual conception of ourselves as persons is such that we conceive of ourselves as having a sense of justice. We must actually have one. So, again, why the judgments that express our putative sense of justice supposed to be authoritative? Rawls suggests that, as a first approximation, the function of a theory of justice is to describe our native sense of justice. And he compares the sense of justice to the Chomskyan capacity of syntactic competence. According to Chomsky, we have a native capacity to judge the grammaticality of utterances in the natural languages in which we have been brought up. The aim of a theory of syntax is to systematize native speakers’ intuitive judgments of grammaticality through a (hopefully minimal) set of principles that would predict these judgments. Ideally, this systematization mirrors the set of principles that is psychologically realized in language users and generates their competence. OK, sorry. That's tough going. Now, some philosophers, namely Susan Dwyer, have run with the analogy to Chomskyan linguistic competence, further developing Rawls's intriguing idea of a sense of justice as a part of a broader moral competence characteristic of human nature. Now Susan wrote a paper on this, which I read a few years back, but no longer have access to, so I'm not addressing it. [Whoops! Just found it! But I haven't re-read it yet.] There's a damn good chance she addresses/answers/refutes everything I say. But for now, I'mimaginingg it so I can explore the analogy to linguistic competence in connection to the function our sense of justice is supposed to play in the justification of principles of justice derived from the Rawlsian construction device. This takes me back to the distinction betweenn ideal and non-ideal theory. In ideal theory, we stipulate "perfect compliance" with principles in order to visualize what a fictive, ideal well-ordered society looks like. Perfect compliance is ensured within the model by the sense of justice of Citizens, which disposes them to adhere to the principles, and common knowledge among Citizens that all possess such a sense of justice. Now, the fact that we do not inhabit an ideal well-ordered society implies one or more of a few things. Either our sense of justice is not quite that of the Citizens, i.e., is non-ideal, or our sense of justice is not fully realized, or it is fully realized but we make constant performance errors, or we lack common knowledge of our sense of justice. On either of the first two options, the analogy with linguistic competence fails. Take the first. It's puzzling how ideal linguistic competence could differ from our actual linguistic competence. What would ideal linguistic competence be, other than actual competence. Competence with a more computationally efficient UG? Maybe competence in a Begriffschrift, a logically perfect, non-ambiguous language? But that's more than anything about semantics, while linguistic competence is about grammar. Take the second. Every cognitively normal person above a certain age has full linguistic competence. We can all generate and comprehend grammatical sentences of our native languages without fail, barring performance errors (which we make when we are slip up when we are tired, drunk, get confused, or whatever.) No special environmental conditions are necessary to develop linguistic competence, and Rawls stipulates that the every person past a certain age under normal social circumstances develops a sense of justice. How about the third option: systematic performance errors. Well, this is weird idea. How could you tell what is and isn't a performance error if performance errors are systematic, much less develop a theory that there is an underlying "moral grammar" at all. So then, the fourth: no common knowledge. This analogy straightforwardly fails. Common knowledge of linguistic competence is what makes communication possible. Thus, the analogy, if we take it fairly literally, is not so good. If it was REALLY good, we wouldn't NEED a theory of justice, because we would already be living it, which we manifestly aren't. Let us suppose that there is universal agreement on certain very general moral principles, and this agreement is an expression of our native moral competence. Still, the persistent fact of moral disagreements so deep that people will kill each other over them, and the pervasiveness of gross injustice, suggests that the natural expression of our moral competence leaves us far far short of well-ordered societies. In any case, I think the first hypothesis is most likely to be true. We have some sort of moral competence, and some sort of sense of justice is part of it, but it is not ideal in the sense that it disposes us to perfectly comply with the principles of justice. OK! But then we are forced to worry how we can justify the elements of the construction procedure that produce Rawls'sprincipless. If the theory of justice is supposed to characterize OUR sense of justice, then why suppose that our considered judgments would endorse the principles when they are the product of a construction procedure in which the stimpulation of a sense of justice unlike our own plays a prominent role? Rawls says in several places that coming up a theory of justice is not an epistemic problem, because there is no objective moral order out there to discover. It may be true that there is no independent moral order, but it there's still an epistemic problem in determining what our sense of justice actually amounts to, and what conception of the person, and so on, it would endorse. If the strict analogy to linguistic competence is tight, then the theorist can take her own intuitions as evidence of the structure of our underlying moral competence. But the linguistic analogy is not tight, if it applies at all. So the theorist cannot assume that the intuitions she shares with her colleagues and students in the seminar room are representative. We'll have to look out the window. But this makeseverythingg REAL hard! We can't build a construction device without model conceptions. And we can't justify using this model conception rather than that unless we can test it against real people's sense of justice. And then the back and forth between judgments of particular cases and judgments about the acceptability of general principles derived from the construction device is bound to take a damn long time, and a lot of NSF grants. Now, the later "political" Rawls modified his model conception of the well-ordered society to include reasonable but ineradicable pluralism of "comprehensive conceptions." A comprehensive conception is like, say, Catholicism, Islam, or Kantian secular liberalism, or any such big theory that tells you all about your place in the universe, your nature as the kind of being you are, and so forth. Rawls thinks he needs to do this in order to ensure a kind of stability for a well ordered society. Unless the principles are those that anyone with a reasonable comprehensive conception could endorse, you won't get compliance with the principles, and the institutions composing the basic structure of society will be unstable. So the principles can't be rooted in any one comprehensive conception, but must be found in a some "political conception" consistent with the various reasonable big conceptions. Now, this is INSIDE the model conception of the well-ordered society. Why is Rawls modifying the model conception this way? Before, the stipulation that the sense of justice of Citizens ensured perfect compliance was more or less enough to get the required stability. I think that Rawls was seeing that acomprehensivee conception is to a sense of justice something like what a natural language is to linguistic competence. And he's trying to create Esperanto. Our sense of justice is expressed THROUGH our comprehensive conceptions, and this causes our patterns of moral activity to take various not always fully consistent forms. When I'm talking to a Catholic conservative or a socialist, I feel quite like we're speaking different languages. Rawls sees this as an intrinsic aspect of the human condition under fairly liberal conditions. Compliance and stability based on a single comprehensive conception can only be maintained by the forced imposition of that conception by the coercive power of the state, which is flatly incompatible with liberal aspirations. So this feature of the real world, reasonable pluralism, has to be moved inside the model conception in order to jibe adequately and gain the assent of real folks whose sense of justice is expressed through a comprehensive conception. So Rawls's hope is that the various reasonable comprehensive conceptions overlap to enough to sustain agreement. This still assumes that there is a universal sense of justice that is expressed neutrally enough in our considered judgments to endorse model conceptions that produce these "political" principles of justice. Maybe. But one wonders to what extent Rawls's model conception of the "moral person," say, can be justified by a neutrally expressed moral competence, as opposed to a comprehensive conception-laden competence (based in Kant, say). Furthermore, the fact that late Rawls moves the pluralism inside the model conception of the well-ordered society shows that he takes problems of compliance and stability seriously. Rawls notes that the theory of human nature constrains the conception of the person used inside the construction device. I imagine this works in rather the way that permanent features of social life, such as pluralism, constrain the conception of the well-ordered society. Are there also aspects of the theory of human nature that need to be made internal to Rawls's conception of the moral person in order to take compliance and stability problems fully seriously? Given the difference between the sense of justice of fictive moral persons and the sense of justice of real people, won't we need to move more features of real moral competence inside the conception of the moral person in order to produce principles of justice that would be endorsed by real people? And if we do this, what's the princinpled basis for stopping at some point before ideal and non-ideal theory collapse into one? OK. That was rambling. And a horrifying, cryptic piece of writing if you don't already know what I'm trying to talk about. Sorry. But I find it useful to brain dump into the blog. So now tell me where to look in the vast unexplored (by me) territory of Rawls secondary literature in order to correct my mistakes and sort all this. Or just give it to me straight out. Thanks!

The Great Pretender -- I dig Chuck Freund's insightful account of the problem of Arab myth and ressentiment embodied by Saddam.

The Coase is Clear -- Try this fascinating Washington Post bigthink piece by Everett Erlich on Coase, the transactions costs of political organization, Dean, and the death of the big two.

Nuclear Meltdown -- Charlotte Hays, on the new IWF blog, wonders whether killer moms are a consequence of the erosion of family values. Listen: With regard to Amanda Hamm, the latest mother to drown her children, the network news last night made a lot of the point that mothers who kill their children are more common than we think. But isn’t it really *moms who have boyfriends* who kill their children? In the case of the deaths of Hamm’s three children, aged 23 months to six, boyfriend Maurice Lagrone Jr. has also been charged. They are eligible for the death penalty if convicted. I hate to say it, but: Couldn’t the spate of killer moms have something to do with the dissolution of the two-parent family? Well, nice. First, is a spate really a spate, or did the press just happen on several provocative stories? And is a spate a trend? Are MORE kids being killed by their moms now than under other family arrangements? Are more kids killed in Western two-parent households than in EVEN MORE TRADITIONAL extended families? (It's always interesting to note when one commences standing athwart history...] Anyway, WHO CARES! Anything to keep the damn fags from getting hitched!!! [Tip to Yglesias.]

Blogroll -- I've finally updated my blogroll. I've rectified some unconscionable omissions of friends, and removed a few links pointing to nothingmuchville.

Curb Rights -- Leonard Dickens has a neat post on property rights in shoveled parking spots. A nice lesson in the emergence of norms.

Plenitude, Alienation, and Leisure -- I just ran across this great little essay by Don Boudreaux on his Mason homepage. I remember when I first grasped Don's lesson. It was some time in my sophomore year of college. The lesson? That I am unfathomably wealthy, due to no special effort on my part, just in virtue of the economic system I am embedded in. Once this really sinks in--once one really grasps the truth of it--your intuitions about the world are forever rewired. Recently, the fact of our astonishing wealth has led me to the belief that Americans border on the pathological in our work habits. No doubt many people really find deep satisfaction in their jobs, so they work... a lot. But many if not most people really despise their jobs. So why in a society of plenitude do people insist on working so much? If offered the choice between a 40 hour/week job paying $60,000, and a 20 hour/week job paying $30,000, I would without hesitation choose the latter. I'd much prefer to have an extra thousand hours per year in which to read, write, think, create, or whatever, than an extra 30 grand. Because Don's right, I can live like a king on 30 grand. And the difference in quality of life between 30 and 60 grand is ALMOST NOTHING. I'm even pretty sure I could do fairly princely on 20G, in most of the country. Now, my preferences are my preferences. But I really do wonder why more people don't share them. My thinking has led me to two main hypotheses, both of fairly leftist provenance. First is that marketing and advertising induces "false" desires. I think this is fairly plausible. When I say that people can have false desires, I don't mean that people don't REALLY desire a plasma TV, or that they don't actually find satisfaction in having one. I mean a desire the satisfaction of which really doesn't connect in any serious way with one's structure of ends. The time and money could have been better spent actually realizing more fundamental ends--the ones that confer deeper and more satisfying meaning and value on one's life. The $2000 TV gets you almost nothing over and above the $99 version. This is not a complaint against Madison Ave or the Sony corporation. They do what they do, and we mostly benefit from it. But in some ways we don't. It's up to us, though. Second is that people have unreasonable relative preferences. We don't want our social peers to be or appear "better off" than we are. So if Ralph has a plasma TV, then I need one too. I constantly feel the pull of this. I have a pretty strong desire to buy stylish and expensive clothes in order to send social signals about my taste and means. I would like a nicer, newer car, even though the gross functional difference between Bucephalus, my 1996 Civic, and an Audi TT is almost totally negligible (even though the difference in price is close to a year's wages.) But when I think about it, I can't imagine how cutting a dashing figure in bespoke threads, or creeping down U St in a trick ride would get me any closer to any of the goals I really care about. I would also very much like to be famous. But the benefits of fame are questionable. For some probably evolutionary reason I have a strong urge to send signals of my relative affluence and prestige. But it doesn't get me anywhere, other than satisfying my urge to send signals of my relative affluence and prestige. So shouldn't we resist? Now, as much as I would like everyone to be happy, I really don't want everyone to immunize themselves against false desire and relative preferences, readjust their baseline of satisfaction, and start working part-time. It's really great to free ride off the crazed industry of others. And it's only going to get better. I like to read blogs. I get a lot out of it. But I sure don't pay a cent for it (other than for the computer and internet connection). And people have been driving themselves nuts trying to figure out how to get paid for it, how to internalize all that value they're just giving away. But I think technology's going to keep making it harder. As things get cheaper and cheaper, the cost of devising mechanisms for charging for everything just won't be worth it. So more and more value just keeps spilling out, free for the taking. And we happy few with a preference for leisure will just mop up. So please, do keep up the fifty hour weeks. I'm counting on you.

The First Amendment Loophole -- Julian sensibly argues for limiting the First Amendment to the protection of porn, and shutting down all that noisome political speech altogether. Funny, cutting piece.

The Hierarchy of Public Goods -- Mainstream economic theory just assumes a market and just assumes a state that can correct market failures and provide for public goods. But the world doesn't work this way, and it's a problem that some economists think it does. There are always markets of some sort or other. But they're fairly primitive and limited except under pretty special conditions. And there's not always an agency that can provide public goods through a system of public finance. Most places try to set one up, but it often doesn't work because people don't like to pay taxes, and the people who are supposed to collect them end up stealing the money, or the people running the state steal the money and buy themselves palaces, or warehouses of rocket propelled grenades, instead of building a sewage system like they said they would. If G is a public good, and M is a mechanism for providing G, then M is a sort of public good, too, and so are the conditions for the functioning of M. If M requires tax compliance, and non-predation and non-corruption by agents of the state, then those things are what we might call higher order public goods. And we get these things by getting even higher order goods, like a certain socially prevalent level of trust, a not-too-high discount rate on future value, and the internalization of certain kinds of social norms. If we think of THESE things as higher order, and logically prior, kinds of public goods, then we'll get over thinking of public goods as things that states provide. For in order for states to provide anything other than abuse, these things have to already be in place. We'll also get over thinking of public goods as things that markets can provide better than states, because these are precisely the sorts of things that have to be in place in order for markets to work in anything other than a very limited and atrophied way. In order for markets to do much by way of providing lighthouses, to take a famous example, the market has to be developed enough to coordinate complex enforceable agreements. Getting to that point is itself a big achievement. We need to get over stipulating ideal markets and ideal states, and work harder at understanding how even partially functional markets and states get to be partially functional, as opposed to fully non-functional, in the first place. How do higher order public goods like prosperity-conducive belief systems and social norms ever get going? How can you ever get a predation-limiting constitution that people don't just ignore? That's what I want to know. Now, hurry!

Who Understands Economics? -- Tyler Cowen discusses a poll of members of the Public Choice Society... When you ask (a broader group of) economists whether markets, in the absence of transactions costs, achieve efficient outcomes, 57.1 percent say yes. This is itself odd, since I would interpret the proposition as a tautology, but it appears some people simply can't bring themselves to praise the market. 70.3 percent of the public choice economists say yes, showing that this group has a stronger belief in markets. 22 percent of the surveyed political scientists say yes, showing a far greater skepticism about the market economy from those quarters. No doubt Tyler's right in that some folks are just loathe to say anything positive about the market. But I've got a different take on the results. As Tyler says, it's a tautology that the market is efficient given zero transactions costs. That's right. But given that that's right, it's not really PRAISE to say that zero transactions costs markets are efficient. It's just definitional, given the assumptions of the model. So isn't the correct interpetation of the poll that some economists, and most political scientists, don't understand the model? Public choice economists understand economics better than economists as a whole, and political scientists are clueless. That's my interpretation.

Holding the Line -- Well, it looks like we may have more or less beat the smoking ban. But it's not over yet. The vote has yet to be scheduled, as far as I know, and there's the opportunity for a lot of politicking before then. So vigilant we must remain. Yesterday's Council hearing made plain who the banners are: political operatives, professional public health fascists, and dimwitted puritan scolds clearly shaken by the possibility that somewhere someone might be enjoying himself. Smoke-Free DC's vastly superior funding could not keep their speakers from coming off as arrogant, censorious, moralizing busybodies, infatuated with any bit of junk science that might reinforce their pinched, joyless weltanschaung. The Ban the Banners, on the other hand, came off as fun, articulate, intelligent people who do not consider it a categorical duty to live as long as possible, but who think it's damn nice to live as well as possible, as long as one happens to live. Not only were our arguments better, but we showed ourselves to be better human beings. And cooler, too. The restaurant and bar owners were simply amazing. Dante Ferrando of the Black Cat made his point loud and clear. The Cat is his private property. He owns the building. He owns the land it sits on. And the reason he owns it is that he likes to drink, he likes to smoke, he likes to rock, and he likes to surround himself with smoking, drinking, rocking people. His dream was to build a community, a family, united by a lifestyle. And he's succeeded... so far. But the ban would cripple his business, and destroy his family. John Arce, a bartender at the Cat, noted that some members of the Council can't seem to tell the difference between a public elevator and a private club (and, in good DC socialist-punk fashion, said that if the Council really wants to help him, it can institute a universal health plan.) Cici Mukhtar, owner of Polly's Cafe, made a point I hadn't thought of before. She says she's trying to open a second Polly's, perhaps up on Georgia Ave. In order to do it, she needs a loan from a bank, and banks don't care about "public health" policy, they just want to get their money back. And Banks are smart. They know that a smoking ban could hurt business. If a ban goes in place, Cici won't be able to finance her new Cafe. And neighborhoods that would be helped by new business will have to go without. Stephen Greenleigh shared the witness table with me and Justin Logan. His testimony was heartbreaking. He runs a chain of hotels in DC. Since 9/11, they've been struggling. He said every time a "Code Orange" alert goes out, his switchboards light up with cancellations. He said his businesses have taken one hit after another, and some of them are losing money. But he won't close them, because he cares too much about the employees, and maybe, MAYBE, they'll be able to pull through. But Mr. Greenleigh was downcast. With emotion in his voice, he said he wasn't sure how he's going to make payroll this month. The smoking ban would be just one more hit, and quite probably the last one. Unlike the bureacratic prohibitionists, Mr. Greenleigh, a businessman, understands margins. He is not bouyed by the fact that over time the macro effects of the ban may not be negative. If his business dips because of a smoking ban, that's it, he's done. I'd be remiss if I failed to mention Allan Jirikowic, owner of Chief Ike's Mambo Room, a bushy-faced, voluble, bearlike man of simply amazing wit and spirit. I can't begin to do justice to his hilarious, satirical testimony. (To employee, shouting: "Don't you know that Robert Wood Johnson is doing this FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!!!") If I could put a face on the anti-prohbitionists, it would be Allan Jirikowic's fat, happy, smiling-eyed, hairy face. This is a man who loves his business, who loves his employees, loves to laugh, and lusts for life. He doesn't smoke himself. But he understands that some people ENJOY it. And he's in the business of helping people enjoy themselves. It's what he does, and you can tell he loves it. The prohibitionists are in the business of saving people from enjoyment. Judging from their earnest, crabbed, whining performance at the hearings, they've done a wonderful job of saving themselves. [For your listening pleasure, I've recorded my super-cheesy testimony from the hearing, here.]

Ban the Ban Pub Crawl -- Don’t forget that tonight is Ban the Ban’s first event, a pub crawl through Adams Morgan. Be sure to tell all your friends who are interested in fighting the smoking ban. And wear your red, white, and black! If you can’t make it for the whole thing, here’s where we’ll be: * 7:30 pm - meet at the SW corner of 18th and Columbia. * 7:45-8:45 pm - Millie and Al’s * 9:00-9:45 pm - Tryst * 10:00-10:45pm - Angry Inch * 11:00-11:45am - Brass Monkey * 12:00- ?? - Peyote Cafe We'll be the contingent in Ban the Ban T-Shirts, or red, white, and black (ANARCHY!) If you can't find us, give me ring at the number below.

New Digits -- I've changed cell phone providers, and got a spiffy new DC number. So if you should have my number, email me.

Ban the Ban -- The DC City Council is set to consider a bill that would ban smoking in DC bars and restaurants (and other DC "work places"). A group of Washingtonians has gathered together to fight this kind of fascism-creep here in our fair city. Visit us at bantheban.org. If you live in DC, you can learn how to join us. Or if you would like to support our effort from afar, you can contribute to our tipjar, or buy some of our fly ban the ban merchandise. Help stop the wave of unfreedom! Your city could be next! It's pretty amazing how confused people can be about the issue of smoking bans. The issue isn't about smoking. The issue is about freedom and choice. It's about the freedom of property owners to determine how to dispose of their property. We don't hold votes to determine what people can do in their houses. We shouldn't hold votes to determine what people do in their businesses. If patrons of restaurants and bars want non-smoking establishments, they should communicate that to the owners. Close to 300 bars and restaurants in DC are smoke-free. Consumers demand, the market provides. Don't allow some people's preferences (and junk science) determine how others must run their businesses, and how everyone must behave on a Saturday night. JOIN THE FIGHT TODAY! Visit bantheban.org

Seriously? Yes. Seriously. -- There's a peculiar but interesting interview with Charles Murray in one of the reader reviews of his new book Human Accomplishment. [Scroll down to the Steve Sailer review.] Here's the concluding exchange: Q. You found that per capita levels of accomplishment tended to decline from 1850 to 1950. Would you care to speculate on post-1950 trends? A. I think that the number of novels, songs, and paintings done since 1950 that anyone will still care about 200 years from now is somewhere in the vicinity of zero. Not exactly zero, but close. I find a good way to make this point is to ask anyone who disagrees with me to name a work that will survive -- and then ask, "Seriously?" Very few works indeed can defend themselves against the "Seriously?" question. Ah, nothing like the Scientific Method! A more interesting, albeit unanswerable, question would be: What works would a cultured person in 1800 cite as likely to last 200 years? And then the followup: Would he have been right? Murray's question tests the resoluteness of his challenger, not the correctness of the challenger's judgment. (Tyler, I believe, is prepared to say "seriously" of Eminem, and much else.) The difficulty here is that we have to learn how to appreciate great new works. So greatness isn't obvious to us. Greatness can and does pass unnoticed beneath our noses. When we are too close in time to a work of art, it's hard to separate it from the nexus of lesser works it references, or from its relationship to momentarily salient, but ultimately transient, matters of fashion. A work's political, cultural and technical significance at the time of authorship can overshadow deeper and more lasting themes. So who knows what, exactly? I don't. But I'd put solid money on there being something from our time two centuries hence. And, after all, what does Murray mean by survive? It's all digital. It will all survive. Thirty seven people in 2203 will listen to Kylie Minogue and love it.

Seniors of the World Unite! -- I 'm endlessly amused by this passage from Terry Eagleton's new book, After Theory. (Taken from this spiked-online review.) There is far too much change around, not too little. Whole ways of life are wiped out almost overnight. Men and women must scramble frantically to acquire new skills or be thrown on the scrapheap. Technology becomes monstrous in its infancy and monstrously swollen corporations threaten to implode. All that is solid - banks, pension schemes, anti-arms treaties, obese newspaper magnates - melts into air. Human identities are shucked off, tried on for size, tilted at a roguish angle and flamboyantly paraded along the catwalks of social life. In the midst of this perpetual agitation, one sound middle-aged reason for being a socialist is to take a breather. Eagleton clearly avows what's been long apparent: socialism is conservative philosophy for retirees. Socialism has always hidden within its breast a longing for stasis. What happens after the revolution? Nothing, really. It's not a new thought, but its worth revisting the observation that socialism, in its extreme and adamant forms, is a vulgarly secularized Christianity. Socialist salvation is no less boring than Christian salvation. Heaven, whether among clouds and sunbeams, or straddling the rolling Volga, is a paradise of monotony. In the Sunday morning version, it's all harp all the time as we gaze lovingly for eternity upon the creator's unfathomable visage. In the Red version, we're loosed from the chains of want, and free to amuse ourselves with dilettante pursuits, now painting landscapes, now sharpening our backhand, etc., not unlike residents of a money-drenched assisted living facility in Boca Raton. The problem with capitalism is that it's... tiring. After Theory, there is, what? Golf?

Civics Lesson -- Nice little piece on the The Bizarre Math of Elections by physicist Richard Muller. I think high school kids all ought to learn a bit of social choice theory in high school civics class. Sure, in some sense knowing the truth about democracy can make us a little cynical, but the cynicism is simply a reaction to massively unreasonable expectations created by Rousseauvian myths about the general will. We should know how the electoral rules of the game make some outcomes more likely, and other outcomes--outcomes we might very much like to see--impossible. A lot turns on how we choose the rules of elections. But we have to choose some rules. It's a bit of a paradox is that in order to get the best rules for democratic choice, those rules probably have to be chosen non-democratically.

God is Dead, but Don't Tell the Neighbors -- Shadia Drury, Straussian bete noir, is wonderfully articulate in this interview with Danny Postel at OpenDemocray. Although my Straussian friends have tried to disabuse me of this opinion, I think Drury and Laurence Lampert are right about what Strauss's philosophy really amounts to. I always try to communicate that the nice thing about the Nietzschean-God-is-dead-everything-is-permitted- but-don't-tell-the-hoi-polloi interpretation of Strauss is that, although it makes him sound a bit diabolical, it also makes him sound smart! I think this is really interesting position, and has much more truth in it than the norm-saturated-nature-higher-human-dignity-natural-right-blah-blah interpretation. I think the former is a position that the naturalist liberal had better take seriously, and should really try to engage. I think there may in fact be an important grain of truth in noble lie doctrines, and I'll try to explain why if I get a spare moment this weekend.

Wake Up Call, False Alarm -- According to the police update PJ forwarded to Gene, the gang rape next to the Central Mission was a "false alarm." If that's true, then I'm damn glad. But then, what's the story? Was the alleged victim, Anne Marie, making stuff up? If so, why? I want to know more.

Cold Snap Hits Hell -- Maybe it was a slow day. Nevertheless, I was stunned and delighted by the efficiency of the District of Columbia Department of Motor Vehicles. I stopped in to get a DC driver's license, and, get this, my number was called BEFORE I COULD FINISH FILLING OUT THE FORM! Then the photo guy called my name AS SOON AS I SAT DOWN. I think I waited a total of 45 seconds, surely a record. Then, I went to get my emissions inspection. Again, I DID NOT WAIT (although Half St. SW is sort of hard to find.) It was done in maybe five minutes. I got my clean bill of automotive health, the sticker on my window, a pat on the ass, and I was on my way. Here's to you Washington, D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles!

Just So Stories and the Future of All we as Americans Hold Dear -- The lord knows I love Julian. And I loved his piece in Reason on the libertarian case for Dean (or whoever the electable Dem is). It's a good argument. Maybe I'll vote for Dean! Early on in the essay, while farting in Virginia's general direction, Julian speaks of the dichotomizing tribalism saturating political discourse. "You pick your team and root for it, come hell or high water!" Woo hoo! This sort of autopilot gang devotion is beneath the underside of the bottom of contempt for those of us who occupy the clean cool air beyond the reaches of mere ideology. Because he's a man, and not the robot-puppet of the package-dealing propaganda masters, Julian just won't have it. He is not only able to vote for a Democrat, but, despite the short but undistinguished libertarian alliance with Republicans, he is WILLING to actually do it! I heartily applaud his independence of mind. Now, Julian's argument is almost totally innocent of a certain bad thing, but there was a bit of the taint there, and every time I catch a whiff, I get worried that political commentary is just a very weird form of improvisational sport and not really, you know, serious. Horse race political argument is all like this: If Dumbledore is elected, then the Grand Parliament will pin him to a hammock, thereby defusing his tendencies toward genocide. If Puffnstuff is elected, the Parliament will root wildly as he authorizes the jackbooted thugs to defile the sacred burial ground. So we should favor Dumbledore and a divided government. Unless Gewurztraminer gets in the race, in which case Puffnstuff doesn't stand a chance in the primaries, Dumbledore will be razed in the general election, and we'll be helpless to avoid collusion between the government and Big Hair in their bid to nationalize the cosmetology industry. Etc., etc., etc.... I'm not complaining. I love just-so stories not only as much as but MORE THAN, the next boy. (The next boy is Nick. Hi Nick!) But as a basis for making an actual realworld decision, it's sort of silly, isn't it? I had no idea Bush would cultivate the regulatory state like a prize pumpkin. And NO ONE ON THIS BLESSED ORB (other than those involved) foresaw the grisly events of September 11, 2001. A fortiori no one foresaw the Patriot Act, the dread ascendancy of Dark Lord Ashcroft, and so forth. But 9/11's just an instance of a general principle. Huge amounts of bad policy get enacted because some unpredictable event, big or little, rejiggers fickle public sentiment for a month or so. And that's rejiggering enough to open a window of opportunity big enough for some interest group to jump through. It's well nigh impossible to tell what's going to agitate the zeitgeist, which interest group or coalition will leap, how the press will spin it, how the executive will react, and how that reaction will interact with the legislature. Sure, we can ASK candidates what they'd do under various contingencies. But we'll never think of the contingency that turns out to matter most. Telling the future is hard enough. But its even harder than that because POLITICIANS LIE! They don't always tell us what they really think. They tell us what they think we want them to think. And even if they tell us what they think, that doesn't tell us what they'll do. Why not? Because like all of us, politicians don't quite know what they're going to do until they actually have to do it. And the circumstances under which they actually have to do it inevitably turn out to be damn different from the scenario they had imagined, and they'll be swayed by considerations that just didn't occur to them while running their little offline imaginative simulation of "what I would do if terrorists attacked us" or whatever. When we actually decide, we're hot. But when we're cool, we think we'll always be cool, even when the heat is on. So we mispredict our own behavior. So Dumbeldore's confident proclamation of his plan of action is likely to be worth less than the vibrations in the air that it's not written on. So what am I saying? That NOTHING MATTERS!? No! If I thought our proud citizenry in their very limited wisdom might actually elect some fascist Gewurztraminer who would damn us all to a lifetime of bowl cuts (FOR WHICH WE WOULD HAVE TO WAIT IN LINE!) I might get motivated to jump into the fray. But, for the most part, our institutions protect us from ourselves fairly well, and our ambient mytho-ideologies offset one another pretty nicely. So when you've got a system like ours, where the candidates are jockeying like Tobey McGuire on Seabiscuit for that median voter, the winners will be so alike, as far as we can tell, that's there's little point in shedding sweet perspiration over who gets to pretend to be Michael Douglas. If I was bored enough to vote, I'd vote on some kind of personality-free statistical fact, such as the supposed fact that divided governments grow slower. If that's the case, then who cares which tribe is which, or who gets to be the chief? Well, say what you will about Dean-leaning libertarians, at least its an ethos. [Yes, I am happy to take credit for "Dean-leaner" bon mot. ]

Riding the Wave -- It seems Joanne McNeil meant to comment on the horrifying recent rape on 14th and R. But she takes.... how to put it?... an insane turn, and lashes out with stupefying ignorance and incoherence at people who sound remarkably like me and my beloved housemates. Let's look at what Joanne says, bit by bit, after her recap of the crime. I walk alone around that party [sic] of town, and have done so, even before it housed places like Saint Ex. This news was a wakeup call. No matter how much an apartment just put on the market in Logan Circle costs-- sorry, I meant, "Dupont East" -- or how many corporate coffee chains flood the neighborhood, recreating a ghetto into a shopping mall won't happen overnight. So , I live in this part of town. Now, how exactly is a terrifying rape a wake-up call? Is it that the victim is white? Is it that she is a lesbian? Is it because Joanne doesn't expect rapes in "shopping malls"? Is it because she thinks that women aren't raped in DuPont or Foggy Bottom or Cleveland Park or Van Ness? Has she looked at the crime statistics? Did she ever THINK coffee chains were talismans against violence? Is crime outside a homeless shelter a jaw-dropping surprise? Why are we waking up? Who wasn't already awake? Whereas, people like Zoe and her roommates understood the risks and dangers when they moved in their house a few years ago; the third and fourth-wave gentrifiers are either clueless to it, or even worse-- the product of suburban white guilt-- find it charming. OK, now. I feel sure Joanne didn't intend it, because she couldn't be that dumb, but this feels a touch personal. Zoe lives just a few houses down the street from ours, which we inhabited a few months ago. No doubt Zoe and Co. is a band of brave trailblazing pioneers, knowingly risking life and limb by encamping in the midst of such a sturdy enclave of black people. And no doubt we are third or fourth-wave gentrifiers, and the harsh rigors of urban life have been softened by the efforts of the enterprising first-wave gentrifiers who came to tame the colonies. But, why suppose we're "clueless" to the risks of an increasingly integrated neighborhood? Or, worse, why suppose we're products of suburban white guilt, and that we find it all so... charming? Now, it's true. I have lived in suburbs. I am white. And I've plenty to be guilty for. And frankly, I do find our neighborhood charming. But I find it charming in large part because I have cosmopolitan tastes, and I consider it civilized and socially desirable for people of different backgrounds, skin colors, and income brackets to live side by side. It would come to me as a massive unwelcome surprise to find that my tastes are false consciousness, and that liberal indoctrination has deposited me in harm's way. For every homeless person, there's some Gap-clad white girl who out of obnoxious naivate [sic] tries to befriend him. Because all the disadvantaged need is a little TLC, right? And like, just because all the residents on a street are black, doesn't mean a place is unsafe! There are like, plenty of places to go in Anacostia that are really neat! Oh, for the love of God. Does Joanne actually know Gap-clad white girls who believe that the solution to homelessness or deprivation is friendship from Gap-clad white girls? And, like, AHEM!, just because all the residents on a street are black DOESN'T mean a place is unsafe. And there ARE plenty of places to go in Anacostia that are really neat. Joanne, you don't really mean to dispute this, do you? You don't really think black people are, ipso facto, dangerous? You don't really believe the hundred thousand or so people who choose to live in Anacostia are just willfully stupid, and wouldn't think to have neat places? It has never before occurred to me that perhaps mandatory sensitivity training courses DO serve a purpose. Christ. OK. So she gets back to the rape.... But the victim wasn't even one of them [Gap-clad naif]. She was street smart, and told the homeless guys to fuck off, rather than extending a "helping hand." But they didn't. This is, just perhaps, a data point relevant to judging the success of homeless-management strategies. And that is DC life. The crime is a reality, and not just some garnish to your banal yuppie lifestyle. Really, Joanne, who ARE you talking to? Is your point that people--third and fourth wave gentrifiers for instance--move into certain neighborhoods BECAUSE rather than despite the crime. That is, that some folks choose to consume close proximity to rape and murder in order to spice up their otherwise intolerably prosaic whitebread lives? What kind of sick fucks ARE we!? Here we are, wearing Gap, reading InStyle, thinking we had some kind of cognizance of our surroundings and some kind of grip on our motives. No doubt we have a lot to learn.

B-rama @ K-rama V -- Well, it's that time again. What was once fresh and exciting is now a DC institution. No doubt at Blogorama X we will present a lifetime achievement award to a superannuated 28 year old blogger, retired due to carpal tunnel and myopia. Last time, there was a fire across the street. Let us pray for such excitement.

Voters ARE Stupid... Even When They Agree With Me -- Matt Welch reports on the horrified lefty reactions to the Schwarzenagger election. To sum it up, voters are stupid. Now, Matt's right to imply that there's almost certainly some level of hypocrisy here. When the majority agrees with you, you'll tend to wax enthusiastic about the "mandate" for change established by the unimpeachable legitimacy of the "general will." On the other hand, when the majority disagrees, then it's just that voters are stupid, and we all need to be VERY VERY worried about voter ignorance and their susceptibility to manipulation. I think the latter position is ALWAYS CORRECT! Some democracy fetishist political theorists like to trumpet Condorcet's theorem, which states that if voters in general are more likely than not to make the right choice, then the greater the number of voters, the greater the chance the election will deliver right answer. In fact, given a smart electorate, the probability that they'll get it right approaches certainty when you get a voting population as big as California's. What democracy fetishists don't so often point out is that the downside is exactly as nasty as the upside is nice. If voters in general are more likely than not to make the wrong choice, then the probablitity that they'll make the right choice quickly approaches zero as the number voters increases. So, the question is: are voters smart or stupid? Answer: They are very very stupid! Almost no one has or even can have the relevant information. And even if they CAN have the relevant information, it will be an immense waste of their scarce time and energy to get it, so they WON'T get it. The evidence points to stupid voters. (I am not impressed with models that argue that following the lead of parties, interest groups, and so forth is a low-cost trick that improves the quality of voter decisions. Parties and interest groups are stupid too!) So my conclusion about Schwarzennegger is that he was almost certainly the wrong choice, or if he was they right choice, almost everybody voted for him for the WRONG REASON. But this is not unique to Schwarzenegger. The point is perfectly general. Winning an election with incredibly high turnout is about the best possible evidence that you shouldn't have won! Yes, I'm being a bit flip. But only a bit!

Liberty Island! -- This is a hilarious article. It's about libertarian disenchantment with the republicans. But the funny thing is the small-worldness of it, given that every libertarian in the article, other than the Gene Berkman dude, is more or less part of the same social network. Now, I work with Alina at IHS. Alina and Radley are well acquainted. I live where I do because of social connections through Julian. Julian slept on my couch when he moved here, and then moved into Gene Healy's basement. And I've slept on Gene's floor, now that I think of it. And Gene's girlfriend writes on Radley's blog. I don't know Jim as well, but I know him! I chatted with David Boaz JUST HOURS AGO. And the author of the article, Shachtman, admits to having gone to Georgetown with Healy. So, I think we can conclude that he really busted his hump to get at all those diverse libertarian opinions. You know, from people with unique circumstances and points of view, who've never been in each others houses, who don't read every word the others write, and who don't get their opinions from each other. If all libertarians are blogging, Dean-leaning, Washington, DC libertarians, who at one point or another were Koch Fellows and/or have worked at the Cato Institute, then that might really throw a wrench in an election. Way to dig, Noah! [Hello there Instapundit & Virginia P. readers! I love you all.]

Lucky and Deserving -- Matthew Miller makes the same old mistakes in discussing luck as a mechanism of distribution. Suppose that some people have more because they got lucky, and not because they work harder. Or suppose they do work harder, but only because they were lucky enough to have genes that confer a high level of internal motivation, or because they had outstanding early childhood training by their parents. In either case, they have what they have in virtue of luck. Now there are two related bad arguments often heard in the train of this supposition, and Miller seems to make them both. First, you might argue that if someone received something ultimately on the basis of luck, then they don't deserve it. That doesn't follow. Second, you might argue that if someone doesn't deserve something, then it is legitimate for somebody else to take it from them and give it to somebody else. That certainly doesn't follow. Regarding the first bad argument... If our natural and developed dispositions are a matter of luck, then pretty much everything is. What's the opposite of something coming about through luck? Well, something coming about intentionally, through our efforts. But I can bring things about intentionally, and effortfully, and be fully responsible for it, even if my ability to devise those intentions, and to put forth that effort, are simply manifestations of my genetic endowment. Miller brings up the free will issue, but muffs it. We do have free will. And free will is a condition for ascribing responsibility and desert. But having free will doesn't require the absence of luck ALL THE WAY DOWN. Free will requires LOCAL control of the relevant kind. So if I tried hard and I brought something about through my effort, I was in control, and I'm responsible and deserving, even if I'm not ULTIMATELY responsible for being so good at trying hard. Nobody is ULTIMATELY responsible for anything in a deterministic universe. But the roles our ordinary concepts of responsibility and desert play in self- and social coordination require no such grandly transcendental conceptions of ultimate responsibility. So there is no conflict between being lucky at some level and being deserving. Even lottery winners, those exemplars of luck, in one important sense can be said to deserve their winnings: all participants of the lottery explicitly agreed to a principle of distribution according to which any participant holding the randomly selected number is entitled to the money in the lottery pool. So, although the principle of distribution is entirely based in randomness, the immensely lucky winner is fully entitled to the winnings. The second bad inference is even worse. The first obvious point is that if Bob, say, doesn't really deserve his million dollars, even though, prima facie, he earned it, then neither does Carol, who tried just as hard but didn't earn it. It can't be the case that even if you seemed to earn it, you didn't really deserve it, but that if you seemed to earn it, but didn't get it, then you really do deserve it. Even worse, imagine Ted, who didn't try hard at all and has nothing. Now, it's not his fault that he didn't try hard. But it's not Bob's fault either. How does Ted's sad fate give HIM an entitlement that you can't even get by trying? If Bob doesn't deserve his money, then probably NOBODY does. But, of course, general compatibilist reasoning tells us that Bob can full well be responsible for, and thus deserve, his money, even if he got quite lucky in the genetic lottery. (For good summaries of state of the art compatibilism see my old prof Tomis Kapitan and my old roommate's old prof Bill Lycan, both a bit technical.) We all perfectly well recognize the obvious gaping difference between stumbling over a sack of unmarked 20's, and creating wealth through ingenuity and effort, even when under a halo of natural advantage. But suppose Ted does deserve some of Bob's money, and Ted is under some kind of obligation to let gim have some of it. Even WORSE YET is the argument that if Bob doesn't deserve his money, then somebody else, say Alice, is entitled to coercively appropriate it in order to give it to Ted. Maybe all that follows is that Bob's a real jerk, morally speaking, if he doesn't voluntarily yield some of his income to charity. But let's think about how Alice could get an entitlement to political power? Suppose we say it was through a democratic process. HOW DOES THIS HELP?! If Bob can't be entitled to his economic power gained through a series of voluntary exchanges for mutual benefit, then Alice can't be entitled to her political power through a series of elections, because SHE JUST GOT LUCKY TOO. She just HAPPENED to have a nice smile, to be an articulate public speaker, and a great social networker. The luck argument, if it is good, PROVES WAY TOO MUCH, and undermine the legitimacy of unequal political power just as much as it undermines the legitimacy of unequal economic power. If we're as extreme about the relationship between luck and desert (namely that one vitiates the other) as Rawls seems to be, then it's hard to see how any distribution of anything can be legitimate. And that includes any REdistribution of anything. One might argue that sure, this entails that no INDIVIDUAL is really entitled to anything in particular. But this gives us a nice rationale to socialize all the goods within a society (including the capriciously distributed talents) and then decide how to distribute them. If we derive our principles of redistribution in an ideal manner, such that everyone would agree to be bound by them (were they thinking about it under ideal conditions), then an implementation of those principles will be sort of like the lottery case. Nobody will "deserve" what they have, in the sense that the guy whose number got pulled didn't really "deserve" a million dollars. But everyone will be entitled to what they get, because they got it according to principles they would have agreed to. Perhaps more on why this is silly later. (Homework: Can there be a Rawlsian difference principle for the justification of political inequalities?) For now, suffice it to say, that (1) it's hard to see how getting lucky cuts against desert, unless it is at the level of control relevant to ascriptions of responsibility, praise, blame, etc. And (2) it is especially mysterious how the argument that nobody really deserves anything can somehow delegitimize economic inequality while not also delegitimizing the sort of political inequality necessary to carry out any sort of corrrective redistribution.

Smoking! -- Yes, smoking is erotically trangressive. [Tip to Samizdata.]

The Seed of Liberalism -- While in Iraq, Thomas Friedman had dinner with two muslim liberals, one being the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, the other a Shiite cleric named Sayyid Iyad Jamaleddine. Friedman is heartened, as am I, of their ambition to secularize the middle-east states. Ladies and gentlemen, I have no idea whether these are the only two liberal Shiite clerics in Iraq. People tell me they definitely are not. Either way, their willingness to express their ideas publicly is hugely important. It is, for my money, the most important reason we fought this war: If the West is going to avoid a war of armies with Islam, there has to be a war of ideas within Islam. The progressives have to take on both the religious totalitarians, like Osama bin Laden, and the secular totalitarians who exploit Islam as a cover, like Saddam Hussein. We cannot defeat their extremists, only they can. This war of ideas needs two things: a secure space for people to tell the truth and people with the courage to tell it. That's what these two young clerics represent, at least in potential. I have been stressing the importance of the war of ideas. It has to be won. And it can only be won from the inside. What can we do to help? As Friedman stresses, we need to get the lights on in Iraq in order to create a stable environment for the free dissemination of ideas. But I think that aside from security and so forth, the USG must step aside, and not meddle in the coming ideological/theological controversy. If the locals see the liberals as pawns of US policy, they'll recoil. Sadly, I'm sure we're perfectly capable of fucking it up, to get these guys on the dole, and to delegitimize them to their people. Let's hope not.

Elevated Opinion -- There's quite an interesting debate going on in the comments to the Carelessness and Inattention post. I thought I may as well drag some of the action out the shadows of the comments box and into the bright light of the front page. The prodigious Robert Light continues to treat us at length to Jaffaite gospel. Rob writes: Will claims that he believes (belief?*) value judgments can be legitimated -- but if that's the case why does he persist in referring to these as "_values_"? I'd be most satisfied with a compelling answer to this -- but, again, I doubt one is there because, "rationalized" though they may claim to be, at the end of the day, when it all boils down, at root, at bottom, when the fat lady sings, etc., THESE ARE STILL OPINIONS. The "norms" we have endorsed we have done so through opinion. Yes, even perhaps through elevated opinion, but opinion (um, er, _prejudices_) they still are, opinion about what constitutes "the good," what the right way of life is. And absent an understanding of natural rights, the political order -- and everyone else's rights -- are meaningless. Rob keeps plucking on the same string, and it sounds the note of a false alternative. Let me put on my old Objectivist hat for a second. You're giving a classic example of the (in Rand's language) forced choice between intrinsicism and subjectivism. That is, either normativity is inscribed into the deep structure of reality, or it's just a free-for-all of whims. But that's not the choice. The third way, objectivity, is the path between the Scylla of the Absolute and the Charybdis of the relative. Proper norms are based in, yes, human nature--what we are like, what the mind is like, what we need to survive and flourish--, but also in choice--in our embrace of life, and the things that make our lives worth having. When we embrace life, our choice entails our acceptance of the way our nature as humans limits and enables the kind of lives we might lead. Ethical and political norms grounded in human nature are necessary. But the FACT that we are human by itself entails nothing. We have no duty to live, or to desire to live, or to want something particular out of life. If we want to live, and if we want to live lives of a certain quality, then we have to be bound by principles of cause effect. If we're humans, then we can't expect to live good lives by fighting against our natures, by trying to get impossible effects, or by trying to get possible effects by the wrong causes. The principles of causation are the source of the objectivity of ethical principles. Your brand of natural rights theorizing makes us lazy. First, by replacing nature with an ideology or dogma. Second, by thinking that nature itself, independently of our goals, frames the good. So when the issue of homosexuality comes up, you already have an answer; nature has spoken. But, setting aside your mythological conception of nature, we have to regard it as an open question. We have to find out. Are same sex relationships in fact compatible with a good human life? Is a society that recognizes same sex marriages compatible with the kind of society in which everyone, or almost everyone, can successfully pursue a goof human life. I think the evidence points to "yes" for both questions. It will not do for you to continue simply citing your philosophical ideology. You need to join the actual debate. I understand that your metaphysical illusions will prevent you. But unless you get over them, your contributions will not be regarded as useful. So let's see if we can get over your bad conditional: If no intrinsic natural rights, then a struggle of unconstrained will. In fact, this reminds me of the argument David Stove called "the Gem," and crowned as the worst argument in the history of philosophy: If the mind has a nature, then we cannot know reality as it is. Of course the mind has a nature, and that's HOW we know reality. Similarly, our nature as humans places causal constraints on what we may achieve in life and society, and principles that relate our nature to our individual and shared goals are neither written in the stars, nor subject to our mere wishes.

Anti-Interventionism -- Nice overview of Dennett's Freedom Evolves, an excellent book, in Blackburn's review in the American Scientist. Someday--SOMEDAY--this subtle, accurate conception of human nature and human choice is going to get through.

Carelessness and Inattention -- Derbyshire has a great encapsulation of the psycho-epistemology of conservatism. Derbyshire likes reason well enough, but wants to put it in its place. If we attempt to reason everything through to its logical end, we will, like Hume, find we can be sure of nothing. In practical affairs, we might find ourselves paralyzed if we attempt to justify each of our norms by means of reduction and analysis. Thus, as Hume says, "carelessness and inattention alone can afford us any remedy." Derb's problem is that when we think too hard about the institution of marriage, it's just plain hard to explain exactly why same sex couples shouldn't be allowed to marry. So the solution is to STOP THINKING and just carry on. He hopes that all our yammering on about our fundamental social institutions is like foundational questions of math. We don't know how to solve them, but it doesn't make that much difference to the math. Now, it's not like there's nothing to this, despite the fact that Hume ran into his problem because of his bad epistemological assumption, not because reason is just like that. But we do rely on habituation, tacit knowledge, the internalization of norms, and so forth. And it is impossible to act well (if it is possible to act at all) if one attempts to justify all motivating reasons in advance of action. But from time to time it's necessary to re-evaluate the norms we have endorsed and internalized. Why? Because the world changes. And our social practices, if they are worth having, are adapted to present circumstances. In general, we don't need to know what those circumstances are, or how our norms are fitting. We can just do our thing. But if it keeps coming up--if acting on a principle or according to a certain practice keeps causing problems for a good number of us--then we'll have to consider whether we want to just keep doing it this way. If we decide that gays should be able to marry (and, yes, they should), then we can stop thinking about it again, and just go on living normal lives of carelessness and inattention. Granted, it is very uncomfortable to live through a period of revaluation. It throws things into doubt, and whatever we're doubting, it might be central to the way you conceive of your life, so you feel a bit shaken. And you don't know how to think about it, and you don't want to think about it. You just want to yell, "Stop! This is just how it is." And that's fine, that's a natural reaction. But the issue keeps coming up for a reason. The reason is that "how it is" is flatly unacceptable to many members of society. And all they want is to change how it is FOR THEM, not so much for you. But during the revaluation, you're forced to suffer through the process of thinking too much, and because thinking is hard, the best you can do is justify the practice in the terms that are most familiar to you. And so you end up begging the question, because you assume that if its not exactly how it is, then it will be something fundamentally different, and everything will change. But it won't. Everything won't change. Some things will change. And it will take some getting used to. Once you get used to it, though, you can just go forward, like number theorists who have only a passing recognition that the foundations had once been called into question.

The Truth is Out There! -- And it's out at the Drug Enforcement Agency website and museum, in Crystal City, just down the road! Did you know that the drug trade has a "symbiotic" relationship with terrorism? Well, you will when you see the shocking exhibit Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists, and You. You can see the work of drug traffickers right before your eyes in this display of the ruins of the World Trade Center: On the testimonial page, Kate and Alex from Greenwich, Connecticut share their feelings: "We liked the remains of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. It was moving to see the remains up close." We like the remains too, Kate and Alex! They show us that murder, suicide, and choking on one's own vomit are only a few of the more pleasant ways that drugs kill. Or stop by Illegal Drugs: A Modern History where you will learn about the role of the shifty Chinese in "America's First Drug Epidemic: 1850-1914," and that By the 1960s, the great majority of Americans had forgotten the lessons of the first drug epidemic. Moreover, the new Bohemians, Beat literary types, were sending a very different and powerful cultural message: drugs and altered states were part of being hip, social rebels. By encouraging a whole generation to see drug use as "normal," these cultural icons consigned millions to re-learn the painful consequences of rampant drug use--even as the drug menu was expanding to include amphetamines and psychedelics. When many of the 76 million baby boomers embraced not just drugs, but also dealing and trafficking, the drug culture exploded. The U.S. Government responded with new laws and new anti-drug units, culminating in the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973. And thank God for the DEA! Not only are they whipping that drug problem, and shutting down those damn terrorists, but they also provide us with sound information about the dangers of drugs on a daily basis, and create wonderful educational opportunities, like the DEA Museum and Visitors Center, where visitors to the nations capital are encouraged to contribute their own thoughts. Madeleine Patton, of Houston, Texas says, "I think that the main problem with drugs is that people don't understand that the law is here to protect you. People are so dead set on breaking the rules that they don't care wether or not it is a good law." They sure don't care, Madeleine. But then people are silly. Matt McDonald, also of Houston, sure got the message. (And he really means it: all caps!): "NICE JOB ON THE MUESEUM. IT REALLY HITS PEOPLE WHERE IT'S SUPPOSED TO. I DON'T THINK WE SHOULD HAVE PEOPLE LIKE RAP STARS, ACTORS AND MANY OTHERS SHOWING-OFF BECAUSE THEY DO DRUGS. I MEAN, WHOEVER DECIDED DRUGS WHERE [SIC!]"COOL"? Clearly no one should show off, Matt. Showing off makes the less fortunate feel bad. When rap stars and actors show off, all we can do is shake our heads, and puzzle over the fact that they have had successful careers as rap stars and actors despite the devastating effects of drugs on their lives. Of course, no one person decided drugs were cool, Matt. The coolness of drugs is a social construct, built out of many, many individual judgments. So until more good people start thinking like you, Matt, drugs unfortunately will still be cool, and you still won't. But keep up the good fight! I, for one, plan on going the DEA Museum and Visitors Center. You should go, too, to see how wisely your tax money has been invested in ensuring that Americans of all ages have access to the truth about drugs in our history and in our lives today. [UPDATE: It has come to my attention that certain young people would revel in the irony of attending the museum's while "high" on marijuana (aka, "grass", "weed", "reefer", "Mary Jane," "chronic," etc). Besides constituting a dishonor to the brave men and women who risk their lives policing our air and waterways to prevent the infiltration of our borders by money-grubbing Mexicans, Colombians, and Moslem terrorists seeking to poison the youth of America, the effects of "weed" will leave you permanently addled, unable to hold a decent job, dependent on the charity of hopefully loving friends and family, and unfit for higher political office. Now, if you would like to go to the museum with me, I'll be happy to show how we can have a great time without chemical "enhancement," and maybe afterwards we can have a few drinks or six! So drop a line! We'll write the greatest testimonials!]

Loving to Hate -- I can only heartily second Anne Applebaum's sentiment in her biting review of Coulter's Treason. Even the company of Maoist insurgents would be more intellectually invigorating than that of Ann Coulter. More to the point, whatever side this woman is on, I don't want to be on it.

Are You Open to the Whole or Aren't You? -- Robert Light posts a long passage from Strauss in the comments to the below post on natural law. I believe Light takes Strauss to be saying something especially relevant, important, or true here. But I find the passage characteristic Strauss. There is very little argumentation. It is more a kind of poetico-philosophical rhapsodizing. Key claims are asserted and then left wholly undefended, as if elevated rhetoric and literary erudition can do real intellectual work. Here's a representative nugget: Yet granted that there are no valid moral or political objections to classical political philosophy -- is that political philosophy not bound up with an antiquated cosmology? Does not the very question of the nature of man point to the question of the nature of the whole, and therewith to one or the other specific cosmology? Whatever the significance of modern natural science may be, it cannot affect our understanding of what is human in man. To understand man in light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in light of the sub-human. But in that light man as man is wholly unintelligible. Classical political philosophy viewed man in a different light. It was originated by Socrates. And Socrates was so far from being committed to a specific cosmology that his knowledge was knowledge of ignorance. Knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledge of the elusive character of truth, of the whole. Socrates, then, viewed man in the light of the mysterious character of the whole. He held therefore that we are more familiar with the situation of man as man than with the ultimate causes of that situation. We may also say he viewed man in the light of the unchangeable ideas, i.e., of the fundamental and permanent problems. For to articulate the situation of man means to articulate man's openness to the whole. This understanding of the situation of man which includes, then, the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the cosmological problem was the foundation of classical political philosophy. The most important claim, relevant to the debate about the relative merits of contemprary philosophical naturalism vs. scholastic "natural" law, is this: Whatever the significance of modern natural science may be, it cannot affect our understanding of what is human in man. To understand man in light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in light of the sub-human. But in that light man as man is wholly unintelligible. The first sentence is a BIG claim. And it is not defended. And it is false on its face. Modern science HAS affected our understanding of what is human in man. If Strauss means to say that it should not affect our understanding, then he should say so, and say why. But he doesn't. The latter two sentences are mystifying. The first is I guess true, if by sub-human he means non-human. (If he's invoking a "great chain of being" picture, then he's just wrong straight out of the gate.) Explanation and understanding proceeds by the elucidation of the mechanisms that underlie observation and experience. Man, as a part of nature, functions according to mechanisms that are, of course, not themselves human. They are cognitive, neural, hormonal, chemical, physical, etc. mechanisms. Apparently this form of explanation does not capture "man as man." But what is that? We can't argue against Strauss unless he tells us what he means, and he doesn't. Apparently he means something like "a conception of man revealed by a priori philosophical reflection according to which man is that which is 'open to the whole'". And... well, aghh! How DO you argue against this? There seems to be an assumption that "the whole" is not simply the physical totality. He needs to say why not. I think "the whole" IS the physical totality. He can't argue against my claim simply by arguing that man's manifest image is not simply one according to which he is an embedded part of a complex physical system, because we naturalists can tell you why it makes sense in naturalistic terms that man's manifest image is unlikely to reflect man's true relationship to "the whole," or even to himself. We can say something credible about the cognitive mechanisms that enable epistemic access to the physical totality, and why that access is very imperfect, and why those mechanisms can be systematically misleading (and why even very smart people can become irretreivably committed to mythological self-conceptions). It strikes me as intellectually impossible to NOT have a fundamentally changed conception of human nature--of what is human in man--after the neo-Darwinian synthesis and the cognitive revolution. Strauss writes that Socrates "held. . . that we are more familiar with the situation of man as man than with the ultimate causes of that situation." But how about this instead? We are in general more psychologically confident of our introspectively derived self-conception than with the theory of the ultimate causes of that confidence and that self-conception. But we are more epistemically confident in--have greater evidential warrant for--the scientific theory that explains our erroneous confidence in the manifest image. I don't blame people who confuse their confidence in their self-conception with evidence for the truth of their self-conception. It's what we should generally expect. But if we are truly open to the whole--to understanding how humans are folded into nature--we can come to understand some of our tendencies to self-delusion. And to the extent that we can so understand, we can do something to overcome them. But those actively fighting rear-guard battles to insulate our delusive self-conceptions against genuine advances in knowledge of our relation to the whole are, wittingly or unwittingly, closed to the whole, friends of ignorance, and enemies of philosophy.

Mutual Advantage vs. the Draft -- In his reply [scroll down] to Judge Posner's defense of an all voluntary military, Bill Galston writes: Let's begin with a conception of society as a system of cooperation for mutual advantage. A society is legitimate when the criterion of mutual advantage is broadly satisfied (versus, say, a situation in which the government or some group systematically coerces some for the benefit of others). Each citizen then has a duty to do his or her fair share to sustain the social arrangements from which all benefit, and society is justified in using its coercive power when necessary to ensure the performance of this duty. As John Stuart Mill, whom Posner wrongly drafts into the anti-conscription army, states in On Liberty, the state may legitimately require each citizen to bear "his share ... of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation." A counterargument urged by the late Robert Nozick is that we typically don't consent to the social benefits we receive and that the involuntary receipt of benefits does not trigger a duty to contribute. Mill anticipated, and rejected, that thesis, insisting that the duty to contribute does not rest on a social contract or a voluntarist account of social membership. Besides, the argument Socrates imputes to the Laws in the Crito is compelling: If a society isn't a prison, if as an adult you remain when you have the choice to leave, then you have in fact accepted the benefits along with whatever burdens the principle of social reciprocity may impose. OK. I like to begin with the idea of society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage. But Galston's argument moves way too fast. (It is a letter to the editor, so I admit that it's not fair to expect a tight argument.) I'm sure part of my problem stems from the fact that I have a stricter conception of what it means for the "criterion of mutual advantage" to be satisfied. Suppose Galston's right, and citizen's have a duty to do their share to sustain the system. Well, it's a non-sequitur to move directly from a duty of a citizen to do her fair share to a permission for some other citizens, as agents of a government, to use coercive means to ensure the execution of the duty. Granting some a right to employ coercion, while denying that right to others, creates a form of inequality that is morally troubling on its face. The suggestion that this sort of inequality in coercive power be institutionalized requires a special justification in terms of it's effect on mutual advantage. But suppose we find some justification. It remains open what a "fair share" requires. If an all volunteer military is MORE effective than a conscripted military, and requires LESS sacrifice and burden then conscription, then it seems obvious to me that, from the perspective of cooperation to mutual advantage, a volunteer system is better justified. If sacrifice and burden are unnecessary--if you don't need to interfere with people's pursuit of their personal projects over and above the level of taxation required to provide the good--then a system that demands it will straightforwardly fail the mutual advantage test. Furthermore, the positions from Nozick and Mill that Galston plays against each other are perfectly compatible. Nozick is right that positive externalities don't necessarily trigger a duty to contribute. I have no obligation to throw quarters at attractive women walking past on the sidewalk. (Econo-geek code: "Got a quarter?" = "She's hot.") Nor do I have a duty to contribute to the R&D costs of a company that develops a vaccine, the side effect of which is that a disease dies out, and I therefore never get exposed to it, even though I was never vaccinated, and never gave a red cent to PharmaCorp. The beauty of a system of cooperation for mutual advantage is that the private pursuit of private ends creates positive spillovers that benefit us all, and the private actors creating the benefits are generally happy to internalize the costs because a disproportionate amount of the benefits accrue to them. We want a system where it is possible for everybody to constantly free ride, but where nobody minds. And Mill is right that the duty to contribute does not require explicit consent. But whether explicit consent is required to justify a system where some are granted powers to coerce others into contributing according to duty is an entirely different question. (Again, P has a duty to A does not even BEGIN to entail that S is permitted to coerce P to do A. It may be that S always has a duty to refrain from coercing P, no matter what other duties P has.) In any case, we're all already meeting our duty to contribute insofar as we're paying the taxes that pay the salaries of the people who have volunteered to internalize the risks of serving in the military. The logic of Galston's argument, even if we grant him premises about the justification of coercion in the service of mutual advantage, only gets him as far as the current system. He doesn't HAVE an argument for conscription. If he thinks we have a duty to serve in the military even though the voluntary system is most effective and places lower burdens on citizens at large, then he has abandoned the principle of mutual advantage as the basis of political obligation.

First thing we do, let’s kill all the [natural] lawyers -- Post Lawrence, the advocates of natural law have been emerging from their ghetto to speak of the "unnaturalness" of gaydom. [See E. Volokh's sound analysis.] In this vein, Robert Light has passed along to me a short dissertation on Scholastic metaphysics by his acquaintance Marc Balestrieri, who writes: Everything of material creation in the world has a "final cause," on the contrary, finality is the "prime cause," or first of all causes. Potentiality and actuality being two elements of being necessarily composing every essence in existence, the finality of an object is the act towards which every potency necessarily tends towards during the duration of its existence. It is, by analogy, the "raison d'etre" of a faculty of every being which is human, of everything which exists. . . . Therewith, it is without a doubt that the finality of the genesic faculty is the creation of offspring, just as the finality of the eye is to see, as the finality of the intestines is to digest, as the finality of the brain is to intellectualize, the finality of the mouth is to maciate and swallow wholesome food. If one of those faculties were to be willfully used contradicting its finality, or finis operis, than one would act "unnaturally," or "irrationally," per Aristotle and Aquinas. . . Now, no doubt Marc gives us solid scholastic philosophy. But why think scholastic philosophy has to do with anything important? Aristotle's system is a thing of intellectual beauty, especially insofar as he was striving to provide an empirically adequate characterization of the world. The spirit of Aristotle lives on in contemporary naturalists, who, like Aristotle, actually care about the way the world works. Catholocized Aristotelians, however, long ago gave up on Aristotle's project, and have made an elaborate a priorist dogma of Aristotle's essentially empirical enterprise. Aristotle was the first systematic biologist, and perhaps the finest that ever lived. Nevertheless, Aristotle's biology is in most important respects false, and we know vastly more about nature than the Philosopher could have dreamed. I would suggest to Marc that he begin taking the Aristotelian project seriously by apprising himself of this knowledge. About kinds & essences... Organisms form natural kinds only on an extremely loose and discreditable conception of 'natural kind'. Aristotle understandably did not understand that species are impermanent and contingent. He did not understand recombination, mutation, drift, or speciation. There is little to species membership other than shared lineage. There are no species essences. At best, for each species there is a normal distribution of traits, such that certain members are more typical than others. But the nature of the distribution shifts over time, and variation may occur on any dimension without an organisms thereby becoming any less a member of its kind. At time t, statistically typical members of one and the same species might have one behavioral profile, and at time t+n have quite another. Perhaps the environment changed causing some old behaviors to became maladaptive, and so an atypical and tenuously adaptive behavioral profile from t came to dominate the population by t+n. At each point in time, the behavorial elements of the typical profile had likely been selected for, and thus it was the proper function of the underlying behavioral mechanisms to produce those behaviors. But there is no proper behavioral function for a species for all time. Likewise the function of organs can change over time. The thumb, say, has a function: grasping. But the thumb is an evolutionary transformation of some non-thumb appendage of one of our ancestors, and that appendage had a different function. Human organs have functions on this etiological/adaptive conception of function. But there is no reason to understand the function of human organs as straightforwardly normative. If organisms have an overall function, then it is to maximize inclusive fitness. But who cares? We don't WANT inclusive fitness. We want happy, deeply meaningful lives among others who are also trying to have happy deeply meaningful lives. The fact that we want THIS, and not inclusive fitness, may or may not be an accident of our evolutionary history. I use my mouth for smoking cigarettes, chewing gum and kissing, not just for "maciating wholesome food." But whatever. Insofar as using our organs according to their biologically proper function contributes to happy, meaningful lives among others, then we should use them that way. Insofar as they don't, we shouldn't. I guess one COULD say that the function a trait adapted to perform among small bands on the savanna tens of thousands of years ago is precisely what we ought to use that trait for NOW... COME WHAT MAY! But you'd have to be caught in the grip of an utterly mystifying ideology to say it. Of course, the scholastic doesn't understand our traits and their function in Darwinian terms. But Darwin and his school is right. Which is why scholastic noodling about human nature is perfectly irrelevant. We are talking about homosexuality here, right? Think of it this way. Or, anyway, this is how things seem to me to be. There are some human beings who find themselves sexually and emotionally attracted to members of the same sex. A happy, meaningful life among others seems unattainable to these people without same-sex relationships. Now, there is this old metaphysical system, and the reason it has not died out completely is that it was adopted as dogma by a major world religion. There is otherwise very little of intellectual credibility to be said in its favor. Our best, current, highly confirmed empirical theory of the natural world says merely that predominantly homosexual behavior is almost certainly atypical in a population, but nevertheless obviously natural, because observed in nature. It is also observed that a large number of people engaged in same-sex relationships have happy, meaningful lives, even despite widespread discrimination and persecution. Okay. Now somebody decides to explain to us that according to the elaborate ancient dogmatic system, there is something unnatural or irrational about same-sex relationships. My reaction: "Oh. Interesting. And I wonder what the Hindus think."

Ahab, Amputee -- At the bottom of this disturbing Slate article on amputation as pathological lifestyle choice, we are given an advertisement for Moby Dick from Buy.com. Cute. And the sick little Slate illustration really fucks with me.

Hawkish -- On my drive to work today, I saw what I swear was a hawk perched on a lightpost aside the highway overlooking the Pentagon. What could that mean?

Dialogue on Rationality -- At the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students, a conference I ran a couple weeks ago, John Tomasi and I did a little workshop session called "Ideal Justice, Real Institutions" about the constraints social scientific evidence about the possibilities for social organization place on theorizing about justice. It was a good time. John and I were really just thinking out loud with the workshop participants. And it really got my juices flowing. Some further reflection led me to consider just how a moral philosopher (untainted by hallway conversations with Gordon Tullock) might react to a social scientist's misgivings about philosophical theorizing about the best society. The following (hastily composed) dialogue encapsulates a good bit of my reflection. Comments, please! ---- Political Philosopher (PP): Behold! Here is my picture of the best social order! Social Scientist (SS): Well, it's unrealizable. [Throws Calculus of Consent on the table.] Look, you're assuming perfect voluntary compliance/costless enforcement, and perfect alignment of incentives between agents of the state and the citizens they are supposed to serve. The social world doesn't work like that. Your scheme isn't obviously utopian, but you can't get there from here. PP: SS, your conclusions about the untenability of my ideal society assumes a conception of rationality that is both false and degrading. And you're simply missing the point. The IDEA of normative political theory is to create a picture of what society could look like if we behaved BETTER. Why should I accept the assumption that we're all going to behave badly? Nobody ever said justice would be easy. SS: I don't think you quite understand. OK, OK. There is no homo economicus. Rational choice ain't so rational. Whatever. But I don't have to assume a strict homo economicus model of behavior to get all the problems I mention (and I could mention more). All you need is to understand that people do not at all times (if ever) deliberate over their alternatives in the guise of a citizen of the Kingdom of Ends. All I need for my conclusions is the fact that each person sometimes make choices in the guise of, say, mother or son or employee or friend or artist or businessman, etc., and that a great many people are making choices on the basis of these kinds of practical identity at any given time. And although each person may in principle endorse your conception of justice, their motivation as individuals trying to realize their life-plans and capacities... to do the best they can for their children, to fulfill their obligations as an employee, or whatever, is often in conflict with the motivation they would need to act upon if your ideal were to be realized. PP: OK. You sound a lot like philosopher for a social scientist. But I still think you're assuming too much. Let me try to sound like a social scientist. Suppose we're in a society that is deeply impoverished, deeply corrupt, deeply distrusting, and also violent and dangerous. Sadly, such societies are all-too-common. In such a society it would be rational, in your terms, to place a very high "discount rate" on expected future benefits, because the future is so uncertain, others are so unreliable, and there is no systematic assurance that I will ever see benefits from cooperation or collective action. Even if we all badly need certain public goods to be provided, it will be "rational" for each of us to take $10 from the treasury today, thus draining the treasury, rather than leave the $10 in treasury as part of the pool of funds that could provide us all with the public goods that could have many, many times $10 value to each of us. Now, this description seems true enough to life. And so perhaps you economists are right and the _explanation_ here is a superduper high discount rate. But is this a moral JUSTIFICATION of the discount rate? Is this really supposed to constrain my theorizing about justice for this society? Do I have to assume right at the beginning that cooperation or collective action is impossible? The question is: SHOULD people have such a high discount rate? Wouldn't they all in fact be better off if they trusted each other more? So SHOULDN'T they be more trusting and cooperative? The point is that morality is precisely what overcomes the constraints of rationality, in your cool sense of rationality. I mean, if I think like you, it would seem that we're stuck in a sort of basin here without the momentum to get over the lip. That's WHY people need to behave morally. That's the point of my theory: to show us where we can get if we behave better. SS: OK. I see where you're coming from. But ought implies can, right? Is there in fact some Rawls-flavored "sense of justice" that disposes people to comply with the principles of justice once they come to rationally (in your moral philosopher's sense of 'rationally') endorse them? Can they just take a leap of faith to trust and cooperation once they see they morality of it? I don't think you can just stipulate this, any more than I can just stipulate utility maximization as the principle of choice. In order to have a constructive conversation, I think we need to come up with a characterization of rationality that is not blithely descriptive. I agree that your moral theorizing should not be so tightly constrained by regularities of behavior that may be a consequence of people acting worse than they could be acting. But we need a characterization that is also not dreamily aspirational. We need to know HOW good people can be, and under what conditions they WILL be good. The experimentalists show us that people are in fact more cooperative than rational choice led us to expect. So we can't just assume defection in coordination games. And that gets us SOMEWHERE. But cooperation and trust in these games are context sensitive. It depends on the way the game is structured (logically identical games aren't necessarily played identically), and how people represent the games they're playing. Perhaps "morality" is a kind of lens through which to represent games, such that people seeing the game in this way will commit to the cooperative outcomes and enable larger cooperative surpluses. But then we've just pushed the question back to a cognitive problem. Given the de facto social psychology of a people, is there a psychological/cultural route to a schema of representation, say, a moral schema, that will facilitate trust and cooperation? Or are there cognitive and cultural path dependencies that limit the range of feasible representational schemas we can get to from our starting point? PP: Well, I'm not sure. But I'm inclined to assume that persons have a fundamental nature as moral beings that enable them to take up the moral point of view at any time. This is consititutive of our moral personhood. SS: Well, I'm not inclined to assume this. The moral point of view strikes me as a contingent and conventional cultural achievement. PP: I hope you're wrong. SS: Me too.

The Paradox of Blogging -- It turns out that the more your life is worth blogging about, the less time you have to blog. Things have been pretty interesting while I've been MIA. Just for instance, on Saturday I spent a couple hours in a car driving Douglass North to D.C., talking about the problems with the prevailing wisdom in economics, cognition, and international development. And I just got back from the Tombs, where a bunch of us drank, smoked, and chatted with Hitchens for a couple hours. But the best of it is that my friends, who have been congregating frequently at Westminster, are hardly an intellectual letdown from Nobel Prize winners and the Orwell of our age. So, it's a good life.

Quote Help -- O' disembodied spirit of the information superhighway, lend me your wisdom! There is a quote, by a semi-notable, that I pledge myself to remember each time I read it, yet each time I forget. The gist is that the appearance of conformity makes it possible to be deviant, because it won't occur to anyone that you're not entirely normal. Let this saying be revealed... NOW! (You know, in the comments box.)

Take Two Multinationals . . . -- Ram Ahluwalia has the lowdown on a new NBER study that reveals--SURPRISE!--that folks who work for multinationals in less developed countries do better than folks who don't work for multinationals in less developed countries. Ram's pulled out the most interesting figures. Good ammo in the sweatshop wars.

Teeny Tiny Comment Box -- Some administrivia . . . Because every third comment I receive is a complaint about my comments software, I decided finally to repair the problem, which, for the most part, was simply the size of the text fields. This took some doing on my part as by now I had totally forgotten how I had installed my comments software, how the template editing interface works, etc... But I did it, FOR YOU, the loyal commentator.

Dorks on Parade -- No doubt if you should know about it, you know about it. But, anyway, Blogorama on Kalorama IV: this Thursday at the Rendevous Lounge (18th and Kalorama NW) at 7:00 or so. Maybe I should just think of these announcements as a coordination device. Some people don't want to come unless they know enough other will. So I hereby announce that I will be present, in case that is a marginal inducement to your attendance. If you're lucky, you may get invited to my nearby phat new digs for after-party. That is, if you're sufficiently geek-cool (or sufficiently estrogen-sculpted.) Consider it a challenge.

Grotius to the Max -- My thinking about international relations remains hazy, but I felt there was something quite wrong about Martha Nussbaum's essay about Grotius and the current international scene. My skeptical feeling, I believe, flows from my skepticism about the moral status of the nation state. I believe that there may be morally legitimate political units, and morally legitimate associations among those units. But I fear that almost no contemporary nation state is morally legitimate and that almost no association is legitimate. Therefore, laments about American unilateralism strike me as misplaced. If any states are legitimate, then they are liberal democracies. (I'm not sure that any are in fact legitimate, but see Chris Morris's Essay on the Modern State.) However, there are very few genuinely liberal democracies. There seems to be little that is not totally arbitrary in favor of the notion that a state like Iraq (prior to the occupation) has any moral standing whatsoever. Talk of sovereignty is totally hollow when a state is NOTHING more than a territorial monopoly on force--a Mafia with a whole lotta "turf." Recognition of moral standing for nations comprised mainly of an autocrat who treats the entire land as his private property, and the people as his chattel, is not only perverse, but evil. But that's the arrangement of a good chunk of the globe. As for associations of states, the fact that the UN fails to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate states saps it totally of legitimacy. The idea that, in order to invade a morally arbitrary geo-political unit with no legitimacy or moral standing, a legitimate state must get consent from an organization containing members states that have no use for the notion of 'consent' in general is absurd on its face. This is not to say that invasion is morally permitted, only that entities with no moral standing have NO MORAL STANDING and thus cannot be wronged. People within a territory (the Iraqis) can be wronged, but not the agency that claims dominion over the territory (the state of Iraq). And organizations, like the UN, largely constituted by entities of no moral standing, generally have no moral standing, and thus cannot claim to be wronged as the "voice" of the "international community." Clearly Nussbaum understands something of this: National sovereignty also is limited internally by morality. If a nation commits certain very bad acts against its own population, such as torture and mass murder, another nation may intervene - what we now call "humanitarian intervention" - to help the people. National sovereignty's importance derives from its value to people and their freedom; it cannot be invoked to justify genocide and torture. But this is too little. A predatory and oppressive state has no legitimacy, and thus no claim to sovereignty. So there is no basis for restricting intervention to missions to "help the people," and no basis for restricting the agent of intervention to "other nations." Indeed, other nations strike me as less likely to be able to legitimately intervene than private agencies, because the legitimacy of states is derived from the value to ITS people, and so intervention must be justified by reference to the interests of the states subjects. (This is where the justification of the Iraqi invasion fails.) An invasion by a capable, privately-funded force aiming to bring liberal democracy to Iraq would have been easily justified. Nussbaum waxes lyrical about Grotian internationalism: Grotius' vision was not the way the world was seen in his own day. But by insisting on the power of this vision he created a climate of opinion in which that vision increasingly became real. Although his contemporary Thomas Hobbes influentially developed the pre-Grotian idea that the realm between nations is one of force and interest only, Immanuel Kant in the 18th century sided with Grotius, envisaging a world that achieved lasting peace through a federation of nations. Such ideas eventually led to the United Nations and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although the UN treats nations as the major actors in international affairs, the human rights movement moves us closer to Grotius' picture of a world in which national boundaries are porous, and international agreements have at least some power to constrain nations. And then shits on the Bush administration: Are these ideas still alive? The Bush administration treats such moralized visions with utter scorn, casting the United States as the Hobbesian sovereign needed to bring order to an amoral realm. This stance is deeply alien to America's founding traditions: Thomas Paine and other founders were steeped in the continental human rights tradition that had grown out of Grotius' ideas. The Bush crack is a total, ideologically motivated failure on Nussbaum's part. Bush obviously has an extremely moralized vision of international affairs -- one clearly based on a strong notion of human rights. Say what you will about the vision of Wolfowitz, Perle, and the quasi-liberal neo-Trotskyites, but it is not a Hobbesian vision. In the State of the Union Bush proclaimed: America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere. No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. We have no intention of imposing our culture. But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the power of the state; respect for women; private property; free speech; equal justice; and religious tolerance. America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world, including the Islamic world, because we have a greater objective than eliminating threats and containing resentment. We seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror. Bush is clearly "steeped" in the human rights tradition, and I believe he is sincere. It is obtuse, willful misinterpretation to read Bush's vision as one of the imposition of sheer power. In general, Nussbaum is too complacent about the dubious standing of most nation states. I too am concerned with peaceful, liberal, global order. But this seems most likely to emerge from the voluntary cooperation of non-state associations, bound together by affinities less arbitrary than territory, force, and ethnicity. The Grotian framework is an artifact of its time, when international relations were limited to interactions among kingdoms, and a relatively small network of international trade. But we now live in an age of airlines, email, Ebay, global culture, massive economic interdependence, and therefore in an age of heretofore unknown ability to forge associations more distributed, more closely tied to our individual interests, and less dangerous and unstable than states.

Little Minds -- Julian has a good analysis of that ever-abused Emerson quote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...," which, as it is usually used, is the last resort of the incoherent. (Julian is complaining, again, of the NRO crowd.) I really love the quote, properly understood. (Go see it.) It's about having the courage to assail your own convictions, and thus your own identity. It's a little mind that craves so badly to BE something, to BELIEVE a meaning-conferring doctrine, that it cannot countenance the prospect of admitting error or ignorance or limitation and thus cannot do justice to the world by admitting new facts and revising old opinions. Folks seem to miss the crucial difference between doing one's best to be consistent at any given time, and being doggedly consistent OVER time, which is foolish. Inconsistency over time is required by the effort to be consistent at a given time. New information comes to light, and that has to be integrated with one's prior beliefs, and when it is, some of those old beliefs have to be jettisoned or revised to comport with the new information. Emerson is arguing FOR unfoolish synchronic consistency--for holding to what makes for the most coherent story NOW in light of one's ever-shifting context of evidence--and its incompatibilty with the sort of dogma that rules the little minds of the folks at NRO .

X-Men and the Circumstances of Justice -- There is a massive rash of philosophical comic geekdom breaking out in the blogosphere over the arrival of the new X-Men movie. See, for example Matthew Yglesias and Jacob Levy. As I am a philosophical geek who bought his first issue of X-Men almost 20 years ago for I think $.65 (It had the Juggernaut in it), I will do my part... Among Hume's "circumstances of justice" is the requirement that there be no great asymmetries in power. "Moral standing" requires that a party to an agreement be able to contribute and gain roughly equally from cooperative agreements, and be roughly equally disposed to comply with those agreements. We are not in the circumstances of justice with young children and the severly handicapped, and this entails that for certain purposes they lack moral standing. Now, are homo sapiens and homo superior in the circumstances of justice with respect to one another, or do we mere humans lack moral standing relative to certain mutants with massive powers? Given a contractarian framework sensitive to the Humean requirements, is the moral message of the X-Men even intelligible? Does the massive asymmetries in power introduced by the story render the underlying analogy with the struggle for civil rights moot? Discuss.

The Dissident -- Check out the great new campus publication produced by the Critical Review Foundation. 50,000 copies of the first issue has gone out to fancy schools, in an attempt to reach out to bright undergrads who rarely have a chance to hear ideas that fall anywhere outside of the center-left to radical-left range that dominates in the universities. The Dissident is the smartest campus think mag I've ever seen. Indeed, it's smarter than lots of think mags for adults. And I'm not saying that just because of my piece trashing the World Bank and the IMF is in it. Jeff Friedman's long piece is a great summary of his extremely provocative post-post libertarianism, and a good taste of what one gets at the Critical Review seminar (highly recommended for undergrads in poltical theory and thinky journalism.)

Federal City vs. Chocolate City -- Washington, the District of Columbia, is the capital city of the wealthiest and most powerful nation (empire?) in the history of the known universe. It is a city that teems with entrepeneurs of expropriation, dandyfied lobbyists, scrubbed legislative aides from the hinterlands, scores of Lewinskys and Levys hyperventilating amidst the faux Roman grandeur of the Federal City at the thought of their proximity to power. But beyond the shadows of the monuments, there is a city where interns fear to tread. A city of hand dancing, go-go music, and, yes, black people. With only thinly veiled racism, the tourist guidebooks firmly steer innocents away from all but the whitest and most gentrified portions of the District. The 2002 Let's Go DC guide warns us of the Darkest DC: In 1942, DC doubled New York City's murder rate and, according to Newsweek, became the 'Murder Capital of the US.' Exactly 50 years later, the title was resurrected, thanks to widespread crack addiction and the increasing availability of assault weapons. The murder epidemic, while mostly an affair of drug dealers shooting one another, sometimes catches innocents in the crossfire. Most crime occurs in places that do not get many visitors, primarily the Northeast and Southeast neighborhoods, and east of 14th St. NW. Try to enter these regions only in a car, and always exercise extreme caution. Now, it is true that DC retains the murder crown. However, the outrage of the Let's Go passage is in the flip manner in which it, in effect, excises 2/3 of the city, as if these areas are uniformly populated with Glock-wielding crack fiends, murdering each other indiscriminately among delapidated ruins. But this is, of course, bullshit. There is much worth seeing and doing in North- and Southeast, and one does not face certain death should one wander into the neighborhoods where MOST of DC's residents raise their families and live their lives. Thankfully, my future roommates have set out to rectify this injustice, and have produced a guide to the sites, sounds, and tastes of the DC beyond the the Mall and the two or three tony neighborhoods approved by skittish guide book authors. Their site is our-dc.com . Even if you've lived in DC for years, you are sure to discover something new. But check it out soon. We're moving east of 14th Street, so, no doubt, we will all be dead in weeks.

Coercion: WTF? -- Here's a challenge for libertarians. What exactly is wrong with initiatory coercion, other than the fact that it strikes us as intuitively repugnant? For my part, I cannot find a satisfying answer. Other kinds of non-coercive psychological manipulation, such as those that occur in relationships gone sour, strike me as just as odious as bona fide coercion. Indeed, I'd rather do something under the threat of being puched in the nuts (or just punched in the nuts straightaway) than to be emotionally blackmailed by someone I love. So why is preventing and punishing the one considered the proper province of the state, while the other is considered a paradigm case of a purely private affair? Furthermore, I'm not sure I even know what coercion IS anymore? An extremely diffuse structure of government threats is considered coercive (almost none of us are ever directly threatened by someone with the power to harm us). Yet a religious ideology, induced by childhood brainwashing and promising eternal pain in the case of rule-breaking, is NOT considered coercive. Why not? And what's so special about physical violation? Since I genuinely prefer to be kicked in the nuts over having my heart shattered by psychological manipulation, what's so special about nuts-kicking? If I kidnap your kid and threaten to break her kneecaps unless you give me a Toyota, then that's considered coercion. But if I date your daughter, and she falls so desperately in love with me that she will attempt suicide should I leave her, and then I tell you I will dump her unless you give me a Toyota, then that's not coercion. What gives? I think I know what you'll say, but let's see if you suprise me. And this brings us to positive vs. negative freedom. I'm no longer seeing the importance of the distinction. It seems to me the freedom worth caring about is positive. What we want is a bigger opportunity set--the ability to choose among more alternatives. If, in order to get a huge increase in abilities and possibilities for my future, I had to accept some small amount of structural coercion that would block off a much smaller set of abilities and possibilities, then I'd be quite glad for the coercion. In fact, the thing that seems wrong to me about coercion is just that it closes off a possible course of action that I should be free to choose. This is more salient than having courses of action closed off by, say, a set of tarrifs, but the result is the same. There's something I should have been able to choose to do, but, in some sense, can't. The negative/positive distinction strikes me as analogous to the killing and letting die distinction. Whether I kill someone, or let them die when I could have prevented it, someone ends up dead. Whether you forbid me under threat of prison from taking a drug, or regulate the pharmaceutical industry in such a way that they never produce it, then I end up without the drug. I don't really care WHY I can't have it. I just care that I can't. Just as Bob doesn't really care if you shot him in the head or starved him to death with your disastrous economic policies. Coercion, whatever it means, seems like just one way to prune that loveliest of abstract objects, the Tree of Future Timelines, and not obviously the most diagreeable way. Now, I'm certain that one of the best ways to make our future as bushy as possible is to restrict coercion. And that's why I think restricting coercion, insofar as I've got a grip on what it IS, is a nice idea. But it's not obvious that the bushiest future emerges from the branch with the least coercion.

Nigerian Democracy -- Wolverine.

PoMos Concede Impotence, Irrelevance -- This is very heartening. (Link from NRO.)

C.P. Snow's Five Year Plan -- I've just been reading C.P. Snow's famous The Two Cultures for a Liberty Fund in Indianapolis next weekend, and it's just an astoundingly obtuse book. Of course, I have the benefit of having seen how things panned out. In Snow's day, perhaps it made sense to delineate something like monolithic scientific and literary cultures, but today's world emphatically lacks any monolithic cultures. He was worried that physicists hadn't read Shakespeare, and that playwrights didn't understand entropy. Reading Snow, I'm filled with joy to be embedded in a culture of such richness and complexity that these sociological groupings make no sense, and that the tidy canons of cultural and scientific knowledge have simply been exploded by the ever accelerating proliferation of cultural invention and scientific discovery. I have exactly no idea how I would fit into Snow's schema. I've a degree in drawing and painting and art history, a passable acquaintance with the "classics" of literature, and am working on a second advanced degree in philosophy. But my philosophy is post-Quinean naturalism, drawing its metaphysical assumptions about man and nature directly from the sciences themselves. Am I schizophrenic? No! Just a perfectly unusual sort of hybrid intellectual type. This meta-type is a nice possibility opened up by the "looseness" of the American system of education, which Snow derides. How about this? I once took half a course with Mark Turner, who is a professor of English Lit at Maryland, as well as a faculty member of the program in neuro- and cognitive science, as well as associate director of the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford. He has an advanced degree in math from Berkeley. He has written lovely books on metaphor. Now, not everybody's a Mark Turner. But the naturalization of the mind has done a lot to bring the subject matter of science and the arts much closer together. (Philosophers of art these days are interested in such things as the neuroscience of musical experience).The message that aesthetic experience and quality are features of the natural world subject to scientific inquiry has yet to penetrate the darkest, frenchest corners of comparative literature departments, but the future is with the Mark Turners of world. But I digress. Back to Snow... Two Cultures turns out to really be about the world's poor. The problem, as Snow has it, is that the poorer countries have yet to undergo a scientific revolution. Once they do industrial technology will chug and chug and chug and chug and puff until scarcity and want is fully overcome. He was clearly impressed with the USSR, although he should not have been. Pete Boettke tells me the Soviets produced heavy industry at an impressive rate, and those are the numbers that drew everyone in. But somehow, all that "conspicuous production" never cashed out in terms of increased consumption, that is, in increased quality of life for the folk, who, damn them, wanted toothbrushes and shoes and good booze, not i-beams. In any case, Snow liked to say things like this: "The poor countries, until they have got beyond a certain point on the industrial curve cannot accumulate capital. That is why the gap between the rich and poor is widening. The capital must come from outside." And they can get either from us or... from the Reds! It seems that a man of science, like Snow, would not need someone like P.T. Bauer to point out the just GOD DAMN OBVIOUS fact that Earth is an economically closed system, and so, necessarily, the first economy to accumulate capital didn't get it from the outside. Anyway, Snow entertains a massive technocratic fantasy to the effect that a huge effort to train scientists and industrialize the developing world (involving enormous expropriations of wealth) will straightaway make all those poor laggard brown people rich. If we fail to do it, the Russkie's will, and then, at best, the West will remain as a mere "enclave" surrounded on all sides by the vast engines of Soviet industrial might. Laugh as we might, Snow was not alone in his breathtaking economic incompetence. (He shows no glimmer of an appreciation of even the most basic economic precepts. It's just we're-smart-enough-to-engineer-The Bomb,-so-we're-sure-as-hell-smart-enough-to-engineer-worldwide-economic-growth fatal fucking conceit all the way down.) This kind of view once dominated development policy, and we're not yet totally in the clear. Let me close by sharing a relevant quote from John Nye's paper for a USAID Forum organized earlier this month by Mercatus's Global Prosperity Initiative (where I work--read the other papers too.) If technology could do so much, who needed to worry about institutions? As one of my instructors argued at one time, good institutions may buy a nation an extra five or even ten percent income in the short run, but good technology raised growth rates by one or two percent a year forever. Indeed, it has taken a revolution in our views of economic history, and particularly the widespread assimilation of the claim by North and Thomas that technology did not “explain” modern economic growth, but was itself a manifestation of the phenomenon we think of as modern economic growth. Which is the academic way of saying "ass backwards."

Liberation Forthcoming -- After 4 1/2 years in College Park, a few of them simply dismal, I'm moving to the city! Where? Here. Five minutes or so on foot from Black Cat, 9:30, Velvet Lounge, Kingpin, Bohemian Caverns, Ben's Chili Bowl, Cake Love, Saint Ex, etc., etc. I am exceedingly enthusiastic, reflecting my pent up disenchantment with residence in the quasi-urban environs of PG County. I will be exchanging gay men for girls roommate-wise, which, I hope, will enable my life to maintain a good level of awkward but warm sit-comicity. It'll happen early next month I reckon, and there will be a party sometime after. You may or may not be invited. [Update: And of course I'll be just a hop, skip, and a jump from Adams Morgan, where I am now, blogging from Tryst, writing about the Rawlsian "sense of justice," listening to my new CDs from DCCD (White Stripes, Elephant, and Pedro the Lion, Control), watching little girls on the sidewalk doing some unbelievably complex patty cake hand slapping routine while waiting for their parents. How the hell do they do that? Oh and there go some church hats! I love church hats. College Park can eat me.]

After the Fall -- Nice piece by Chuck Freund on the prospects of pan-Arabism after the collapse of the Hussein regime.

The Underdetermination of Just Social Order by Democracy -- Iraq, we are told, is to become a democracy. This is a laudable aim. But democracy is a genus, not a species. Getting a democracy is rather like getting a mammal for a gift. Kittens are nice. Wolverines will lunch on your eyeballs. You don't drop a wolverine in your friend's lap, and then walk away feeling you've done them a favor, since the best pets are mammals. Democracy names a vast range of possible institutional structures. There are good reasons to believe that certain kinds of democracy promote stable, mutually advantageous social order. However, other forms of democracy create incentives for corruption, dominance by special interest, and social instability. It's true that the best pets are mammals, but it's not an especially useful thing to know. What we're really interested in is whether, say, Vizslas are better with kids than Weimeraners. That's why this paper by law and economics pioneer Robert Cooter is so important. He lays out the likely consequences of some different kinds of democracy. I won't summarize his arguments (you should read them yourself, espcially if you're rebuilding Iraq), but he indicates that countries like Iraq may benefit from a democratic structure quite different from our own. Just as an example of the range of democratic possibility, imagine that there is no legislature. Instead of living in a single legislative district and voting for a representative who votes on every kind of issue--from economic policy to the environment to transportation--one instead is part of multiple overlapping jurisdictions that have authority over single issues. So you vote for a representative on the transportation policy board, and a different representative for the defense board, etc. And you just vote directly in referenda on certain issues, like what the tax rate will be, or whether weed's legal. Kitten or wolverine?

Report from Buffalo -- So, last weekend I was in Buffalo for a grad conference on John Searle and a bigger conference on issues surrounding the works of Searle and Peruvian economist Hernando DeSoto. I presented a paper at the little Searle conference, and the man himself was there to comment. Searle has always been one of my philosophical heroes, so it was pretty thrilling to have him comment on a bit of my work. He liked it! Searle's a remarkably funny and affable guy, and, besides being just astoundingly smart, probably has the keenest bullshit detector on Earth. Anyway, if you like to read things with titles like "Rationality, Institutional Ontology, and Contractarian Choice," drop me a line and I'll send you my paper.

The Sound of Silence -- I hope you've enjoyed my experiment in meditative blog silence. If you thought I was inactive, you must have succumbed to my well-wrought illusion of stasis. More discerning readers will have noticed how each new day, my apparently unchanging page was commenting subtly--passively protesting the hectic, frantic hurly burly of the world at large. The silence takes on new overtones as its steady note interweaves with the symphony of human endeavor creating ever-shifting harmonies and dissonances. You missed it, didn't you? Next time, listen harder.

Disgusting and Vile The American soldier who tried to kill his colleagues with a grenade looks to be Muslim. So this dipshit (shame on Instapundit for linking with apparent approval to this post) writes: I'm angry right now, and I may regret these words. But, I think it is entirely reasonable for Americans to suspect the loyalty of American Muslims. There is substantial evidence that their allegiances lie not with their country, but with their god. And: What has this disgusting, vile faith wrought? I'm no fan of faith in general, but it doesn't stike me that's there's anything uniquely vile and disgusting about Islam, as such. It's the interpretation and the ideology built up around it (see below, for instance) that ratchets up the disgusting and vile rating. How many Muslims are there in the American military who have NOT tried to kill their confreres? All of them but one. (And what kind of poor excuse of a faith doesn't trump allegience to the state, anyway?) Get a grip, man. I hope you do regret your words. There are, indeed, ugly Americans.

The Darkness of the Shade Stop what you are doing right now and read this amazing essay by Paul Berman on Sayyid Qutb, the philosopher of Islamism, whose works have gone, to our great detriment, neglected and unanswered. Berman's immensely informative piece makes perfectly clear what I have suspected all along: the war against Islamic terrorism is a war of ideas. Berman writes: Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things. Berman lucidly lays out Qutb's philosophy, which is deep, deeply wrong, and thus deeply dangerous. Qutb, it appears, identifies the Christian sundering of mind and body (corresponding to the libeal west's division of the religious/spiritual from the secular/scientific) as a main source of modern pathology and anxiety, and proposes that only Islam, and life strictly lived according to the Sharia can make us once again whole, and free. So for freedom's sake, then, the Islamic law must be the state's law, and enforced unflinchingly. We intellectuals have work to do. Judging from Berman's remarkable account, Qutb's philosophy is both profound and inspiring. If freedom is to survive--as we understand and cherish it--these ideas must be engaged, and put down. And that requires that we speak to the same needs Qutb speaks to. His followers are ready to murder and die for freedom--as they have come to understand and cherish it. The Enlightenment must put up, or be shut up. This is why philosophy matters. This is why the evaluative paralysis of post-modern nihilism isn't just self-indulgent stupidity, but a potentially deadly suppression of our civilization's intellectual immune system. So, really, we've got to fight. But this is not a war that can be won with espionage, JDAMs, and airrcraft carriers. Berman's concludes: It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse. But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society's every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that. Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.

It's On -- Somehow, I feel both sick and hopeful. May it end quickly. May we leave soon.

The Theory of Optimal Disenchantment -- The fascinating discussion following Steven Pinker's recent presentation to the President's Council on Bioethics led me to consider whether there is an optimal level of realism about the physical world, human nature, and our relationship to the universe. Let me say what I mean by this. Think of a continuum running from an extremely superstitious and mythical conception of the universe and human nature to a rigorously empirical conception of the universe and human nature defined by some complete future science. Call this the continuum of enchantment. The history of human progress has to a large extent consisted of a rightward shift on the continuum. Truth is the enemy of mystification, and the discovery of large truths, such as the heliocentric theory of the solar system and the theory of evolution by natural selection, are, generally, victories for disenchantment. (I intend 'disenchantment' descriptively, not pejoratively.) At any moment in time, there are ideologies that codify and organize human life around the prevailing conception of the universe and human nature. A rightward shift on the continuum presents itself as a threat to the ordering of society, especially to those with a vested interest in the ideology of the prevailing worldview. Think of the Catholic Church's attitude toward Galileo. Inevitably, these people argue that the source of disenchantment is false, because it contradicts the ideology, which defines "the truth," and, even if true, would be destructive of human society, virtue, and meaning. Because Galileo and Darwin did not in fact cause civilization to collapse, morality to wither away, and meaning to dissolve, those of us with a naturalistic, scientific bent are suspicious of claims, such as those made by Leon Kass, head of the bioethics council, of the dangers of further disenchantment. Kass himself does not think we would be better to return to the pre-industrial era, forsake our advanced medical knowledge, or begin believing once again that the Earth is the center of the universe. He, like almost of all us, is glad to be fairly far along the continuum. However, he does seem to think there is a danger in moving further. Is he wrong? Pinker's exchange with the council is interesting as a piece of sociology. Pinker is on the vanguard of the forces of scientific discovery, and it is clear that he understands the need to allay the concerns of the ideologues of the prevailing conception, which he attempts to do in his presentation. Nevertheless, his disenchantment comes through in his discussion of the justification for punishment. Pinker argues that we have probably ineradicable intuitions about retribution. However, he seems to believe that these intuitions are the consequence of a selective process that built into us behavioral dispositions that would effectively secure peace and coordinate behavior by creating a social climate of credible commitments to punish. So, the underlying logic of our intuitions of retributive justice is a logic of deterrence, and it is that underlying logic that justifies the expression of our retributive sentiments. Several on the Kass panel seemed to want Pinker to admit that some people--evil people, Nazis--should be punished because they deserve it, period. That's the position left of Pinker. But he's moved on. So he was prepared only to say that it's impossible for us to keep from feeling that they deserve it, and we're right to express that feeling, only if it serves it's proper function of deterrence. Several on the Panel, Krauthammer for one, seemed a little unnerved by this. Pinker is not unnerved, because he has already begun to build an ideology that makes coherent and liveable his location on the continuum. He understands that the intransigence of our intuitions will guarantee that our practices of criminal justice will not unravel if we understand their justification in a way that is more sensitive to the facts about human nature. In fact, they may well be improved. I think he's right. Yet it's not obvious that every rightward slide will be beneficial. There may well be diminishing returns to disenchantment. I don't believe that Kass is right that genetic manipulation and cloning somehow undermines human dignity, and so on. One sometimes suspects that folks like Kass know better, but think, Strauss-fashion, that the hoi polloi need to maintain a certain level of enchantment to ensure the viability of a desirable polity. I personally know folks on the right who believe that certain religious beliefs are a prerequisite for the long term enjoyment of political freedom, even though they will admit that those beliefs have no basis in reality. That's a theory of optimal disenchantment! The problem with most theories of optimal disenchantment is that they are ad hoc and arbitrary. We are rarely given a principled basis for believing that the prospects of civilization, morality, and meaning will suffer should the average worldview shift right on the continuum. Generally, we are given nothing but a heated reiteration of the received ideology that points out how the shift threatens to undermine "what we believe." And it is easy enough for the forces of disenchantment to just laugh it off. But it seems possible to provide a sound theory of optimal disenchantment, and somebody ought to try. The problem is that a convincing theory of optimal disenchantment will have be drawn from a point on the continuum to the right of the putative optimum. A good theory will need to draw from the epistemically best conception of human nature, and show us how believing such and such can in fact be expected to produce bad behavior and undermine good institutions, and that believing this or that falsehood is in fact a precondition for everything that makes living worthwhile. But the epistemically best theory will be the most disenchanted one. And those most motivated to set forth a theory of optimal disenchantment are not those most prepared to lay aside the prevailing ideology in order to really understand the disenchanted facts.

The Social Change Project -- There's still a lot to do, but, after a long wait, my program at Mercatus, the Social Change Project, finally has a website. Having a website is kind of like... existing.

Yglesias on Libertarians and Reason (and the reality of numbers, intuitionistic logic, the ontological status of moral properties, etc.) -- I'm a big fan of facile, wandering philosophical argumentation (if you seeks its monument, look around you). In this post, Matthew Yglesias, does it with gusto, but, I fear, dabbles overmuch in confusion and irrelevancy. Matthew's initial topic is why there is a tendency among libertarians to maintain that their politics partake more of reason than the alternatives. Before I dig in to Matthew a bit, I'll explain it: Ayn Rand. There you go! Well, more should be said. Rand held that life and happiness are man's rightful moral ends, and that the faculty of reason is the sole means for achieving them. Indeed, Rand has a secularized Thomistic conception of reason (in "The Objectivist Ethics" at least) whereby the achievement of life and happiness is reason's proper function. However, reason is able to perform its proper function only under conditions of non-coercion--that is, when negative rights are respected. (It might be thought peculiar that reason would have a proper function that could not be fulfilled throughout all but a small fraction of a rather unfree human history, but whatever.) Respect for negative rights, as Rand understands them, is tantamount to libertarianism (although she would not use the dirty 'l' word). So a libertarian polity is the condition under which it is possible for reason to properly function and reliably bring about our survival and happiness. Furthermore, the application of reason according to methods consonant with its nature will allegedly reveal this fact to any who may inquire. Many if not most libertarians got that way by reading Ayn Rand. Hence, the frequent association of libertarianism and reason. (Reason magazine was so called, I believe, because Bob Poole and Tibor Machan (I think that's who) were/are heavily influenced by Rand.) So that's that. But what does Matthew have to say, otherwise? Well, he seems to say that its silly to promote one's political opinions as being especially rational. [I]f I produce an argument that demonstrates "Doing X is immoral" and you produce a counterargument that proves "Doing not-X is irrational" then I win. We have, after all, a nice tautology that says you ought to do the moral thing, whereas one ought to do the rational thing if and only if it is the moral thing. Of course, one would need to produce actual arguments for both sides of this debate, but the point is that demonstrating the rationality of your moral system is neither necessary nor sufficient for establishing that it's worthy of adherence. I wracked my brain looking for any tautology here, much less a nice one, but it continues to elude me. Like H.A. Prichard, Matthew misses that there may be more than one kind of 'ought'. There are 'ought's of morality, 'ought's of rationality, 'ought's of etiquette, 'ought's of interior decoration, and so on. Matthew assumes that the ought of morality is universally authoritative, but why think that? It is a tautology (I wouldn't say nice) that one morally ought to do what one morally ought to do. Likewise, one rationally ought to do what one rationally ought to do. And so, yes, one morally ought to do what one rationally ought to do only if it's moral. But big deal. One rationally ought to do what one morally ought to do only if it's rational. So if you establish that x-ing is immoral and I establish that refraining from x-ing is irrational, you do not "win." To decide you the winner, we'd need to establish that moral imperatives trump rational imperatives. If one is in the grip of the moral point of view, one will, no doubt, be tempted to pound the table and beg the question and insist that one REALLY (read: morally) ought to do what morality says. But we can all play that game. Those, like myself, in the grip of the rational point of view will want to know why, if morality will not help me to achieve my ends, should I care about it? Matthew's infatuation with morals, detached as it is from rationality, strikes me as rather arbitrary. There's rather more to say about Matthew's post, and I may say more later. Somehow Matthew's post terminates in a discussion of moral realism, via Dummett and mathematical intutitionism. Perhaps Matthew is being innovatively synthetic. I hope so.

If Iraq is Such a Direct Threat, Why are We Willing to Wait? -- Good column in the Orange County Register by Cato's Ted Galen Carpenter. Here's the thrust: If Iraq poses a dire threat, why has the United States bothered to go to the United Nations? Again, the contrast with America's actions in Afghanistan is stark. In the latter case, the United States invoked the right of self-defense and took action on its own. In the case of Iraq, U.S. leaders have wasted months going through the diplomatic agony of securing a U.N. resolution and the endless weeks of pointless U.N. inspections. Washington continues to play the diplomatic game of trying to secure a second resolution -- one that would explicitly authorize the use of force. The United Nations is an international debating society, not a serious security body. The United States and the other major powers have typically taken to the U.N. only those issues that are peripheral to their own security. They bypass the world body and take action unilaterally or with regional coalitions on more serious matters. The willingness to go through a multistage diplomatic farce at the U.N. suggests that Bush administration officials, despite their statements, do not really regard Iraq as a major security threat to the United States. I think he's right. Either Iraq is a direct threat or it is not. If it is, then we should have invaded already. If it's not, then we would be behaving exactly like we are. But in that case, an invasion isn't justified.

Igby Goes Down Goes Down

audblog audio post Almost as annoying as having a drink with me after a movie!

My Retarded Audblog Debut

audblog audio post You know, people tell me I must really like the sound of my own voice, but, you know, now I'm not so sure...

The Uses of Truth -- Lovely little essay by Dennett against the postmodernists. (Link from A&L Daily). Let me quote just one line, in appreciation of the metaphor. Dennett is speaking of the way disputes on the frontiers of science provide for some the impression that science isn't reliable, or is just one style of assertion among other. "[T]he warfare on the cutting edge of any science draws attention away from the huge uncontested background, the dull metal heft of the axe that gives the cutting edge its power."

The Costs of War -- Bush asserted tonight that "Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country." If so, he knows something the rest of us don't. As I've said before, I eagerly welcome Hussein's overthrow and the liberation of the Iraqi people. And I eagerly welcome Mugabe's overthrow and the liberation of the Zimbabwean people. And I eagerly welcome the overthrow of Kim Jong Il and the liberation of the North Korean people. And I eagerly await the overthrow of . . . In response to the request for an estimate of the cost of the war, Bush punted. He either doesn't know, or doesn't want to say what the cost to American taxpayers is likely to be. He seems to say (it's not really clear to me exactly what he was saying) that it's very expensive to get attacked. But it makes sense to include this in the calculation of cost only if an attack is likely, and, again, he has given us no reason to believe that it is. Bush's vagueness on the exact nature of the threat, the bumbling way in which he brought the possibility of being attacked it into the question of cost, and the way he quickly moved off this line of thought suggests that he knows that it's not really a relevant consideration. However, when he moved on to his next line of thought, there was a contrasting sincerity that indicated a conviction of relevance to the question of cost. Bush says: How do you measure the benefit of freedom in Iraq? I guess if you're an Iraqi citizen, you could measure it by being able to express your mind. Though how do you measure the consequence of taking a dictator out of power who has tried to invade Kuwait? Or somebody who may some day decide to lob a weapon of mass destruction on Israel, how would you weigh the cost of that? Those are immeasurable costs. And I weigh those very seriously in terms of the dollar amount. This is conceptually garbled in a manner characteristic of the extemporaneous Bush. (It was clear listening live that he meant "Those are immeasurable benefits.") I'm not sure how he thinks the benefits of deposing Hussein can be quantified so as to be included in a calculation of the "dollar amount" cost of the war. But that's hardly the point. The point is that Bush more or less dismisses the question of the the cost of the war to US citizens by citing the benefits to Iraqis, Kuwaitis, and Israelis. Certainly all of us wish nothing but the best for the Iraqis, Kuwaitis, Israelis, and every other soul on God's Green Earth. But Bush is the US President, and it's his job to protect the interests of US citizens. It's frustrating to get evasive allusions to a threat to US interests, and then receive earnest and heartfelt explanations of the benefits to the interests of others. There are billions of people around the globe who are suffering badly, and we could ease immense amounts of grief by spending hundreds of billions of US dollars. But it is not the place of the US president to distribute the wealth of the US citizens for the improvement of the lives of people elsewhere (when plumping for a tax cut, he's very happy to remind us that it is our money). Because of the principle of diminishing marginal utility, a transfer of billions of American dollars to the world's poor might increase net well-being, and in this sense "cost" nothing. But imagine if someone asked Bush "How much is this global wealth transfer program going to cost us?" only to receive the reply, "How do you measure the benefit of eating to Ethiopians?" We would not be impressed. So what exactly is the threat? How exactly are US interests endangered?

Intelligence Failures Need Not be Failures of Intelligence -- You must read Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant piece of applied epistemology. O' Gods, why can't all journalists be as smart as Malcolm Gladwell!?

Like Al Qaeda, but, ya Know, for Good -- Check out my piece on the forthcoming war in the new issue of Doublethink. Ideologues may complain in the comments box.

Bad Poem Thursday -- Gaining Perspective It's tiresome but true that truth is vantage-bound. The blood-splayed strife of beast against beast May be seen as the peace of tiny things, Dumbly and mutely bouncing around. From one point of view we're all one race-- "From a distance," as Bette might say. But closer in we hate so well, And so well we blow each other away. No doubt there's a way of looking at love As a shadowy figment of tedious forces: Our fullness of heart, but Darwin's whip. Adoring, we check the teeth of our horses. But where I stand, the truth is full face. The catch of my breath when you come near. The sweep of your hair, the awe of your grace. The terrible constancy of my fear Has worn me on this pained paradigm. So let's have a perspective wholly swell, Where aches are apples and tears taste of lime, And each tossed, sweating midnight hell Is a token of heaven, a cherished gift. I'll be moving in shortly, Once I learn how to shift.

We Have a Winner! -- The winner of the Name the Car contest is the ebullient Lynne Kiesling! This weekend, at the Mercatus Center Capitol Hill Campus Chiefs of Staff Retreat, Lynne suggested Bucephalus, the name of Alexander the Great's awesome stead... and I like it! So I hereby christen the Civic Buchephalus. And henceforth and forever so shall you be known. So, Lynne, you're entitled to a dollar or a kiss.

Prudent Predators, Sensible Knaves, and Fooles -- Several years ago, debate raged on several Objectivist discussion lists about the the problem of the "prudent predator." The problem, simply put, is this: Why should a rational egoist accept constraints on her self-interested behavior, such as respecting others' rights, if it is advantageous to throw them off in a particular case? The prudent predator accepts that the system of constraints is beneficial, given that others reliably accept them, but sees no reason not to "defect" from the pattern of general compliance when it pays. It would have been to my immense benefit at the time of those debates had I read Hobbes' account of the Foole in Leviathan, and Hume's account of the conditions of justice and the Sensible Knave in the Enquiry. I'm making a study of compliance problems in contractarian moral theory this semester, and I'm astonished to see that all the moves that I tried to make in the Objectivist debates were anticipated by Hobbes and Hume. Of particular interest is Hume's analysis of the conditions under which we are obliged to practice the virtue of justice, which he conceives as respecting a system of several property. I had argued that the logic of Objectivist egoism is such that respect for rights is required only when there is a social order under which interaction to mutual advantage is possible. Although Hume is no egoist (his moral theory is based in moral sentiment), he justifies his theory of justice on grounds of self-interest. And Hume says exactly what I had said, and more. In conditions of scarcity, war, or in other systematically predatory social conditions, the practice of justice (the respect for rights to property) has no foundation. A consequence of this view is that rights to property cannot be conceived to exist prior to the solution of the problem of scarcity, and the existence of cooperative norms. In which case a puzzle arises: scarcity is solved by markets. But markets require stable property rights. So how do we get to either? Good question! More later!

What's That about Oil? -- Energy expert Lynne Kiesling at Reason Public Policy provides an excellent overview of the ways in which the war with the Hussein regime is and is not about oil.

The Keen Wind of Understanding -- From Richard Holloway's review of Dawkins's new book, A Devil's Chaplain: The goal of life is life itself. There is no final purpose, no end other than entropy and the end of all endings. But there is deep refreshment to be had "from standing up full-face into the keen wind of understanding". Beautiful.

Are You Scared Yet? -- Well, I am, to tell the truth. But the press is going overboard. Check out this terrifying picture from the FoxNews main page:

Snow Poem -- The quickening snow Creates the oak, The ragged, intransigent leaves, A beacon of static As the massing heavens Betray the darkness And embarrass the night. ... Stay warm!

Blogoramalamadingdong -- It was fun. We should do it again. I seem to be the coverperson (along with the lovely Miss Ahluwalia) over at Julian's wrap up page. Unfortunately, my expression seems to be of the sort elicited by a visit to the proctologist. Also, here at Missy's page looking grave and deceptively conservative, and here, looking like I've just been shot (smoking gun just off camera). I may have been drinking.

Women and Children First -- I can't help but picture these grandmothers as charred corpses. Hussein hands out guns, thereby making his civilians combatants. The US kills them, then Hussein, and the NYT, claims them as civilian deaths. I'm somewhat heartened by the fact that people aren't dumb when it comes to self-preservation, and will very quickly lose the AKs and hide when the American troops thunder into the already decimated town. I hope for the best for the like of Faris Zubaid who says, "We will show them our bravery. We will show them we can fight. And we will fight until we win or die." Once the heavens tear open, I figure a situational assesment of the odds of winning against death will reveal to Faris that fighting in this case is not an instance of bravery. Building a liberal democracy in fucking Iraq, now that takes bravery. So save it. Please, please save it.

James Watson -- Iconoclastic Randian Hero of Science who also, as it happens, likes to get laid. I quite like the fact that he pisses people off. And he's often right on, for instance: "You know, the only people who say that stupid people don't exist are people who are not stupid. We know that if we go to homeless people there is an underclass with a very strong mental disease component. Those people can't pull themselves together, the brain just won't allow it. So it is not that they are weak in character, they are seriously unequal," Watson says. "People in first-class universities may have brains that work more efficiently than people who aren't there and if you could help someone, wouldn't that be nice?" And this is priceless, and as true as truth gets: "The book of the DNA sequence would in time be regarded as more relevant to human life than the Bible. It tells us who we are," he says, adding without a hint of irony: "I've never read the Bible, so I'm not sure I've missed much." [from A & L Daily]

Automobility! -- I finally got a car! I can stay out on weekends after the Metro stops running! I can LEAVE WASHINGTON! It's a cute vehicle, a 1996 Honda Civic EX in lovely shape with just 43,000 miles. So I'm jazzed. But I need your help. I like to forge a personal relationship with my cars. My last, a red 1988 Escort GT, which gave up the ghost in the middle of Manhattan in August 2001, was dubbed Mephisto by my Goethe-loving German freundin. The Civic needs a name! So I propose a little contest: suggest a name for the Civic in the comments box, and if I pick your entry, I'll give you either a kiss, a ride in the newly christened conveyance, or a dollar -- your choice! A sleek little black creature, it looks almost exactly like this:

We Like the Government Lots . . .

State of the State of the Union -- Well, I thought the SOTU was pretty good, overall. About style . . . Although I wince at his missteps, I find Bush a compelling speaker. He's direct, it sounds like he means what he says, and he engages ordinary (not obnoxiously intellectual) people. His moral sensibility comes through clearly, and doesn't seem especially calculated. Weirdest but most powerful part of the speech: The litany of torture methods employed by Hussein's regime, followed up with "If that's not evil, then 'evil' has no meaning." I liked this. It's a powerful defense of the "Axis of Evil" line against the bullshit he got for it. And it's certainly true. Both moralists and nihilists can sign on to the conditional. Biggest surprise: AIDS relief in Africa. If we're drawing up a multi-billion dollar bill of goods anyway, this strikes me as a very good thing to do. As far as transfers of wealth goes, this is one that strikes me as having a chance to actually help. It would be even better if some day soon living in Africa is A WHOLE LOT better than dying there. Second biggest surprise: Hydrogen cars. Well, umm, OK. (I've sometimes wondered if government-funded R & D is always a bad idea, but that's another post.) War: I found Bush's rhetoric moving, because I'm susceptible to that sort of thing. I'll look forward to Powell's speech to the UN and see if he has something less vague to offer by way of justification. I cannot help but be stirred by the rhetoric of freedom and liberation, and Bush used it to good effect. He's right. The US is not the people of Iraq's enemy; their leader is. And deposing Hussein would be liberating for the Iraqis. But I think we're neither required or permitted to do the liberating. If there's a genuinely good reason to invade, such as a non-fabricated connection to Al Qaeda, or the demonstration of some credible threat, then I would certainly welcome liberation as a side-effect of proper defense. Bill of Goods: I hate this pandering shit. But, as Julian notes, Bush's 20 proposals is better than Clinton's 104! in 2000. Bush: I can't imagine what breeds so much hatred in so many people. He strikes me as a good-hearted, earnest guy with not especially threatening political commitments. If we picked presidents American Idol style, and I was Simon, I'd say something demeaning about his verbal abilities and kick him out in seconds. But he does alright. I just don't see what there is to loathe.

Spreading the Word -- Because my link network consists mostly of strong ties, and is thus highly redundant, my readers will have already been informed. But, just in case, don't miss Blogarama at Kalorama III, Thursday, February 6 at the Rendevous Lounge in Adams Morgan. I'll be a bit late. I've got class, the nicely titled Architecture of the Mind, with Carruthers. So don't leave early, especially if you're gorgeous and single (and female)!

Vacillation Update -- You'll notice that I don't say a hell of a lot about the war. That's mainly because I don't know what to think about it. Well, I know what to think about it; that's the function of having an ideology: to tell you what to think without having to do much thinking. My ideology tells me to oppose the war. War is the health of the state, and so forth. And it's true! It is. I do not want John Poindexter to know which brand of condom I prefer. However, my heart's not really in it. I can't convince myself that invading Iraq will be a disaster. But neither can I convince myself that it won't be. Actually, I'm disoriented by the strident confidence on all sides of this. There seems very little to warrant confidence. I am confident that there are a great many people who hate the US, and wish to do us harm, or to see us harmed. A history of bad foreign policy decisions on the part of the US is partly to blame for that. But it's really just a small part, I think. There is a spreading mythology about US power, and the malign influence of our culture, our markets, our military might. As preparations for the war have ramped up, and as the anti-war movement has ramped up, I have become increasingly amazed at the breadth and ferocity of hatred for the US, and what I take the US to stand for. And although I am nominally anti-war, I find it impossible to identify with those who cannot manage to see that Islam, as it is practiced throughout most of the Middle East, is straightforward misanthrophic tyranny, not one among many acceptable ways of life. My breath leaves me when I contemplate the moral atrophy of those who seriously propose that American values, or, say, George W. Bush, is a greater threat to humankind than a malignant ideology of mystical authority, institutionalized violence, and the systematic dehumanization of women and non-believers. Those of us who hold our Enlightment heritage dear can feel nothing but horror at the resurgence of pre-modern irrationalism and disgust at the willingness of those who enjoy the blessings of reason and freedom to declare solidarity with this undiluted hatred for the human. I don't consider opposing the war as important as opposing a doctrine and a culture that effectively enslaves millions, stunts the expression of creativity and intellect, and treats women like dogs. The case against the war is mildy convincing. The case against radical Islam is damning and airtight. It has repeatedly struck me that, after the relative successes of the civil rights and women's movements, the left has been casting about wildly for something at which to aim their righteous, moralizing fury. Well, how about the folks who take the heads off their daughters for getting raped? How about the folks who murder Americans en masse, and promise to do it again? How about the ideas that animate them? But no. Instead we are given to believe that the problem is our failure to understand and appreciate the complex and fascinating beliefs, mores, and folkways of the fundamentalist Islamic peoples. And that George W. Bush is Hitler incarnate. Something has gone wrong. If I thought the invasion of Iraq was a sure first step toward eradicating the politics of radical Islam, then I think I'd be for it. It may be that in my heart of hearts I hope for Paul Wolfowitz's wildest dream. But I remain unconvinced that we won't make it worse, as we are so very capable of doing. Still, I have little wisdom, and don't know the way forward. My libertarian soul wishes we could just shut up and keep to ourselves, but I'm afraid we can't. I envy almost everyone. You all make it look so easy.

Base Ten Gets Me Down -- I turned thirty today. Life goes on.

Crash -- Apparently my web hosting service's servers crashed some time last night. Apologies to anyone who tried to visit and came up 404.

WWMLKD? -- Am I the only one who finds it distastefully presumptuous to invoke Martin Luther King's memory for the anti-war cause? I have no idea what the man would have thought of our present situation, and I doubt others are in a much better position. I guess when you do such an awful job making a moral case against the war, you'll take whatever associations of moral authority you can muster. (And this from someone who is by no means in favor of the war.) [UPDATE: One of Glenn's readers sent him this link to a piece by MLK on Zionism and anti-Zionism. King argues that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-semitic, which is, as Glenn notes, a position not likely to be well-received by some anti-war protestors. However, I don't believe any of us can divine what King would have thought of the present claims the Palestinians, had he been more fullly aware of their plight and their tactics of retaliation. Nor can we venture to guess whether King would see a war against Iraq as a mission of liberation, or an act of dangerous and uwarranted aggression. It has been a long time since he died. And King was nothing if not an independent mind. It does no honor to his memory to make him a posthumous ideologue.] [MORE: OK, I turns out the MLK letter I linked to is bogus. Glenn's got the skinny. Chuck says in a comment below that he thinks MLK's position would have turned out about the same as Jesse Jackson's. Maybe, but I think MLK was a far more intelligent man than Jackson is, had a more independent mind, and a far more developed and discerning moral sensibility. Which is not to deny he would have been against the war; there's a good chance he may have been. But the Iraq affair has several layers of moral ambiguity, and the arguments on both sides have great merits that I believe MLK would have understood. In any case, this kind of question is about as useful and unanswerable as "Would Jefferson (Thomas, not George) have been a Republican?" The only reason to answer it either way is to try to create a halo effect for your own opinions that cannot be achieved by genuine argument.]

Right or Happy? -- In a comment on the "Keeping it Real" post below, Julian glibly defines an intellectual as one who would rather be right than happy. Well, I don't think that can be right. I'd rather be happy than right, no doubt about it. Experience machine, here I come! My problem is that I have a neurotic urge to be right. I just can't help trying to be right. (I should say, not about everything - there're lots of fights in which I've no dog.) It would be wonderful if there was some kind of pre-established harmony here, where the lack of ignorance is bliss. But, no.

Now, I do think that we're all stuck with a disposition to regard the feeling of having truth as integral to happiness. We can't just say out loud, with full awareness, "Sure! The religious stories around which I build my life are nothing but elaborate fictions, and there is a largely unconscious conspiracy to create an environment in which the social and psychological costs of rejecting this tangled skein of falsehood is higher than just going along," and then believe all the same. The point of this kind of tacit conspiracy is to insulate believers from psychological dissonance--to maintain a milieu in which it is possible, even easy, to believe that the stories are literally true, so that one can derive whatever value there is in them, including the satisfying feeling of having posession of the truth, without having to seriously confront the divergence of tale from fact.

It is precisely the need to reduce uncertainty, to feel sure, that makes it hard for certain intellectual types to be satisfied. I can't escape or dismiss the high likelihood of my own self-deception, delusion, and habits of confabulation. So my defining commitments are cast under a shadow of doubt, and my sense of my self becomes indistinct, which is unpleasant. I try to be Zen about it, and convince myself that the self is an illusion anyway, but it doesn't help.

It strikes me the Marie Gryphon is a bit optimistic in her smart post on the happy/right issue. She argues that by deferring to "opinion leaders" who appear to have happy followers, one is pursuing a generally rational policy for getting at the truth. All I see in such opinion leaders is the leader of a succesful conspiracy of belief. The relationship to truth eludes me. Furthermore, I think Marie's undersestimating the role of epistemic deference in the intellectual lives of even very independent minds. Almost everything I believe, somebody else told me. In this, I'm just like everybody else. We all make extensive use of the cognitive division of labor. What makes me different from many other people is that I have different policies for when to believe what people tell me. However, I adopted these policies rather than others in no small part due to my deference to certain people I regarded as experts in good policies. But it never ocurred to me that I should prefer to adopt policies for deciding when to believe what I'm told from experts with happy customers. And, for the sake of truth, it's probably a good thing too.

Marie writes that, "Most everyone is pursuing a rational strategy for finding truth," and I wish she was right, but I can't quite believe it. No doubt, most are pursuing rational strategies for generating the feeling of having the truth, but that's not the issue. Now, there is a trivial way in which Marie's claim is true. Keeping your eyes open is a good strategy, and most everyone does it. And if you want to know which way to take the Red Line to get to Woodley Park, then asking's about as good as revelation, and we're all in the habit. But when it comes to the big questions -- what it means to be a human being, or what a just society is, or what happens to us when we die -- rational strategies seem thin on the ground. If the world were teeming with rational strategies for getting at the truth, wouldn't we see rather less delusion?

Don't Mess With the Turtle! -- There are few feelings more exquisite than trashing Duke.

Globalization is Grand! -- Check out the Institute for Humane Studies' loverly new website on globalization, A World Connected. Too often, the debate about globalization proceeds in terms of tired, potted arguments. A World Connected gets past that by focusing on stories of real people around the world whose lives have been improved by increasing global interconnectivity. Check it out. And if you've got a blog, help IHS spread the word, and give A World Connected a plug.

Capitalism: For Anything You Want to Be -- I'm sure this point has been emphasized and re-emphasized to the point of excruciating boredom in the pages of Reason, but I just wanted to stress it myself. I was chatting with my roommate, who is very bright, and very reasonable, and has fairly refined taste. Thus, he tends to disdain fast food, and shopping malls, and big box stores, and so forth. He was complaining about the malign influences of consumer culture, mass marketing, and so forth that lead so many of us to lead small, shallow, blinkered lives. I felt compelled to point out that all his carefuly chosen classical and indie music CDs and the funky ethnic restaurants he likes are for-profit enterprises. Kramerbooks, where he had just purchased a Camus volume, is not a charity. Nor are the boys' dance clubs he frequents, or the stores here he shops for clothes, or buys his High Art Cinema DVDs. It's all capitalist consumer culture, I insisted, and you've used it very expertly to build a style and identity. The protesters constantly visiting DC use it to buy hemp necklaces, Chomsky books, Fugazi records, and so forth. National Review readers use it to buy William Bennett's Treasury of Heroic Stories for Warmongering Boys, Brooks Brother's blazers, Ronald Reagan commemorative plates, Veggie Tales videos, or whatever. So what's the problem? The problems were (1) marketing and advertising are coercive, and so people are getting what they're manipulated to want, not what's really good for them; and (2) in any case, people have shitty preferences, and it's a shame to have them catered to. The short replies are (1) how did you become immune to the evil coercive marketing forces of Big Corporation, and how is it that not everyone likes the same things?; and, (2) don't be a snot.

Keeping it Real -- [Autobiographical, free-associative, overwrought prose alert!] It's hard coming to grips with one's own deviance. No, I've no special interest in pre-owned panties, or spurs, but I have a self-conception that makes a fetish of getting at the truth about ourselves. But surely this is healthy; examined life and all that. Well, no. Most people keep truth in its place, looking for it only when they really need it, generally content with the consolations of self-deception and delusion. I have a hard time with this, and as a consequence, I have a hard time relating at more-than-superficial level with most people. I don't like this. I'm a very affable, and awfully sensitive, and so it stings when I'm more or less accused of inhumanity for claiming to know, for instance, that there is no gemlike flame of divinity flickering within our breasts; or that we are continuous with the lesser beasts; or that the multimedia, technicolor riot of consciousness is what it is because of the principles of electricity and chemistry played out in that blob of firm grey pudding between the ears; or that there is no cosmic plan for us, and no planner.

I went to church today, and not for a wedding. I went to church twice a week from birth to 17 or so. It's a form of life with which I am intimate, and sometimes I miss it very much, as an isolated expatriate might miss his mother tongue. I am not always happy with myself. I often fail to be what I hope, or fail to give people their due. Sometimes I am very lonely. Today, among alien Episcopalians, I choked back tears as we collectively announced our sinfulness, and petitioned for redemption. My voice wavered and broke as together we sang of our salvation, and the comfort of our constant companion. These stories and songs are in my bones, and sometimes I need to hear them. I hope the Episcopalians will not mind if I was so deeply moved by what is to me a metaphor, or that I had no choice, after the fact, to think of my rush of religious feeling in terms of the sudden activation of well-developed, but lately starved, sets of of neural networks. Consolation is consolation. Neurotransmitters are neurotransmitters.

Who knows? Walk into enough bars and you might end up a drunk.

It's a trick to maintain this tension. You should avoid it. Don't listen to me! We are glorious machines of meat, our remembered lives (that first kiss, say) registered as mere chains of proteins, which come and go, come and go, each iteration losing something, adding something, increasing the distance from truth with time. (How warm were her lips, really? What color was the sky?) The experience of choosing is a flattering report of decisions made; the feeling of openness an illusion of our ignorance. We are transient, patterned agglomerations of matter, and my matter and your matter will someday soon lose coherence and commingle dumbly with the huge mute universe. Yet the structured electrochemical tangle that make us us is not prepared to accept this.

We demand a sense of our permanence, a sense that our selves are solid, and that solid is not, as physics tells, mostly empty space. We need to believe in the purpose of the whole, and the transcendent import of the little miracle that is each free choice. And we are being watched, and we must be in good terms with the watchers, from whom all things flow. This we are prepared to accept. And rejecting it is a lot like walking everywhere on your hands: it's unnatural, uncomfortable, and people will look at you funny.

Taking the road less travelled makes all the difference not because it's less travelled but because you went one way rather than the other, and going one way rather than the other always makes all the difference. There's no way to calculate the opportunity costs, and to conclude that, yes, this was a profitable difference, really the best road. But it remains that there may be nothing better than to walk on one's hands the whole way, despite the stupefied stares, and despite all the kisses one is destined to miss when one's head is the wrong way 'round. Or . . .

The Heart of the Heart of the Heartland -- Michael Novak usually ticks me off, but when he writes poetically about Iowa, my hard heart softens.

The Heritage Foundation of the Left? -- That's the self-description of the leftist Commonweal Institute (via Instapundit). And, hey, it makes sense. Paleo-liberals are the new conservatives. They've got Ed Begley Jr. on their advisory board! Look out right-wing conspiracy! I'm amused by the overwhelmingly reactionary and oppositional tone of the website. It's all about countering the alleged malign influence of the powerful right-wing public relations machine. The problem that Commonweal seeks to solve is "an imbalance in the marketplace of ideas." This is funny, and it shows why Commonweal is coming out of the gate blundering. The theory they're working from here is that there is, in fact, an honest-to-goodness right-wing conspiracy. (Grover Norquist has meetings every Wednesday, you know!) And the way to stop the juggernaut is... to mimic it! (Quoting: " The best response to the pervasiveness of right-wing messaging is to use similar techniques.") That's the implicit slogan: "Commonweal: Building the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy". There is an obsession with communications strategy. If you click to learn more about Commonweal's raison d'etre you get an amusingly paranoid account of the success of the conservative and libertarian tanks. This is it, in a nutshell, with some minor embellishments: The Kochs, Coors', Scaifes, and a few other plutocrats gather secretly in the immense inner sanctum (mounted heads of endangered species dot the redwood paneled walls) of their undetectable mountain escape (each attended, naturally, by his own eight year old, third world, hunchbacked, spiritually broken, manservant) and outline a unified strategy for political domination. They put the word out (through special encrypted satellite telephones) to their Machiavellian savant operatives, who forthwith erect institutions in Washington. These institutions hire raving ideologues whose task it is to create carefully crafted propaganda cleverly disguised as "research," which they then feed to their allies in the media (who slyly camouflage themselves by propagating a myth--through the devious use of "studies" and "polls"--that the media is overwhelmingly Democrat), who then disseminate this misinformation to the minds of Americans everywhere, thereby creating "conventional wisdom", false consciousness, and Republican majorities. Those ingenious bastards! But really, it's comical. The error they're making is in thinking that conservatives and libertarians are simultaneously smarter and dumber than they really are. I know plenty of folks at Cato, Heritage, AEI, CEI, and some of the foundations. And... these folks are not strategic geniuses united in vision and purpose. However, lots of libertarians and conservatives are very smart in the sense that they produce sophisticated, original, and sound arguments. And thus, when they are able to communicate these arguments, they sometimes convince people. How about that! But this isn't considered. The Commonweal site reveals why the left has been losing: they have no strong arguments, but they don't know it! They've been so victimized by confirmation bias that the only conceivable explanation of the success of the rightish tanks is heaping helpings of dough, breathtakingly effective strategy, and sophistical rhetoric of the first order... anything but the content and appeal of the ideas themselves. Well, maybe the ideas come later. For now, it seems the Commonweal website is just a piece of development strategy. The message at this point seems to be: Don't those freakishly brilliant troglodytes of the right scare the living shit out of you? I bet they do! And you should be scared, because they're winning! And they're winning because they're a hell of a lot smarter than we are. But don't worry! We've captured enemy technology, reverse engineered it, and now we can use it and win too! So give us money, before it's too late! And I'm sure they'll manage to drum up plenty of cash. Who can say "no" to Ed Begley Jr.? [Update: I don't really buy into the left/right uni-dimensional thing; and I don't much identify with conservatives. I'm probably to "the left" of folks at Commonweal on civil liberties and consensual crime. But when people with bad categories lump you with people you don't necessarily belong with, and then piss on all of you, it's hard not to see fellow pissees as confreres.]

Marketplace of Ideas? -- Oh, and does an imbalance in the marketplace of ideas even make sense? At the commencement of their theory of conservative hegemony, the Commonwealers cite the following, under the heading "There is an imbalance in the marketplace of ideas": “It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market…” - US Supreme Court, 1969, Red Lion Broadcasting vs FCC (Upholding the Fairness Doctrine) Why is this there? The implication seems to be that inspired right-wing strategy has lead, or is leading, to the monopolization of the marketplace. However, since the First Amendment is as robust as ever (that is, the market is operating under conditions of fair competition), thanks in part to libertarians and classical liberal Republicans, the obvious implication of the quote is that the truth is coming to the fore, and that's why the left is doing so poorly. Of course, you can't be of the left and believe that your principles have been found wanting in the process of free deliberative discourse. So you have to devise an alternative explanation. Hence the conspiracy theory. And hence the conviction that there is an imbalance. If the equilibrium state of the market tracks truth, and you know your ideas are true, but the market isn't tracking your ideas, then there must be some factor distorting the market. It seems a rather desperate set of ideas to be founding a think tank upon.

Lott's Revival of Anti-Republican Hysteria -- My mostly a priori analysis of the midterm elections is that the Democrats had a hard time mobilizing their minority base, and the reason why is that Bush has made inflammatory scare-the-shit-and-thus-votes-out-of-black-people tactics less effective. How? Colin Powell and Condi Rice. That's how. When blacks see that Bush has put Colin and Condi in charge of more or less defending the free world, and is happy to defer to their judgment, it's hard to sell the argument that a vote for Republicans is a vote for throwing black children to wild dogs. Preferring one major party to the other is hardly sufficient to motivate most people to vote. They need to believe that if the other guys win, it will be a DISASTER. Enter Trent Lott waxing nostalgic about systematic racial oppression. Well, that's all it takes. That's more than it takes. "The Republican Senate Majority Leader wants you to sit in the back of the bus, drink from different fountains, go to different schools. Do you want to be a second class citizen? Vote Democrat." Lott and his moral retardation is manna from heaven for the Democrats. If the Republicans don't can him and his ridiculous coiffure, I hope the Democrats make the most of it.

Young Americans -- Every month or so, I guess, the government swears in new citizens at the GMU building next door to the law school in Arlington, and I tend to pass bunches of these newly inducted Americans on my walk to work. It brightens my morning. Here we have Indians, and various sorts of Africans, and Malaysians, and Koreans, very young and very old, standing on the sidewalks waiting for their rides, holding little American flags, wearing little buttons that announce that they too are now Americans, all beaming in the same human way. Their excitement and relief is transparent and palpable. These people, from every corner of the globe, are thrilled to now be Americans. And that makes me thrilled to be American, to be a member of a political community that doesn't much care where you came from, or what language you speak, or what God you do or don't worship. In light of the diverse menagerie of flag-wielding humanity on the sidewalks of Clarendon, the criticism that the U.S. is insular, racist, or intolerant seems, well, just bizarre. Try to become a citizen of Germany, or Japan. This here is a place that cares nothing of "blood," or of what patch of land from which your ancestors hailed, but only of willing allegience to a set of principles. I wish it was even easier to become a citizen, that there were even fewer hurdles to membership. But even so, there is something very fundamentally right about our official lack of xenophobia, and something pretty incredible about the willingness of people from thoroughly different cultures, with thoroughly different habits of thought and living, to assent to our principles, and to actually live together peacefully and advantageously on their basis. That's an incredible achievement of civilization. To all the folks who just joined the American club: Very glad to have ya, and good luck! I'll see ya around.

Language Mavens Blow -- Linda Hall, in this Hudson Review essay, laments the degradation and trivialization of English. This sort of thing is boring. One gathers mostly that the author is pleased with herself for the excellence of her diction, the range and precision of her vocabulary, and her intimacy with literary greatness. It's also easy to suspect the academic humanist's universal need to generalize to a trend from a small fund of anecdote. Yes, even the smart kids say "hooked up", "you rock!", "that sucks", and so forth. This does not mark a general decline in "our" sensitivity to fine language. If there was some way to measure it, I'd suspect that there are rather more, not fewer, youngish people well in touch with our English High-Art Literary Heritage. Check the sales trends of the "classics." I bet there are more who can speak and write with admirable fluency than a generation ago. Ms. Hall may be distracted by some social trends. Many more people complete college educations, and so college educations don't distinguish as they once did. Also, popular culture is increasingly a lingua franca among an increasingly diverse population. And our work culture is rather egalitarian, rewarding general competence rather than effete fixation on "correct" English (otherwise, I'd be paid a lot more!) And so it pays to speak the common tongue. But we can switch easily between dialects, while our abilities to frame thoughts vividly, and to express subtle distinctions, remain intact.

Happy Blogiversary to Me!-- It doesn't seem that long ago, but The Fly Bottle is now over a year old. (It was November 23, to be exact). This is a pretty low-volume, low-traffic site, and Instapundit and others get more hits in a day or so than I've seen in a year.... nonetheless, I think it's nice that I've had 40,000 hits since I've started.

My Man, Trotsky -- I found myself amazed to be nodding in agreement at the end of Mick Hume's New Statesman piece on Trotsky (via A&L Daily). He writes: The left-right debates or class divides of Trotsky's time mean little in politics now. New divisions are taking shape, perhaps most importantly between those who champion progress and change and those who resist it. Every argument against change is posed in moral terms, whether it be about our duty to conserve the environment or the alleged dangers of embryo research. The supposedly ethical argument seems always to be the conservative one for restraint, aiming to put a brake on scientific or social advance. Yet by the standards that Trotsky acknowledged in very different circumstances, the progressive view remains the moral one, especially if it "leads to increasing the power of humanity over nature and the abolition of the power of one person over another". It seems Virginia's ideas are getting through to the not-quite-but-close Trotskyites at the New Statesman. Anyway, he's right about the new alignments. In the face of the evidence, Marxists can give up their progressive humanism, give up on evidence, or both (which is dispiritingly popular). Congratulations to Hume for sticking with progress and people, at least.

I'm Not Dead -- I haven't been entirely unproductive for over a month. I posted a couple items, reproduced below, on Stand Down. However, I forgot to mirror them here. Full-time job + grad school do cut into one's blogging time.

Jonah Goldberg: Egalitarian -- Jonah Goldberg sounds a dissonant egalitarian note in his reply to Nick Gillespie in the Tech Central Station debate. Now, we can expect Jonah to be vehemently opposed to the redistribution of wealth in domestic policy, or for the purposes of foreign aid. Yet he appears to find it plain commonsense that we should sacrifice both wealth and liberty so that others may be more free. He writes: So in a very serious sense, I think the anti-war folks who claim that war is the enemy of freedom are often deeply selfish and myopic. Too often they look at captive nations and threatened populations abroad and say "you're on your own" if it means higher taxes for a few - and most likely temporary - losses of convenience at home. In the truly grand scheme of things this position makes peace-at-all-costs the true enemy of liberty because its adherents hold that the basic rights of millions or even billions are not worth any sacrifice at home. Jonah's reasoning here is stunningly similar to the reasoning of leftist egalitarians who find that it is "selfish and myopic" for conservatives and libertarians to oppose "higher taxes or a few . . . losses of convenience at home," on the grounds that liberty will suffer. If Jonah is willing to admit the general principle that the state may legitmately coerce sacrifice for the sake of improving the prospects of others, then it seems that what divides him from his leftist brethren is merely a question of the best goods to be redistributed, and the means for doing the distribution. Jonah might reply that economic redistribution does not in general actually make people better off economically. And that would be a good reply. But it applies equally well to the use of war to make people better off in terms of liberty. The ongoing prospects for liberated peoples depend on much more than throwing out the despots. Freedom, in the long run, is a matter of stable institutions. And instititutions aren't pieces of paper, they're patterns of behavior that depend fundamentally on the shared beliefs and aspirations of a people. Freedom won't blossom because we've rained fire on the tyrants. Freedom has to percolate from below, as a conservative should know. Ending one regime simply makes room for another. And the character of the new one will depend largely on what the people there are like, what they believe in, and what they want for themselves. If liberated people eventually choose against liberty, are we obliged to stop them? Are we obliged to serve as colonial governors, and give people no choice but to accept the institutions of liberty -- force them to be free? Are we selfish and myopic if we refuse to do so? Jonah's examples of good wars of liberation in his reply to Nick all involve liberating places with a deep-seated tradition of liberty. But Iraq set free from Hussein seems more likely to resemble Belarus set free from the Soviets than France set free from the Nazis. In the end, Jonah's appeal against our selfishness and myopia are no more persausive than the left-egalitarians' appeals. Even if we set aside the questionable moral legitimacy of redistributive coercion in any case, we would need to believe that the point of the coercion would be fulfilled; that people will in fact be made in the long run richer, or more free. Jonah has not begun to show this to be true.

Buying Hegemony -- This Franklin Foer article in the New Republic, about a liberal scholar of Islam, Khaled Abou El Fadl, caused me to experience immense gratitude for the ability to dissent freely and without fear. Those of us who participate in forums like this one should read it, and reflect on the immense importance of our intellectual and expressive freedom and the need to fiercely preserve it. The war against terrorism, I believe, is fundamentally a war of ideas, which, as this article shows, the Saudi Wahhabists are winning, and which, I fear, a war against Iraq will obscure. Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at UCLA, has been harassed, threatened, and tortured for his fairly conservative, but relatively liberal, views on Islamic theology. The real story is that the totalitarian plutocratic Saudi powers-that-be have created an "offer you can't refuse" incentive structure for scholars of Islam. Your choices: hundreds of thousands of dollars, and endowed chairs, for supporting the party line OR harassment, torture, and death for dissent. The Saudi tactic has effectively created a monolithic edifice of extreme fundamentalist dogma that the average Muslim cannot help but perceive as authoritative, and silenced any Islamic scholar of any credibility who might contribute to an intellectual resistance. This is the ideology of bin Laden and his henchmen, and it is the root of the terrorist threat. And this is where the attention of intellectuals concerned with the preservation and spread of liberal ideals should be directed. We don't even have to look far from home to see its influence. Such bastions of intellectual freedom as Harvard, Berkeley, and Oxford, having accepted generous infusions of Saudi money, threaten to serve as unwitting tools of Saudi theocrats bent on expanding an ideology tailor-made for creating subjects both compliant and fanatically opposed to basic human liberties. So what does this have to do with the war on Iraq? Well, the administration's rather incredible line is that Iraq is in cahoots with al Qaeda, and that ousting Sadaam is part and parcel of ridding the world of terror. But by all accounts, Sadaam is at best orthogonal to the most pressing threats to our security. The argument over the war on Iraq, though unfortunately necessary, is a distraction from the deeper causes of terrorism, and leaves the fundamental and seemingly inevitable battle of ideas and cultures unjoined. In any case, check out the TNR piece. It's disturbing.

Liberating Iraq -- (also posted on Stand Down) After compiling a list of the truly sordid accomplishments of Saddam Hussein's government, "The Counter Revolutionary" writes: "Again, I ask -- how can a moral person stand against the liberation of Iraq?" The quick answer is, well, a moral person can't. But that's not the question. The question is "Should these United States of America liberate Iraq?" It's a different question, and it has a different answer. I'm unequivocally in favor of Hussein's ouster, and for his replacement by a relatively liberal regime. Indeed, I'm unequivocally in favor of the liberation of the entire world! I can hardly begin to enumerate the nations in which the people are oppressed, killed, allowed to die, starve, deprived of liberty, of the insitutions necessary prosperity and the realization of human capacities, and more. Yes, I'm in favor of the liberation of everyone, and what kind of moral imbecile isn't? However, must a moral person support an invasion of Iraq sponsored by the hardworking taxpayers of the U.S.? By no means. The depravity of a totalitarian regime makes it permissible for someone to liberate the people who suffer under that regime. But that does not imply that it is permissible for the U.S. to undertake the liberation of Iraq. There is no doubt that Hussein is beastly, and that he deserves nothing but the most terrible hell. However, that a criminal deserves punishment, or that a people deserve liberation, does not entail that just anyone may dispense it. For instance, I may not personally execute John Mohammed, although he richly deserves execution. The wanton violation of rights is not a sufficient condition for the iniation of war. Those who wish to invade Iraq on liberal, humanitarian grounds need to show that other liberal conditions for a justified war are satisfied. If it is morally permissible for the U.S. military to attack Iraq, then the moral purpose of a military is served by doing so. What's the moral purpose of the military? To provide the citizens of the nation the public good of defense against foreign aggression. That's why the pertinent question is whether there is evidence that Iraq is a palpable danger to the lives and liberties of U.S. citizens. And that's why the character of Hussein's regime, or the suffering of the Iraqis, is not pertinent to the justification of a U.S. invasion. Because the evidence that Iraq is a genuine threat is so meager, support for war at this point is not justified. If the awful plight of the Iraqis under Hussein in fact required moral U.S. citizens to support war, then I believe that we would have to be comitted to very radical general principles of redistributive justice. If the fact of Hussein's evil, and of Iraqi suffering, is sufficient to create a claim on the earnings of U.S. citizens (to fund the invasion), then I cannot see how the evil visited upon people all over the world by predatory leaders and backward-thinking economic ministers does not likewise create a claim on the earnings of U.S. citizens. This should give pause to libertarians who are tempted to support war on humanitarian grounds. And perhaps some egalitarian leftists might wish to reconsider whether they are really opposed to this kind of war after all.

We all complain about what we do, but short of being an actual professor, I think I've got about the best job a philosophy/politics geek could want. Here I am (I mean RIGHT NOW), one floor down from my office in the GMU Law School, in a room with Bob Cooter (Yeah!), Gerd Gigerenzer (Yeah!), Robert Frank (Boo!), Cass Sunstein (Double Boo!), Vernon Smith (Double Yeah!), and various other intellectual luminaries arguing with each other about the Law and Economics of Irrational Behavior. Well, that's just cool. In two weeks, I go to St. Louis to eavesdrop on a discussion of Douglass North's new book manuscript. I can't imagine a grad program that could possibly provide me with so much exposure to first rate, bleeding edge, social thought. It's like a moveable interdisciplinary department that has the social science all-stars as the faculty. Or like the intellectual wannabe's version of being a stagehand at Woodstock. Lucky boy! OK shouldn't be doing this... back to taking notes... Varieties of Internalization via cognitive dissonance or self-perception... OK.

Poetry Wednesday -- Was going through old files and found another good bad poem. Aristotelian metaphysicians will like this one. Enjoy! Love and Accident Can I love you if you’re more radiant than stars, If you’re Sardanapalus rich, or Einstein-minded? A person is not a property, Though a single lack may be enough For unlove. You are not bald for want of a single hair, Nor do you disappear having lost faith in Democrats. Yet neither does a gemlike you-ness abide Nestled just left of your human rights. We are packages of accidents, hung upon nothing. Some swarm in league and cause shambles prised away. Some molt like skin, lost at no great price. Which are which, though, is an utter mystery; Our best efforts merely glancing the lovable core. In the end there is what you want to be loved for, And that in you which I love. O’ Lord I pray, may these sets coextend! And in the case of disjunction, May we be ignorant of our reasons And lucky in corruption.

Whig Out! -- I do believe I'm a whig. As my researches into the self-deceptive grounds of ideological commitment continues, I find ideological identification less and less appealing. The thing about "isms" is that while they may accurately account for most of one's views, avowed identification with an "ism" communicates an emotive commitment to an intellectual/political identity, and not simply agreement with a set of propositions. This is distasteful if your first allegience is to the truth, and you would be willing to give up any proposition whatsoever (and any identity based on its truth) in the face of countervailing evidence. That's why I want to call myself a "whig," since it captures the core of my political views, but does not convey solidarity with a living political/intellectual lifestyle, as "libertarian" might. Here's Ken Binmore, in his absolutely fascinating and funny Game Theory and The Social Contract, Vol 2: Just Playing, on whigs: ... we whigs are for economic and political freedom, thrift, self-help, and equality of opportunity. Our enemies are either the advocates of big-spending government intent on creating a lickspittle citizenry, or else the corrupt backers of arbitrary government and ancient privelege. Of course, if too many other people start calling themselves whigs, and turn it into an identity, I'll toss it out. But for now, whiggery rules!

Religion, Morality, and Metaphysics -- Here's a great quote from David Gauthier (twice as good as Rawls, but an 1/8 as famous!) pertaining to the post below: Religious practice and religious language are, or until recently have been, ubiquitous in human life. But if we take religion at face value, and ask ourselves what must be the case if the claims of religion, literally construed so that they possess ordinary truth-value, are some of them to be true, then we find ourselves driven into an account of the world that is prodigal in admitting into its ontology entitites that play no role in our best explanations and justifications. ... The only theory of religion that, to my mind, has the least credibility, is an error theory. [I am not the least easy about this, but] I should be even more uneasy were I to suppose that morality would share the fate of religion, so that our moral claims, literally construed, would, to be true, require us to accept a prodigal and ultimately incredible ontology. Putting metaphysics first means building a moral theory that does its job with the materials actually provided by nature, and not with "exalted entitites," to use Rawls's phrase.

Morality for Adults -- I want to butt in on the methodological conversation between Eve and Julian, which you should probably read first. Eve speaks of the Objectivist "Birthday Cake of Existence," according to which metaphysics is the base, and epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics are piled on in that order. Other than aesthetics, this is right! My former teacher Michael Devitt likes to say, "Put metaphysics first!" And that's key. Metaphysics is the study of what there is. Well, what is there? There are rocks, cats, trees, and so forth, which we know from ordinary experience. Science tells us what else there is: genes, quanta, and so forth. That's where we start, with our list of stuff drawn from common sense and science. But isn't epistemology really first? I mean, how do we know that we know that there are rocks, cats, and trees? Well, we do know. That's the data for an epistemology. If your epistemology implies that we don't know that there are rocks, trees and cats, so much the worse for your epistemology. Roderick Chisholm distinguished between particularism and methodism in epistemology. Descartes and Hume are the paradigm methodists. They came up with pretty abstract theories, that is, methods for determining what would count as knowledge, and then went on to see what putative knowledge could clear their theoretical hurdles. Turns out, not much! Thomas Reid, the Rodney Dangerfield of Modern epistemologists (and the paragon of particularism), rightly pointed out that folks like Descartes and Hume pretty clearly had to claim to know that their epistemological theories were true. But are Cartesian and Humean epistemological assumptions really on firmer ground than the existence of cats? Well, no. There are cats. If your epistemology can't handle cats, then it isn't worth a bag of hair. But how about genes, protons, synapses and the like? That's trickier than common sense knowledge. Why should we think we know that such funny mostly invisible things are part of the Inventory of the World? Well, we slide into a bit of unsophisticated epistemology to figure out some of our metaphysics. The best argument for scientific entities is the argument from predictive and technological success. Our theories that posit these things have made us successful in predicting and controlling the world. The best explanation for that success is that those theories are pretty much right. So, we've got out list. But we've also got more. We include scientific entities on our list, because they account for predictive & technological success. But how did we find out about them? Science! Now, it's pretty incredible this success of science. And science is a way of knowing stuff, like what exists. So, like Quine, we should regard science as the knowledge gathering enterprise par excellence. Now science, it turns out, is going to tell us lots of things about the way our minds process information, and what kinds of cognitive mechanisms produce reliable belief. And this knowledge can be turned around to improve science, which improves our knowledge about how our minds gain knowledge, and so on and so on. Now, Eve pretty much suggests that we should be a kind of epistemic particularists about ethics. Maybe we should start with a list of things we know are wrong, like killing babies, and use the items on the list as constraints for the adequacy of our ethical theories. Isn't a moral theory that can't account for the absolute wrongness of baby-killing like an epistemological theory that can't account for cats -- not worth a box of mulch? I don't think so! In order to be secure in the parallel, we'd have to know that the data we derive from ethical intuition derive from mechanisms of belief formation as reliable as the processes that lead us to believe that there are cats. But we have good reason to think the opposite! That the mechanisms of ethical belief formation aren't truth tracking, because truth tracking isn't really their function. In the ancestral evolutionary environment, we certainly needed mechanisms that would inform us of the presence of cats, lest the cats eat us. So it is not surprising that most brain-heavy species have very reliable mechanisms for ascertaining the existence of things like cats, and for categorizing those things with more or less precision. But what's moral intuition good for? We'll it's good for jiggering with the payoff matrices for social choices in order to promote fitness enhancing moves in social games. Built-in visceral baby protectiveness is a damn good way to protect your next-generation gene vehicles. Visceral anti-incest sentiments are a good way not to waste perfectly good germs cells, and so on. But I think we might do well question whether we need to take the wrongness of incest, say, as a datum for moral theory, since the reasons that incline us to confidently regard it as wrong have nothing much to do with morality. So, no, we should not be particularists in moral theory. We really do have to develop a general method for determining what things count as right and wrong, largely independent of our intuitions about it. Now, I think morality is, on the personal level, about having a happy, satisfying, meaningful live, and, on the social level, morality amount to a "cooperative endeavor for mutual advantage". Basically, I'm stipulating that this is what morality is about, although I do think it captures a great deal of what we intuitively take morality to be about. If you don't want to call this morality, then that's fine. It's up to you. But then we might wonder why we ought to care about morality, so construed. What we have to find out about it what it really means to have happy, satisfying, meaningful lives, and what is necessary to facilitate effective cooperation for mutual advantage. Religion and tradition may help us to some extent, by pointing to emergent solutions to the problems of living. But we should not rely on it. The work for morally serious people is in discovering how human beings mentally represent alternatives courses of action and payoff structures, how they learn and act on cultural norms, how institutional structures relate to socially norms and provide incentives that result in beneficial patterns of behavior. What's happiness, really? How do we best achieve it, given our biological nature and socio-historical condition? This is, as David Gauthier put it, "morality for adults, for persons who live consciously in a post-anthropomorphic, post-theocentric, post-technocratic world."

Tantamount to Disbelief -- A reader of Arab News asks, with more than merely academic interest, whether anal sex is indeed forbidden(scroll down) by Islam. The author of the peculiar theological advice column (also touching on whether to punish a teenage girl who prays during her period) finishes his reply by writing: Besides, several Hadiths confirm this in very clear terms. A man came to the Prophet and asked him whether it was permissible to have sex with his wife from behind. The Prophet answered in the affirmative. As the man was on his way out, the Prophet called him back and said: “Consider what I have said: from behind, but in the front.” I suppose nothing could be clearer than this. In another Hadith, the Prophet mentions ten sinful actions that are tantamount to disbelief. One of these is “anal sexual intercourse with women.” I suppose no expression of prohibition could be stronger than describing an action as tantamount to disbelief. Now, I'm fascinated by the fact that the Prophet had a considered, undoubtedly God-endorsed, opinion on the propriety of doggy style versus backdoor. I grew up in a church that relies on ongoing prophesy, but the messages that came through the God-phone were always so general. Prophet Wallace B. Smith thankfully never had anything to say about how to get busy. Probably you could rank religions from best to worst in terms of the invasive specificity of their moral commands. (Taoism rules!) Anyway, its always good to be reminded of the stupidity and credulousness of which we humans are capable when in a religious mode. And I would encourage everyone to express their disbelief explicitly, or, if you wish, through actions merely tantamount to disbelief.

Shut Up! -- Helicopter circling College Park. It's 2 am. Looking for sniper? Go to bed.

On the Eve of Personhood -- Eve Tushnet comments on some points of mine (and Julian), thusly: I think Julian is ignoring the difference between valuing individuals in a rational species, and valuing currently-existing rational mentalities. Will Wilkinson does this too, actually, when he accuses anti-cloners of assigning metaphysical status to a tangle of DNA. (Later, here, Wilkinson conflates not-gonna-be-rational-again individuals with pre-rational individuals. OTOH, he posted more complete notes than Julian did, so he wins in that regard.) The important thing about DNA is not that it happens to be a clump of human DNA--so is a toenail, or a foot, or a cancer, or a corpse. The important thing about the human DNA in, specifically, an embryo, is that it marks the presence of a living human individual. It is that individual whom I value. Individual rational beings go through more and less rational stages; our rationality develops; thus there is a period before we are rational. If I came across aliens who had rational and pre-rational stages, I would value these individual alien lives as I value individual, developing human lives. First, I didn't conflate "not-gonna-be-rational-again individuals with pre-rational individuals." Regarding the brain-damage case, I was merely offering a counterexample to the position that being an organism with human DNA is sufficient for full moral standing. Nor did I say anything whatsoever about rationality. It may be the case that some live, yet non-sentient, members of our species have full moral standing, even if terminally brain-damaged folks don't. But if so, then it has to be some feature other than having human DNA that accounts for that standing. Now, notice that "not-gonna-be-x-again" and "pre-x" are fancy ways of saying "not x". Perhaps there are some ways of not having full moral standing that are more important than other ways of not having full moral standing. Eve seems to suggest that"not" in the "not yet" sense is more morally special than "not" in the "not ever again" sense. Eve's talking about rationality, so let's talk about rationality. So, it's true that rationality develops. Well, OK... Getting bored.... So.... It just might be time for an Outrageous Thought Experiment! Suppose a mad scientist develops an implant that, when installed in a chimp brain, makes the chimp fully rational. (Cyborg chimps! YES!) The implants are mass produced, so that there is one per living chimp. Now, since all chimps that have a plug-in have become rational, all those without a plug-in are pre-rational -- they are potentially rational. Would we therefore be morally obliged to not kill pre-rational chimps? (Or, if you're sentimental about chimps, try wolves, or whatever). It might be objected that little humans will become rational as a matter of course. We don't have to do anything, like implanting a chip, to make that happen. But that's untrue! If we were to put an infant in a room deprived of sensory stimulation for a year, it would develop very little cognitively. We have to do plenty for our little humans. We have to allow them an extended stay in the womb, we have to feed them, we have to talk to them, we have to expose them to novel stimuli, we have to carry them around because they can't just follow us around or just hang on like a proper primate, etc. Of course, we do all that for our little humans as a matter of course, because we wouldn't exist ourselves if the disposition to do that sort of thing wasn't pretty well wired in. But can the relevant moral difference really be that we don't install implants in chimp brains as a matter of course, and so that's why pre-rational chimps don't have full moral standing? Suppose that certain human babies have a funny disorder: the won't develop rationality unless they are shown reruns of The Gong Show everyday for their first year. Now, we don't show the Gong Show as a matter of course, but if that would help our babies develop Reason, wouldn't we think that we'd be obligated to do it? So, either pre-rational chimps have full moral standing, or little humans don't. (I said it was outrageous.) Alright, sorry... but I do mean the thought experiment with about 65% seriousness. Let me lay out some relevant opinions about more foundational matters in a slapdash but hopefully comprehensible fashion. I differ from Julian in that I don't think anything is intrinsically valuable. NOTHING! Not being a member of our grand species. Not being sentient, sapient, rational, or what have you. NOTHING! All value is relative... [GASP!] And that doesn't mean bashing baby heads against bricks "might be wrong for you, but might be right for me." That means that values are indexed to valuers. Value is a n-adic relation, not a monadic property. So, if there's some object, process, event or whatever (let's get creative and call it 'X') and it turns out to be valuable, then that's because there's some person, call her "P", for whom it is valuable. So, for every X, if it's valuable, there is some P that stands in the value relation to X. But wait!There's more... argument places! If X is valuable to P, then P has some purpose for which X is constitutive or instrumental. So, I want to have a happy life. I've got a purpose. Suppose friendship is partially constitutive of a happy life. Well, then friendship is valuable for me. Suppose friendship requires the existence of some friends. Then the existence of some friends will be valuable to me. Friends are other people. So the existence of some other people will be valuable to me. Suppose one of my friends also want to have a happy life. Then I'm valuable to my friend, too. Look! We've got people valuing each others' existence, and no funny intrinsic values! Qua friend, my friend is not valuable because he's rational, or a member of the human species. Those are surely necessary conditions, as is being carbon based, I suppose, but those things aren't what make my friend valuable qua friend. It's a bunch of other stuff I wouldn't know anything about, because I don't have friends. Rationality's generally like that. It's good for other stuff we want. Lots of our ends have to do with other folks, and other folks figure into our ends quite prominently because of their Very Special Human Cognitive Abilities. But the thing that matters for each of us is how all that figures into our ends. The human world is shot through with value not because some things instantiate the hard gemlike flame of intrinsic value, but because we have purposes, and we figure in to each others' purposes in profoundly complicated ways. I've rather more to say... how tiny tiny humans do and don't fit into the network of human purposes... But I'm becoming loopy with sleepiness... I value sleep. Do cyborg chimps dream of electric genital displays?

Pinker's Natural Approach to Human Nature -- During the audience question period of the AFF biotech debate, I was surprised to discover that some conservatives took Julian and me to be denying that there is a human nature. I was perplexed. I had made a very strong statement to the effect that there is a human nature, and that we learn about it by studying biology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and the various sciences that study human behavior. Indeed, I was promoting the picture of human nature, almost to a tee, that is described in Steven Pinker's wonderful new book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Now, the naturalistic conception of human nature does radically depart from the Greco-Judeo-Christian conception of human nature. An accurate conception of human nature does not depend on the notion that humanness is an Aristotelian metaphysical essence. Indeed, an unorthodox, but philosophically compelling, view in the philosophy of biology, defended by Hull and Ghiselen, is that species are not natural kinds at all. Species are complexly bounded historically and spatially distributed individuals. Very, very roughly you are a member of a species S, just in case you are the offspring of members of species S. That is, you're a member of S just in case your heriditary line is traced back to a particular ancestral individual who divided off, through mutation or drift, from a different "mother" species. This provides for a kind of essentialism, but one very different from traditional essentialism, since here the essence of humanity has to do with location of a particular branch on the evolutionary tree. If, through a massively improbably series of events, a group of organisms genetically identical to human beings, evolved from, say, chimps, they would not be members of our species, even though there would be no feature whatsoever to distinguish them from humans. (Analogy: To use chimps a different way, if a chimp happened to type out a document word-for-word identical to Hamlet, it would not be Shakespeare.) Anyway, back to Pinker. Pinker's new book is intended to refute the common liberal dogma that human beings are nothing in particular, but can be socialized into anything at all. However, it is also useful for those who worry that if the religious conception of human nature is false, then there is no human nature at all. Indeed, Pinker's vision of human nature can support a broadly classical liberal politics. Anyone who cares about defending classical liberal values ought to take it as a project to defend those values on the basis of our best scientific picture of humanity, not on the basis of a picture of Man totally devoid of rational merit.

Full Moral Standing and Genetic Humanity -- Here are some notes I wrote in preparation for the AFF debate concerning the logical relationship between having human DNA and having personhood, or "full moral standing" as I'm calling it. I'm riffing off a quote from Ramesh Ponnuru. In a nutshell, there is no relationship, human DNA being neither necessary nor sufficient for full moral standing. Here are some notes that illustrate why Ramesh is full of shit. Ramesh: This being is valuable simply because it is a human being and not because of any traits — sentience, hair, the ability to protect itself — that it happens to possess. (Technically, of course, the "it" is wrong here.) It is a person from the first moment, rather than a mere body that becomes inhabited by a person as it develops (which would imply an untenable person-body dualism). You were once an embryonic human person." Human DNA is not necessary for full moral standing (FMS): Imagine that a mist-covered island is discovered in the crater of an unexplored volcanic lake. The excited press calls it Atlantis. Then, the world is stunned to discover that Atlantis is inhabited by creatures that look exactly like humans, and are capable of speaking ,laughing, reasoning, inventing, cooperating, exchanging, loving and so on. However, the world is stunned once more to discover that Atlanteans are not homo sapiens. Atlanteans and humans cannot interbreed. Genetic testing reveals that Atlanteans are descended from the now extinct species that also developed into both humans and chimpanzees. Atlantanteans, it turns out, can not only do everything humans can do, but live to 110, and are especially good at some things, like singing, mathematics, and Yahtzee. Question: Do Alanteans have FMS? If Atlanteans were mixed into the population at random, no one could tell them apart from humans. It would be absurdly arbitrary to argue that while Atlanteans have all the attributes we humans hold in the highest regard, they nevertheless do not have full moral standing. Conclusion: Human DNA not necessary for FMS Human DNA is not sufficient for FMS: You have human DNA. A piano falls on your head and you sustain massive brain damage. You are taken to the hospital. Although all of your organs are functioning very well (you're in good shape!), there is no activity in the parts of your brain that accounts for consciousness, and there is no prospect of starting it up again. You're declared brain dead, taken off life support, and allowed to die. This sort of thing actually happens a lot. Now, while it would have been possible to keep you alive indefinitely in a vegetative state, it was clear to all involved that when your ability to maintain an inner life was definitely gone, YOU were gone, and with you, your FMS. But you were still a coherent biological being with human DNA. Or, you're born with only a brain stem that governs autonomic functions. You are rightfully allowed to die. Conclusion: human DNA is not sufficient for FMS. Another argument: You drive around in a van and murder 10 people with a rifle. You are captured and sentenced to death by a court of law. You have human DNA. If having FMS requires nothing more than being human, and requires no other traits, then adding traits, such as being a cold-blooded murderer, cannot negate FMS (If FMS supervenes on nothing more than the simple fact of being human, then [If human, then FMS] is monotonic!). So, either the death penalty is murder, or simply being human is not sufficient for FMS. More, for fun: If simply having human DNA is good enough for having FMS, regardless of any other distinctively human attributes, then what exactly is it about human DNA that confers FMS? DNA is a sequence of molecules. What is it about the human sequence that is special. Exactly how does value supervene on sequences, such that it supervenes on the human sequence, and not other sequences? If it's just a matter of the molecular sequence, and not macro properties, that matter for FMS, how do we know that other animals don't also have DNA configured in a way that confers FMS? Maybe snails have FMS conferring DNA. Sure, snails don't have complex mental states, but if it's the molecular pattern that matters, it's the molecular pattern. So, what is the theory of intrinsically valuable molecular patterns? Why should we believe there is such a theory. On biological classification: Homo sapiens is a biological species. In virtue of what do members of this species have FMS while members of others species do not? Why is the species level the right place to draw the FMS line. Why not at the Family level. Suppose I say that primates have FMS. What's the argument against that? If the argument against drawing the FMS line well into gestation is that it is arbitrary, and gets us on a slope, so we'd better just draw the line at the beginning, then why not be really sure and just draw the line at primate membership instead. If some primates don't have FMS, how can we ensure that we do. So we better draw an inclusive circle, lest we get on a bad slope (bonobos don't have FMS, we're almost identical genetically to bonobos, so presumably we don't have FMS!) Suppose I am, in fact, a mutant, the first member of a new species. If that's the case, then the FMS circle clearly goes around homo sapiens plus me, because I'm evidently a person, even if I'm not technically a human. So if you argue for an exclusive circle rather than an inclusive circle, it's going to have to be on the basis of some phenotypic properties, because monkeys and men and mutants are pretty well the same thing looking at it from the genotype. And if I'm a mutant, the thing that makes me a person with FMS bviously ain't my membership in the species. So what does confer FMS? Certain psychological capabilities, clearly.

Biotech Debate Notes -- Since Julian posted his, here are some of my notes for Wednesday AFF biotech debate. You'll get the the thrust of some of what I said, although there was much more, and there's no guarantee that I actually said any of the following. More on the debate later.... ---------- [Thanks] This forum is advertised as concerning "issues that divide the right." Now, I doubt there's much sense in the left/right distinction, but it's certainly true that libertarians and conservatives share a number of important principles. To a certain extent, American libertarians and conservatives are both offspring of the Enlightenment classical liberal tradition, devoted to individual rights, the rule of law, free markets, and limited government. Now, libertarians and conservatives generally part ways when conservatives attempt to use the heavy coercive hand of the state to impose on all of us a narrow set of moral dictates. I was delighted to see that both Ramesh and Justin in their writings try to avoid giving the impression that they're up to this sort of conservative moral imposition. Instead, they acknowledge the moral authority of the libertarian philosophy by attempting to squeeze their convictions about cloning and genetic engineering into a compelling framework. Ramesh argues that therapeutic cloning is homicide, because embryos are destroyed in the process, and embryos are beings with full moral standing. Justin argues that genetic enhancement deprives children of their freedom by subjecting their nature to their parent's will. Now, if it's true that destroying an embryos is tantamount to homicide, and that choosing the color of your child's eyes enslaves them, then the stance of a defender of liberty would certainly be one of opposition. While it's nice that Justin & Ramesh acknowledge the appeal and power of libertarianism, their attempt to extend that appeal and power to their anti-cloning, anti-genetic manipulation preferences fails. Embryos are not persons, and destroying them is not homicide. Choosing improve your child's genome is not a form of enslavement. If Justin and Ramesh are to wear the libertarian mantle, rather than simply advocate the state imposition of their moral preferences, they must show these claims to be true. But this they cannot do, because their claims are false. If they want to be taken seriously, they need to provide us with argument rather than assertion. In a National Review piece, Ramesh writes: "This being [the embryo] is valuable simply because it is a human being and not because of any traits — sentience, hair, the ability to protect itself — that it happens to possess." It's all right to say this, but we need some reason to believe it. A newly minted human embryo is a cluster of cells almost indiscernible from a newly minted dog embryo. Ramesh says it is valuable, that it is a person, has full moral standing "from the first moment" simply because it's a human embryo. Now what makes the human embryo a human embryo, and hence valuable, while the almost identical dog embryo is just a dog embryo and not valuable. Well, the answer has to be that the one has human DNA, while the other doesn't. But DNA is just a sequence of recipes for building proteins. So, Ramesh's position comes down to the claim that some some sets of protein recipes confer intrinsic value, personhood, and full moral standing, while some don't. This is mystifying. What's the theory that explains how personhood emerges from certain sequences of molecules, but not from others, just in virtue of the pattern of the molecules. If Ramesh isn't depending on any tendentious theological assumptions, he needs to give us this theory if we are to treat his claim as anything more than aspirational bluster. In his Doublethink piece, concerning genetic enhancement, Justin writes, "Parents who choose their child's IQ, eye color, or athletic abilities, or tweak its genes to produce a musical virtuoso or math prodigy, are abrogating to themselves a frightening power over another human being. To the extent that biology determines our natures--which is to say, to quite an extent, though not in every way--there is no freedom if other people are manipulating the parts without our consent." Freedom is the absence of coercion or constraint. Justin needs to explain to us how tweaking genes to amp a kid's IQ coerces them or constrains their choices in any way. Directly intervening to ensure blue eyes is no more coercive than a blue eyed gal choosing a mate with blue eyes. And tweaking the genes for vertical leap seems no more constraining than sending the kid to basketball camp. I can't see the argument here. In the absence of an argument, we can't accept that genetic manipulation is coercive, and thus that the state ought to disallow it. Genetic science promises to be a huge boon for humanity. Embryonic stem cell research may open up therapies and cures for cancer patients, for Alzheimer's (which is why Nancy Reagan is now a champion), for diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and spinal cord injuries. All of today's discussants are winners in the genetic lottery. The pursuit of happiness is surely enhanced by triumph over disease. Reproductive cloning provides new hope for couples who want to have genetically related children, but now can't. Cheap and simple enhancements, rather than fostering inequality, may in fact level the playing field, in addition to curing childhood disease. Conservatives have been powerful and effective advocates for the idea that parents, not the state, are best at making decisions about the welfare of their own children. I hope they don't stop fighting for this idea. Progress can be unsettling. The advent of vaccines was met with religiously inspired outrage. Fortunately, the forces of science and freedom prevailed, to which millions of us owe our very lives. I personally remember the debate about in vitro fertilization. It was said that we should not meddle with nature, or play god. Now, however, we've gotten used to it, no one much cares, human dignity has been unsullied, and around 40,000 Americans conceived in petri dishes, walk among us. If we ban these technologies real people, with real hopes, dreams, aspiration, friends, and loved ones, will suffer and die. If you have a theory that says we have to let these people face agony and death, then it better be a damn good theory. But so far, opponents of biotechnology have shown us next to no theory at all. [Later on, when the issue of human nature came up, I had the occasion to say something like this....] In some sense the dispute over bio-engineering is probably not the deep issue here. The deep issue is about what it means to be human. From a purely secular perspective, and that's my perspective, human beings are the products of evolution by natural selection. To be human is to be a kind of animal with a certain set of genes. The thing that makes us special is that we have very unusual, complex and specialized brains that give us a spectacularly rich inner life, the possibility to relate to others on levels unknown to the rest of the animal kingdom, the ability to cooperate in complex ways for mutual advantage, and to articulate and reflect on all of this with an amazing degree of precision and discernment. But we didn't have to turn out this way. Evolution is a chancy process. Accordingly, human nature is not something that is not written into the deep structure of reality. What it is to be a human is a contingent historical fact that reflects countless improbable turns through the space of evolutionary possibility. Moreover, what we are is in no deep sense fixed. We have never stopped evolving. Human nature is changing, bit by bit, as we speak. We just happened to turn out this way. We might never have existed at all. Some other species very much like us, but different in important ways, might have existed instead. It follows that moral principles based in human nature are similarly contingent. If we had turned out differently, then the principles that ought to govern our behavior might have been different. Again, they aren't deeply inscribed in the necessary structure of reality. This may be unsettling to some of us, but it's TRUE. So you can either reconcile yourself to it, or retreat to the consolations of mystification and tradition. But it really is our reason that makes us special, and applying those powers to their utmost is precisely what leads us to the truth about our nature.

Vernon Wins!!!! -- Vernon Smith, one of the very, very good guys, was just awarded the Nobel Prize "for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms"! Vernon is a Professor of Economics at GMU and a colleague of mine here at the Mercatus Center. We're all extremely excited, since Vernon, who pioneered the field of experimental economics, deserves the recognition so richly. I'm still wiping away tears from hugging Vernon's lovely wife Candace, who is naturally immensely excited. In a flurry of enthusiasm she exclaimed, "I've got to find him! I've got to find him a kiss him, and tell him I don't love him any more! I mean, that I don't love him any more than I did before he won!!!" Congratulations Vernon!!!

Come to the Biotech Debate!!! -- The great conservative vs. libertarian biotech debate is impending. And you need to be there if you want to enjoy the Sanchez/Wilkinson intellectual pyrotechnics live and in person! (And, you know, Ramesh Ponnuru and Justin Torres doing their... thing.) Got a hot date? Bring 'em! Argue after about whether you'd give your future kids a genetic IQ boost! ("Honey, it's not "disgusting" it's just sorta like a prenatal Kaplan course.") Going to a concert instead? Don't be stupid! Julian looks like a rock star! (And if you try to give him red M&Ms, he'll throw a TV into a swimming pool.) In the unlikely event that we start losing, I'll do a striptease to distract the crowd. Lucky for you, I just trimmed my chest hair (though it remains plentiful and lush.) And moderator Judge Loren Smith is fairly dripping with Orson Welles sex appeal. So what's your excuse? Come! Where: Fund for American Studies 1706 New Hampshire Ave. NW Washington, DC (Metro: DuPont Circle, North Exit, right from elevator down Q St, left on NH, I think) When: Wednesday, October 9th 7:00 drinks (that's right! Drinks!!) 7:30 dinner and discussion RSVP to matthew@americasfuture.org

Iraq and the Awesome Powers of Ideological Insulation -- Much of my reading over the past year or so has centered on quirks of human reasoning. Though it is not exactly surprising to find out that our computational powers are limited, and that, instead of living up to Enlightenment ideals of capital 'R' Reason, we resort to to a kludgey toolkit of quick and dirty rules of thumb that work just well enough for Darwinian purposes, it is nevertheless humbling to understand in detail just how bad we are at thinking. This literature (bounded rationality, naturalized rationality, heuristics and biases, and so forth), once you get into it, will really erode your confidence in your ideological commitments. The phenomenon of confirmation bias, for instance, is very robust, and very unsettling. Confirmation bias has to do with the way we seek and process information, and it works like a one-way ratchet, pushing us ever deeper into our intellectual commitments. We seek and relish every bit of data that seems to support our views, and avoid and rationalize every bit of data that undermines them. We don't do it on purpose. We just do it. Which is what makes it troubling. And what makes our ideological opponents seem so willfully blind. So, believe it or not, this is a post about what I take to be the impending war on Iraq. The point is that after living in the literature of human fallibility for so long, I find that I cannot muster a position on the war that leaves my sense of intellectual honesty intact. In principle, I oppose war, since it involves killing people, consuming vast amounts of resources that could be put to use in the service of less grim satisfactions, and tends to erode our liberties. However, I also don't care to perish suddenly in a nuclear conflagration, or something equally horrible, precipitated by an ideology-mad, power-drunk, desperate dictator. What to do? Here are the main arguments, for and against. For: Hussein, has aided and is aiding the Al Qaeda murderers, and is developing WOMD that he may attempt to use against us. We need to punish him for his complicity, and secure our safety by effecting a "regime change" in Iraq. Against: All the accusations against Hussein are mere rumors. And attacking Iraq may "destabilize" the whole region, and bring about even worse terroristic reprisals. My problem: I have NO idea which is most likely to be true. My gut says prefer "against," but I don't know that the Administration is feeding us sheer bullshit. Maybe they know something that they can't safely spell out. Or maybe not. I DON'T KNOW. And I don't know that invading Iraq will or won't have bad consequences. It could turn out that we end up in a winning war against the sundry forces of Muslim evil and wind up liberating millions, and ushering in a new era of peace on earth. Or we could fuck things up horribly and end up with a decimated Manhattan or, God forbid, a high radiation zone inside the Beltway. It seems to me that NO ONE has enough information to pin reliable probabilities on either of these or alternative scenarios. The people who don't like war will find what seems to them very persuasive reasons to oppose it, and those who are keen to kick ass will find deep cogency in arguments to the effect that we must do so. Myself, I can only maintain a very anxious agnosticism. Such a stance is anxious because most of us prefer "cognitive closure," that is, a sense of having a firm grasp on why things have and will happen, over "integrative complexity," that is, a willingness to juggle and weigh contradictory explanations and arguments. In his paper, "Close-Call Counterfactuals and Belief-System Defenses: I Was Not Almost Wrong But I Was Almost Right," political psychologist Phil Tetlock shows that experts in world politics, and especially those who preferred closure, were likely to reject close-call counterfactuals that challenged their explanations for the past, but would happily embrace them when they protected their predictions from refutation. A close call counterfactual statement is a "what if", like "The Nazis would have conquered the USSR had they invaded two months earlier." This is all to say, that when we get it wrong, we're going to say, "Well, I WOULD have been right, if only so and so had done such and such," and when we get it right, we won't accept "Well, I would have been WRONG, except for the fact that so and so did such and such." Which is precisely the kind of asymmetry in the way we process information that locks us in to our prior commitments. We are almost impervious to refutation by events. My guess is that, whatever the outcome in Iraq (good I hope!), almost no one's prior commitments will be dashed. Everyone will have been at least almost right, or, if right, so clearly right that they obviously weren't almost wrong.

Doublethink Doublecross -- The America's Future Foundation (who recently made me a member as recompense for using my name and a quote from this blog in a fundraising letter without bothering to mention it to me first) purports to be "a network of America's next generation of classical liberal leaders" -- classical liberal understood as a broad category encompassing both conservatives and libertarians. (Dear AFF, please feel free to use any portion of this post for fundraising purposes) I've suspected for a while that much of the leadership of AFF wasn't so much classical liberal as plain anti-liberal reactionary. Why the suspicion? Well, take this anecdote from an AFF happy hour. A friend introduces me to two well-sloshed Irish-looking fellows in suits slouched over the bar. (One guy has something to do with AFF, the other, I think works for Bob Novak.) One guy loudly and drunkenly declares, "Catholicism is a philosophy of freedom!" I say, "Come again!?" He replies, "Freedom from sin!! Freedom to do the right thing!!!" I stare, stupefied. And then I think, this here is the right flank of the enemy. Smug, drunk, cigar smoking, Catholic conservatives in suits. The right flank. Why are we here together? What on Darwin's green earth do we have in common? And what else? Well, AFF has a little print magazine, Doublethink (.pdf). Now, either Doublethink's editor, Justin Torres, made a big fucking mistake, or he wants to straight-up alienate a good chunk of AFF's membership with his transparent bad faith. In his introductory remarks to the all new, all-reactionary biotechnology edition of the AFF organ, he writes, "Unlike this journal's discussions of other issues, we cannot, on this topic, pretend to straddle the fence between conservatives and libertarians." Since I'd guess at least 1/3 of AFF's regular patrons are libertarians, you'd think that'd be sorta tucked in there all inconspicuous-like. But no. That's the freaking pull-quote, run across two columns in huge, I mean, HUGE italicized font. So that's how it is, huh? So in general Torres and Doublethink "pretends to straddle the fence." Which means, what? That Torres does not consider it part of Doublethink's brief to provide a forum for genuine engagement between conservatives and libertarians. When the magazine appears to do so, well, that's a fence-straddling ruse. When the pretense is dropped, Doublethink (and AFF?), is (what's the word? Oh yes...) staunchly conservative. And libertarians, well libertarians can stuff it. One might have thought that AFF would take the opportunity to get some articulate, well-informed, pro-biotech libertarians and see how the libertarian and conservative views stack up. But why do that when you can just take the libertarians' membership dues and use it to tell them what they really ought to believe. The Doublethink biotech issue is chock full of the handwringing, gut-moralizing, sophomore philosophizing, sanctimony, and sheer bullshit bluster that we've come to expect from people who thrill to the prounoucements of Leon Kass (yes, there is an interview with Kass) and hail Hans Jonas as a "great philosopher of science." Having admitted that he is practiced in pretense, Torres himself goes on to write a pretentious and ill-reasoned essay in defense of disease, infirmity, senescence, and death (to be fair, that's not how he frames it). Because I like AFF in general, but because I care a great deal about scientific freedom, and about improving the lot of humanity, this issue really chapped my ass. I'm irate. So let's let off some steam and give the philosophical smackdown to just one representative passage from Torres. He writes: Parents who choose their child's IQ, eye color, or athletic abilities, or tweak its genes to produce a musical virtuoso or math prodigy, are abrogating to themselves a frightening power over another human being. To the extent that biology determines our natures--which is to say, to quite an extent, though not in every way--there is no freedom if other people are manipulating the parts without our consent. First of all, let me be petty and note that Torres doesn't know what 'abrogate' means (pretty much the opposite of what he thinks it does.) Second, he needs to read something other than Kass or D'Souza, or take a good philosophy course on human nature or free will, or something, because... well it's embarrassing to see people reason like this in public. Let's suppose Justin's right, and that biology largely determines our natures. Well, it doesn't begin to follow that manipulating the building blocks of biology has anything to do with freedom at all. A fortiori it doesn't begin to begin to follow that genetic manipulation abrogates (that's how you use it) the freedom of the manipulated. Justin's assumption is that folks whose genes haven't been manipulated are free. In which case, freedom must mean something like "just happened to turn out this way." From the reductive point of view, our biology is, at bottom, a combination of genes. So Justin's saying that if your genes got combined the way they did because of a more or less random process (this sperm just happened to fertilize that egg), well then you've got freedom. But if somebody intentionally moved a few of those molecular suckers around, well then you're a SLAVE! "There is NO freedom if other people are manipulating the parts without your consent!" Can anyone with an education make sense of this? It's a breathtakingly wild non-sequitur, but since I've heard both Kass and D'Souza make the same fantastic leap, I fear I'm missing some immensely important intermediate step that could transform the argument to several small non-sequiturs rather than a single yawning one. What's the idea? I'm baffled. OK. Suppose Al and Betty come into our clinic. We take a bunch of ova from Betty, and a little vial of sperm from Al. Next, we tag each ovum and sperm with a unique identifier. Then we put them all through our super-fast genetic reader, which gives us a genetic profile of all of our germ cells. Now, our superdupercomputer spits out all the possible genetic sequences we could get with these eggs and those sperm. Since we've long ago finished the human genome, and we've got all the protein folding and cell-signaling shit all figured out (or whatever), we can pretty near figure what combination of gross attributes would be generated by each possible genetic sequence. We pick the one we like the best (hazel eyes, of course!), take that sperm and that egg, and use the one to fertilize the other. We implant it in Betty's womb, and nine month's later... dream baby! Now, have we "manipulated" the biological "parts"? We'll, we have decided how we'd like things to turn out biologically. That genetic sequence will pretty much constitute the kid's biology, and that biology will pretty much constitute the kid's nature. OK! But it could have also turned out that that sperm would have fertilized that very egg had Al and Betty decided to stay in bed and hit skins instead of going to the clinic. And nine months later... dream baby! NOW! According to Justin Torres, clinic baby has NO freedom. Yet conventional baby is free as you and me. But they are, wait for it... GENETICALLY IDENTICAL. They are exactly the same in every biological respect. Whatever capacity one has, the other has... because they're EXACTLY THE SAME. If one is free, then so is the other. So what does genetic manipulation have to do with freedom at all!!!??? Freedom in general is a lack of constraint, or the ability to choose among alternate courses of action. Our capacity for free choice undoubtedly has something to do with the way our brains are organized, and that undoubtedly has something to do with the way our genes are organized. But as long as the organization is a human one, whether it came together by chance or choice, then there's free will. Are parents who manipulate a sequence of genes to get a better kid somehow constraining the kid in a freedom-diminishing way, or closing off alternatives that would have otherwise been open. Well, no. Not if the sequence they come up with is a possibility in the natural lottery. Maybe once they invest in the fancy genes, they'll turn into assholes and make little Al shoot jumpshots so that they might one day be enriched by Al Jr.'s native athletic prowess. But clearly, the problem's not genetic manipulation. The problem's being an asshole. [Afterthought: The opposite might even be true, if enhancement is available, and you fail to take advantage of it for your children, then you may, by omission, be closing off opportunities that would otherwise be open to them. Kind of like failing to give your children an education. So you'd be depriving the kids of a kind of freedom by failing to enhance them. I don't know that this is true, but at least it makes some sense, as opposed to the bizarre claim that the mere fact of manipulation voids freedom.] As a special treat for the slow, here's a ridiculous argument, somewhat parallel to the Al and Betty argument, in dialogue form (initials chosen at random): JT: You know how piles of pick-up sticks can be SO beautiful? WW: Well, um... Sure, JT. (Cough.) JT: Well, I'll tell you something about pick-up sticks and beauty! If you randomly drop a bunch of pick-up sticks into a pile on the ground, then the pile's beautiful. But if you move any of the sticks, then the whole pile's not beautiful AT ALL! WW: Well, why's that JT? JT: Because when you move a stick, the thing that made the pile beautiful just disappears. WW: Well, what was it that made the pile beautiful? JT: Don't you go to church? WW: Hmm... Let's see. How about this? What if there are only so many ways the sticks could be arranged? JT: Well, OK. I suppose that's true. WW: If the sticks randomly fall into one of those arrangements, well then the pile's beautiful? It that right? JT: Yes! That's how it works! Very good! WW: Then so what if I've got a beautiful random arrangement, but then I move just one of the sticks to one of the other possible arrangements. Is it still beautiful? JT: Oh, no! There is NO beauty when the sticks have been manipulated! WW: Even if the manipulated arrangement is identical to an arrangement that could have occurred by a random drop? JT: It's just not the same! Nihilist! WW: JT, have you been into the acid again? Or, worse, did you resubscribe to the Weekly Standard? JT, it's OK, you can tell me. JT: You don't care about beauty! Philistine! (Storms off.) OK. I feel better. But, hey, AFF! Anytime you want to show some genuine good faith toward libertarians, rather than simply "pretend to straddle," how about you take any two of those guys in the bio-Luddite issue of Doublethink, and I'll get a guy, and we'll put on a debate. You know, air both sides of the argument. Provide a forum in which the best arguments may prevail. That sort of thing. Call me.

Is Military Spending Like Insurance? -- Dr. Weevil writes: I'm no economist, but it seems to me that Will Wilkinson of The Fly Bottle and Megan McArdle of Live . . . from the WTC are missing the point in arguing that war is definitely (Wilkinson) or possibly (McArdle) bad for the economy. Many economically useful activities aim not to make money but to avoid losing it. Weevil goes on to mention insurance, and asks "is not the defense budget a form of insurance?" He argues that it is. Well, let's see. First, sure, insurance can be a good idea. But keep in mind that insurance is exactly like gambling. Because it is gambling. If, like Weevil, you pay in $30,000 and never file a claim, then you're a big loser. If you turn out to be liable for $30,00.01 or more of damages that the insurance company will cover, then you're a winner. But most people are losers in insurance. That's why insurance companies, like casinos, make lots & lots of money. However, most people are willing to gamble, since it's generally worse to need insurance and not have it than it is to have it and not need it. In any case, if you pay in $30,000 and never get anything back, then, as a matter of fact, you're screwed to the tune of $30,000 dollars. You are not in any sense wealthier. That's a nice car, a (state) college education, a fat downpayment on a house, the beginning of a small business. And it's just gone. Poof! Like playin' them slots down on the riverboat in Dubuque. Again, you ain't no richer. And, yes, military spending is a bit insurance. But it's not really like insurance in that it doesn't really guarantee anything in case of bad luck. You can spend billions on the military and still get your ass kicked by the enemy. There might have been no amount of money that the French could have spent to prevent the Nazi conquest. But if I'm paid up with Geico, they will pay for my fender-bender. So be clear that in order to make the insurance metaphor go through, you have to assume that military spending will result in effective deterrence and prevention of disaster. But that's not an assumption you should blithely make. (And the Soviet economy would have certainly improved had the Nazi's been victorious there, so you have to assume that it's economically better in the long run not to be conquered.) Further, the idea about the military is that it actually deters or prevents disaster. Insurance doesn't do that at all. It just pays to clean up the mess. So, given that the insurance metaphor is pretty much hopeless, does U.S. military spending insure the U.S. economy against disaster? It depends! If building up a vast nuclear arsenal prevented Soviet invasion, then we were probably Cold War insurance winners. But if you know about insurance, then you know about the notion of moral hazard. The idea behind moral hazard is that someone who has insurance in some domain is more likely to engage in risky behavior in that domain than someone who isn't insured. So simply having insurance can make it more likely that you'll need it. I think military spending is quite like insurance in that it can cause a moral hazard problem. Because the US has a very powerful military, we're pretty cavalier in our interference with the affairs of other nations. We take risks we wouldn't otherwise take (we don't even think of them as risks!), having the confidence that other nations will be cowed by our might. But this kind of aggressive ultra-confident meddling is precisely the sort of thing that breeds resentment. So we become a target for terrorists and other malcontents. Which fact is used to justify the need for additional military spending (and additional aggressive ultra-confident meddling). A better kind of insurance might be a foreign policy based on non-intervention and unilateral free trade. Sure, let's have a strong military that can protect us against invasion and the like. But like having too much insurance, having too much military just increases the chances that you'll need it.

Sullivan's Broken Windows -- Intent on exposing the New York Times as the center of a giant left-wing anti-war conspiracy, Andrew Sullivan claims that the following Times paragraph is the acme of editorialization hidden as news: Already, the federal budget deficit is expanding, meaning that the bill for a war would lead either to more red ink or to cutbacks in domestic programs. If consumer and investor confidence remains fragile, military action could have substantial psychological effects on the financial markets, retail spending, business investment, travel and other key elements of the economy, officials and experts said. Sullivan's reply: "Could it get any more obvious? One question: wouldn't lots of military spending help the economy?" Yes! And, No! It could get a lot more obvious that the Times is trying to muffle the war drum -- everything they say is correct. Why is any of that editorializing? It seems a likely and straightforward consequence of ramping up for war. And NO, NO, NO, lots of military spending will not help the economy. Money spent on tanks and guns and planes and missles and bombs, much of which is promptly destroyed to the tune of billions, is money not invested on the stock market and not used to produce and buy motorcycles and slacks and dishwashers and dildos and cigarettes, etc. Military spending is a largely a transfer program from computer programmers, farmers, and insurance salesmen--you know, regular folks like you and me--to the employess and executives of Lockheed and so forth. This does not help the economy. It does not create wealth. It does two things mostly. First, it moves a great deal of diffuse wealth and concentrates it in the hands of the war industry. Second, it simply destroys wealth. When the government takes huge amounts of taxpayer money and transfers it to the "military/industrial complex," no new wealth has been produced. Old wealth has been collected and moved. And when the war industry goes on to produce billions and billions worth of stuff that is intended to be utterly destroyed, and then the state goes and destroys it (destroying the enemy's wealth in the process), it should be obvious that all that expensive destruction is the opposite of production. War spending is like dumping money by the truckload into an enormous bonfire in the hope that the towering conflagration will scare off our enemies. We'll be glad if the enemies go away. But we will not have been enriched by dumping our cash into the flames.

Poetry Specials -- After badly insulting my philosophic, yet poetic, soul, Natalie Solent has made amends, even reprinting one of my good bad poems (I write bad poetry, but it's good bad poetry... I may have once written a bad good poem, but it's hard to tell). Because no one has clamored for more, I'm going to give it to you. Here's another good bad poem over on my Afterthoughts page.

Happy Birthday Uncle Milty! -- Milton Friedman turns ninety! Nice tribute by Joel Miller in Reason. More Friedman information at IHS's LibertyGuide.com.

AFF You! -- I'll be going to the America's Future Foundation monthly happy hour at the 18th St Lounge this evening. I have a soft spot for AFF's monthly event; I met my sweetheart there. Here I am (on the left) at the last one, underdressed and unshaven, as usual. (And try here (center-right) for Julian in his mafia/pimp outfit, along with Kelly, Juan Carlos, and some tall dude.)

Deconstruct This! -- Somebody at the Onion wasted a lot of money in college. But thank the Lord!

How to be a Package-Dealing Theist -- In a recent NRO essay, Michael Novak accuses atheists of trying to have the cake of theism, while eating it too. Novak's analysis is such a well-distilled statement of common confusions, that it's worthwile working through the worst of it. Novak says, Atheism is a long-term project. It is not completed when one ceases believing in God. It is necessary to carry it through until one empties from the world all the conceptual space once filled by God. One must also, for instance, abandon the conviction that the events, phenomena, and laws of the world we live in (those of the whole universe) cohere, belong together, have a unity. What is born from chance may be ruled by chance, quite insanely. Most atheists one meets, however, take up a position rather less rigorous. To the big question — Did the world of our experience, with all its seeming intelligibility and laws, come into existence by chance, or by the action of an agent that placed that intelligibility there in the first place? — the run-of-the-mill journalistic atheist replies, By chance. Problem is, such fellows blink at the point grasped so fearlessly by Nietzsche. If the answer to the Big Question is chance, then all the coherence among the little questions may mean nothing at all — is intelligible only in appearances, and is otherwise a big lie. Courage is not really any better than cowardice; that's only a preference. Hate is not really worse than love; to think so is merely a weakling's prejudice. Freedom is no better than slavery; both are equally absurd. Destructiveness is no better and no worse than creativity. Most atheists, of course, would rather get rid of God, but still keep the rationality in the universe that comes from actually having a God, Who understood all things before they were, and then made them to be. Atheists of that sort would even like to keep the Jewish vision of community, justice, and compassion, as set forth in the Prophets. All this, without keeping the God of Israel. A nice deal, if you can negotiate it. Novak starts out in magnificent error. Atheism is not a long-term project. It is completed when one ceases to believe in God. The reason why a philosophical atheist becomes one is that there is no conceptual space filled by God. The postulate explains nothing. Novak says, "One must also, for instance, abandon the conviction that the events, phenomena, and laws of the world we live in (those of the whole universe) cohere, belong together, have a unity." But why? Clearly phenomena do cohere. That is why they are explicable by laws of nature. And the laws by which we have come to explain the universe do not mention God, do not need him in the inventory of things in order to do their explaining. Physics, chemistry, biology and so on, do just fine. God does not help here. We may ask where the laws came from. And likewise, we may inquire into God's provenance. To say that God just exists, period, is no better than to say that the world and its manifest order just exists, period. Indeed, to bring in God is to make it worse. We've just postponed our questions. God is not an explanation until we explain how God explains the coherence of nature, and until we explain God. To argue that God is a mystery beyond our ken is but a lazy evasion. We have in effect said, "Got something to explain? Well, let me tell you, there is something that explains everything. But what about that thing? Well, don't worry about it; just relax and go with it." This does not satisfy understanding. Again, where did that thing come from? Is it the way it is of necessity, or chance? If it didn't come from anywhere, and if it is the way it is because it has to be, then why isn't that explanation just as good for the universe sans God? It's surprising how many people are taken in simply by adding something else to the universe, and then moving explanation back a step Is the Godless universe governed by chance? To say so is to say that there is another way things might have been. I do not know that there is another way things might have been. In fact, the fundamental laws of nature create the space for how things are. The laws are the frame in which the universe is the picture. To say that the fundamental laws could have been different is grammatical, but I doubt it's a meaningful claim. You've bumped up against the bounds of sense. You're making meaningful-sounding noises, but you aren't meaning anything. But, more to the point, how does lack of belief in God entail a belief in the ultimate chanciness of the universe? It doesn't. That there is order is a datum. Whether God explains it is the question. It begs the question to assume that no God, no order -- or to assume that if God, then necessarily God. Next we get this, the tired canard that atheists must be nihilists -- that according to the free-thinker, "Courage is not really any better than cowardice; that's only a preference. Hate is not really worse than love; to think so is merely a weakling's prejudice. Freedom is no better than slavery; both are equally absurd. Destructiveness is no better and no worse than creativity." Again, all the relevant questions are begged. Dubious packages are dealt. Novak's assumption is: if values, then God. But this really is absurd, isn't it? There is something it is like to have a happy meaningful life, to be satisfied with life as a whole. And that experience of happiness, meaning, and satisfaction has a lot to do with courage, love, creativity, and freedom. True, the value of these things is not underwritten by the deep structure of reality. It is underwritten by human nature and the nature of human social life. And that's deep enough, if you're human. I'm sure Novak was not intending to write something compelling to an atheist, because the tendentious circularity of his reasoning is transparent. But you can safely assume what others would ask you to demonstrate when your intention is merely to rally those who share your assumptions against an imagined enemy. I do not disagree with Novak that religious stories, religious tradition, and religious inspiration played an integral role in creating liberal American institutions. But I won't let him get away with this package either. The question is not whether religion has played a role in the creation and defense of liberal institutions, but whether it is necessary to support those institutions. Novak assumes, no God, no America. But he's wrong here too. Neither virtue nor liberty needs to be mythologized to be loved. Human intelligence does not need to be so demeaned. Virtue and liberty are what people need in order to have satisfying lives, and each of us are capable of seeing this, whether or not we do. With gargantuan condescension, Novak says that "One must feel sorry for atheists. They seem so lonely. Alone not only under the vast stars of a summer's night, in all this immense cosmos. And passing through it as we do all, as evanescently as fireflies. But alone also in this religion-drenched country, most of whose public spaces reek of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." True, it is not easy being just in a world of injustice, nor is it easy being clear-headed in a world of delusion. But I prefer justice over injustice, and clear-headedness over delusion. I could feel sorry for those who prefer delusion, who are willing to use it -- to use the church house, the myths of ubiquitous love -- to medicate their loneliness. But I don't feel sorry. I just feel a little sad that people aren't taught, and so never learn, that they are strong enough to walk without the crutch, to engage the world as it is, to find the beauty that's really out there, free for the taking. [Update: Recommended remedial reading for Novak, and those like him: here.]

How to be Post-Modern -- Stanley Fish is giving lessons. Check out his Don't Blame Relativism (.pdf) for a bit of a master class. Here Fish says that the essence of post-modernism is the recognition that there is no common language in which truths can be couched, grasped, and agreed upon by all. But this is just wrong. Fish writes: [It is claimed that] no post-modernist could possibly retain his or her views and acknowledge the reality of a plane hitting a tower. But no postmodernist would deny this or any other reality. What would be denied is the possibility of describing, and thereby evaluating, the event in a language that all reasonable observers would accept. That language, if it were available, would be hostage to no point of view and just report things as they are, and many postmodernists do hold that no such language will ever be found. I found this passage confusing on several levels. First, Fish seems to concede a certain independence to reality (realities?) such that it makes no sense to deny them, but then straightaway proceeds to deny the possibility of a description of reality that just anyone could accept. But to acknowledge or accept some aspect of reality (beyond a purely perceptual report), it has to be acknowledged or accepted under some description or other. If there is no possibility of a universally acceptable description, then there is no possibility of the universal acceptance of the aspect of reality (e.g., the event of a plane hitting a tower) one is seeking to describe. So either the postmodernist has to concede there there is a way of describing the event such that "no postmodernist would deny" it, or he has to admit that postmodernists do in fact deny "realities" that are couched in alien languages. Second, it's just queer to deny the possibility of describing things in a language that all reasonable observers would accept. Anyway, you don't need one language. Take any language you want. How about English, or Arabic? Those are perfectly good languages. Anything you can describe in one, you can describe in the other. Now, of course, it's true that everyone won't agree on the correct description no matter what language you pick. But that just means that some folks have got it wrong. Or maybe everybody does. Everybody doesn't have the same evidence. Everybody doesn't use the same standards for evaluating the evidence. That's just obvious and trivial. However, that hardly bears on the possibility of true description of the evidence, or the possibility of a standard for evaluating the evidence that tends to track the honest-to-god truth. I don't understand Fish at all! Last, Fish implicitly makes the following claim: If there was a universally acceptable description, then it would come from no point of view. That's just a stunning non-sequitur. How about this, in English: 'Hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1.00794'. Now, this proposition describes hydrogen atoms. When I express this proposition in writing or speech, it is certainly captive to my point of view (my context of evidence, my native language, etc.), and also to the point of view of the theory of atoms and atomic weights. Yet, the very same thought could be expressed in any language whatsoever! And it would be true in all of them! It's not so hard to "just report things as they are," and you can do it in any language you want. Just watch me! "My pants are green!" It's true! It's true for everybody. Will's pants are green! And you could see that it's true from all sorts of points of views -- through glasses, through a telescope, from the left, the right, above, below. Say it in French. Say it in Latin. Whatever! Anyone who denied it would be plain wrong. It's not so hard! Suppose the proposition expressed by "Killing thousands of innocent civilians by crashing an jetliner into a building is evil" is true. Then it's true no matter what language you express it in. Whether it's universally true, and whether people universally accept it as true, are two entirely distinct matters. The first matter is metaphysical, having to do with the nature of truth itself. The second is epistemological, having to do with our grounds for believing things to be true. Maybe Fish is worried that we don't have any good way of knowing for certain which propositions express the universal truths. Fair enough. That's the core question of epistemology. But he seems to be after something else -- like covering his ass. Post-modernism is not the doctrine that it's really hard to get people to agree on questions of value, or that it's nice to walk in somebody else's shoes once in a while. It's a development of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. Kant said we don't have access to the way the world really is because we have minds, not passive mirrors, and the structure of the mind get in the way. But at least all of our minds get in the way in the same way. Hegel said that, well, not exactly, the way our minds get in the way changes over time. It's relative to where you are in history. Nietzsche said our minds get in the way because of the way our languages reflect systems of values. So values are just a matter of what language you're speaking, and argument about value isn't about reason and evidence, but about raw power -- about over who owns the language and the way it structures the experienced world. PoMos extended the reasoning to race, gender, class, and so forth. All these things get in our way of accessing an independent reality. There is no objective truth. Every assertion of truth is a power play. And that's why PoMos are so nasty. And that's why Fish is so busy defending his vocabulary. Because, by his own lights, if he loses the war of words, he's screwed.

Soviet Mass Murder and Never Saying Sorry -- I'm very excited by the appearance of Martin Amis's new book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Amis addresses the question why the 20 million Soviet dead has never been considered with the same moral seriousness as the victims of the Holocaust, and why Stalinist apologists have hardly begun to be adequately contrite for their sanction of such a vast, bloody moral horror. Apparently he calls bullshit on Hitchens. Good Salon review by Charles Taylor. I'm picking this up from Amazon now.

My South Park Character. Check out Diana.

Liberal Property Rights vs. Collective Deliberation (WARNING: PHILOSOPHICAL!) -- I'm going to jump in here to the debate over property rights taking place between Tom Palmer and Chris Bertram, aka Junius. Naturally, I agree with Tom, because I agree with Tom about most things. However, I do agree with Junius that he did not commit himself to a position as strongly statist as the one Tom seemed to be attributing to him. Nevertheless, I believe that Junius does subscribe to a rather subtler from of statism--one that is false for many of the same reasons that the coarser form is false. It is agreed on all sides that rights are not invented or necessarily granted by the state. They can arise outside of the state. The question is to what extent these norms morally bind the state. Junius seems to imply that there isn't much special about rights (in the Lockean mold) to distinguish them from other kinds of norms that may arise in civil society. Additionally, Junius seems committed to the view that decisions of the state have a certain special moral authority insofar as the state is a vehicle for democratic "collective deliberation." So the moral weight of property rights may be justly overwhelmed by democratic choice. This is really the essence of the disagreement. I bet Tom thinks that there is something special about rights, as against other kinds of norms, that sets a very high bar for their defeasibility. And I bet he thinks very little of the moral authority of decisions made by state mechanisms of "collective deliberation." (In any case, that's what Tom would think if he wanted me to go on agreeing with him.) Junius writes that, "Just because processes of entitlement can and do arise outside of state and formal legal structures, there is no reason to limit ourselves to those processes once we have the means to deliberate collectively about what we ought to do." And that's right. The mere fact that property rights arise in civil society is not enough to constrain the legitimate scope of the state. After all, norms of fashion and etiquette arise in civil society, independent of the state. However, it's not the "informality" or state-independence that create accounts for the authority of norms like property rights. It's the fittingness of the norm, the rights principles, to the mutual welfare of the individuals who adhere to that norm. Where property rights principles come from is one question. They emerged historically for various reasons. Their ongoing ontological basis is another thing. Rights, like other norms, seem to me to be a kind of social facts, in John Searle's sense of a social fact. That is, it's a fact that I have a property right in my computer in something like the way that it's a fact that a One Dollar bill is worth what it is, or in the way that it is a fact that hitting the ball over the outfield fence constitutes a home run. There is a set of shared set of representations and intentions that constitutes the fact. The normative authority of a rights principle is yet another thing. The normative authority derives from the relationship between the system of principles and the well-being of the people who subscribe to them. Philosopher David Schmidtz makes a distinction between procedural and teleological justifications for institutions. Junius seems to me be attracted to a strongly procedural conception of institutional justification. He concedes that an institution may have normative teeth just on the basis of convention, but seems to be saying that have REAL normative teeth, an institution (like a system of property rights) must be brought about, or at least vetted, by some sort of "fair" collective decision making process. My view is that procedure has very little to do with justification. A set of institutions is justified just in case it will make it possible for individuals in general to be better off than they would be under alternative institutions. That is, it's justified because of the good results it tends to bring about for each individual, not by the process by which the institution emerged. Furthermore, it strikes me that collective deliberation and democratic decision are in fact exceedingly bad mechanisms for improving individual well-being, other then the well-being of rent-seekers who know how to use democratic processes to coercively extract things from others. There is no reason to expect that the people who engage in collective deliberation and democratic decision will ever know enough to design a system that will bring about better consequences than the unsullied system of liberal property rights. Nor is there any reason to believe that people who are empowered to bring about redistribution by force will be motivated to redistribute optimally, rather than motivated to redistribute to themselves. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the participants in these processes will always have insufficient information, and will always be motivated to game the system. Given this, it's hard to see how the output of these processes could have much normative authority at all, much less trump the normative authority of the system of liberal property rights.

Flybottle: Defunct No Longer! -- Have you missed me? I've missed you. I've been distracted by my work on the upcoming IHS Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students, and by an effort to have something of a social life. But it's not really worth it, is it? Having a life? Well, last night blogging and life combined at the Blogorama on Kalorama, as I'll call it. A bunch of libertarian & conservative D.C. bloggers appeared, and I would link to them all, but I'm a schmuck. After, had a nice Mexican dinner at Lauriol Plaza, with PJ and Erin Doland, and Julian Sanchez, who managed to dump half a pitcher of frozen margaritas on his sizzling vegetable concoction. Afterwards, Julian and I, for reasons known only to the Gods, paid $5 and ascended to Heaven for 80's night and got our dance on. Anyway, I'm back, at least until the week after next, when I'm gone again, to UVA for my seminar. (How many Nobel Prize winners will you chat with next week? Huh?)

Journalists are Dense. Surprise! -- Fantastic post on the fatuous narcissism of journalists by Tony Woodlief.

Come as You Are -- Fourth Annual Masurbate-A-Thon. Sometimes I'm especially proud to be half-Canadian.

Middies & Johnnies, Oh My! -- Because Mollie Ziegler has commanded it, I'm making note of Saturday's St. John's College/U.S. Naval Academy annual croquet match at the St. John's campus in Annapolis, the quaint seaside capital of the ironically nicknamed "Free State." The event is singular and must be experienced to be fully appreciated. For those of you who don't know, St. John's is a little liberal arts college devoted to a "great books" curriculum designed by the late pop-Aristotelian Mortimer Adler. While kids at State U are busy taking "Gynocentric Critiques of Post-Capitalist Logocentric Discourses" the Johnnies are reading Platonic dialogues to each other (naked?) and doing geometry straight out of Euclid, and generally keeping Western Civilization and The Canon alive. The average Johnnie is quirky, having decided that it would be a good idea to read Thucydides and dwell on the nature of Virtue for four years, rather than skip Gyno-Critiques, knock up sorority girls, and bribe NCAA athletes into throwing games. Anyway, they do have organized competitve sports at St John's, and as far as I know, the athletic program culminates in croquet. Each year, Navy comes to the St John's lawn for a fierce best-of-five bout. It must have been exciting, but I couldn't tell you because I was drunk. I did notice that all the St. John's guys decided to dress like the Luke Wilson character in the Royal Tennenbaums, what with the headbands and sports jackets with shorts. Which cut a nice contrast with Navy's natty white 1952 sweaters complete with a big golden letterman 'N', and assisted by pointless croquet caddies decked out like stewards from The Love Boat. But like I said, I was drunk, the croquet game being quite beside the point. The point is that St. John's alumni gather on the lawn, set up tables, fill them with little sandwiches, strawberries and lots and lots of booze, and get drunk. Or that's the point I gathered from the experience. It should come as no surprise that St. John's does not attract young inner city toughs yearning to read Herodotus in the original. The crowd is stunningly pale, and not only pale, but preppy beyond the bounds of taste. Some fellow in the party to which I had been invited (by Marnie Nicholson - thanks!) was wearing something like a pink checked shirt with a green tie, a navy jacket and navy pants covered with tiny green alligators or ducks or some such obscene icon of the country club. "Chipper! Oh, do fetch Heather! We're taking the yacht for a spin!" You know, that sort of thing. Some Johnnies, having immersed themselves so long in the past, seem to pine for a bygone era when women wore white lace dresses, twirled white parasols as they strolled, and died in childbirth. I had forgotten the overwhelming WASPiness of the affair, and was forced to apologize to my date, a dazzlingly majestic young Belizian-Indian-Scottish-Japanese-American woman to whom I had utterly failed to convey the standards of attire. But it didn't matter. She was still most beautiful and admired. And there was champagne. And it beats a College Park riot.

Killing the Intellectuals -- If you're a new tyrant, what's up near the top of your to-do list? Kill the wordsmiths! Kill the artists! Kill the musicians! Or at least, shut them up or ship them out. Why is that? Because political reality is a kind of social reality. Tyrants have guns, and guns can get you far. But the main place it gets you is a valley of acquiescence. The guns themselves cannot secure power. Only deference can secure power. And guns help with that, but don't suffice. You need to establish a set of shared representations -- shared intentions, to regard you, Mr. Tyrant, as the uncontested ruler of all you survey. You need the folk to go along. The problem with intellectuals and artists is that they trade in representations. They excel in spreading them around. And wouldn't you know it, but they're always the wrong representations, like "Mr. Tyrant is a sociopathic moneygrubbing brute of a homocidal megalomaniac and has no real authority over us, a rightfully free people who should be able to live like we want to. (And he's got a tiny cock.)" Not only do these incredibly inconvenient thoughts get around, but the eyeglasses set encode these nasty thoughts in clever little stories filled with emotion, or, heaven forbid, set them to music, which certainly gets the folks mighty riled. No good. Kill 'em all. Here's an idea: strive to be the kind of person who, if landed in a certain kind of bad place, would be disappeared in days. I'm rambling. But this is something I've taken a strong interest in. I want to collect stories of corrupt regimes killing, kidnapping, and expelling the intelligentsia. What do you know about this? Historical examples? Places where it's happening now? Books and articles that discuss it? I hope to write a nice little piece in which these stories will play an important role. Help me out, O great distributed mind of the world wide web!

My New Man-Crush -- I've recently discovered that I have an intellectual crush on Christopher Hitchens. I can think of no active intellectual so free of cant and dogma, and so driven by intellectual honesty. And his prose kills. Here's a good bit, from The Nation. Spot on, too. This takes off from a discussion of a nauseating little anti-semitic exchange between Billy Graham and Nixon, and of the generally sorry state of the monotheisms. ... After all, in the National Cathedral after September 11 he [Billy Graham] was allowed in the presence of our country's elite to assert that all the murder victims were in paradise and happy to be there--a wild outburst of evil and stupidity that implicitly copies the fantasies of bin Laden. So there you have it: The country's senior Protestant is a gaping and mendacious anti-Jewish peasant; the leaders of official Jewry are cringingly yoked with him for the purpose of a disastrous crusade and meanwhile the cardinals are running a rape fiesta for twitchy "celibates." All official attention turns, meanwhile, upon the weird beliefs to be found in the Koran, which may be partly because the Attorney General himself is a tuneless, clueless, evangelical Confederate dunce. Damn! Something to aggravate everyone. Yet so unavoidably true. He goes on to correctly argue that: The struggle against theocratic fascism should, therefore, be inseparable from the struggle for a truly secular state. This need not mean an atheist state; the religious impulse itself seems to be partly innate at our present stage of evolution. But it need not necessarily take the extremely backward form that it assumes in our society, nor need its recognition eventuate in the present sickly "multiculturalism," whereby all forms of religious stupidity are granted equal "respect" while challenges to, say, scientific teaching are greeted with nervous tolerance. That's pretty much my view. All the monotheisms are dangers to sanity and freedom unless culturally and politically gutted by wholesale assimilation to the market liberal order. Thus, my periodic spats with certain sorts of conservative. Anyway, go forth read the rest of the piece.

The Repugnance of "Repugnance" -- We're all now wearily familiar with Leon Kass's "wisdom of repugnance" arguments. I want to point out a class of cases in which these arguments (if we're charitable enough to consider them arguments) commit the fallacy of begging the question, that is, of using the conclusion as a premise in the argument, merely assuming what needs to be proved. For just about any intervention in the genome, Kass's tactic is to say that the intervention itself, or one if its allegedly likely consequences, strikes our native moral sense as repugnant. This, of course, assumes that the human moral sense is constituted in such a way as to deliver authoritative judgments that we have good reason to trust, rather than delivering manifestations of, say, ingrained prejudice. Now, suppose that I believe that utilitarianism is true (just as an example), and that we morally ought to be totally impartial about the welfare of persons. People starving in Africa count exactly as much as your own children, or your beloved grandmother, or yourself. And so buying a new SUV to take the kids to soccer practice is exactly morally equivalent to standing idly by while a baby drowns helplessly in a puddle at your feet. The money spent for the SUV could have saved countless lives. But our native moral sense is a more or less accidental product of the course human evolution happened to take, and it happens to have a built-in bias for advancing the welfare of our genetic relatives and the members of our local tribe. So our evolutionary endowment, our moral sense as it is presently configured, interferes with our ability to recognize the equal importance of everyone's welfare, and with our motivation to provide for strangers on an equal basis as our own friends and family. We are constitutionally unable to do our moral duty. UNTIL NOW! Advances in genetic engineering (just suppose) have made it possible to reconfigure the human moral sense for the total impartiality utilitarianism demands. So morality demands that we manipulate the human genome to make a truly moral world finally possible (although our moral sense naturally makes it hard to see that this is so). How can Kass (or an intellectual clone thereof) reply to this? Suppose he says, "We all agree that manipulating the genome to alter the human moral sense is morally repugnant." Well, then he's begging the question. My toy utilitarian is challenging the authority of our moral sense. The claim is that we need to alter the moral sense, because it now gets in the way of being genuinely moral. An appeal to the moral sense assumes what needs to be shown: that the moral sense as it is presently constituted has rational authority. You could even make it much simpler and just do the following: Make a list of all the very morally worthy and life-enhancing procedures Kass finds repugnant. Now, declare that what we need to do is re-engineer people so that we don't find those things repugnant anymore, because those kinds of unreasoned sentiments prevent us from improving our lot here on Earth. How can a Kassian respond? The only non-fallacious course is to argue for the moral authority of the human moral sense as it is presently constituted, without assuming its authority in the argument. And that's what I want from Kass, and from all those who argue via "the argument from 'yuck.'" And that's what we never get.

Posthuman Blues -- I haven't read Francis Fukuyama's new book, Our Posthuman Future, but I did get a chance to chat with the man himself a couple weeks back in St Louis. While I don't agree with him on most counts, I respect the fact that he didn't resort to table thumping "repugnance" assertions about genetic manipulation, but rather set forth creative and thought-provoking arguments. Here are two that struck me (as best as I remember them). First, about life extension... Our worldviews tend to get cemented into place sometime in our twenties. The usual course of things is that generations die out and are replaced by the next in line. And this is one main way the world changes. It is common for academic fields, for instance, to become ossified as the elderly doyen of the discipline wields his influence over the research programs for decades. The field is revitalized only when the master succumbs, releasing the creative energies he has suppressed. The same can and does go for society as a whole. However, suppose life expectancy is increased to, say, 200 years. We won't then see this generational churning, and as a consequence we may get locked into the control of elder generations for long stretches, stifling innovation and social evolution. And we don't want that. Second, about cloning.... Suppose an infertile couple decides to have a daughter by creating a clone from the mother's genes. The daughter, a perfect genetic replica of the mother, grows up into late adolescence, and the father finds himself looking into the very face of the young women he fell in love with so long ago. Won't he experience uncanny echoes of his desire for his young wife? But it is not his wife; it is his daughter. Does this not create an unhealthy, perhaps dangerous, psychosexual tension in their relationship. Can their relationship ever be normal? And doesn't a daughter deserve that? I was about to grace you with my replies, but I think it might be fun to see what others come up with first (and I need to go to bed). I think the debate over scientific freedom is likely to be among the most important, with the most profound consequences, over the next decades. So if you disagree with Fukuyama, as I do, you need to know what to say. Technology is opening up possibilities we don't yet know how to think clearly about. So it won't be easy. But we've got to give it a shot. So shoot!

Telos Schmelos -- All this talk about embryos is frustrating. It's frustrating because there's little middle ground between 'lump of cells' talk and 'person' talk. There's little middle ground because there's little middle ground between reality and fantasy. There's really no getting through, is there? The "it's a person because it's a potential person" argument is just so shoddy that one despairs for Reason (the faculty, not the magazine) when it is advanced. But, hey. I'll just try again... To say that something is a potential x is a way of saying that it is NOT an x. I am a potential brain surgeon. But I CANNOT sever your corpus collosum. Because potential means not actual. I'm a potential serial murderer. I'm a potential father. I'm a potential car crash victim. But I'm not hunted by the police, don't get deductions for dependents, and haven't been eulogized. Potential persons are not actual persons, that is, aren't persons at all, just as I'm not a corpse at all. Rights are something persons have. Things that aren't persons don't have them. Potential persons aren't persons. So potential persons don't have rights! Got that? Well, no. No you didn't. Oh well. What? I forgot to address the hypothesis that bad fairies spoil milk, or that superspecial spiritual substances animate fertilized gametes. Oh, and that superspecial spiritual substances magically create binding moral obligations on all of humankind! (You mustn't hurt me! I'm imbued with superspecial spiritual substance!) Well, I wouldn't call it forgetting exactly... but I try. I try.

Who's Afraid of the Bourgeoise? -- The anti-American Jew-haters, that's who. Insightful essay by David Brooks. (Thanks to Farsam for the last two links.)

Lego-peutics -- Why not play with Legos to work out your company's problems? Weird.

Wars on Terrorism -- Good piece by Peter Beinart in TNR on why not all wars against terrorism are the same.

Terps Rule! PG County Police Incompetent -- First, WOOHOOOO! Go Terps! We'll crush Indiana. Now... the Prince Georges County Police are fucking idiots. Nationally notorious for their brutality and abuse of power, the insanely militaristic PGCPD badly exacerbated the damage of the College Park Final Four steet celebration. I live about two blocks from the College Park bars on Baltimore Ave. After the game, excited, I ambled down to enjoy the revelry. The street was filled, of course, with happy drunk undergrads peacefully chanting "Let's Gooo Muhra-Lund!," "We Want Hoosiers!," and even a gloating round of "Fuck Duke!" I exhanged random high fives and hugs, lit some cigarettes, then made my way into The Cornerstone for some beer. From the bar patio, I watched a happy bunch of kids crowded in the street, chanting, dancing, and doing their best mam-flashing impersations of Mardi Gras, sans beads. It was fine, doing nothing but blocking traffic. Then some jerks tear down a turn lane sign. Whatever. Then some real Einsteins rip the top off a crosswalk light. Fuckups. But that wan't the overall spirit. People were just happy. The PG Police, however, did their best to ensure that vandalism and agression did become the overall spirit. First, they sent four riot cops on Steads of War into the throng to guarantee to get things really riled up. One horse just about went batshit from the clamor and started stomping around and charging people. What do you want to do with hundreds of drunk 20 year olds on a tribal testosterone/seratonin kick? Well, attack them of course. The focus of the gathering shifted rapidly from celebration of UMD's victory to the challenge of a fresh arrogant foe. Then the line of shielded stormtroopers descended down Baltimore Ave. Why? Who knows?! I mean, if you've got riot gear and cool shit with laser scopes, you wanna use it, right? From inside The Cornerstone, we looked at the cops lined up just outside the window, and were treated to multiple angles of the hoopla from the Channel Nine news playing on 14 or so bar TVs. I have absolutely NO idea what prompted it (failure to flee in fear, I don't know) but the Man started firing tear gas into the crowd. The Cornerstone went into lockdown, shutting all the windows, driving everyone in off the patios. The teargas assault quickly dispatched the crowd, right? Well, of course not. Everyone got VERY excited. Now here is a promising story to share with our future children about the time Maryland won the national semifinals and we all got shot with tear gas pellets! WOOO! So the crowd became enthusiastically truculent. If you're going to get shot at, you might as well deserve it! After about a half hour, The Cornerstone decided it was a good time to not be open, so they made last call at about 1:00 and started kicking everybody out the side door, the front door being blocked by the black army of Mordor. More drunk people into the streets! Strangely, the police made no peaceful effort whatsoever to disperse the crowd. They didn't yell into bullhorns asking/telling people to leave. They didn't send groups of officers into the crowd to subdue the few vandals and protect property. No, the stood stone silent in an ominous line of helmets, shields, and batons, training their laser sights onto the crowd, firing gas pellets willy nilly at anyone who looked capable of rowdiness. It was clear that they had drawn a line: if we can see you and you are not one of us, you are the enemy, and you deserve a pellet in the back of your head. The PGCPD must give specialized courses in how to actively create a climate of opposition and rebellion, because they achieved this with brilliant efficiency. Now students we're just thrilled to have an opportunity make frat house martyrs of themselves. A group of guys stood about ten feet in front of the line, just stood there, back to the cops, saying Fuck You with their proximity. And after a short while, sure enough, the kids were painted with Terminator lasers and fired upon repeatedly, Pop Pop Pop. And they just stood there, enduring the sting and the gas. That's right, fuck you. The crowd roared in appreciation. The PGCPD established themselves firmly as the enemy, and declared open season on the non-police. And the students, in their inebriated pride, felt it incumbent upon themselves to actively resist, and so began hurling bottles at the shields, tearing down police line ribbons and using them creatively for a bit of limbo in the intersection, all to show that you ain't gonna tell us what to do. A very dumb driver in a white Jeep somehow got into the intersection and turned North up Balto. The Jeep was engulfed by the crowd and began to be violently rocked. That's when I first got riddled with tear gas pellets. When I stepped into the crowd to push against the rhythm so that the Jeep wouldn't go over. It hurts. Two police cars had been parked and abandoned with tactical genius outside of The Smoothie King and The Haircuttery. One had an unlocked door, so it was pillaged for flares which were duly flung at the Ominous Line. Other undergrad criminals ripped from the concrete the benches outside of Council Travel out and threw them through the windshield of the forsaken cruiser. Again, no effort was made to pick out the perps. If you were within fifty feet, you were guilty. I got hit again, in the arm and leg. Coughed up a lung. In front of the Chevy Chase Bank across the street some folks threw a match in the trashcan creating a mighty pyre of ATM receipts. Pop Pop Pop. Shirts over mouths. Nineteen year olds bleeding from the face. Finally, they set the horses on the belligerent, audacious guys who refused to budge from their spot in the street. And then the line advanced, beating the shields, lasers streaking across the assembled Business and Government majors, who may as well have been Black Bloc anarchists as far as they cops were concerned. More fires. More bottles. Pop Pop Pop. Of course, the individual students who did damage are criminals, responsible for their crimes. But the PGCPD is responsible for astonishing overreaction, responsible for turning a somewhat rowdy celebration into a full-blown riot. The authoritarian style, the unwillingness to discriminate between the peaceful and the vandalous, the total lack of effort to get things done in any way but the most agressive and inflammatory, ensures that the students see them not as public servants out to keep the peace, but a power-mad paramilitary out to assert control. God, I hope we destroy Indiana on Monday. And I hope the Prince Georges County Police get a fucking clue and learn to let exhilerated kids block traffic for a while. Because now the Hoosiers aren't the only Them to the students' Us. If the cops screw it up Monday like they screwed it up tonight, there will be one last contest of the season, and nobody will go home proud. [Update: For a terribly facile and uninformative account, try WaPo. They fail to note how the police visibly incited the crowd. And when architecture major Henry Pena says of the police that they were "tolerant" he must certainly mean that they were negligent in apprehending people committing crimes against property, preferring instead to stand in one place and shoot tear gas at everyone. I mean, they could just see the guys carrying the bench toward the cruiser directly in front of them. So, if you're a cop, do you run and stop the assholes and arrest them? NO! You just stand there, 40 feet away, and watch them smash your windshield in. And then you barrage everyone else with gas pellets. Retards.]

Yes, Democrats are Assholes Too -- This weekend I carefully crafted an analytically sensitive and astonishingly insightful response to the many replies to my "Republicans are Insufferable Dorks" post. It was a gem. I wept like Halle Berry at the music of the language, the irresistible tautness of the arguments, the clever yet enticingly masculine dialectic. Then, just as I was about to triumphantly press Post & Publish and transmit my wisdom through the far flung ether, my computer locked up tighter than Miss Spears's thighs. I played Al Green. I said "I love you... I'll always love you." In binary! But, no. Because I was at the time hopped up on a cocktail of guarana, German chocolate, and crushed Ritalin, I don't now hope to replicate my heroic lost effort. I do, however, want to revisit a couple of my main points, in brief (don't believe it). First, I am not, nor have I ever been a Democrat, although I freely admit to consorting with Democrats and enjoying it. And it should not need saying that a dislike of Ashcroft does not entail a love of Reno. (Here I am in front of the former Clinton residence handing out fliers in protest of the Reno-mandated kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez.) So, for the record: Ashcroft is an unlikable prick. Reno burns babies. Second, I agree wholeheartedly that many Democrats are also uptight, sanctimonious, moralistic assholes, after their own fashion. Indeed, if you are a libertarian who has spent the last decade of his life in the universities, it’s an observation with the flavor of self-evidence. (What's the flavor of self-evidence? Peanuts. "Clear, distinct, and peanutty," Descartes wrote of the cogito). But you have to ask why it is that the image of David Kessler or Robert Reich is not the image that leaps to the mind of the average college student when prompted with "quasi-fascist moral imperialist." My hypothesis is that leftish sanctimony is generally less offensive because it is lacquered over with layers of dissembling "progressive" rhetoric about health, equality, and the next step in the noble march of Social Justice. In contrast, choice Republicans, perhaps to their credit, will come straight out and thump tables and declare that YOU, THAT GUY, OVER THERE WITH THE MOUSTACHE, CHAPS, AND MEDICAL MARIJUANA, YOU are eating into the social fabric like a swarm of voracious moths, are personally responsible for the precipitous decline of Western Civilization, and will surely burn in Hell for your irreversibly corrupt influence on the Good. If you are THAT GUY you will not take kindly to this kind of assault on your identity. Whatever group the moralizing orator is member of, that is not your group. Certain Democrats (now more likely Greens) surely believe that the businessman, say, is a rapacious leech sucking the blood of Justice from the body politic, and they may even say so to their friends over foie gras. But the rhetoric is that the businessman is swell as long as he "pays his fair share" or "gives back to the community." I personally don't feel my sense of identity directly threatened when I'm asked to "give something back" even though I know what it really means. And those who seek to regulate cigarettes out of existence don't inveigh against the depravity of smokers. They blame somebody else -- the media, peer pressure, the tobacco companies, anyone but you. It not your fault that you're doing whatever you're doing, and you probably can't help it, so we're just going to help you help yourself, improve the public health, and eliminate the exploitation of the weak by giant corporations in the name of Justice. While demeaning if you think about it, this kind of rhetoric does not come off as a direct, malicious attack on the smoker's identity (and most people don't think about it). But if you're gay, or enjoy weed, or like that crazy rock and roll music, or don't believe in God, then there's some pretty visible Republican with bad hair, maybe with his own show on cable, who will tell you that you are rotten to the core. Just a few of these folks, in positions of sufficient prominence, help to create and enforce a conception of what it is to be a Republican so corrosive to sympathy that it would take a of boatload of Condis to counteract the effect.

Informed Tactical Voting v. Gut Identity Politics -- I think Rand Simberg wonkfully misses the hard nut of truth in Mr. Instant's point about the damage done to the Republicans by censorious prudes. Rand argues that it's better to go pachyderm than jackass, because, while true that there are those on the right who would strip from us our god-given rights to "get small" and bugger each other, this kind of violence to liberty is difficult to establish and maintain, and these folks at least sort of appreciate markets, while the damn Democrats are deviously expert at slowly implementing their creeping plan for total economic enslavement. (I paraphrase.) For all I know, Rand may have the political calculus right: the net loss to liberty is smaller under Republicans. But this really just misses the point. If it's the case that the Republicans are on the whole better for liberty, then Rand should be very concerned that Republicans aren't associated in the popular imagination with obnoxious, unappealing, totalitarian lifestyle philosophies. Most people aren't as bright as Rand, and they aren't very interested in determining what political program is really in their best interests. What people are interested in is a sense of identity. If a party grates against our sense of the kind of person we'd like to be, then we don't want anything to do with it. So, if the the alternative to being an uptight, sanctimonious, moralistic asshole is to be a Democrat, then we'll want to be Democrats -- even if we do end up getting shafted by Taxman. And I think that's the way a whole lot of folks in my demo (BoBo Gen-X) see it. To large swaths of the public mind, choosing to put a gargoyle like John Ashcroft in charge of norm enforcement is like choosing to put Michael Moore in charge of the Fed. It's bound to cause about half the population to recoil in repugnance and fear. That's not the face (or the hair) you want on your party. (Ashcroft can't even tolerate a marble tit, for chrissake). Until the Republicans get out from under Ashcroft-like fundie stiffs, the cool kids will continue to stay away in swarms. And if the fate of liberty truly rests in the hands of Republicans, then you'd better hope for the death of cool.

But Why Vote At All? -- I should mention that I don't vote. First, the state is a system of institutionalized violence and exploitation, and I don't care for the idea of endorsing it by directly participating in the political process. Second, my vote doesn't matter. Third, no candidate ever espouses my values to a degree that would merit casting a vote as an exercise in identity affirmation. So, why do you vote?

Nader Spotting -- Filled with renewed resolve to finish my grad studies, I jumped off the Metro at Farragut West after work to see if the Borders on 18th and L had Michael Bratman's Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason. They didn't. But they did have... Nader, in the flesh, getting interviewed by some nebbish NPR-ish sounding chap about his new book, Crashing the Party. Ralph started off badly. He was trying to make some kind of point about the populist appeal of his brand of leftist crankery, and came up with a trainwreck of an example in the form of (in Ralph's words) Dirty White Men, Michael Moore's new book. (I'm surprised he didn't call him 'Roger'.) According to Nader, Moore's book has had "no publicity," aside from a "brief appearance" on Politically Incorrect, yet somehow managed to rocket to the top of the NYT bestseller list. I laughed audibly, and the assembled alpaca-clad zealots riddled me with sally of annoyed gazes. I was astonished. Really! You don't need to watch much TV to have noticed Moore's relentless media whoring of his latest achievement in letters. He's been ubiquitous. At this point I would regard a Moore appearance in a John Basedow commercial with nonchalance. ("Tired of looking like a disheveled, hypocritical swine? Try Fitness Made Simple!") Anyway, bad start. He went on to say some stupid things about AIDS drugs and "Big Pharma," and the meaning of freedom. However, I found myself ultimately disappointed by repeated agreement... about the two party system; about corporate welfare; about the grotesqueness of the "Patriot Act." And that was just no fun. And I was hungry. So I decamped and read my new Peter van Inwagen book over fogged glasses and a huge bowl of steaming curry lakhsa at the Malaysian place up the street. It's pretty hard to stay annoyed at a benighted busybody like Nader while enjoying the fruits of the land: huge chain bookstores, funny analytic philosophers, savory curried soups.

Action Between the Lines -- There's an interesting exchange between Dan of Nature Creek Farm and myself going on down in the comments box of the lifestyle entrepeneurship post below. What do you think?

The Meaning of Life -- Read this moving essay by David Schmidtz on the meanings of life, with a bit of autobiography. Find out how today's best libertarian political philosopher was saved at the last minute from a life as a mailman in Saskatchewan. Good philosophy and good reading.

Try Not to Laugh -- Think of the kittens. (You'll have to scroll down.)

The Benefits and Hazards of Lifestyle Entrepreneurship -- This past weekend I had the happy responsibility of running a small workshop that included, among notable others, my favorite political philosopher, Wendy McElroy, and Chuck Freund and Nick Gillespie of Reason. We shacked up in a quaint art deco hotel off Dupont Circle, ate in swell restaurants, and talked at length about human cognition, social networks, and other heady stuff. Good work if you can get it. Anyway, listening to Nick and Chuck about the plenitude of market culture inspired a few thoughts perhaps worth developing. Their line, roughly, is that popular culture spawned of free markets and unregulated minds provides a panoply of opportunities to construct a personally meaningful identity, and this is good. Now, let me elaborate, according to my best understanding. We need our lives to mean something. One way we make our lives mean something is by fitting ourselves into a narrative in which we matter and our striving has some kind of point. The stories of our lives involve a cast of other characters, and we want to go forward in our stories together with these folks, to be part of a community that matters and has some kind of point. Communities that matter are organized around artifacts, symbols, songs, ways of playing and taking pleasure. And lives that matter have a character, a style -- there's something that it looks like and sound like and feels life to live a life with a point, be it punk life or Mormon life. Market cultures produce the artifacts, symbols, songs, styles, and whatnot in heretofore impossible abundance, and this abundance makes possible new kinds of lives and new kinds of meaning. This is liberating, because not just any story or form of life will do. We each come into the world a certain way: with talents, tempers and personality. And the world we come into pushes onto us and fills the open spaces of our native dispositions. When it comes time to worry about life's having a point, we've already become something semi-solid -- pliable, but only so pliable -- and the stories, communities, and styles we inherit may not be the sorts of things we can squeeze ourselves into or take much meaning from. Your father's Oldsmobile might bore you; your father's life might crush you. So it's good for us that there's this wealth of potential meaning laying ready in the record shops, in the bookstores, in the boutiques, bars and concert halls, in the vast menu of professions. We can find the story we need to play out, the artifacts that define our rituals, and the communities to share them with. Well then, it's milk and honey for everyone, is it? Of course not. There are complications. None of us come equipped with an internal sensor that lights upon finding the right life. And some kinds of life are plain unhealthy, damaging, and wrong. We're pliable, but only so pliable. It's easy to fuck up. With that in mind we can imagine two main strategies for meaning identification: risk averse and risk seeking. A risk averse meaning seeker is likely to conform with an extant lifestyle package that has proven itself reliable in meaning provision. He will, as the economists say, "satisfice," figuring that the meaning gained will be "good enough." (The strategy is conservative, but the package one adopts in prudence needn't be conservative in the social or political sense; there are boho risk averse meaning seekers.) A risk seeking meaning seeker will search for a lifestyle package that provides the ultimate fit, even in the face of the possibility of the search ending badly in a self-destructive spiral of ennui and self-loathing. An extreme risk seeking meaning seeker is the "lifestyle entrepreneur" who will not only search for a good fit, but will customize a lifestyle package whole cloth and recruit others to buy in. Imagine the pioneer of a vegetarian free-love commune. There's a very good chance that things will go badly, and that the entrepreneur will go spiritually bankrupt. But like her economic counterpart, we all have a lot to gain from those who engage in risk seeking behavior. We risk averse types need people willing to make forays into that dauntingly huge field of possibility in which all beautiful things are found. When the entrepreneur comes back with something that works, that really makes life better and more meaningful, we all win. Sooner or later, even the most risk averse bring the treasure to their comfortable lifestyle cocoons. If the entrepreneur comes back with a wrecked life, then she loses. And we lose too when the entrepreneurs take our friends and children with them. But as long as little Stevie joined the commune of his own volition, we should withhold our state sanctioned wrath. Failure is part of the search. The U.S. is remarkably lenient on bankruptcies, and we should be lenient on spiritually bankrupt lifestyle entrepreneurs for similar reasons. The risk seekers are the treasure hunters. They may make stuff no one really wants. They may live lives no one would want to have (or for that matter smell). But they might come up with jazz, or the United States of America. We all want better, more interesting, more fitting, more meaningful, lives, but most of us are too timorous to seek it ourselves. So we must keep wide the gates to the space of possible lives, and trust the intrepid to return to us with bounties of meaning.

9/11 Reflection -- A couple days late, but still worth it, I guess. I just looked back at my first blog, hosted as an experiment on the site of a friend, Carolyn Ray, who is/was developing a journaling program, and discovered my almost forgotten 9/11 post. You'll find my (I must admit) somewhat knee-jerk libertarian response to the attack. I stand by much of what I said, but my isolationism has become tempered by a fuller understanding of the complexity involved in protecting ourselves. I continue to loathe intensely the welfare/warfare state, and there is no crisis that does not feed leviathan. Yet it's clear that war is the state's killer app, and sometimes its not a bad app to have. Here's what I wrote, anxiously, six months and two days ago, from Arlington, about a mile and a half from the Pentagon: In response to Tom... I too share his anger, and his retributive urge. But I believe now is a time to reign in these passions and to reaffirm the values that make America both beloved and despised. I firmly oppose the impulse to an imperialist foreign policy. This will breed exactly the kind of resentment that leads to terrorism. Indeed, our meddling in others' affairs may be precisely what provoked (though not warranted--nothing warrants) today's horror. We must try to find those responsible, give them a fair trial, and mete out justice in the most dispassionate and humane way. We must maintain our dignity and liberality. I've more to say, but my building--the George Mason University Law School--is being shut down. All morning we have watched the smoke from the Pentagon out our windows, and the circling helicopters and occasional fighter plane. This is an awful and frightening day. I don't know how I'll be getting home. I don't know if I want to get on the Metro. I do know that I am angry. This is my home. My great fear now is that my fellow Americans will give into this anger and do something rash.

North Korea: Butter Side Down -- Here's stupidity so flourescent your eyeballs will burn... Slate asked a bunch of folks what book they would foist upon their city. Check this:

Cindy Chupak, writer/executive producer of Sex and the City The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss for Washington, D.C. (just to remind President Bush that some people in the "Axis of Evil" simply butter their bread butter side down).

Get a Job! -- My employer, The Institute for Humane Studies, is looking for a few good men and women to fight the good fight for liberty (and make my job less stressful). Go to the job board we maintain on Libertyguide.com and look at the IHS listings for Manager, Program Director, and Program Assistant. We've got high standards, but if you think you meet them, please give it a shot. And for God's sake don't contact me.

Off to the Seminar Table -- I'll be gone over the weekend to attend a seminar about welfare and individual responsibility with a bunch of grad students, so I won't be posting. However, I'll try to make it up to you Sunday night. My hope is that a bunch of Ph.D. students from ritzier schools than mine will stimulate some fresh thoughts. If so, I'll share them. Oh, and won't you be lucky.

The Benevolent Market -- Also in Reason, check out Ron Bailey's piece on some cross cultural experiments conducted by anthropologists and economists. It turns out that people experienced with markets are nicer. The experiments are part of a fascinating larger project to develop a realistic alternative to the startlingly silly homo economicus model of human behavior. Experimental economics is a fantastically interesting field that I think is finally beginning to get some of the recognition it deserves. If you are on the Nobel Committee, you should nominate this man: Herbert Gintis, who is featured in Bailey's piece, has always struck me as a very cool, intellectually open guy. He occasionally makes great contributions to the big evolutionary psychology email listserv. And he writes very useful Amazon reviews. And outstanding books on game theory. I declare Gintis my favorite leftist! (Everybody should have one.)

Liberty and Low Brow-- Let me breathlessly recommend Charles Freund's In Praise of Vulgarity in Reason -- the best magazine article I've read this year. Freund beautifully makes the case for the liberatory power of pop culture.

Ready, Set, Refute! -- I have just looked into the heart of the coming evil. Is it a terrorist plot? No! It's a philosophy book... about taxes! NYU's Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy have teamed up to justify the inherently violent redistributive functions of the managerial welfare state in The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice. From the publisher's blurb: Taking as a guiding principle the conventional nature of private property, Murphy and Nagel show how taxes can only be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. Does this imply that the system of property rights doesn't exist unless a tax funded state helps create it? Hmmm.... The authors have been doing the colloquium rounds. So you can read parts of the forthcoming book here. Right from the start, the authors go after libertarian conceptions of justice, which are indeed an impediment. It's heartening to know that Nagel, among the most eminent living moral philosophers, sees that he has to beat up on libertarianism before he can move forward. Indeed, it's heartening that the welfare statists feel the need to write book length moral defenses of taxation. At one point, academics took its goodness for granted. But the fight is far from won! I expect it to be a very sophisticated and intelligent apology, well appreciated by a philosophically hungry left. So its probably a book well worth getting to know.

Political Ecology -- You may know about the idea in biology of the evolutionary stable strategy. An implication of the idea is that a mix of strategies can be in a sort of equilibrium, while a single or pure strategy may be unstable. Here's the classic example, from the originator of the idea, John Maynard Smith: As an example, imagine that two populations, one of them aggressive (hawks) and one passive (doves). Hawks will always battle their neighbors over any resource. Doves won't fight under any circumstances. A population made up entirely of doves would be unstable; that is, if a mutation caused the introduction of a single hawk, it would have an immediate advantage, and the hawkish behavior would bully the doves out of existence. But a hawks-only population would also be unstable. A single dove introduced by mutation would have a long-term advantage. That's because the hawks' constantly aggressive behavior leads to frequent injury, while the dove, refusing to fight, escapes that risk. Through application of game theory, Smith showed that there is a particular ratio of hawks to doves that forms what he called an "evolutionary stable strategy" for the species. Thus, selection actually works to maintain a balance of different characteristics in the population. I've always felt a pang of skepticism when strongly ideological people say "If only everyone was [a subscriber to the speaker's ideology], then the world would be just great!" Maybe my suspicion is that pure strategies in politics are recipes for trouble. Historically, the healthiest regimes have head a fair degree of ideological plurality. Might there be some optimal distribution of liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and so forth in a population, each stymying the others to just the right degree -- a system of ideological checks and balances? The analogy is quite loose, but are there politically stable strategies? Folks very motivated to legalize heroin are unlikely to be the same folks who are motivated to keep neighborhoods especially suitable for wholesome childrearing, and vice versa. Folks concentrated on lowering the capital gains taxes may not be focused on directly bettering the plight of the poor. Would it be possible to believe that a mixed political stategy is best, yet still remain a devoted ideological purist, quite aware that one merely fills a necessary and useful niche? Or can a purist properly fill her niche ony when she believes that the world is going to fall apart unless all are converted?

Progressive Libertarianism -- Peter St. Andre has some great thoughts on moral progress and the attitude that distinguishes progressives from paleos. It looks like we've been thinking quite along the same lines. Peter also mentions 'urban libertarianism'. Maybe 'cosmopolitan libertarianism' is better... Hmmm... Cosmopolitan progressive libertarianism. How could you be against that!? I especially like Peter's addendum to the lefty bumper slogan: "If you want peace, work for justice... If you want justice, work for freedom."

Positive Rights and the Branching Garden of Paths -- How about a little wandering, inconclusive speculative philosophy? Libertarians tend to conceive of harm in terms of rights violations. I steal your car, I've harmed you. The state denies me the ability to use my property for certain purposes, and I'm harmed. I've been thinking about cases where the major harm isn't so much a traditional rights violation like these, but where people get screwed when something that might have been brought into existence isn't. Suppose the state forces pharmaceutical companies to sell AIDS drugs at cost. Since there's no profit in it, the companies put a halt to AIDS r & d. Now, suppose that if they'd continued r & d for one more year, a cure to AIDS would have been discovered. That year, millions die of AIDS. Now, on the normal rights analysis, the state has harmed the drug companies by denying them the right to choose their price. And that's right. But, obviously, the millions of people who died but who wouldn't have are the one's who really got screwed. But we don't say that their rights were violated. Why not? Well, if the victims had their rights violated, then that means that they had a right, in some sense, to the availability of the drug. But libertarians reject positive rights. I'm thinking that we may be sort of wrong to do this. One of the main lessons of the libertarian tradition is that of the seen and the unseen. The state screws us by making impossible nice things that would have otherwise developed. Aren't we entitled to at least the possibility of these nice things? Can't this be part of a libertarian rights theory? Assuming the falsity of determinism, at any point in time, there are a multitude of possible future histories. At some future histories, we fare better, and at others we fare worse. Suppose we're at a fork in history. On the left, there is a richly branching future history (because, let's say, we have encouraged scientific discovery). We can go down only one possible path, but there are an enormous number of paths here we could take. On the right, there is a sparsely branching future history (due to banning science, say). In effect, by choosing left, future possibilities geometrically multiply; by choosing to go right, we're left with a badly pruned tree and a meager set of futures. It seems that what dynamists and progressive libertarians are groping for is the point that policies that foreseeably prune the tree of possible beneficial futures constitutes a sort of harm to our future selves. Indeed, I want to say that we are entitled, in some sense, to the future with the broadest range of possibilities for the advancement of human life. Suppose stem cell research and cloning is encouraged, but not banned. This opens up, suppose, a possible future where we live to 150 years, and many others where we live to around 100. There's no guarantee that we get to the best possible future, but it's open, and other good ones are likely. Now, suppose this sort of research is banned and there's then no possible future where most of us can live past 90. I submit that our future selves will have been harmed by the ban, and we have a right to not be so harmed, aside from the more direct rights violations involved in the ban. I feel strongly that I have been harmed by our system of socialized education. By analogy with markets for other services, it seems reasonable to believe that had education been on the market for the last century or so, excellence in education would likely far exceed the reach of our imagination. Who knows what diseases have gone uncured, what inventions have gone unbuilt, what works of art have gone uncreated, because of the institutionalization of an enervating mindcrushing system. I've been told that I was lucky to attend the public schools in Iowa, among the best in the US. However, compared to some of the possible educations closed off by the public monopoly, "best in the US" is something like "richest man in Bangladesh". Can I sue? In a way, I'm arguing for the opposite of the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle more or less says that if a state action today can close off a very bad possible future history, the state is obliged to take that action, even if the that possible future is very improbable. I'm saying that if a state action today will likely close off very good possible futures, then the state is obliged to refrain from undertaking that action. We don't have a right to any particular possible future, but only to the realization of one among the best set of possible futures. Or, perhaps better, to the institutional structure most likely to give rise to the best set of possible futures (it may be that a regime of negative rights is the only structure that can satisfy the positive entitlement.) Of course, the problem is knowledge. We can't look into our crystal balls and see how decisions today open up or close off the space of possibility. And, naturally, there is wild disagreement about which possible futures would be the best ones. I have no idea at this point how to formalize entitlements to possible futures in a political philosophy. Nevertheless, I think there's a compelling intuition here, and it's worth thinking about, and worth formulating more clearly and forcefully.

Libertarianism: Left and Right -- I just ran across an essay, "What Libertarianism Isn't" by Ed Feser, on LewRockwell.com, written in the wake of the "cultural libertarianism" debate instigated by Jonah Goldberg. In his essay, Feser argues that libertarianism, the right, and traditional morality fit hand in glove, and that folks like Nick Gillespie of Reason have made a big mistake in celebrating transgressive pop culture, and in extending a hand to the cultural left instead of remaining monogamously wedded to the right. I think Feser's position is badly mistaken. We need to spread the love around! My comments below will make much more sense if you read Feser first. One of Feser's main contentions is that: There is, in particular, nothing in libertarianism that entails that one ought to be in the least bit hostile to or even suspicious of traditional morality or traditional moralists. There is thus no reason whatsoever why libertarians and conservatives ought to be divided over the question of traditional morality. No reason whatsoever?I find it fantastic to suggest, as Feser does, that libertarianism and traditional morality are cozily complementary. It's not far wrong to say the whole history of humankind has been characterized by affronts to liberty in the name of morality. A morality that forbids the coercive enforcement of moral norms is traditional morality in rather the way punk is traditional music. Sure, it's now part of the scene, it's got a history, and a culture has grown up around it, but the history is short, the culture is young, and only a spate of people care much about it. Funny sort of tradition, that. In order to get libertarianism and genuinely traditional morality to fit together, one must dismantle traditional morality and extract one of the mainsprings--the part that says it is morally permissible and often obligatory to compel people with the threat of violence to meet their moral obligations. Once you've put things back together again, you haven't anything traditional in the normal sense of the word. Feser argues that Nick, Virginia, and folks like myself present a false alternative. One can either choose traditional morality and coercion, or weak-kneed amoralism and freedom, "as if there were no third position, viz. that of those who reject the use of state power to enforce traditional morality, but are nevertheless critical of those who flaunt it." Well, it looks to me like Feser's giving us a false alternative: either traditional morality or none at all. But there's always non-traditional morality, and that's what I would defend (and what I read Nick to be defending). I'd argue that the correct moral theory is a modestly relativistic individualism. Relativistic because the good life varies from person to person. Modest because the range of possible good lives is limited by biology and experiential development. And I'm certainly willing to make strong moral judgments about people and policies that interfere with our ability to discover and pursue the best kind of lives for ourselves. Now, it strikes me that Feser's missing the implicit argument of Reason after its cultural turn. The argument is that libertarianism supports free-markets (among other things). Markets in fact give rise to an active consumer culture. Consumer culture provides people with the ability to pick among a variety of lifestyles and modes of expression, and to develop an individualized style and sense of identity that contributes to a more satisfying life than could otherwise be had. Because modestly relativistic individualism is true, this is a great moral boon. Capitalist consumer culture helps us to search the space of possible good lives, and thus makes it easier to discover the best kind of life for ourselves. However, commercial culture does in fact tend to undermine traditional morality. Traditional morality does in fact tend to be authoritarian and express itself politically. (Whether or not it must "in principle," it does). And, proponents of traditional morality do in fact react to challenges to traditional morality with coercive limits on markets and freedom. Because libertarianism defends markets, markets produce consumer culture, and consumer culture undermines traditional morality, libertarianism and traditional morality really are at odds. Most conservatives understand this, and that's why they are antagonistic to libertarianism. Feser argues strenuously that traditionally sexual and family morality are a necessary part of the good and free society. He ridiculously asserts that "everybody knows this." It turns out that what everybody knows it that we must maintain a social ethos that abhors adultery, divorce, pre-marital sex, (homosexuality?), and pornography. And we all know that we've got to drop the ruse that marriage might be a vehicle for personal satisfaction, and just suck it up and sacrifice ourselves for the kids. Let's just suppose, thankfully contrary to fact, that Feser is right about this. He needs to deliver some goods before he can claim a coherent position. First, he needs to show us how it is possible to put these norms into place without employing coercive means. And he needs to argue, against the history of the world, that a society where such norms were dominant would not use coercive means to defend them against the inevitably corrosive forces of consumer culture. I don't think he can deliver. Indeed, I think he's caught in a bad dilemma. If we don't have strong families, then (says Feser) we don't have a bulwark against the state. And we don't have strong families unless we've got traditional sexual morality. But markets undermine traditional sexual morality. So either we have to use the state to protect traditional sexual morality or we lose the protection against the state that the family affords. But if we have to use the state to preserve our bulwark against the state, then the point of having the bulwark is vitiated. I think Feser's right about the importance of intermediary institutions, but I think he's wrong that they've got to be traditional family and religion, and so I don't think there's really a problem. But I think he's got a problem. Several times Feser asserts that we've experienced serious moral decline of late. I flat out disagree. I think we've experienced serious (net) moral advance. (The left is responsible for a little, the right is responsible for a little, and the market is responsible for most.) This is really the nub of the issue between conservative and progressive libertarians. Feser argues that libertarians and conservatives are joined in their picture of the dignity of man, while the left sees humans as "little more than clever animals, or as cogs in a vast social machine, helpless victims of forces beyond their control." The most one can really get out of this is the suspicion that Feser sees lots of conservatives socially, and finds that he can fit in by spouting demeaning falsehoods about the left. The claim's just ridiculous on the face of it. One need only be awake to observe that great swaths of the right explicitly avow that human beings are fundamentally flawed, corrupt and base creatures, who are undeserving of love and salvation, but get it anyway from an inscrutable, magical being. I don't see the dignity in that. And, to look at the other side of it, much of the left is evidently animated by a genuine belief in human dignity and the value of each person, and genuinely care (often rather more than the glib right) about issues of exploitation and dehumanization, although they are more often mistaken about the causes. I'm sure that libertarianism won't get far culturally without the help of the cultural arbiters -- the artists, media and literary intellectuals. And we have no hope of gaining their help without showing how libertarianism has interesting things to say about the issues they care about, and how libertarianism best supports the kinds of lives they themselves want to live. Conservatives have always been as great a threat to personal liberty as liberals have been a threat to the market. Once it is shown that libertarianism and traditional morality are indeed in serious tension, it is worse than arbitrary to suggest that libertarians should remain locked up in a room with the right. Of course, the company we keep is up to each of us, and if we want to consign ourselves to irrelevance, that's a choice we are free to make.

The Left vs. Poor Black Kids -- The public schools systematically squelch the potential of millions of underprivileged children every day. The ACLU and the NAACP wants to keep it that way. Check out William McGurn's outstanding and damning story in Opinion Journal.

Pathologizing Dissent -- A while back I gave a little analysis of the PoMo/AntiGlobo left. The upshot was that left chose to reject reason and progress, rather than socialism, when reason showed that socialism is hopeless and capitalism leads to progress. However, I was stumped by the way in which this arm of the left justifies itself. Having given up reason and logic, what can one do? Shout? Well, yes, shout. But upon reading Paul Gottfried's cranky but learned After Liberalism, I think I've filled the gap. The old left, the one that believed in reason and progress, felt it was the role of state institutions to preserve the democracy, which requires a democratic citizenry. However, now and again the hoi polloi don't know what's good for them, and they go and vote in the National Socialists, or the Republicans. So, as a bulwark against tyranny, the state must implement a program of mental hygiene to stave off authoritarian tendencies and preserve democratic virtue. As each flicker of "antiliberal" sentiment was stamped out, a new inferno -- of sexism, racism, of homophobia, xenophobia, or tax cuts -- would be seen to rage, naturally necessitating an ever expanding bureaucracy, a greater reach for the public schools, and so forth, in order to keep the 'liberal' in liberal democracy. In short, the rational, progressive ideology of the left came to be perceived by its adherents not so much as an ideology, but as a definition of social "health." And as the case for socialism shattered, the conviction that the state must benevolently tend to the pathologies of its citizenry remained quite intact. Indeed, it was only too easy to substitute the rhetoric of health for arguments of reason. If you disagree with the left, you are not so much wrong as you are sick. Bring evidence against affirmative action; find yourself assigned to sensitivity training. In a brilliantly Foucauldian turn of phrase, Gottfried argues that the left undercuts disagreement by "pathologizing dissent." Thus, the PoMo left sleeps at night by means of a blithe faith that their conception of the political good is a sign of their true and balanced souls. Yet faith it is. The hard question is only pushed back a step. What are the reasons for believing that these political arrangements characterize social "health"? Where's the evidence? Well, to merely ask such questions is, of course, a symptom of sickness, say, of one's denial of one's own oppression or one's complicity in the structure of systematized exploitation. Thus we're caught in the impregnable self-justifying circle. If it comes to that, you can do any number of things. Pelt your interlocutors with spare volumes of Popper. Argue louder. Tell them they're the sick ones. Or just call bullshit and walk away.

The Race To Equality -- Here's a nice piece by John Nye (an economic historian, not Bill, the science guy) explaining how economic growth diminishes inequality. The upshot is that differences in income hide everything that really matters: the quality of what you can afford. The difference between rich and poor in transportation used to be feet versus carriage. Now, its a 1988 Escort vs. a 2002 BMW, which, despite our keen sense for the social distinction, is in fact a triumph of equality. Read it. You'll get a sense of how all the whining about the income gap masks the amazing egalitarian power of markets and technology.

Out of the Darkness -- Yes. I disappeared. I hope you have not abandoned me, though I could not blame you. The static blog reeks of death. If you must know, I went into seclusion to study the dark arts of the social and cognitive sciences to unlock the secrets of the social world. You may think to yourself, "Well, I certainly don't feel like a plaything of forces beyond my comprehension." Exactly. Forces beyond your comprehension are... beyond your comprehension! As all good compatibilists know, being a free will is nothing more than feeling like a free will. But every now and again, ask yourself: "Exactly, why do I want to do this?" You will tell yourself a story about yourself. Now... do you really believe it?

More Nozickiana -- The Economist has an excellent combined obituary and review of Invariances.

Axis of Evil: Laugh Riot -- If the Axis of Evil held an Olympics of self-satire, North Korea would sweep the gold. At the official North Korean website, one can read side-splittingly banal anecdotes about Kim Jong Il, such as this inspiring gem: It happened when the president gave field guidance to Kaesong area on September 14, Juche 61 (1972). He asked officials there what was the special food of the area. None of them could give a correct answer to the questions repeatedly put by him in the course of the on-the-spot guidance. While visiting factories in the city he met old men who had lived there for years and found out that loach soup was a special food of the city. And he made sure that a new restaurant was built there to serve only loach soup to the customers. Gripping! And don't miss these breaking stories! Poultry Makes Rapid Progress in DPRK Books on Kim Jong Il's greatness off the press "Comrade Kim Jong Il, The Great Leader Of The Juche-Oriented Revolutionary Cause" (five volumes), a library comprehensively dealing with his greatness, on the occasion of his birthday. It's easy to laugh in the face of evil when you just can't help it!

Now I Can Die -- Message from Kathy Kinsley in the comments beneath the picture below: I hereby declare you an honorary Bellicose Woman ™ I'm honored beyond the bounds of speech. Now if I could only honorarily date myself.

Picturing the Blogosphere -- The photo frenzy over at Samizdata inspired me to search my archives for a picture of myself wearing camouflage, shooting automatic weapons, releasing a falcon, or something equally manful. I came up empty handed. Instead, I offer myself at seventeen years wearing a dress and wig in the classic drag farce, Charlie's Aunt. Real men wear upholstery.

Best American Example of Enlightenment? -- I was delighted to discover that this Yahoo! search phrase offers up, yes, The Fly Bottle!

Perry... So Very -- Patriotic! Samizdata's Perry de Havilland has some great thoughts on the meaning of patriotism for those of us with little allegiance to the notion of citizenship or the nation state. Recommended!

Blogger Pro -- I've upgraded to the new Blogger Pro, not because I really need it, but because it only seems fair to shoot a little money Ev's way for providing such a great free service for so long, and to keep this thing chugging. One new Blogger Pro function is the ability to send posts via email. Thus, I've created a YahooGroups list for those who'd like to get Fly Bottle posts in their Inbox. Send an email here to sign up.

Nozick vs. Friedman: Apocryphal? -- I just got this message from David Friedman that casts doubt on my secondhand story in the Nozick piece below: "A philosopher friend once related a story of Nozick's one-upping David Friedman in a discussion first of philosophy, then of economics, and finally of particle physics. " David Friedman: It isn't impossible, but I don't remember any such conversation. The only public exchange I can remember with Nozick was at an LP convention in New York, where I gave a talk on his book, he was in the audience, and we had an exchange after the talk. Interestingly enough, he didn't try to defend the argument against anarchism that he gave in his book, but instead fell back on the (I think stronger) argument that if a-c was really workable, we would expect to see some examples.

Robert Nozick, R.I.P. -- I've just heard that Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, died this morning. It's strange... I recently finished Nozick's new book Invariances, and I was blown away, once again, by the depth and suppleness of Nozick's intelligence. I was meaning to plump for Nozick as role-model, both political and epistemological, far superior to Popper. Yet, sadly, I didn't get around to it. Let me try to correct that, at least a little. Nozick was one of the most talented philosophers of the past half-century, making significant contributions to every major area of philosophy. However, to libertarians, Nozick was a giant. His first book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia , is universally considered a classic of 20th Century philosophy, and it inserted libertarianism, to the chagrin of the establishment, into the "conversation" as a serious intellectual position demanding respect and careful consideration. (Those who'd like a bit more info about Nozick, and some links to related sites, try this page I wrote for my employer.) Nozick is one of my heroes. Not just because he was a libertarian of incredible intelligence (several of the smartest men I know have said that Nozick was the smartest man they ever met), but because he was singular in his intellectual independence and creativity. Nozick, true to his libertarian soul, espoused a "non-coercive" philsophic method that sought to open up new vistas of the intellect rather than craft airtight, drop dead arguments -- arguments that tend to be sophistical in any case. Nozick was interested in everything, but you can't accuse him of being a dilettante, because his knowledge of his varied subjects was profound. A philosopher friend once related a story of Nozick's one-upping David Friedman in a discussion first of philosophy, then of economics, and finally of particle physics. This is no mean feat, David Friedman being the son of Milton, an economics professor, and a University of Chicago physics Ph.D. Nozick's books are odd in they way they range over subject matters, explore intriguing possibilities, raise profound questions and then leave them in the reader's lap, unanswered. He never quite fits into existing "conversations" because his questions are very often his own, and he slips in and out of the philosophy literature as it suits his interests. Thus, his work never suffers from the clubbish, insular feel of so much Anglophone philosophy. The impression is one of a man who has an intense (even "burning") curiousity about the way the world works, almost entirely innocent of preconceptions about the way the inquiry should turn out. That is to say, Nozick was a philosopher, in the very best sense of the word. May his work, and his example, live on.

The Frigging Enlightenment -- Conservatives take a "chinese menu" attitude toward the Enlightment, picking up threads they deem properly sanctified by heaven and history, while leaving out some of the best parts -- like men's clubs that celebrated the liberating power of regular wanking, as this Guardian review reveals. Best line: Forward- looking proponents of commerce, members seem to have been enthusiasts for both free trade and free love. A prize possession was a snuffbox donated by honorary member George IV containing pubic hair from one of his mistresses. Who wants to start a club? Let us now praise Enlightenment men!

Robert Altman: Idiotarian -- From a piece in The Times, reprinted on FoxNews, director Robert Altman makes a major bid to join the leagues of the fluorescently stupid: I am a political person," Altman says, "but I don't have to put a strong debate into a film. This present government in America I just find disgusting, the idea that George Bush could run a baseball team successfully; he can't even speak! I just find him an embarrassment. I was over here when the election was on and I couldn't believe it; and I'm 76 years old. Then when the Supreme Court came in and turned out to be a totally political animal, the last shred of any naivety that was left in me has gone. When I see an American flag flying, it's a joke." I'm not enthusiastic about Bush, but Altman's implicit identification of intelligence with verbality is inane. Literary folk surround themselves with a like kind, and within this peculiar tribe linguistic virtuosity is the sine qua non of intellect. If you don't say things like, um... "sine qua non," then you're a bumbling dolt, like Bush. Growing up in Iowa, you meet lots of men who are spectacularly competent, if not rousing orators. I'm not that kind of guy, I'm all fancy talk and no competence. But I admire that kind of guy. They know how to do things that utterly mystify me, like fixing tractors and feeding the world. Although he can't fix tractors, Bush is that kind of guy. He knows how to make things work. The fact that he sometimes sounds like a small town businessman firing up the Rotary Club is both a strength and a weakness. Ordinary folk can genuinely identify with him, because he talks like ordinary folk (despite his chi chi pedigree.) But he's an embarrassment to guys like Altman. And that's a genuine weakness because the opinion makers are so often condescending assholes, like Altman. Yet I don't doubt that Bush holds the reins in his administration, or that he know what to do with them. Now, the American flag... If it stood for the executive and judicial branches of the government, then Altman might be approaching outlying areas of intelligibility. But it doesn't. It stands for America -- an idea and a people. "When I see an American flag flying, it's a joke." Like freedom and the people who love it are a joke. Who's the embarrassment? Then, this: An enraged Altman suddenly checks himself, aware that he is on sensitive ground in our post-September 11 world. But, controversially, he thinks that Hollywood may have inspired the World Trade Center attacks. "We gave them the ideas: it was a movie," he fumes. "We should be ashamed of ourselves." The filmmaker's wet dream: all ideas and originate in the movies, and people are puppets manipulated by those ideas. Altman's an idiot. He should be ashamed of himself.

The Far Left in A Nutshell -- The antiglobalization postmodernist left is easy to understand if you see the position as a way to bring the following unstable convictions into equilibrium. Old Left: (1) Logic, reason and evidence (science) is good. (2) Progress is good. (3) Socialism is supported by logic, reason and evidence (it's scientific!). (4) Socialism is good. (5) Capitalism is evil. Together with Unavoidable Data: -- Socialism is undermined by logic, reason and evidence (see Mises, Hayek, history). -- Capitalism leads to progress, while socialism hinders it. Leaves these options for the leftist: (a) Reject (3), (4), and (5). (b) Reject (1), (2) and (3). The PoMo left takes option (b), rejecting logic, reason and evidence (it's an oppressive, patriarchal, capitalistic construct, etc.) and rejecting the desirability of progress (let's have "sustainable" stasis instead.) Further, they must abandon the claim that socialism has rational support. Thus you get: PoMo Left: (1') Logic, reason and evidence (science) is a myth. (2') Progress is destructive. (3') Socialism is supported by ????. (4') Socialism is good. (5') Capitalism is evil. But clearly, (b) is the much more desperate option. What about (3')? Having dispensed with rational grounds for support, how can one argue that this bundle of convictions isn't just arbitrary? Well, you can't. And, strangely, it seems that original impetus to support socialism came from a more or less earnest belief in the desirability of material progress. Giving up on the desirability of progress is like setting one's heart on driving to Miami, discovering that one has gotten on the wrong road, and therefore deciding that Miami's a lousy place to go. You'd think you'd just switch roads. Why did people do this? My hypothesis: The earnest, progress-loving left came to identify support for socialism and rancor against capitalism as the criterion for personal virtue. So people in this coalition built their identity around this attitude, took pride in themselves as moral, and identified as immoral outsiders people who supported capitalism. When the case for socialism collapsed, coalition members were faced with a crisis. First, their sense of identity and virtue was threatened. It is hard enough to admit that you were wrong when you thought you were right. It's really, really hard to admit that you were in fact bad when you thought you were good. Second, if one were to change one's mind about socialism, then one would lose one's network of social support, and that's frightening. So, anything that allowed the maintenance of one's sense of virtue, and one's belonging in the virtuous community, was welcomed -- although from the outside, it appears ridiculous and desperate. This suggests that the views of the PoMo left won't really stick to generations that came up after the theoretical and historical collapse of socialism -- even though the PoMo left is largely in charge of educating the young. A vague feeling that leftishness has something to do with goodness does hang in the air, but the kids don't really grasp the animus against reason, progress and the market, and so they are relatively easily swayed by experience and argument. Well, it's a big nutshell. What can I say?

Factual Correctness -- Jonah Goldberg's NRO piece on PoMo and the PC WTC firefighter sculpture is pretty funny. One can do a lot with words, but Jonah's right, literary intellectuals do seem to resent the fact that you can't power airplanes with adverbs.

Snap, Crackle, Popper -- It's bizarre that glass-eating mercenary independent scholar, Rafe Champion, suggests that I am a "true believer" for not developing a critical preference for Popperianism. I'm tempted to say, "Right back at ya, buddy." I grew up philsophically among Ayn Rand devotees, and I sense a similarity in conviction among the Randians and Popperians like Rafe. I'm sure Rafe can appreciate that Popper's epistemology just makes very little sense to me, and that I don't consider his counterarguments "effective". Indeed, I am at a loss to understand how a "critical preference" for some proposition P over some proposition Q, is anything but the belief that P is more probable relative to one's evidence than Q. What other basis for a rational preference is there? If P is more "corroborated", then I need to have it explained how one can assign ordinal rankings of corroboration that do not correspond even roughly to degrees of probability. Corroboration is supposed to be a historical measure of experimental survival. Popper claims that it is rational to prefer the hypothesis that is more corroborated. But why should this preference be rational unless it is in fact the case that theories that have survived a lot of experimental tests are more likely to be true than theories that haven't. Anyway, I think I'm done beating on Popper, at least on the pages of The Fly Bottle. I understand that this kind of topic drives off a lot of readers. However, I do think this kind of issue is important, both for its own sake and for its implications. I am convinced that post-modern epistemologies are driven by politics. When it was shown by reason and evidence that communism is both ineffective and deadly, the folks on the far left had a choice: either give up communism or give up reason and evidence. The PoMos chose the latter. Of course, PoMo epistemology supports libertarianism just as easily as it supports Marxism, yet notice the overwhelming absence of libertarian postmodernists. When you've got reason and evidence on your side, like libertarians, you've got very little motivation to throw them away. Anyway, my point is that it is not only important to argue for libertarianism against the anti-reason PoMo left and the anti-reason Mystic right, but it is also important to make the case for reason itself as the proper basis for the political argument. If you can get folks to accept the proper standards of reason and evidence, you're already way ahead in the argument with postmodernists and mystics. My practical problem with Popperianism is that I don't think it really sets up intelligible standards of reason and evidence from which to argue against the dark forces of the left and right.

Inter-Blog Popper Wars: The Impotence of Falsificationism -- (Note: If this bores the shit out of you, I'm really, really sorry about that.) The replies to my Popper criticisms, and the slow return of my philosophy of science courses from murky recesses of my brain, are deepening my sense that Popperianism is at bottom a skeptical philosophy of darkness, which, despite the enthusiastic rationalist rhetoric of Popperian advocates, shares more with Rorty-like post-modern pragmatism than pro-reason philosophies of light. Popper is very much one with the positivists in his fixation on formal logic (which I think, of course, is justified like everything else by a kind of induction from experience). In any case, Popper notes that a universally quantified statement is equivalent to the negation of an existentially quantified statement, e.g., 'All swans are white' is equivalent to 'There does not exist something that is both a swan and not white.' So the discovery of something that is both a swan and white directly contradicts the theory. (If I were writing a song about Popper, I'd call it "Mad for Modus Tollens".) Now, a proposition, so it is said, isn't scientific unless it is falsifiable. 'All swans are white' is scientific because 'Here is a swan that is not white' would falsify it. However, in order for a proposition to be decisively falsified, the falsifying proposition must itself be decisively true. That is, if 'Here is a swan that is not white' has a probability of less than one, then 'All swans are white' is defeated only partially. However, according to Popper, there is no way to assign any positive probability to any proposition. And falsifying propositions must themselves be scientific, and therefore falsifiable. The probability of a basic observation statement like 'Here is a swan that is not white' is no greater than the probability of the theoretical statement, 'All swans are white'. And a critical inquirer, it would seem, is under just as much an obligation to seek falsification of the observation statement (after all, the alleged non-white swan might be a white swan painted black, an animatronic swan, etc.) as of the original hypothesis, because the observation statement turns out to be just another hypothesis. And one can keep going at this forever, trying to falsify any statement that purports to falsify another. So one wonders how we ever get to falsification. Well, according to Popper, while propositions cannot acquire any degree of confirmation, they can acquire some degree of "corroboration" by passing experimental tests (by not being falsified). The more and severe the tests, the more corroborated the proposition. Popper insists that this isn't confirmation. You can't assign a numerical degree of corroboration. You can just very roughly speak of positive and negative degrees of corroboration. ("This hypothesis is really, really corroborated!") And of course, well corroborated propositions are, strictly speaking, still no more likely to be true than contradictions, but they have (unaccountably) some positive logical standing. So, if 'Here is a swan that is not white' is corroborated, then it can falsify 'All swans are white'. But how do you know a proposition is corroborated, or corroborated enough to have falsifying power? Well, there is no way. According to Popper, we (or the relevant scientists) just decide. This is what it comes down to. At some point, we just decide that we're going to accept a statement as corroborated. But there is nothing to instruct the inquirer whether to reject a theory by deciding that a potentially falsifying lower level hypothesis is corroborated or to defend it by trying to falsify the hypothesis. This seems far from the clear, deductive logic of science that Popper promises us. Indeed, it smells ripe for relativist appropriation. I can just imagine: "Your ethnic group (social class, sex, whatever) may have decided that hypothesis y is corroborated, and refutes hypothesis x. But our ethnic group (social class, sex, whatever) has decided that hypothesis z is corroborated, and refutes hypothesis y, and thus x is secure." If there is disagreement about corroboration, I guess we can always resort to.... what? War? For my part, I have not been made to see what is wrong with being certain in seeing mugs on desks, nor in the problem of a proposition becoming more likely true in light of new evidence. Americans tend to be a little perplexed by the enthusiasm for Popper in the Commonwealth. What is it with you guys?

Popper's Champion -- It is daunting indeed to debate a man named "Rafe Champion", a name that evokes race car-driving secret agents, or a dangerous, seething, family-wrecking hunks from a "daytime drama". Shows what you get when you disagree with the redoubtable Perry de Havilland: set upon by mercenary indedependent scholars named "Rafe Champion". Anyway, Champion believes that Popper's epistemology solves some puzzle that needs solving. Popper's work makes most sense understood as a response to the deficient epistemologies of the Vienna Circle positivists, such as Carnap, Hempel and company, but I shall not bore anyone with a rehearsal of that history. In any case, Champion argues that it is incorrect to understand scientific knowledge as a species of belief, and that Popper provides a way forward after the alleged failure of the "justified true belief" account of knowledge. According to Champion, in the classical epistemologies "there is no way to decisively (certainly) justify the beliefs that are supposed to be true." First, I am keen to know what knowledge is, if not a kind of belief. If I know that water is H2O (a scientific proposition), don't I also believe it? Next, I find that I'm able to decisively justify all sorts of beliefs on the basis of experience. For instance, that there is a mug on my desk. I see the mug on my desk, and I thereby know that it is there. Science is rather more complex than looking at mugs on desks, but one surely can derive certain beliefs from the evidence of the senses. It's not clear to me what bind Popper is getting us out of. Everything Champion says about the imaginative, critical, entrepeneurial nature of science is consistent with just about every account of scientific discovery. Now, although a few scientists with dated educations are avowed Popperians, Popper's theory fails to describe the actual successful practices of the scientific community. Scientists do in fact count positive experimental evidence, and other indications of theoretical success, such as simplicity, comprehensiveness and so forth, as confirmatory, and they are not wrong to do so. Scientific practice is more Bayesian than Popperian, and because scientific practice is so successful, I am inclined to think the scientists are doing something right. (I will resist the temptation to discuss the problem of prior probabilities.) Last, I said nothing about limiting science to collecting confirming instances. All I was saying is that Popper is wrong that positive instances don't raise the probability of a hypothesis. According to Popper and Champion, the probability of Newton's theory being true, even after all its success, was the same as the probability of cats giving birth to elephants. And that's absurd. Champion says that my arguments against Popper are "weary and worn out". This isn't quite to say that they are false, is it? Rather, it says that they are often used. And one might well wonder why that is.

Popper? I Don't Even Know Her! -- Perry de Havilland of Samizdata quips in an aside that Karl Popper's conjectural objective epistemology "makes more sense" to him than Ayn Rand's epistemology. Well, Ayn Rand didn't really develop much of an epistemology (theory of knowledge). She developed the outline of a theory of concepts, and little else. In any case, the little bit of theory that she did produce has the virtue of coherence, while Popper's epistemology is grievously flawed. According to Popper, prior to inquiry, the probability that all swans are white is zero. If I go out and observe a billion white swans, and no swans of other hues, then the probability that all swans are white is... still zero! The same as a contradiction!!! Popper claims that positive instances can do nothing to confirm a universal statement, which is just bizarre. Most large samples of a population match the population in composition. So of course finding something out about a large sample provides some evidence about the entire class. Popper argues that one can only disconfirm a theory--prove that it is false. But then what do you say of a theory that has been subjected to huge numbers of potentially falsifying tests, but has passed with flying colors? Isn't not being falsified by many tests a lot like being confirmed? According to Popper, No! Then what's the difference between a theory that has passed a lot of tests, and a theory that hasn't been falsified because it's never been tested? Here, Popper just punts and makes up a different word for 'confirmation' and pretends to mean something different by it, similar to the way that Chomsky says we don't exactly "know" innate Universal Grammar, but we are "cognizant" of it. Pace Popper, induction works just fine, and it works pretty much the way people intuitively think it does (i.e., The more horses you encounter, the surer your knowledge about horses in general.) Anyway, for one of the most entertaining take downs in recent philosophy, try David Stove's Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, which is conveniently online. The trashing of Popper starts right at the start of chapter one. Stove was a misogynist, racist, reactionary... but a good philosopher of science, and a damn fine writer. It's just blistering good fun. Yes. I really care about this sort of thing.

Bush as Boromir & The Shire as Anarchist Paradise -- Debate has raged over at Andrew Sullivan about Bush's counterpart in The Fellowship of the Rings. Having just completed the novel (I saw the movie, but in German, which I don't speak), I am ready to make sagacious pronouncements! Perry de Haviland has intelligently suggested that the ring represents the awful and corrupting power of the state. I agree. (And I cite some of the same passages as Perry.) Now, Sullivan sees Frodo in Bush, and it's true: plainspoken, wide-eyed George does fairly emanate Hobbitude (have you seen his feet?) However, given that the ring is the state, Bush cannot be a Hobbit, for he has won his glory as a leader by marshalling of the awesome power of state force against dark enemies. Frodo seeks to destroy the ring. Bush seeks to use it for noble ends, heedless of its dangers. Thus spake Boromir, imploring Frodo to give him the ring, so as to overcome the Enemy with might: True-hearted men, they will not be corrupted. . . We do not desire the power of wizard-lords, only the strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause. . . It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the Enemy against him. . . And they tell us to throw it away! I do not say destroy it. That may be well, if reason could show any hope of doing so. It does not. I've condensed the speech, but there's the essence of it. The state may be dangerous, but not if my tribe, true-hearted folk, hold the reigns. We don't wish to be dictators, only to defend what is good and true. A just cause. If it was possible to get along without the state, that would be great, but it's not possible. So best that I run it. That's a Bush in a nutshell. A Frodo is one who has chanced upon power, but attempts to use it only to destroy it. Is the Shire indeed an anarchy? Yes! In the Prologue, Tolkein goes to pains to make clear that the Hobbits, while not egalitarians with regard to material goods, are egalitarians with regard to political power. They recognize no inequalities in coercive authority. Tolkein writes: The Shire at this time had hardly any 'government'. Families for the most part managed their own affairs. . . There remained, of course, the ancient tradition concerning the High King of Fornost. . . But there had been no king for nearly a thousand years. Tolkein goes on to concede that the Hobbits do have a Thain, which office falls to the head of the Took family, but "the Thainship had ceased to be more than a nominal dignity." The one genuine official of the Shire is the Mayor, who oversees the post and the watch. And the police are little to speak of, being "in practice rather haywards rather than police, more concerned with the strayings of beasts than people." Tolkein almost belabors the point that there is no coercive authority in the shire. Only when Bilbo returns with the ring is the stateless well-being of the Shire threatened. We are made to admire the Shire and its bucolic anarchy. However, those libertarians who might take heart in the example of the Shire should heed the conditions Tolkein seems to find necessary for the sustenance of this happy situation. Hobbits are incurious, deeply conservative and stasist: "Growing food and eating occupied most of their time. In other matters, as a rule, generous and not greedy, but contented and moderate, so that estates, farms, workshops, and small trades tended to remain unchanged for generations." Not exactly the ambitious, creative, dynamic commercial society we tend to celebrate. Like frontier Americans, stateless Hobbits do well without legislation, but only a time-tested body of law. "They attributed to the kind of old all their essential laws; and usually the kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just." In addition, Hobbits are fascinated with family, and the Shire is small enough that almost everyone is related to everyone some way or another, and thus bound to each other with a sense of family obligation. Generous dispositions, together with a rather unthinking respect for rules, and a recognition of others as part of an extended family, might well suffice to guarantee peace without force. But given the somewhat more individualist, ambitious and grasping nature of Men, our conditional attitude toward rules, and our society full of change and strangers, the Hobbit way to anarchist bliss holds little promise for us. For now, we can only hope that our own undisappointed Boromir, wielding his great yet essentially evil ring, can stave off corruption with Hobbit-like fortitude, so that we all may for some time remain Free Men.

Objectify Me, Please! -- A main objection to porn seems to be that it "objectifies" women (and, yes, men). The force of this objection has always eluded me. We are objects, big chunks of matter moving through space-time. How can looking at dirty pictures objectify what is already an object? Maybe I'm being a little coy. 'Objectification' is just a bad word. The core of the objection, I think, is not that porn objectifies, but that it de-subjectifies. When we concentrate on bodies and the pleasures they afford, we are liable to lose track of the mind within the body -- the hopes and dreams, loves and fears, of the person in the lens. But still, I don't get it. This needn't happen at all. Troubles with porn strike me as, you guessed it, Cartesian! My sense is that some folks just don't feel comfortable with the fact that our minds, in some sense, just are our bodies. Nor do they understand that our subjectivity is not independent of our embodiment. We are essentially physical beings with aesthetic and sexual dimensions. And our sexual, aesthetic physicality is an essential part of our subjective experience of ourselves and our world. Thus, you can't begin to do justice to the inner world of the person without taking into account their embodiment as sexual beings who care about beauty. If you're not objectifying people, if you're treating them as disembodied souls, then you're doing violence to their lived experience. Pictures, films, stories or whatever of people having sex strike me as entirely unobjectionable. It all depends on what you do with it. If certain kinds of bodies, or sexual acts, are arousing and pleasurable to behold, then what's the problem in taking pleasure from it? The real nature of the inner life of the folks involved is no more pertinent than the inner lives of folks in travel brochures, or the folks who make your sneakers. If one comes to reduce all a person's value to sexual value, then that would certainly be bad. But that's no worse than a coach reducing his players' value to athletic value, or a stock broker reducing his clients to their economic value. Thankfully, there is nothing in the nature of coaching or porn or financial counseling that keeps us from maintaining a realistic and compassionate conception of the whole person. Do strong objections to porn often flow from a constricted notion of what it is to be a person and a sexual being? Yeah, probably. Personally, I like to be admired for my physical attributes, and I never feel diminished as a person when someone implies they might like sex with me. Maybe it's because I'm a rather abstracted intellectual sort, but I often feel more visible as a person when someone is paying attention to me as a physical and sexual thing. It's not all I am, but it's a fair part of it, and I lose touch with it without a little help. So go ahead, objectify me, please!

Faith & Boyle-ing Nihilism -- Dawson Jackson asserts that atheists have "faith that God absolutely does not exist." This is a common claim, but it rests on an elementary confusion. Theists are ever making atheism into a strong positive conviction, like their own, but it is nothing of the sort. To believe that something exists is to rely on it in your explanation of the world. That x does not exist is an automatic and idle consequence of the absence of claims about x in your body of belief. If I believe that hydrogen plays a role in explaining the way the world works, then I believe in hydrogen. If kryptonite never enters into my theory of the world at any point, then, by implication, I don't believe in kryptonite. I don't go around exerting mental energy not believing in kryptonite, just as I don't walk around trying not to wear lipstick. Not wearing lipstick is not something I do. In addition to typing, breathing, sitting, etc., I am not also not wearing lipstick, not kicking a dog, and so forth. Obviously, things you are not doing are not among the things that you are doing. If you are an atheist, then one of the things you are not doing is believing in God, but not believing in God is not thereby an ongoing activity. Also, faith is belief in the absence of evidence. Non-belief in the absence of evidence is the opposite of faith: reason. It doesn't take a logician to realize that opposites cannot be the same thing. Dawson also gives us a nice quote (?) from T. C. Boyle about atheism and nihilism. I just wish to say that I find nihilism incoherent. If nihilism is the view that nothing matters, or nothing is valuable, then it's just obviously false, and it's hard to see how it's even possible for anyone who isn't suicidal to hold it. It's better to be healthy and well than sick and in pain. It's better to have love and friendship than loneliness. It's true! Just try to dispute it! But then being healthy is valuable, and having friends matters. Boyle is being a dramatic idiot. He clearly believes that good prose is better than bad prose, and that success is better than failure. Maybe Boyle means that he doesn't believe that anything matters from the perspective of the universe or that meaning is conferred on our lives by our role in some grand, pre-ordained story. Well, sure. It would be silly to believe that. But not believing in that is not what nihilism is. Dawson accuses me of making the "ancient blunder" of conflating two things into an antithesis, but since I have no idea what that could mean, I can't really stick up for myself on that score. I do understand "conflating two things that are antithetical." It's what Dawson does with reason and faith.

Interactivity Returns! -- The comment feature has been reinstated at The Fly Bottle, thanks to Leo Dillon's new version of SnorComments. So talk to me, baby!

I Don't Really Want to be Having This Debate -- But Christopher Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal also misses the distinction between total harm and net benefit. And in any case, my original point was only that questions of better require answers to questions of better for what. I have no clear idea whether the benefits minus the harms of Christianity is positive or not. My contention is only that Christianity has killed more people, wrecked more lives, and squelched more liberty than Hustler and "American Booty." And if porn objectifies women (and men too, Christopher), one would like to hear exactly what is the harm in that, and how it is worse than burning Bruno, say, at the stake. Christopher seems also to overlook that porn provides an enormous amount of pleasure and satisfaction for millions. Is that not a cultural achievement? I really don't care to be defending porn, because it's beside the point at issue with Goldberg. The point is that cultural libertarianism is not relativistic or nihilistic, and that everyone, conservatives included, have a "Chinese Menu" attitude toward culture, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.

Jesus & Porn, etc. -- Kevin Holtsberry cites scripture in order to vindicate the value of Christianity. Well, I'm not impressed. The principles expressed by Kevin's select passages have nothing especially to do with Christianity as such -- in believing in a superpowered being from another dimension, that he was once born of virgin, died... but didn't really, saved us from our intrinsic awfulness, and so forth. All of that is just false, and it's bad to believe false things. But I was thinking about the murder of heretics, providing a rationale for stripping millions of people of their natural freedoms for thousands of years, the subjugation of women, and so forth. The evils of porn are, well, just trivial in comparison. I'm not saying that there haven't been good consequences of Christianity, such as pretty cathedrals, the abolition movement and helping to aim the light of moral judgment on the individual person. But the history is just too complex for me to make an assessment about the net benefit. However, I do think that anyone who thinks the harm of porn has been worse than the harm of Christianity either never had a Western Civ course or is delusional. Kevin argues further that there are conservatives who do in fact argue for their values on the basis of an understanding of human nature and history. He mentions Kirk, C.S. Lewis, Novak and Neuhaus. But those are producers of exactly the kind of historical quasi-fictions I had in mind. The selective histories these thinker's works contain are, like Marxist histories, constructs in service of ideology. And the essentialist, non-Darwinian view of human nature shared by all above is false.

Fighting the Good War on Film -- Check out Michael Valdez Moses's fascinating Reason essay on the way the recent spate of films about WWII express unfulfilled boomer fantasies.

Porn Versus Christianity -- I was delighted to be quoted by Virginia Postrel in her reply to Goldberg during the late cultural libertarianism bruhaha. And I was flabbergasted to be quoted by Goldberg on NRO in his riposte. It is perhaps a dubious distinction to become known for defending the merits of pornography against Christianity, but the noble do not blanch in the face of uncomfortable truth. [Clears throat.] In response to my points that a comparison between porn and Christian books requires a dimension of comparison (you probably don't want to use the Bible for self satisfaction, Batsheba notwithstanding), and that the immorality of porn must be argued, not assumed, Goldberg replies: Touché, I suppose. But doesn't this make my point? Cultural libertarians are uncomfortable with, and quite defensive about, drawing distinctions between such bedrock components of Western civilization — in this case a little thing called "Christianity" — and the latest installment of On Golden Blonde. According to these guys, the burden is on me to explain why and how porn is worse than Christianity. I'd be glad to do it sometime (though I'm hardly an anti-porn zealot); it doesn't sound too tough. Golberg's point, I take it, is that cultural libertarians are relativists or nihilists, unable or unwilling to make firm judgments about value. If that's his point, then I certainly haven't made it. I'm keen to make value-judgments. That my judgments conflict with Goldberg's may appear to Goldberg to reduce them to absurdity, but we aren't (thank God) all Goldberg. Goldberg keeps missing our (or at least my) point: judgments of value require an answer to "Valuable to whom and for what purpose?" Although I certainly believe Christianity is false, and has been far more harmful than porn could ever be, that's not to the point. The point is that conservatives need to stop pounding tables and explain to us why their cultural preferences really are valuable and what justifies us in believing that they are. That Christianity, say, is a "bedrock component of Western Civilization" says absolutely nothing in its defense. Here's why. Although I certainly count myself a defender of certain Enlightenment ideals, I don't think it even begins to make sense to fight for something so ill-defined and contradiction-laden as "Western Civilization." My background is in western philosophical thought, and although there is, to an extent, a unified conversation that stretches over the ages, that conversation contains both truths and their contraries, and the cultural expression of that conversation contains both genuine values and genuine evils. The Inquisition, the Divine Right of Kings, American slavery, German National Socialism, and Soviet Communism are just as much an expression of "The Western Tradition" as the scientific method and the Bill of Rights. It's absurd on its face to bundle all this together, call it one thing, and come to it's defense. Goldberg accuses cultural libertarians of failing to draw important distinctions of value, yet this is precisely the crime of conservatives who make axiomatic the value of an incoherent Western tradition, and then ridicule those who are careful to distinguish between what is genuinely good and bad within the tradition. Indeed, conservatives try to have it both ways -- to glorify something called Western Civilization, and at the same time to criticize key strands of the tradition, such as scientific secularism (good) or totalitarian collectivism (bad), as being somehow outside of it. Goldberg pretends to loathe grab-bag culture, but he and his ilk do it just the same when they pick Christianity over Celtic paganism and individual rights over collectivist subjugation. However, conservatives attempt to camouflage that their preferences are just preferences by constructing a highly selective narrative about "Western Civilization" that gives their preferences the illusion of intrinsic worth as necessary keystones of their fictitious cultural edifice. I'm not being postmodern here. I'm being descriptive. Of the essentials of Western Civilization, Goldberg writes: ... some of the ingredients for Western civilization I have in mind are such categories as Christianity and religion in general, sexual norms, individualism, patriotism, the Canon, community standards of conduct, democracy, the rule of law, fairness, modesty, self-denial, and the patriarchy. Why not Stoic mysticism, collectivism, military nationalism, absolute monarchy, slavery and the Napoleonic Code? Why don't these go in Jonah's grab bag? Conservatives need to stop making up self-justifying historical quasi-fictions about "Western Civilization" and just tell us straight why we all should all value what they value. They always demur because they cannot do it. They cannot do it because they have derived their package of values from contingent emotive attachments, not from an objective standard grounded on the real, various nature of human beings. It's not relativism or nihilism to argue that there are more legitimate human values on heaven and earth than in the dreams of conservatives. It's just true.

Goldberg Redux -- Sadly, I learned of my mention by Goldberg, and of his further ramblings, only just as I was embarking on my holiday trip and I was unable to reply. Although the topic is rather stale, by blog standards, I do want to say a few things. And I will say them tomorrow.

European Vacation -- My foray to "The Continent" was great fun and provided me, by contrast, with a heightened sense of American culture. There are a few things I prefer about German norms over American. You can smoke just about anywhere and you can bring your dog just about anywhere (and you can probably let your dog smoke just about anywhere). People insist on eating breakfast. There are tits and foul language on network television. Beer as a food group. In Prague, I admired the anarchic attitude toward fireworks. And some things about Germans are unexpectedly cute. A Christmas Eve performance piece at a very prole club in Cottbus, which featured folks dressed up as reindeer, Santa, snowmen, striking awkward poses and chanting "Kung-Fu fighting!", confirmed the reality of endearing German loopiness of the Sprockets variety. I also like it when my lovely German friend requests intimacy in the imperative mode, e.g. "Now you will pet my hair." I came to better understand the complaint of American cultural imperialism. A great deal of German TV is dubbed American. Almost all the incidental music I heard in Germany and the Czech Republic was either American or British. Almost all the movies in theaters are American. I knew that American pop culture gets around, but I really wasn't expecting this kind of dominance. Of course, it's really not imperialism at all. It's just that Germans don't seem to make music, TV and film that they themselves prefer over American products. I have a theory why this should be so, but as I'm suffering jet lag, and feeling rather like I swallowed too much cough medicine, I think I'll advance my theory tomorrow, for cogency's sake.

I have returned! -- from strange lands afar. Developing...

Happy Christmas/Hannukah/Kwaanza/Solstice/Newtonmas/Season of Joyful Consumption! -- Like Matt Welch, I'm off to the Continent for the Holidays. I'll be in Berlin, visiting a good friend. I'm looking forward to Christmas in Vetschau, a little burg east of Berlin and New Year's in Prague. It'll be my first trip out of North America. And it's about time! I may post once or twice from Berlin in the next week or so. Otherwise The Fly Bottle will be a field of deafening silence. Have a great time celebrating whatever you celebrate, and may you get more than you deserve!

Totalitarian Chic -- At the Georgetown Urban Outfitters, for $45 you can get a replica Soviet soccer Jersey -- CCCP boldly emblazoned across the breast. For only $45, you can purchase ideological transgression. For just $45, you can have your own faux-vintage wearable protest against hegemonic market culture. Show you're too cool to care about forced starvation and other forms of mass murder! Nazi-wear is a skoche too Republican for the scenester in the know. But Urban Outfitter Soviet-wear... well that's just proletarian, but, you know, with flair! The irony just destroys me. The Guevara-gear too. The kids who buy this stuff in a spirit of dissent are oblivious to their role in punctuating the utter destruction of the collectivist order. Like severed heads impaled on posts, these kids are walking warnings for anyone who would dare challenge the market order: Resistance is futile. You will be commodified. Attack us with ideology and we will sell it as nostalgia.

Without genetic or cybernetic enhancements to the capacities of the human brain it may be impossible to fully comprehend just how dumb Ted Rall is.

Living Without Appeal -- Re-reading my previous post, I was reminded of one of my favorite philsophical passages. It's from The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus, and it moves me every time I read it. It's about living "without appeal." Very roughly, Camus' point, as I understand it, is that by remaining almost naively honest about what one truly knows and persistently denying the desire to use doubtful readymade schemes to make life seem meaningful, one might discover a more authentic kind of meaning. But that doesn't do it justice. Go read it. I've posted it on a new page, Afterthoughts, where I'll be putting things like like this that supplement writings on the main page.

In Praise of Crises of Meaning-- A common complaint from both left and right is that liberal commercial society creates a crisis of meaning for its denizens. Without the external imposition of expectations and responsibilites, our lives lack a structure within which meaning may emerge. This is supposed to be a problem in need of a solution. Our free society, together with our thriving market culture, creates a surfeit of choice. Yet in the absence of a readymade vision of life's meaning and duties, we cannot know what we need to choose, or make a resolute stand against the onslaught of marketing that pulls us in contrary directions. Worse, without a readymade vision of life's meaning, a vision of life's meaning becomes yet another consumer product. But we cannot know which vision to choose without some sort of vision already in place. We are left with a gnawing anxiety, unsure of who we are, alienated from our own culture even as we participate in it. What good are thirty four models of toasters, or one hundred twelve flavors of gum, when this sense of disconnection and aimlessness dogs you relentlessly? You might have the exact Sumatran blend you desire. But that won't make you happy. That's the argument, isn't it? Well, it's not a bad one. The anxiety of freedom is real. However, like a tortured, heartbreaking decision between Giselle Bundchen and Laetetia Casta, there are worse problems to have. The beautiful possibilities go overlooked. There's no denying that it's hard making something of your life. And there's no denying that there is comfort, even meaning, in tradition and in assigned roles. But there is no universal formula for meaning. And readymade visions may leave you cold, or oppressed. Our freedom and wealth is beautiful and good. And, yes, the possibilities of freedom and wealth are daunting. But therein lies much of the beauty and goodness. We are now at a point in history when our wealth and freedom make it possible to treat life as art. We are at liberty to recombine the found elements of our culture and shape our days into something not only novel, but beautiful and true. Now, no one is forced to be an artist with her life. There are templates. Join the Marines. Become a Moonie. Save the spotted titmouse. If you need a scripted life, then by all means have one. However, if you need a script to tell you how to choose a script, that's your problem, not freedom's. We are not too free. For the first time in history we are almost free enough. Because this is new (in the big picture), we have yet to fully internalize the loveliness of a custom-made life, and to recognize periodic crises of meaning as its necessary concommitant. No one ever said great things are easy. It is a great virtue of our civilization that so many of us have these crises so often, because it means we are not entirely preoccupied by immediate needs -- by herding the sheep, throwing more dung on the fire, burying the children. Last night I paid thirty minutes' wages to see one scary looking bearded dude do awesome and dumbfounding things with a bass, a synth, a vocorder and drum machine. Who fucking knew? And that's the point: Who fucking knows? Like the freedom to explore the vast space of musical possibility, the freedom to explore the vast space of human possibility is awe inspiring, not only for the beauty of exploration for its own sake, but for the treasures exploration can uncover. So, yes, I am unsure of who I am, or what to make of myself. My life has no fixed meaning. I feel alone and a little afraid. And I like it that way.

Goldberg has moved on to a topic proper to his intellect: Is respect for dogs a sign of cultural health? Wow.

Gillespie Gives Goldberg the Beatdown -- Nick Gillespie's crisp, smart rebuttal to Jonah Goldberg's aimless ravings about the dangers of libertarianism demonstrates by contrast the morbid condition of conservative thought and the vitality and robustness of the libertarian program.

Perry de Havilland of the Libertarian Samizdata lets Goldberg have it, and sportingly links to The Fly Bottle. And Instapundit mentions us both!

The Libertarian Defense League v. George Will -- George Will bizarrely characterizes libertarianism as "faux conservatism." Have libertarians ever tried to pass off their ideology as conservative? Are gay marriage, legalized heroin, open markets for prostitution and so forth easily confused for conservatism? Someone please explain this to me. In any case, the libertarian view is not "that freedom exists where government compulsion does not," as Will puts it. If my next door neighbor puts a gun to my head, dresses me in a latex body suit, and chains me to the pool table in his rec room, my freedom no longer exists, and government compulsion didn't have anything to do with it. The libertarian view is just that government compulsion is not morally special. If it's wrong for my neighbor to force me to do things I wouldn't volunteer to do, then it's wrong for the government too, and for the same reasons. After all, the government is just a bunch of folks like me and my neighbor. Will goes on to argue that libertarians make a fetish of freedom in a way that fails to face the reality of conflicting political values, such as freedom, equality and order. Well, these don't seem to me to conflict. Freedom is about being unconstrained by others to do what you like as long as you don't use violence to keep others from doing what they like. Order is just the efficient maintenance of the peace that freedom entails. And the only kind of equality that matters morally is equality of violent power over others. We should all be as equal as is possible in having no (or as little as is really necessary) violent power over others. If everyone is equal in violent power such that no one can coerce others, then there is order, and everyone is free. Ta da! Of course, the trick is how you keep people from coercing others by allowing some people (police) to have special powers to use pre-emptive and retaliatory violence, but without allowing this power to be abused? And how do you defend your borders against agressors without a big expensive military? And how do you pay for it if no one is allowed to just take your money, whether you like it or not? Good questions, all of which have interesting anwers!

More Goldberg Bashing -- Goldberg concludes his essay thus: Chesterton pointed out that when a man stops believing in God, he won't believe in nothing, he'll believe in anything. God isn't necessarily the issue here. But the principle is the same. Humans, especially children, very much want to believe in things. If we don't bother to teach — or impose — certain Western values on our own people, they will embrace values that are neither open nor tolerant. Belief in "something" just isn't good enough. First, Chesterton never pointed out any such thing, because pointing out a falsehood is like pointing out the winged horse crossing the street with the elf on its back. He asserted it, falsely. Indeed, it's necessarily false, as it's contradictory. A man who stops believing in God has, by that very action, demonstrated that he will not believe in anything. The gist of Chesterton's falsehood is deeply anti-rational. The claim is that baseless commitment to (i.e., faith in) the existence a supernatural entity is the only possible foundation for norms governing belief. But that's bizarre. One needn't have God's assistance to arrive at the principle that you should only believe things you have evidence for (which principle is an excellent reason to stop believing in God.) With respect to value, the notion is that only God's commands can ground our judgments about value. But of course this is false. There is something that it is like to be a human being, and there are real requirements for life and happiness imposed on us not by God or our own descisions or desires, but by our naturally evolved biological and psychological constitution. Pace Chesterton's mystical skepticism, it is possible to discover what these requirements and values are using plain old human reason unaided by divine guidance. We should certainly teach our children these values. But they aren't really "Western" in any other sense than that Westerners first discovered some of them. In any case, I certainly don't want people like Goldberg imposing them. Goldberg has just told us that he believes that you cannot discover these values by rational means, and the biggest problem in the world today is precisely that of people attempting to impose on others values that have been gained through leaps of unreason. The cultural source of the parental idiocy that allowed one stupid kid to join the Taliban simply has no significance compared to the danger posed by anti-rational religious commitment, which caused the death of thousands of Americans, and which Goldberg continues to recommend to us.

Jonah and the Libertines - In his recent NRO Column, Jonah Goldberg maintains that "cultural libertarianism" is the great threat to the American Order. Goldberg has long been grinding his anti-libertarian ax, and here he outdoes himself, putting forth Virginia Postrel and Nick Gillespie as symptoms and causes of the relativistic cultural decline that brings us John Walker. Goldberg says that while the genuinely open cultural libertarians are less hypocritical than liberals (whose tolerance is a ruse), that openness is really just a symptom of nihilism, which is bad. According to the cultural libertarians: There are no universal truths or even group truths (i.e., the authority of tradition, patriotism, etc.) ? only personal ones. According to cultural libertarianism, we should all start believing in absolutely nothing, until we find whichever creed or ideology fits us best. We can pick from across the vast menu of human diversity ? from all religions and cultures, real and imagined ? until we find one that fits our own personal preferences. Virginia Postrel can write triumphantly that the market allows Americans to spend $8 billion on porn and $3 billion at Christian bookstores, because she isn't willing to say that one is any better, or any worse, than the other. This is wrong. I count myself a cultural libertarian, yet I believe that all truths are universal, in the sense that if a truth is a truth at all, it is a truth for everyone. Who says that we should ever believe in "absolutely nothing"? We should always believe what our careful thought about the available evidence indicates, and these beliefs may be quite firm. Now, I don't have any idea what a group truth is. Goldberg mentions the authority of tradition, or patriotism. It's peculiar that he picks these, since tradition and nationalist sentiments are notorious dens of dangerous untruth. But if there is are truths in either, they are grounded in facts independent of the tradition or the sentiments of the people toward their nation. The truth of a proposition certainly isn't relative to the individual who entertains it. If it's in fact good for Bob to become a pianist, then that's just true, no matter who you are. However, the thing that makes it good for Bob to become a pianist is both something about Bob and something about everyone. Everyone should nurture their talents and pursue goals that inspire them. But Bob should become a pianist because he's good at it and really likes it. So the grounding for certain univeral truths are in part personal. There is thus no tension between picking from the menu of human diversity and the existence of universal truths. Here is a universal moral truth: It is good to have a happy, satisfying, meaningful life. We cultural libertarians understand that there is a great deal of variability among individuals. And the things that are likely to give rise to happy, satisfying, meaningful lives can be very different for different people. Now, if you pick a person, and consider her constitution, experience, capabilities, and so forth, there will be some objective facts about what sorts of things will lead her life to go well. These facts will overlap with the facts that will make anyone's life go well, just insofar as there are commonalities in human nature. Everyone should have friends, love their families, have meaningful productive work, enjoy aesthetic pleasures, have a good sex life, take time for leisure, etc... The way any particular individual might go about achieving such values is variable and, yes, relative to the person. But this in no way entails or suggests nihilism. If you ask whether porn or Christian books are better, you have to ask "better in what respect?" If you want to get your rocks off (a genuine moral value!), you're best with porn. If you want to build your life around limiting, elaborate, socially constructed falsehoods, try a Christian book. Goldberg is talented at making arbitrary assumptions about the Good in order to attack folks without his peculiar set of prejudices. Here he goes after Nick Gillespie for enjoying himself, and then makes a dumb non-sequitur: Gillespie confesses that when he was younger, he did "pot and alcohol, mostly, but also acid, mescaline, Ecstasy, mushrooms, coke and meth... Mostly I did drugs because they were fun and I liked the way I felt when I was high." In other words, if it's good for me, it's good for everybody. Goldberg's paraphrase has no relation to Nick's statment. Nick says that the drugs were fun, and that they made him feel good. I'm not sure what Goldberg has against fun and feeling good (he often strains in a striving geek way to project a Sinatraesque alcohol-and-cigars ethic of masculinity), but in any case, Gillespie said nothing about "everybody." Knowing Nick a little, I think he'd allow that some folks might not feel good and have fun on mescaline. And so they shouldn't do it. And that they shoudn't do it would be a universal moral truth. Golberg owes us moral arguments against porn and drugs if he wants to be taken seriously. Preferring porn over Christian literature isn't a symptom of nihilism; it may rather be a symptom of a firm grasp on reality, and on what it means to live a really satisfying, non-deluded life on Earth. What of Johnny Taliban? Golberg writes: You don't turn children into responsible adults by giving them absolute freedom. You foster good character by limiting freedom, and by channeling energies into the most productive avenues. That's what all good schools, good families, and good societies do. The Boy Scouts don't throw a pocketknife to a kid and say, "Knock yourself out, kid. I'll be back in a couple hours." The cultural libertarians want to do precisely that. If cultural libertarianism is just a synonym from egregious negligence about the well-being of people we love, then to hell with cultural libertarianism! But is Goldberg serious? Does he really think anybody thinks this? Well, if he does, he's stupid, and if he doesn't, he's dishonest. Take your pick. Cultural libertarianism isn't a philosophy of child rearing. It is the belief that because there are a vast multiplicity of ways in which human beings might lead happy, satisfying, meaningful lives, we should keep it open to people to find the truly best way for themselves, and we should encourage a dynamic creative culture that reveals new, perhaps liberatory possibilities. But not all possibilities are equal. Some are contrary to basic aspects of human nature, and so should be avoided. Some will be contrary to aspects of a certain individual's natures. We should certainly limit our children's liberty in order to keep them safe, and yes, in order to channel their energies into endeavors we believe will lead them to have truly good lives. What about cultural libertarianism, properly understood, contradicts that? If I had been Johnny Taliban's dad, I would have argued with Johnny about Islam, because Islam is unintelligent and harmful to a full, happy life. If he would have gone and become a muslim anyway, I would have told him that he's being stupid, and that I don't admire him for it. I might even take away the car keys! I suppose I could characterize conservatism as the belief that one fosters good character by authoritarian suppression of independence through frequent beatings. But conservatives don't believe that, so it would be stupid to say it. Right?

Instapundit's Fox News piece on academia reminds me of Robert Nozick's analysis of why intellectuals oppose capitalism. It's worth reading. So is Matt Welch's commentary on Instapundit's piece.

Sullivan has reconsidered his suggestion that Johhny Taliban springs from the corrupt mores of those blue Gore-voting states. But he does so not because the suggestion is full-on stupid, but because Mr. Walker is in fact a right-wing extremist. In the end Sullivan holds fast, reasoning that the only authentic rebellion against liberal permissiveness is illiberal authoritarianism. He concludes: ... the link between his chosen lifestyle and the culture in which he was born is still valid, I think. The link is what, Andrew? That the culture in which he was born didn't flat out prohibit Walker's eventual choices? As Daschle might put it, I'm disappointed in Andrew's sloppy thinking. Walker is one guy. He is not a representative sample of Marin County. I know the first rule of punditry is to make wild generalizations on the basis of your own experience, and I guess it carries over naturally to wild generalizations on the basis of some other guy's experience. But hasty generalization remains a canonical fallacy. I know folks with permissive parents from permissive places who are conservative/liberal activists (take your pick). I know folks with strict parents from conservative places who are themselves permissive/strict (take your pick). So what! Sullivan's misplaced eagerness to use Walker as a bludgeon against "permissiveness," liberalism, and bluehood is mystifying. I guess when you see cracks in the walls of hegemony, you beat at them with anything you can grab.

Andrew Sullivan won't rest until the last liberal is smoked out of its cave! Geesh, was he beaten as a child by hippies? Sullivan near enough gets an intellectual hernia straining to map Johnny Walker/Mike Spann onto the dubious Blue/Red electoral division. It's really just dumb. Where was Timothy McVeigh from again? (Upstate New York, it turns out.. But you know what I'm getting at.)

Good essay by Claire Wolfe arguing against national IDs.

I just now see that my previous points echo many made by Andrew Sullivan in his posts about Fisk's Fisted Face. Well, great minds... (though I don't have Sullivan's unstoppable urge to grab each dumb statement by someone on the left and hold it aloft as a representative example of the inner depravity of the left as such.)

Unlike some, I feel sorry for Robert Fisk for getting the crap kicked out of him. It's just callous to take pleasure in a man being beaten bloody. And it's plain repulsive when a generally thoughtful person like Glenn Reynolds calls the beating "well-deserved." (Tell me it's just macho bluster, Prof.!) But it's repulsive when Fisk calls his beating well-deserved, too, as he does here: And – I realised – there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us – of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the "War for Civilisation" just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them "collateral damage". So I thought I should write about what happened to us in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions would produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was "beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees". And of course, that's the point. The people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted by us – by B-52s, not by them. And I'll say it again. If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find. This kind of exculpatory reasoning is disturbing, as it denies people any meaningful sort of self-determination and moral responsibility. To whatever extent Fisk is right about the West having harmed the Afghans, Fisk himself has done nothing. He is not a symbol of us any more than a randomly chosen Afghan is a symbol of them. The assailants did not know who he was. They had no warrant for believing him to be a cause of their grievances. They lashed out irrationally, wrongly. Fisk, who wishes to insulate his assailants from responsibility, manages to insult them instead, and us, by casting them as mere conduits for the West's brutal agency. Fisk says they "never should have done so," but it's not clear that he believes there was a real choice. In context, it sounds rather like "the world never should have been such that they felt they had to." It is surely a virtue to sympathize with others and to strive to know what drives them. It's no virtue, however, to sympathize so intensely that you would strip autonomy from your objects of sympathy in order to spite what they hate. If someone does something awful and wrong, at least give them the dignity of having done it of their own volition. If they are brutal, let them own their brutality. The West may be the source of some misery, but it doesn't therefore have a monopoly on causing it.

Apologies for the dead air. I've been a bit busy to blog. Thanks to those of you concerned that I was dead.

Bad Sex Awards! -- The year's most notably execrable passages of sordid prose. Includes Jonathan Franzen, whose honored passage contains such pungent wonders as He was kneeling at the feet of his chaise and sniffing its plush minutely, inch by inch, in hopes that some vaginal tang might still be lingering eight weeks after Melissa Paquette had lain here. (Link from Arts & Letters Daily.)

Man, so close!

More on Embryo Rights! -- Instapundit gives a shout out to Bryan Peterson and his new blog, JunkYardBlog, where Bryan laments that anti-cloners are unfairly cast as reactionary laggards, while cloning advocates picture themselves as the rational vanguard. Bryan's remains agnostic about cloning, but he does have views about the qualifications for Full Moral Standing. Turns out there aren't many: I'm a Christian, but my reason for being pro-life is only partly based on my faith. It's also based on science--DNA, the genetic code that determines hair color, eye color and some basic aspects of our personalities, is present at conception. The presence of DNA means that even at the earliest stages the fertilized is destined for birth as a human child. To draw lines of legality at the first or second trimester is, to me at least, an arbitrary solution brought about for political expediency. Nothing wrong with that per se, democracy is founded on the notion that most questions can be settled that way. But we're talking about defining life here, and in my mind it's best to draw clear, bright lines and discourage people from crossing them. Bryan, your DNA is present in every cell of your body, but you're not made of billions of little people. DNA is just a molecule, almost indiscernible from the molecules that code for monkeys or dogs. A fertilized human egg is not destined for birth as a human child. There are a great many supporting conditions neccesary for an embryo to develop into an infant. In fact a great many fertilized eggs are spontaneously aborted. A fertilized egg might become a human infant if lots and lots of pieces are in place. Now, if you're not going to be theological, you have to tell us what so special about humans such that they have a right to life, while monkeys and dogs don't. There's something that makes us different and special. Whatever it is, it's not yet there at the big-bunch-of-cells stage. Until it is there, whatever it is, then there is no reason to regard bunches of cells with human DNA any differently than bunches of cells with monkey DNA. The potential to turn into a person is the potential to turn into something that one day will have rights. But before that happy day arrives... nada. Rights are something one grows into. You don't - POOF - have them all at once. Five year olds have very, very few rights (can't buy liquor, can't decide where to live, can't buy a Glock, can't get married) and for good reason. If you back up far enough you get to a stage in human development where the organism has no rights at all. And the issue isn't one of defining life. Cabbages are life. The issue is defining the criteria for personhood , for what it is to have Full Moral Standing (or even Partial Moral Standing). To ascribe FTM on the basis of the presence of a not-very-remarkable molecule that might one day, if countless other things click, give rise to an independent, rational, reflective, empathetic, communicative, and productive being -- that seems arbitrary. Bright lines are sometimes nice, but you don't want them so bright that you're blinded to crucial distinctions. Man, I could have this debate forever. Wait! I have been having this debate forever!

Thanks to Tony Adragna, Paul Orwin and Jen Klocke for a most stimulating comment box discussion about my prior post. Pop down and check it out! (Start from the bottom of the comment box and read up.)

Glenn Reynolds admiringly reproduces this letter to the editor from Sheldon Cohen, a U of Tennessee philosophy prof: Regarding the declaration by British Liberal Democrat Graham Watson, "Terrorist organizations in one country can be freedom fighters in another," in a Nov. 27 article: I have heard this true but inane statement, or a variant, one time too many. Yes, one man's terrorist can be another man's freedom fighter, and the man who to the jury is a murderer, to other people might be a meal ticket or perhaps a beloved nephew. None of which changes the fact that the murderer is a murderer, and the terrorist a terrorist. To some people Attila the Hun was one of the best-dressed people of the Fifth Century. So what? Mr. Graham should attempt to substitute actual thought for mindless slogans. It's hard, but with discipline and application, can be achieved. While Mr. Watson may not be expressing himself with the utmost perspicacity, I think Cohen, for all his discipline and application, may be missing the underlying point. The point is, at bottom, linguistic, having to do with the conventional pragmatic force of the word 'terrorist.' 'Terrorist', like 'murderer', is not purely descriptive, but is also a moral category. It implies wrongdoing, that we are justified in condemning the subject. However, by the dictionary definition, any violent political insurgent, whatever the justice of their cause, is a terrorist. Just suppose Minneapolis is conquered by evil occupying Manitobans who forcibly evict all the citizens from their homes and buildings and push them across the river into St. Paul. The overpowering Manitobans establish a cruel and tyrannical regime, denying dignity and basic rights to the Minnesotans. Wishing to loose themselves from the chains of the wicked northern horde, but lacking an organized military, the Minnesotans have little choice but to enact a campaign of guerilla violence to instill terror in the hearts of their dark northern overlords. Now, because the Minnesotans' insurgency amounts to "the unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons," they are dictionary-terrorists. Yet ever since the word acquired an unmistakable moral valence, the use of 'terrorist' implies moral illegitimacy, which is flat wrong in the case of the Minnesotans. 'Freedom fighter', on the other hand, implies something noble, worthy and just. Being both a murderer and a favorite nephew is like being both green and round. But, pragmatically, being both a terrorist and a freedom fighter (in virtue of performing the same acts) is like being both beautiful and hideous (in virtue of the same disposition of features). Applying 'terrorist,' like 'murderer', requires a moral judgment. To pretend 'terrorist' to be purely descriptive while using it for moral effect is a sophistical tactic for forestalling careful reflection on the appropriateness of the underlying judgment. 'Terrorist' is one of those words, like 'fascist', that tempts the substitution of loaded language for actual thought.

Natalie Solent offer the following prefatory disclaimer to her post sympathizing with Scientologists for their persecution by the French state: I have not the slightest belief in L Ron Hubbard's foolish and occasionally sinister made-up religion of Scientology. But of course all religions are made up! (Did Mohammed & Joseph Smith really talk to God or were they just saying that?) And most of them are frequently foolish and occasionally sinister. Natalie gets it spot-on when she says, "Christianity, my religion, was once a cult." Brian Linse harps on the implied equivalence: "I'm no fan of Christianity, but to compare it to Scientology is way off base." Well, in terms of numbers, age and social acceptance the comparison is way off base. But Christianity was indeed a cult (small, new and socially ostracized), and it's really just as likely that the best among us will arrive at a dimension beyond space and time to live alongside an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being as it is likely that the best among us will transform into pure energy at one with and comprehending the entire universe (or whatever it is Scientologists think). But in terms of terror wreaked and lives lost, Scientology cannot begin to compete. But maybe someday! Anyway, Natalie's exactly right that we need to defend the right of people everywhere to commit their lives to unpopular and wildly implausible ideas. I for one daily give thanks to Thomas Jefferson and the cold, immutable laws of physics that I live in a place where I can spout off derisively about incredibly popular but still wildly implausible ideas without being stoned or tossed in the tank.

Thanks to Matt Welch for (1) excerpting my comment about Johnny Taliban and thereby creating a happy spike in my traffic, and (2) calling me handsome. Now, if I could only get a hot French wife like Matt's!

Dawson assures me that he'll be getting around to the cloning debate soon enough. Problem is, he's got a life. No worries, dude. Good luck on those papers! You know where to find me.

My Favorite Israeli -- Great little interview with Gene Simmons at the NYT. He has a number of sound insights about the relation of art and commerce. Responding to the point that KISS never won great ciritical acclaim, Gene says: But that's the great notion of America that appeals to me -- of the people, for the people, by the people. People vote for Kiss with money! Try to argue with that. When we come off tour $158 million later and someone tells me it stinks, I'm going, ''Well, why did I make all this money?'' Indeed. And then a questionable aesthetic judgment followed by an historically accurate observation: Art is highly overrated. Michelangelo, Mozart, Rembrandt -- they were all on commission. Gene, what's KISS's "larger legacy"? You know, in America, if people like what we do, that's enough. I don't think it has to mean anything. I don't know what a hamburger means, but it makes life worth living. I'm about to embark on a Broadway show. And there's going to be a Kiss superhero show. The vistas are endless. Beautiful. KISS: Reason # 303,223,4905 why America is so great.

It ain't easy being Taliban-American -- Earlier this evening I saw John Walker's dad, Frank Lindh, on CNN. He was barely composed. He said John was a good kid. He pleaded for Americans to be merciful. I wonder if we will be. He's not the only Taliban-American. Apparently there are now three. (By the way... John grew up partly in, yes, Montgomery County, MD.) My conjecture is that Frank will get much of the sympathy he wants for his son. One of the repellent parts of war is the way it seems to compel us to define an "other" -- a them to our us -- considered part of the same species only by courtesy. Seeing an American kid among the Other screws with the categories that dictate our sympathies. Is he us or them? Do I hate him or feel sorry for him. Additionally, it shows that there is a psychological path from us to them, that there is a continuity, not a categorical divide. If we want to consider ourselves human, we may have to consider them human too. What then? Though I do think John will get a fair amount of sympathy, it would be perverse to give it to him while witholding it from other Taliban fighters. For John is more culpable by leaps and bounds for his association with the Taliban than the natives, for he made a series of explicit, conscious decisions within the context of a plurality of open alternatives unavailable to most Afghans. Those kids "educated" in Taliban madrassah, rocking back and forth chanting the Koran -- they should elicit our sympathy. Sympathy for lives permanently stunted by mandatory fanatical mysticism. They don't have many options, aren't aware of most of the options they do have, and have been educated to despise any option that might really make them better off. But John Philip Walker Lindh, aka Abdul Hamid, a kid from Maryland and California, knew what he was doing when he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and converted to Islam. He knew what he was doing when he moved to Yemen to study Arabic. He knew what he was doing when he joined a Pakistani madrassah. And he knew what he was doing when he joined the Taliban to become a jihadi. That's not a lifestyle choice we can approve of. And if he fucked himself up because it, that's not something we should feel sorry for.

I don't feel like I know enough about the history and details of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to make strong, categorical moral judgments. I don't think that most of the people making strong, categorical judgments know enough either. However morally complex you think it is, it's probably more complex than that. I was helped a little by this essay by one of my favorite former professors, Tomis Kapitan. The topic of Palestine v. Israel does not move me to take sides. I find the whole hoary affair a textbook example of the relation of faith to force. Disputes based in revealed religious claims cannot be rationally adjudicated, for the convictions driving the disputes are not rationally grounded. There is no common ground of public evidence to which disputants can appeal. There is, in the end, only the subjugation or elimination of your foes or the subjugation or elimination of you. Unless, that is, you don't take religion all that seriously. The nice thing about the west is that our free, pluralistic, scientific, commercial culture has, just like Osama suspects, badly undermined truly serious commitment to religious ideals. People aren't dying for their conception of God, because their conception of God doesn't really matter much to them (despite what they might say), which is a really, really good thing. Or if we do allow ourselves to take our conception of God really seriously, it is because we've adopted a conveniently toothless and benign remnant of our theological tradition. Which is fine. (And also a symptom of ultimate religious unseriousness.) Sugared, part-time religion gives some people the good and hopeful feeling that there's a point to all this, that the universe is meaningful, that there's a big payoff at the end of all this trouble, and so on. Swell! If what Jesus says is "Be nice to people!" then by all means be nice to people! The religious tradition of my youth, Mormonism, recalls a time when Americans still killed each other over religion. I'm glad that time's long gone. And nowadays, when I see religious tribes slaughtering each other, I have a hard time sympathizing with either.

I find Sharon's intention to conduct "a war on terror," -- implying Arafat to be the moral equivalent of bin Laden -- disingenuous, dishonest and despair-inducing. Yes, some Palestinian radicals blew themselves up and took a fair number of Israelis with them. But many of these folks do have legitimate grievances, even if they're expressing them by illegitimate means. The Israelis literally colonized another people's homeland, displacing thousands. And they treat their Palestinian citizens as second-rate. Would you take it lightly if you got kicked out of the family home, and then had your remaining unviolated rights treated with arrogant disregard by the people who did it? This is not a story of bad people against good people. And Arafat just isn't a terrorist. Well... at least not any more than Sharon, a man pegged by his own government for the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians. Arafat may look the other way at times, as his people don't have a high-tech military backed by the world's most powerful nation. Terrorizing attacks are the only way for them to retaliate against Israeli agression and injustice. No doubt some Palestinians have simply turned into fanatical anti-semites, wishing the destuction of Israel more than Palestinian independence and autonomy. But this hatred is stewed in a cauldron fired by so much intermingled agression that it is difficult to segregate the just from the unjust passions. And some Israelis are their mirror image. I really have difficulty avoiding moral equivalence here.

Interesting piece in Reason by Shika Dalmia and Henry Payne reporting, against the CW on the left, that most blacks are against college admissions standards prejudiced in favor of blacks.

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!

Lovely defense of materialism and individualism as the source of American generosity by Lawrence Lindsay (economic advisor to Bush) at Declan McCullagh's Politech. Especially cool: Lindsay gives props to Frank O'Connor (i.e., Ayn Rand's wife), and dwells on skyscraper symbolism.

Like much of the English-speaking world, I went to see Harry Potter this weekend. Although I resisted Harry-mania for well over two years, I ended up getting hooked this spring when my girlfriend at the time read the first book to me in the car during a trip down to Charleston & Savannah and back. I then shredded through the rest of the series. (And I'm not embarrassed to admit it!) Anyway, the movie was a rather rote interpretation, and was so compressed that much of the considerable feeling (for neglect, friendship, ambition, etc.) in the book was almost entirely squeezed out. I'd have loved to have seen what Terry Gilliam, say, would have done with it. How about some philosophical commentary? In the climactic scene, where Harry confronts "he-who-must-not-be-named," the Evil One announces, Nietzsche fashion: "There is no good and evil. There is only power and those too fearful to grab it." (Or something to that effect.) This is a popular theme in fantasy movies. Think Star Wars. The idea is that the acme of evil is the refusal to recognize that there really is such a thing as evil. Evil people think big ticket moral categories are just a way of keeping us down, from becoming all that we can really be. Enlightenment is abandoning our spiritually enslaving scruples and just going for it. But, Harry argues, that's just what evil is! Now, what Harry and Luke have to show us is that there is compensation for abiding by the big ticket moral categories, and this is where these stories become very strained. Harry just happens to be extremely powerful. He didn't do anything to earn it, he's just got it. So, it's not so bad being good if you're Harry, because you've got all this power you never asked for, and every time you use it, you're a big hero. Yet most of us aren't aren't set up so well to attain mass adoration. But I'm being cynical. There is a hint in Harry that adherence to the marquee moral categories makes it possible to attain things that really do matter. Harry himself was saved from evil because his very skin was infused with his mother's overwhelming love. Perhaps acceding to our intuitions about good and evil is what makes it possible to love and be loved, and if that's the case, then that's probably compensation enough. Yet, I bet when kids fantasize about being Harry, they fantasize about his power and not his capacity for love.

Another reason for dropping an MTV bomb on the middle east: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson! Just saw the Full House twins on MTV's Fake ID Club, and oh my... our babies are all growed up! The fifteen year-old nascent ultra-babes stand atop a media empire worth close to $1 billion! Have you seen the Mary-Kate and Ashley magazine? The Saturday Morning cartoon? The clothing line (brought to you by the world largest retailer)? The made-for-video movie series? The Gameboy games? You haven't? Well, the rising cohort of young women -- sure to be the wealthiest, most powerful generation of women ever -- certainly have. While not artists of the highest order, the Olson's have a bred-in-the-bone sensibility for media, marketing, and the overwhelming power of beauty and fashion (Virginia Postrel, take note!) And they know branding -- they've been a brand since their earliest inkling of memory. The Taliban would not approve. And neither, I suspect, would our beloved old-school feminists. But this is what girlpower is about: using femininity to evoke aesthetic and sexual admiration, and exploting it to rule the market. Or: courting objectification for fun and profit. It's Mary-Kate and Ashley's world. We menfolk just live in it.

Apparently MTV is set to do it's part in the middle east propaganda war. The idea is to spam the 15-30 y/o middle east demo with Rock the Vote-like public service efforts to cast westerners in a favorable light. They've clearly got the wrong idea. MTV is a schizoid basketcase message-wise. Their "very special" socially conscious programming is the worst sort of misinformed, pusillanimous liberalism posing as broad-minded humanism, while the videos (once their raison d'etre) are full of the grossest sort of flesh-peddling bling bling -- which is excellent! Clearly middle eastern Muslims need spiritual liberation, and a gyrating Britney Spears slathered in oil singing "I'm a Slave for You" is rather more liberating than MTV's stylized NPR-lite quasi-politics (although Serena Altschul is... desirable). The Afghans & Arabs don't need after-school specials with Serena's sedated earnesty. They need T&A, thuglife and Slipknot! They need their MTV2! If they don't know who we be, give 'em DMX!

Very nice obituary at the Guardian of David Lewis, the Princeton metaphysician famous (for a philosopher) for his stalwart defense of the existence of real, live alternative dimensions. On Lewis's theory, any state of affairs that is possible is actual on some world or other that differs from this one only in not being this one. So there is a possible world with David Lewis still on it (his Lewisian "counterpart" at any rate) and that world is richer philosophically than ours. To learn a little about David Lewis's philosophy, try David King's discussion of a few Lewis quotes about possible worlds. What exactly is a possible world? Try the entry at xrefer.

Please note that The Fly Bottle is fitted with bleeding-edge blog Comment Technology (TM), courtesy of some dude in England . If something I say makes you royally pissed, let me have it. I don't mind encouragement either.

I hereby innaugarate my new weblog, The Fly Bottle. The title comes from Wittgenstein's statement that the aim of his philosophy was to show the fly the way from the fly bottle. What can this possibly mean? Well, Wittgenstein was weird. We're flies. When we philosophize we buzz around bumping into an unseen enclosing barrier, the glass, erected by the philosopher in the attempt to use perfectly good words for perverse intellectual purposes. Once we cease abusing words by ripping them from their native habitats and acquiesce to language as it is unselfconsciously used in "the wild," we'll find that our philosophical "problems" were nothing but artifacts of our linguistic abuse. We'll be free! Now, I don't agree with this. Philosophical problems aren't generally figments of a bad way with words. But Wittgenstein is right that a lot of confusion will vanish if you carefully attend to the contours of common thought and language. What I want to do in this weblog, is to bring this kind of attentiveness to bear on intellectual questions of the day, and perhaps to help see the way out of the intellectual traps built for us by misguided contemporary intellectuals (you know, those bad leftist postmodernists). I'm quite sure that I shan't be half so prodigious as Instapundit, my blogging hero. However, I do hope to post something every day or so, and I hope that my eclectic range of interests will be more interesting than offputting.