On Liberals, Politics, and even Democracy Itself

This is partly inspired by the Democratic primary, and an attempt to understand what's behind the Sanders phenomenon, but it's also inspired more generally by just a loose complex of phenomena over the past few years. Here's my basic idea: over the past few generations, America has been engaged in a rather massive culture war. Beginning in about the 1960s, a bunch of people came along who radically disagreed with mainstream, relatively conservative social norms and political beliefs. And these cultural liberals have been winning, spectacularly so. We've reached the point where many, if not all, of the new liberal views are pretty damn mainstream, such that people who violate them are broadly perceived as deviant (e.g. a Mr. Trump). But, quite rightly, we're not resting on our laurels. Nor are we accepting the current, relatively liberal mainstream views on those issues as sacred gospel. Rather, they're works in progress, and of late, particularly in the internet age, a ton of energy has gone into the development of the new progressive norms. The broad principles are increasingly being translated into a fairly comprehensive code of conduct, which aspires to a kind of perfection. For just about any question of "how should I behave toward other people," there's a right answer out there, which you should follow. The older, more conservative norms also prescribed such a code of conduct, although there is one major difference: the new liberal paradigm, more or less tautologically, gives far greater space for individual autonomy. There are a lot of rules that say, basically, "do whatever you want so long as you're respecting what others want." That last part requires a lot of elaboration, though, and it's been getting a lot of elaboration. All of this is great, and it proceeds within a more-or-less agreed-upon analytical framework. Then it's just a matter of proselytizing for the basic worldview that says you should follow these rules, of spreading the message that it's not okay to violate them. It's a work in progress, obviously, but we're working on it.

Like I said, that's all great. And the way that this enterprise aspires, basically, to Perfection, in a certain way, is great. For the first time we have a chance to implement widespread social norms based on genuinely liberal values, and so we have this opportunity to really think about how to get them Right in a way that's kind of new. But the thing is, then you get to politics. And the trouble with politics is that not everyone agrees with you. And I feel like on some level, the focus on developing liberal norms of righteous conduct, and on condemning those who don't follow them, has a bit of a tendency to distract from the fact that the people who disagree with us are within their rights to do so. Specifically they're within their political rights to do so. Their beliefs are wrongful ones, and as a matter of morality they ought to change them, but they do not lose their rights as democratic citizens because of those wrongful beliefs. The point here is not just that we, as liberals, have to be cognizant of the fact that democratic politics is hard and we won't get everything we want. It's that on some level, we shouldn't. Not so long as the things we want are unpopular with the American people. Because the American people really do have the right to make these decisions for themselves, even if they will make their decisions badly.

Now, to be clear, that last point doesn't apply to everything. I'm a big believer in democracy, but more specifically I'm a big believer in liberal democracy, and in constitutionally limited government. And we happen to have a Constitution that, I think, really does protect a lot of liberal values when properly read. That is to say, it really does restrain the political choice of the people in ways that are pleasing to modern social liberals. At the very least it's perfectly legitimate to argue, as to much of the agenda of modern social liberalism, that the issue has been constitutionalized and is not the subject of ongoing political choice anymore. Gay rights are a great example of that: it's absolutely right for us to say that we should win on that issue even if most Americans are against us. "Equal" really does mean equal. But constitutionalism only gets you so far. It's just not plausible that every single item on your agenda will be constitutionalized, and moreover, it would be bad if that were so, because democratic political choice is important and no constitution should lock in a country's entire political program.

I think the specific impetus for this post was actually when I saw some article about how Hillary Clinton's effort to present herself as the candidate of the modern Democratic Party's identity-politics coalition of oppressed groups is unconvincing because, in order for those various movements to be truly "intersectional," I believe was how they put it, they also need to be radically anti-corporate and what-have-you. My reaction to which was, okay, so what are you going to do if you find yourself in a country where "we shouldn't discriminate against women, or racial minorities, or LGBTQ&c. people" commands widespread support but "we should adopt radically anti-corporate economic policies" doesn't? Because the thing is, not only won't you be able to enact your whole "intersectional" program in such a world, there's a very real sense in which you shouldn't be able to, either. Now, again, it may well be wrongful of the public not to support your position on this. But their wrongness doesn't give you a right to govern them against their will.

This ties into something Barney Frank recently said in a column critiquing Bernie's campaign: "What troubles me and many of my former colleagues—among the most liberal members—is the belief that nothing short of this [Sanders's agenda] is worth fighting for." You have to figure out what's worth fighting for that you can plausibly get a democratic mandate for. But it goes further. In a democracy there's a need to accept that sometimes you lose, and that it's legitimate for the other side to enact its policies when that's the will of the people. Again, this is not always the case, and the modern conservative movement is quite generous in its willingness to have its bad-on-the-merits policies also be unconstitutional. But there's always got to be a large area where it's legitimate for the other side to win, and you have to be sort of graceful about that, because otherwise you start attacking democracy itself. This really isn't something we have to deal with in the project of creating liberal social norms; indeed, it's important that those norms be as uncompromised and as near to perfect as possible. But it's important not to lose sight of it in the political realm, not just as a matter of pragmatism but as a matter of principle.

Yes, People Are Bad. They Should Become Less Bad.

So apparently there's some group trying to argue that the rise of humanity is somehow good for the rest of the planet. Or at least they're saying stuff like that (under the hashtag #GoodAnthropocene, apparently) in the context of a political document seemingly arguing in favor of increased reliance on natural gas and nuclear power (and maybe also solar), and also some stuff about using urbanization and various other supposedly modern/postmodern trends to keep human civilization thriving while reducing the "footprint" of said civilization on the environment. The headline of the Slate article in the link above describes the group as being against "people are bad" environmentalism; certainly their hashtag supports that description. But, like, if they think they're arguing that people haven't been bad, they don't really seem to be. According to the Slate article, they trumpet, basically, the awesomeness of human civilization in itself (for humans that is): "[l]ife expectancy is on the rise, infectious disease risk has plummeted, natural disasters kill fewer people, and abject poverty is on the decline." But they also acknowledge that "those gains have not come without sacrifice: We’re losing species at an incredible rate, and climate change could add ever more stress on human and natural systems." Which sounds like it adds up to, human civilization has been pretty sweet for the humans and pretty terrible for everyone else. Which is about my view, and also sounds exactly like the "people are bad" view. I mean I guess you could distinguish between people who think it was worth it and people who think it wasn't, but that's kind of a boring issue, being just about how we characterize the past rather than what we do going forward.

And on that front, isn't the answer obvious? We're not going to tear down human civilization. Maybe that's regrettable, maybe it's not, but there's nothing to be done about it. So all we can do is our level best to mitigate the damage that human civilization inflicts upon the rest of the world. Or, to put it another way, people should become less bad, as much less bad as they can manage. Maybe as these people seem to suggest, we'll be able to make human civilization genuinely harmonious with nature, or maybe we'll only be able to make it very slightly less bad. Maybe, that is to say, people are incurably bad, or maybe they're not. But surely we must try, whether or not we will eventually fail, and whether or not at the outset of the attempt we think we will fail. What's the alternative? Throw up our hands in despair? Abandon caring about the non-human part of the world, and the horrors inflicted upon it by human civilization? Abandon human civilization, which, as noted above, ain't gonna happen? There is no alternative. If we're doomed to be bad for the world, we must at the very least struggle against that doom to the utmost.

Oh, and if we're gonna try to make human civilization more harmoniously compatible with nature and our fellow species, maaybe we should stop torturing and slaughtering billions upon billions of animals per year just because we think their flesh tastes nice? Just a thought.

Sometimes the Easy Thing is Also the Right Thing

This semester I'm taking a class called "Capital Punishment: Race, Poverty, and Disadvantage." It is shaping up to be a rather unsettling class, though obviously in ways that are a feature and not a bug. In any event, our reading for this week is Furman v. Georgia, the 1972 case in which the Court briefly declared the death penalty unconstitutional. This is what I like to call a "seriatim" case, one in which every single Justice wrote an opinion of his own (in addition to a per curiam announcing the judgment of the Court but not the reasoning); the word is used to describe the British practice, also followed during the first decade of our Constitution, in which there was no single opinion of the Court and each judge would always deliver his own opinion. Chief Justice John Marshall abolished seriatim decision-making to promote Court solidarity and enhance its power and prestige, but every so often (especially during the Burger Court, I've found) things break down and most or all of the Justices need to have their say.

Anyway, one of the opinions was of course by Justice Blackmun. Here's how it opened:

Cases such as these provide for me an excruciating agony of the spirit. I yield to no one in the depth of my distaste, antipathy, and, indeed, abhorrence, for the death penalty, with all its aspects of physical distress and fear and of moral judgment exercised by finite minds. That distaste is buttressed by a belief that capital punishment serves no useful purpose that can be demonstrated. For me, it violates childhood’s training and life’s experiences, and is not compatible with the philosophical convictions I have been able to develop. It is antagonistic to any sense of “reverence for life.”

This was a dissenting opinion. Because, Blackmun says, his sentiments against the death penalty are purely those that should characterize legislative or perhaps executive decision-making, not the judicial disposition of cases. A little later on he says that:

To reverse the judgments in these cases is, of course, the easy choice. It is easier to strike the balance in favor of life and against death.

The implication is that, while it would be easy, it would not be correct, and it would not be correct because this is not a decision for judges to make. This is a pretty common trope, employed perhaps most often by Justice Felix Frankfurter, although Blackmun's opinion is unusual in a way. The typical Frankfurter line is that "whatever we may think of the merits of this policy," it is not unconstitutional and therefore the judiciary is powerless to stop it. Blackmun, on the other hand, tells us in no uncertain terms what he thinks of the policy; he goes into considerable depth about how it is contrary to all of his deepest values.  Blackmun closed by saying that:

Although personally I may rejoice at the Court’s result, I find it difficult to accept or to justify as a matter of history, of law, or of constitutional pronouncement. I fear the Court has overstepped. It has sought and has achieved an end.

Of course, some several decades later Blackmun famously declared that he would "no longer tinker with the machinery of death." That is to say, he had become convinced not that capital punishment was inherently unconstitutional but that it could not be imposed through a system that was anything other than arbitrary and capricious, contrary to the Constitution's requirements.

There's a lesson in that, I think. From his childhood through his retirement from the Court and his death, Harry Blackmun felt nothing but revulsion toward the death penalty. When he joined the Court, he felt however compelled to ignore his own moral impulses and instead apply "the law," operating of course under the assumption that those were two disjoint categories. Justice Blackmun would not do the "easy" thing and strike down those laws he found so morally repugnant; no, he would follow the law. But the older, wiser Justice Blackmun eventually became convinced that the "hard" thing simply could not be done lawfully. He never took the position Justice Brennan forcefully (and, in my opinion, masterfully) espoused in Furman, that death was an inherently unconstitutional punishment. Rather he realized that judicial attempts to craft a system of procedural safeguards that would cabin the evils of the punishment, to "tinker with the machinery of death," were futile, that the system could never be good enough. That was the voice of experience, not naive idealism. It was rather naive when he once thought that such tinkering was worthwhile, that we could in fact build a good enough machine of death.* Experience taught him to follow his heart.

Yes, it is easy to strike the balance in favor of life and against death. There's a reason for that, and it's not just that it's the right thing to do, morally speaking (though it does follow from this basic fact). It's because a wrongful decision striking down these laws would have been no worse than any other decision wrongly denying legislative authority to the American people on some purported constitutional grounds, while a wrongful decision upholding them would have been far worse than any other decision wrongly permitting to them such legislative power, for it would have led the American government to kill people, human beings in its custody, in violation of the Constitution--perhaps the worst legal atrocity imaginable. Therefore, had I been in Blackmun's situation, I would not have voted to uphold the death penalty unless I was absolutely convinced that there was no possible legitimate constitutional argument for striking them down. This is ultimately the key point of Philip Bobbitt's theory of constitutional law: that the law is ultimately indeterminate, that there are different ways of making valid legal arguments and that these modalities can conflict, and that this is an acceptable, nay, indispensable part of our legal system because it allows us to choose. And that choice, between different possible legitimate ways of resolving a case, cannot help but be a place where conscience enters the legal system. For Bobbitt, this is the whole point.

In 1972, Harry Blackmun thought he didn't have a choice--or rather, he thought he had one choice that was easy and another one that was correct. But, fortunately, we live in a constitutional system that does make some room for conscience and for moral choice. And when we make those moral choices, when we follow our conscience in choosing between two visions of the law, of course those choices will feel easy. It should always feel easier to follow conscience than to disregard it. But just because it is easy doesn't mean it isn't also right.

Just ask Justice Blackmun.


*No, not that kind.

Also, Regarding "Justified Shootings"

Okay, one last thought about the whole Ferguson thing. As part of their coverage of the Ferguson outrages this week, Vox.com put up a post called, "When is it legal for a cop to kill you?" The idea was to educate people about the law governing police shootings, which is basically that, as a matter of constitutional law, cops may shoot someone to protect their life or the life of a third party (as may anyone else who's in a position to do so), and they may also shoot a suspect fleeing a crime scene if and only if they have probable cause to think the suspect has committed a violent felony. And the main reaction I kept having to reading the article was, okay, but do you have to actually kill the person? Like, we can put on our philosopher's hats and think about when it's morally justified to kill someone, and we might come up with something a lot like these two situations. The first one makes a ton of sense: in a choice between "murderer kills innocent person" and "attempted murderer is killed," you choose option #2 every time (except, maybe, in some sort of action-movie scripted scenario where the attempted murder in question is actually justified for some reason, heh). The second one is a bit tougher to justify given the level of uncertainty that may often be involved, but at the very least we can see why not letting someone you know to be a murderer flee a crime scene has some of the same elements of not letting someone shoot someone else.

But just because killing the person in question might be somewhere above the ethical replacement-level line, that doesn't mean it's the best thing. Ideally you'd manage to both prevent the violence/apprehend the suspect and not kill anyone. Now, I get why it's not a great idea for cops to shoot dudes who point guns at other dudes in the leg. In that circumstance, I get shoot to kill, and honestly, if you point a gun at someone else and make it pretty damn clear you mean to shoot them, you don't have that much of a complaint if someone else shoots and kills you first.* But in the second circumstance? The only possible reason for preferring to shoot a fleeing suspect in the chest is that you're more likely to hit them that way. Stipulating that your bullet will find its target, shooting in the leg accomplishes 100% of what shooting in the chest would, minus the gratuitous killing. Hell, shooting with some sort of stun gun/tranquilizer dart/tazer would accomplish 100% of what shooting to kill would, minus the gratuitous killing.

So basically what I'm saying is, shouldn't there be some kind of narrow tailoring here? Shouldn't there be some effort to minimize the amount of killing that goes on, rather than just saying, "well, I can make a case that killing this person isn't worse than leaving them uninterfered-with, so I'm gonna kill them"? Shouldn't there maybe be a rule that, if you could've chosen a less-likely-to-cause-someone's-death option that would probably have gotten the job done just as well, you weren't exactly "justified" in using the more-likely-to-kill option instead? Maybe that can't be as a matter of law; maybe you shouldn't be sent to jail for such a decision. But shouldn't you, y'know, get fired for it? Or something? One way or another I know that other countries get by without having their police forces shoot so many people dead, so there must be something we could do to have that happen less often here that wouldn't be a disaster. It seems to me like a moral imperative of the first order that we try.


*Of course, there is the ol' grey zone where someone does something that makes it unclear whether they're about to try to shoot someone. Like, for instance, the guy who was shot earlier this week (not in Ferguson, I believe, just elsewhere in America, the Greatest Country Ever or so I'm told) carrying a toy, plastic rifle around a Wal-Mart. Or when someone goes to fish their wallet out of their pocket for ID or whatever and the policeman thinks they're going for a gun. (Because concealed carry doesn't have any downsides whatsoever...) I feel like the balance that an awful lot of police seem to strike in these situations is to basically give complete, 100% priority to protecting their own life, and 0% priority to making sure they don't kill an innocent person. That does not seem like a particularly good balance to me, since they're both, y'know, human beings who aren't in the act of trying to murder anyone. In fact, since the police officer but not the totally random dude off the street has literally signed up to risk their life in defense of the populace, I think there's a valid though by no means slam-dunk argument for giving more weight to not killing totally random innocent dudes than to letting cops protect themselves. But at the very least they've gotta give more weight to that interest than they do now, right?

Hobby Lobby and the Sanctity of Human Life

Ugh. Not a good day for the law. Not on any dimension. The policy of these decisions is horrible. Admittedly it's not as horrible as it could have been had Alito not decided to write deliberately narrowed opinions. But the price of that narrowness was absolute legal absurdity. I mean, there was plenty legal absurdity anyway, but the narrowness created even more. I don't really think it's possible to maintain that what the Court was doing today was law. Not really. And that actually offends me pretty deeply, as someone who believes that there is such a thing as doing law, for real, in the best sense of that word.

But here's a slightly ancillary thought I have about the Hobby Lobby decision. The purported reason why providing coverage to their employees that included contraception would have violated Hobby Lobby's religious beliefs is that certain forms of contraception were, in the store's owners' view, abortifacients. And we all know that opposition to abortion is that most sincere of religious beliefs; religious people of a certain type are committed to seeing abortion as murder, because they supposedly value the sanctity of human life. And, y'know, I gotta say, I see the ethical case that late-term abortion is something seriously resembling murder, or rather homicide (the difference being that the former assumes the wrongfulness of the act). I have pretty good reasons, I think, for not thinking this means we should criminalize it, although I do think there might be ways to regulate late-term abortions in some way. But I do think we should view late-term abortions as a pretty serious moral Bad Thing, and work hard to minimize the frequency with which it's the least-bad option.

But that's not what Hobby Lobby is about. Hobby Lobby is about birth control. It's about IUDs, which prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg on the uterus wall. This, like a few other forms of birth control (but unlike, say, condoms), prevents pregnancy after the moment of conception rather than before it. It operates at the post-zygotic stage. And therefore certain religious types, though apparently not the medical or legal community, consider it to cause an abortion, and to end a human life. (Apparently scientific types think life begins at implantation or something.) Here the ethics aren't so complicated: the ethical badness of destroying a pre-implantation zygote is precisely zero. It's the same thing as killing a bacterium. It has one cell. It has no computing power, no sensory apparatus. It does not have experiences. It cannot feel pain. It does not have a beating heart. It differs in this regard, of course, from later-stage fetuses, but zygotes and blastocysts are just ethical nullities.

Now, my point could be that it's ridiculous, and kind of sick, to think that destroying one of these nullities is the same thing as killing a living human being. But it isn't. Rather, my point is that it is deeply sick to think that killing a living human being is the same as destroying one of these nullities. That is to say, I don't think it's really possible that anyone at all reacts to the death of a blastocyst or a zygote the way one is supposed to react to the death of a human being. I do think it's possible that people react that way to the death of an eight-month fetus or whatever, and at some point in between it flips, but let's just say that that point is sometime after there are at least 16 cells in the organism. And so if you maintain that you view the two as equivalent, that you think IUDs are murder, well, that's gotta tell us something about how much respect you have for, like, ordinary human life, right? And it tells us nothing good. I think it's gotta tell us that the sense in which you condemn ordinary murder is somehow cheaper than it should be. If the value that you place on human life doesn't change from the moment of conception all the way through the moment of death, I don't think that value can be as high as the value that I place on human life from birth through death. There's just no way you can actually be giving that much value to a zygote, not really. Maybe you have some kind of theological sophistry telling you that killing zygotes is sinful, but you can't really believe that aborting them is murder, not the way we mean that word.

So either there's an act of dishonesty going on, at some level, when people say they think these contraceptive devices cause murders, or these religious types have just tipped that their conception of the "sanctity of human life" is awfully shallow. One or the other, and neither is exactly great.

Someone Needs to Brush Up on Their MLK

This is kind of random, but I was just reading the Vox.com "cards" explaining the whole Nevada rancher controversy/standoff/thing and I saw that some Tea Party types have attempted to label the efforts of one Cliven Bundy to keep the federal government from seizing cattle he's been illegally grazing on federal lands for many years "civil disobedience." If you accept the basic premise that the federal government is wholly illegitimate, I guess that could almost make sense. Except there's a wee problem: it completely ignores everything political philosophers have worked out about the theory of civil disobedience. Because, see, there's a reason we have laws, and there's a reason you'd like to think that people have a moral obligation to follow laws, even if they think those laws are wrong. Everyone just acting according to their own view of what the law should be, rather than what the law is, would be, well, anarchy, or something very nearly resembling it. And yet it seems fairly obvious that, in the extreme case, one cannot be under an obligation to follow a truly unjust law. Reconciling the two requires limits on the manner of civil disobedience, as well as limits on when it is appropriate. To my mind the best single expression of the theory of civil disobedience comes, not surprisingly, from Martin Luther King, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And perhaps the best passage from that majestic tract is this:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

The point is to break the law, and get arrested and punished for it. That's the whole point. Civil disobedience would be if Bundy had grazed his cattle on federal lands, gone around saying he thought federal ownership of those lands was illegitimate, and then let them confiscate his cattle and raised an almighty stink about it, attempting to rally public opinion. Any claim to immunity from punishment for one's act of disobedience is inconsistent with the theory Dr. King lays out. 

Of course, no one is bound to accept MLK's words as binding authority as to the limits of civil disobedience But you don't even need to bother reading Letter from a Birmingham Jail to realize that, of course, the single most defining characteristic of civil disobedience is that it be civil, i.e. nonviolent. What's happening in Arizona is described as an armed stand-off. That is, perforce and in and of itself with no possible counterargument, enough to defeat a claim to legitimate civil disobedience. If Bundy's actions are to be justified, they are to be justified as revolution, nothing more or less. It is quite possible to have a regime so unjust that violent revolution is eminently justified (see South Africa, circa 1948-1994), and of course there's been a disquietingly prominent proto-revolutionary strain in Tea Party politics. But there should be no confusion over what's going on here. Civil disobedience it ain't. Domestic terrorism it is, even if it's the justified kind, like that of Nelson Mandela against the apartheid government.

But, y'know, it isn't. It's just an idiot with some guns looking to get a whole lot of people killed for really no reason whatsoever. What a hero.

The Qualifying Offer System, Macbeth, and Religious Morality

The current collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the Players' Association ushered in a new era of compensation for teams that lose a top player to free agency: the qualifying offer. It used to be that the Elias Sports Bureau would simply rank some free agents as top players, either in the A tier or the B tier. A team signing a type A or a type B free agent would forfeit its top draft pick; the player's former team would get that pick, and for a type A free agent they'd also get a bonus compensation pick after the first round of the draft. Now, each team is allowed to make a "qualifying offer," defined as being around the 75th or 80th percentile of all MLB salaries or something (and in practice around $13 or $14 million dollars the first two years), to any or all of their departing free agents. If the player declines a qualifying offer, then any team that signs them (other than, of course, their original team) forfeits their top available, unprotected draft pick, and the offering team gets a compensation pick. The top ten picks are protected.

Two years in, this system has come in for a ton of criticism. In particular, teams have been willing to make qualifying offers to mid-range free agents such as Kyle Lohse, Nelson Cruz, Kendrys Morales, and Stephen Drew. Unlike an elite free agent, these players have trouble finding much of market if their buyers also have to surrender a top draft pick. We've seen these players waiting until spring training had already started to sign, and it's speculated that it won't be long before a qualifying offer player waits until mid-season, after the draft has taken place and the compensation issue is off the board, to sign. Currently, Morales, Drew, and Ervin Santana have yet to sign, with actual spring training baseball less than a week away.

Another line of criticism, however, has emerged from this season. Of the thirteen qualifying offer free agents this offseason, four have signed with the New York Yankees. (Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Hiroki Kuroda, although he was a Yankee to begin with.) Two more have signed with the Baltimore Orioles (Ubaldo Jimenez and Brian McCann.) Of the four others who have signed, two signed with teams whose first-round picks were protected, Curtis Granderson to the Mets and Robinson Cano to the Mariners, and one, Mike Napoli, re-signed with his current team, the Red Sox. Only one team so far has signed exactly one qualifying offer free agent from another team and forfeited their first-round pick to do so, the Texas Rangers, signing Shin-Soo Choo.

What we see, in other words, is that already having signed one qualifying offer free agent makes signing the next one look a lot more appealing, because it's just your second-round pick you're surrendering. Trading your top one draft pick (and market salary) for one top free agent is a worse deal than trading your top two picks (and market salary) for two top free agents, because the draft picks have steeply declining value while the free agents do not.

Why do I mention this, and what does it have to do with Macbeth or religious morality? An excellent question. (In the unlikely event you haven't read Macbeth, read no more.)

Stop Saying Atheists Think The Universe is Purposeless (And Other Complaints About Ross Douthat)

So, as reported by Kevin Drum, Ross Douthat apparently has some new column or blog post or something that basically beats the old "how can you have morality without religion?" drum. Kevin Drum's response to Douthat is that secular ethics are in fact older than Christianity and are humming along just fine. Mine is slightly different. Here's the central passage from Douthat:

"The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals [the biblical or the spiritual world pictures], because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss."

Can we just stop this already? It's hard to actually get to the bottom of how bad this is. I could go through it line by line. There is no sense in which the modern scientific-atheist cosmology describes the universe as "purposeless." Now, it is true that, as best we can tell, our universe was not created by anyone in particular, and therefore not for any particular purpose. It is also true that the universe was not aiming to create human beings, that instead they just arose from a not-particularly-random evolutionary process over millions of years and that they just as easily could not have. But, so what? Who said that the universe has to have been created for the purpose of having humans in it in order for anything to be meaningful or for individuals' sense of self to be real? Oh, that's right: religious people. That's entirely their idea. For most of us secular-scientific intelligentsia types, the quasi-miraculous facts of life and consciousness create plenty of purpose and meaning all by themselves. And they make it seem, well, pretty bloody obvious that the well-being of us conscious living types is important, and that people should generally act so as to increase it.

Since When Is Saving So Virtuous?

I happen to be watching an episode of Doctor Who set in Victorian England, which features a number of lines about "Victorian values," having already today read a Paul Krugman post that mentioned, in passing, the desire of some people for the economy to be a "morality play" where virtuous, hard-working, thrifty savers are rewarded and those who live beyond their means are punished, both at an individual and a national level. The confluence of the two has me thinking: who said saving money is so virtuous? Obviously there's the actual economic policy question. Under conditions of full employment, saving is good because it leads to investment, and investment drives the course of long-term growth, which is good. But when there's excess capacity in the economy, increased individual savings, which must take the form of decreased individual consumption, reduces overall national income, perhaps quite a lot, and can even end up reducing the amount of investment, all of which is bad.

But what is this sense, this pretty clearly deontological sense, in which people want, viscerally, to insist that saving is virtuous, and that therefore the second half of that policy analysis must be wrong? Maybe it's not so mystifying: after all, saving money means foregoing consumption, and consumption is a form of self-indulgence. Consumption is then un-virtuous for the same basic reason that sex is: it's fun. But here's the thing: you aren't deprived of any asset to have sex. Economic consumption, on the other hand, is a trade of money for something other than money, usually something which you just enjoy for a while and that then disappears into the sands of time. So when I decide to consume something, yes I'm indulging myself but I'm also losing money, and that money goes somewhere. It goes to someone other than me. If instead I decide to save, I just keep the money for myself. In the long run, then, individuals who save more appropriate more of the world's resources for themselves, or more to the point they appropriate a larger share of the power to command the world's resources for themselves, holding employment and income constant. What's so selfless or virtuous about that? It's like a dragon, hoarding gold in its cavern. Now, of course, it isn't like that at all, because you lend the money out to fund investments and the like, but that just takes us back out of the deontology into the policy considerations of my first paragraph.

If, therefore, we forget about secondary economic effects, it's not at all clear why we should think that saving money rather than spending it on consumption is virtuous. If you spend the money you earn, it doesn't stay locked up with you, but rather gets spread back out throughout the economy. Yes, the people who receive your money had to produce something for you to consume to get it, but assuming basic economic principles are right, it cost them less to produce the stuff than you paid them for it, so they come out ahead. Yes, you get to consume the stuff, but at the expense of your own long-term wealth. That sounds like generosity to me, not as much generosity as if you just gave the money away in exchange for nothing more than the satisfaction of improving someone else's life. But in a world of peasants and misers, every peasant would prefer that the misers spend some of their money buying stuff from the peasants. (Again, that's excluding the whole "investment makes everyone better in the long run" thing.) It requires, therefore, the invention of an economic ideology of considerable force in order to make those misers seem like the good guys, the people who morally deserve to be rewarded for their great virtue and self-sacrifice. They're not sacrificing short-term consumption for their own long-term wealth, they're sacrificing it for the long-term good of the whole society.

And in many ways that's true, except that (a) there's just a limit on how much money you can spend on consumption that will actually make your life meaningfully better, so when a rich person saves money they're not really sacrificing much, and (b) as soon as aggregate demand stops meeting aggregate supply, the whole thing falls apart and the virtuous economic effects of saving become vicious instead. The basic point, though, is that we most definitely shouldn't let any notion of "saving = virtue," separate from serious economic analysis about the practical effects of savings on the whole economy, infect our thinking, since that notion can only arise in the first place out of a serious though partial such analysis. Sometimes it is true that lower levels of individual consumption and higher levels of individual savings are a good thing, but this is in a sense the exception, not the rule Consumption is of immediate benefit for both the consumer and the producer. It is not, therefore, perverse for increased consumption and reduced savings to be a good thing; in a sense the opposite is the perverse condition, which only ever attains because of a particular mechanism within a particular economic state of affairs. We should be grateful for that perverse condition, since it has been responsible for much of modern prosperity, but this should not confuse us into forgetting that it is an artificial creation of the modern capitalist economy, not some inherent natural state of the world.

Unfortunately Lousy Arguments Against the Death Penalty, Courtesy of Larry Flynt

Larry Flynt, renowned purveyor of filth and smut to all the world (not that that's necessarily a bad thing), was apparently shot and paralyzed by neo-Nazi Joseph Franklin in 1978. The state of Missouri is planning on executing Mr. Franklin, and Mr. Flynt wishes they wouldn't. Good for him, and a good if perhaps not-very-representative example of how the pro-death penalty position is not at all the pro-victim position, inherently or empirically. He also seems to be in the "death is too easy" camp; that is, his desire to "spare" Franklin's life is about vengeance, since he sees spending decades rotting in jail as a worse punishment than just being terminated as gently as the state can manage (which isn't very gently, but still). And that's a fine position, though I don't think it can plausibly be very central to the abolitionist argument. But here's a quote from Flynt in the ACLU's statement regarding the case:

“I find it totally absurd that a government that forbids killing is allowed to use that same crime as punishment.”

This is an unfortunately terrible argument against the death penalty. Why? Because oh boy does it prove too much. Specifically, under this logic we shouldn't let the state imprison people ever, since private parties aren't allowed to go around imprisoning other people they don't like. (Unless they get a government contract and call themselves a private prison, but that's a whole different story.) As I argued here, power is central to the very concept of government; it is in the nature of governments that they have a different relationship to power, force, violence, and coercion than do private individuals. This is what we call the "monopoly on the legitimate use of force." So of course the state does things that it simultaneously forbids private persons to do, like telling other people what they can and cannot do under threat of imprisonment and violence if imprisonment is resisted. As such, therefore, the fact that the government forbids murder doesn't tell us that it mayn't also kill people. Now, as it happens, the claim is true, for various ethical, moral, political, and philosophical grounds. And the fact that death is so horrible is the motivating factor both for state opposition to murder and for private opposition to capital punishment. But we need at least a little bit of political theory to make it clear that, while states legitimately enjoy a monopoly on legitimate imprisonment, it shouldn't get to kill people any more than private individuals do.

The Limit to the Pursuit of Happiness

I don't know if this is a particularly original thought but in my torts class today we were discussing the issue of the cost-balance test involved in the negligence standard for liability. The economists' idea is that you want a rule under which activities whose benefits (to any and all affected parties) outweigh their costs will proceed, and activities whose costs outweigh the benefits will not. The negligence standard as applied often acts as a proxy for that intuition. Negligence analysis often acts as a proxy for this kind of analysis, saying that if there would have been a way to avoid the damage the cost of which would be less than that of the damage, there was negligence. But a strict liability standard, wherein the causer of the harm is liable whether they were negligent or not, also results in the same kind of calculus being performed, so long as damages are compensatory only and not punitive. In that case, the potential tortfeasor (that is apparently the word, don't blame me) will balance their own potential benefits against the potential losses that they might cause to others, because those losses will turn into liabilities. If the benefits outweigh the losses, you'll do the thing anyway and pay the damages, and that's a win compared to not doing the thing in the first place.

At some point it came up that this is very different from how the criminal law handles things, and also that the law & economics people haven't always accepted the fact that the criminal law does it very differently. If you commit a crime, let's go with theft for now because it's nice and easy to monetize, and you're found guilty, you don't just pay compensatory damages and walk out of court. Now, you might be supposed to make restitution or something (although that's about removing your own benefit rather than making whole the person you wronged), but mainly you just go to jail for several years. The point of the criminal law is not to get people to weigh the harms to others against their own benefits from committing crimes. The point is to get them not to commit crimes. "But I got so much benefit for it, this expensive jewelry is doing so much more good for me after I stole it than it was for the old rich lady who owned it" is not a defense. And people don't normatively accept it if someone says, well yes this is a crime but I'll just do it anyway and pay the price. Well, most people don't, anyway.

Written Constitutions as a Trap for Hypocrisy

This is the first off-shoot of my general contemplation, in the wake of attending a talk by Bruce Ackerman yesterday evening, of what it is about his constitutional and political philosophy that I find so unacceptable that I have felt worthy of being written up. It's a fairly modest point, and not really much related to Ackerman at all except in that he inspires it through his apparent distaste for the idea that the Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th and 15th, really did provide a textual constitutional basis amply sufficient for the 20th century civil rights movement. I don't know for sure whether the particular factor that I am about to discuss contributes to that distaste, but it seems to me that it might in part be motivated by the fact that the framers of the 14th and 15th Amendments were, for the most part, what we would today consider racists. Most of them were also, certainly, sexists and homophobes and religious bigots. In fact, "bigot" is just a good catch-all term to describe the attitudes of nearly every member of the "good" side of the 1860s political clashes, viewed by modern standards (with the possible exception of men like Thaddeus Stevens). To depend on the legacy of these men, these hypocrites who wrote the shining text of the 14th Amendment into the Constitution but who denied the vote to women and who abandoned any efforts to help black people within a few short years of the passage of that Amendment, who may only have been looking for Negro votes in any case, to craft the sweeping societal changes of the Civil Rights Movement could well seem offensive, as tainting the achievements of true egalitarians like Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and (lest we leave out the contributions of African-Americans themselves) Martin Luther King.

Now, I obviously don't find the contrast between the text of the Reconstruction Amendments and the attitudes of those who wrote and passed them particularly unsettling, but it is definitely a striking contrast. Indeed, the same can be said of the original Constitution, which many (though not all) abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, argued forcefully was an anti-slavery document, even though it certainly contained a few provisions directly supporting the slave regime and though it was universally interpreted as protecting the "domestic institutions" of the Southern states. How did this happen? How did polities whose fundamental values we would today consider so prejudiced and even hateful manage to write these documents which are so open to much more enlightened interpretations than any their framers could have envisioned, or even to demand such interpretations? I think the answer lies in the concept of hypocrisy.

Actually, It's Not Mostly About "Human Life"

Jonathan Chait has a post out today in which he argues that the abortion debate is simply the result of a fundamental and irreconcilable divide over a very basic moral question: when does human life begin? Because if, he argues, you believe as the pro-life side does that a one-cell zygote is already a living human, and therefore that all abortions are murder, then of course you think the government ought to ban abortion, no matter what burden that places on pregnant women and no matter how much you might like the idea of "shrinking government" in other contexts. Criminalizing murder is Government Priority #1, and we don't typically say, "oh, but not being able to commit this murder would be so inconvenient!" So the problem isn't that the right-wing pro-life types are hypocritical, but just that they're wrong about the premise. Quoth Chait:

"My side thinks the fertilized egg does not approach human status until much later in the process, which means the mother's prerogative supercedes any rights it has."

This way of looking at the abortion debate is, I think, wrong. Admitting that fetuses, even very young ones, constitute "human life" does not commit you to viewing abortion as murder, or to wanting to criminalize it. The reasons why not are somewhat tricky, but they're also, I think, pretty solid.

Property is not Theft, but Poverty is Coercion

This is a sort of random post, not in response to anything much but rather just the expression of some stuff that's been floating around in my head, largely related to the Classics of Political Economy course I'm taking. It's also, in part, prompted by my having read this Jonathan Chait post detailing the apparent conservative belief that Matt Yglesias, another of my favorite bloggers, is a hypocrite for buying a house. (The relevant part is Yglesias' quoted tweet about the "myth of ownership," the in-his-opinion false idea that the existence of property is prior to the existence of the state.)

So, here's the basic idea. Various political theorists and political economists over time have been known to suggest that private property is theft. I tend to associate the concept with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though obviously it gets picked up in a much more virulent form by Karl Marx and his legions of nominal followers. Rousseau didn't think that property should be abolished, but he did think that the first person who said "this is mine, and that is yours" and got other people to believe him was doing something pretty radical, something that constituted taking the stuff he had just claimed as property away from everyone else. Property is theft, because what is mine is not yours. But there's an interesting assumption buried in this kind of argument, isn't there, namely that if no one owns anything, everyone owns everything? In order for me to steal something from you, you have to have it in the first place. If I hop in a TARDIS and take a trip to a planet no one's ever set foot on before, and say, hey guys, I own this planet now, have I taken anything from anyone? It wasn't anyone's before, ever. If it was a properly lifeless planet, I'm not even taking anything that's ever belonged to, like, any bacteria. Now, what I have done is taken the opportunity to take ownership of that planet from everyone else. Is that theft? It doesn't feel like theft to me.

Now, it's a slightly different case if one can say that a certain plot of land, say, or other physical good is owned in common by society. In some cases that may be literally, de jure, true. For instance, St. Andrews Links is owned and operated by the town of St. Andrews, so if someone came along with a private security force and set up camp in the middle of the Old Course and said, hey guys, this is my private property now, they'd clearly be stealing it from the town. But, well, a town is a corporate entity, so it can own things the way an ordinary person would. What if you just have properly common land, not legally owned by anything but considered to be held in common by all in society? Britain used to have a lot of such land, and still has some, and during the 16th through 18th centuries a lot of it got enclosed. Was this theft? I think it's a defensible claim, although in the English case it is pretty much true that society's agent, i.e. the government, gave its permission for the whole process. (Okay, it wasn't a democracy, but that's a subtly different issue.)

In any event, whether capturing explicitly common lands and turning them into your private property counts as theft, that doesn't establish that all private property is. That would require asserting that the entire earth is, by default, commonly owned by human society. And this strikes me as an incredibly arrogant claim. Human beings are, essentially, conquerors of this planet. Every other species in the world lives under our dominion right now, and we rule over them with virtually no regard for their interests. There is nothing "natural," in the normative sense, about this state of affairs, nor was it always thus. Humans are the rulers of earth because we're stronger, mostly along the various mental dimensions rather than the physical ones, than any other species. We're strong enough, in fact, that collectively we can fight off just about the entire rest of the planet's occupants at once. But at root, our rule is rooted in force, not justice, and to me this makes any claim that the natural order of things is that all the earth is owned in common by mankind pretty laughable. If that is so, it is only so because we stole it from the other animals (okay, and the plants and protozoa and what-have-you, but they're legitimately less important for the story). The idea that one individual human's claiming a part of that stolen bounty for him- or herself constitutes theft above and beyond the original conquest is just kind of silly.

However, while I don't think that for one person to own private property constitutes an act of theft against society, I do think that for a person to own sufficiently little property constitutes an act of coercion by society against that person. An indigent person is desperate. Someone who legitimately cannot be sure of sufficient material provisions for their own survival is living their entire life with a gun to their head. Sure, the gun is held by an Invisible Hand, but it's still there, and so is the demand being made at its point: conform. Do what we want you to do. Work hard. Be willing to work hard at unpleasant tasks. Or else you die. Given how much relatively necessary, extremely unpleasant work there still is in human civilization, we have chosen to maintain a large section of the world's population in pretty dire circumstances, more or less needlessly, so that there are always people desperate enough to do that work in exchange for not dying in the streets. To my mind, this is incredibly exploitative and incredibly violative of those people's basic rights to be treated with respect as people whose interests count. I'm not sure how we would organize society to deal with the problem of necessary unpleasant work if we didn't use this mechanism to coerce people, but I think it's a big big problem that we should be, you know, thinking about. And we should very much welcome any increase in the extent to which we can get non-sentient machines to do this work, as it should in principle reduce the "need" to maintain this underclass of the systemically-exploited. This isn't a violation that we can trace back to any one person, but the fact that it's systemic doesn't make it any less wrong. Private property itself isn't a crime, but the denial to a person of sufficient property for their own sustenance is a pretty massive abuse.

More Ass-Whupping From J.S. Mill

Here's another one of those paragraphs by Mill that can't be excerpted, only reproduced in full:

I have already observed that, owing to the absence of any recognized general principles, liberty is often granted where it should be withheld, as well as withheld where it should be granted; and one of the cases in which, in the modern European world, the sentiment of liberty is the strongest is a case where, in my view, it is altogether misplaced. A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns, but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs. The State, while it respects the liberty of each in what specifically regards himself, is bound to maintain a vigilant control over his exercise of any power which it allows him to possess over others. This obligation is almost entirely disregarded in the case of the family relations—a case, in its direct influence on human happiness, more important than all others taken together. The almost despotic power of husbands over wives needs not be enlarged upon here, because nothing more is needed for the complete removal of the evil than that wives should have the same rights and should receive the protection of law in the same manner as all other persons; and because, on this subject, the defenders of established injustice do not avail themselves of the plea of liberty but stand forth openly as the champions of power. It is in the case of children that misapplied notions of liberty are a real obstacle to the fulfillment by the State of its duties. One would almost think that a man's children were supposed to be literally, and not metaphorically, part of himself, so jealous is opinion of the smallest interference of law with his absolute an exclusive control over them, more jealous than of almost any interference with his own freedom of action: so much less do the generality of mankind value liberty than power.

Boom! I don't really have anything to add, other than that this dude was awesome. I particularly appreciate how, in a section primarily devoted to the defense of children's rights (though the vehicle of the state's protection of those children from abuse and/or neglect by their fathers), he just throws in a little sentence containing one of the major, major policy planks of modern feminism, in an essentially unadulterated form.

John Stuart Mill Was Awesome

I have now moved on from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Approximately one-sixth of the way through the book, I've already encountered the following three seriously awesome lines. The first, on the tendencies of people who find themselves in conflict with dominant social norms in some particular:

"They preferred endeavoring to alter the feelings of mankind on the particular points on which they were themselves heretical rather than make common cause in defense of freedom with heretics generally."

The second, rather self-explanatory:

"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it."

The third, of a majority seeking to suppress a minority opinion with which it disagrees:

"To refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure that it is false is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty."

The first is an incredibly astute observation and might be one of the first explicit avowals of a pro-hersey agenda. It also, I think, is less true now than when he wrote it in 1859: over the past century and a half, the cause of letting heretics be heretics in all walks of life has made tremendous progress. I'm not sure that Mill and his mentor, Jeremy Bentham, were the first major pro-fun philosophers, but they were certainly in the vanguard of the "let's have fun!" agenda that has revolutionized human society. The second is basically the foundation of modern (secular) moral philosophy, and its acceptance is wholly necessary for the flourishing of that pro-fun agenda. The third is an essentially complete statement of one of the many, many sufficient reasons for protecting freedom of speech. This guy knew what he was talking about. He and Bentham both are just such so refreshingly right about stuff compared to most of their contemporaries and predecessors.

The Passionate Society

My current reading material for my Classics of Political Economy course is The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman. The part I've been reading consists mainly of a survey or summary of the treatment of passions in mainstream philosophy from the very early says of Saint Augustine through (with a bit of a skimming over the Dark Ages) the eighteenth century. At least, that's as far as I've gone so far. And the thing I find really striking is that it is the almost unanimous opinion of the thinkers Hirschman has quoted that passions are bad. Augustine, for instance, defined three kinds of lust, namely sexual lust, lust for money/possessions, and lust for power, and, obviously, thought they were all sinful and bad. That continued to be the position of the more-or-less religious segments of the philosophical community until, well, the present day, really. Opposition to that view, that all passions are bad and people should abstain from indulging them because they're bad and people should want to be good, came from people who said, wait a minute, that's not realistic. Instead of just telling people their passions are bad, which won't work (even though it's true), let's try to discover which passions are less bad, and use them to control the others. For instance, David Hume is said by this author to have advocated restraining the "love of pleasure" through the "love of gain."

Now, when I read that sentence, my immediate thought was that it was simply insane. What's wrong with the love of pleasure? Pleasure is great! Almost by definition! It doesn't get much better than pleasure. If people were on the whole more devoted to pursuing pleasure, and less to pursuing gain, everyone's lives would probably be better. Sure, it would pose problems for our particular economic structures, but as the world gets more and more prosperous that becomes less and less of a problem, as seen in the general trend toward more leisure time. That's a straight-up gain-for-pleasure trade, and I think it a most sensible one. After all, what's the point of gaining stuff if not enjoying it? And if the point of gaining stuff is to enjoy it, why try to gain stuff if you could be doing other stuff that was more enjoyable than having the stuff would be? Now, stuff is nice, and can lead to lots of pleasure, so a pure love-of-pleasure agenda wouldn't exterminate the acquisitive interest, but on a very basic level it seems to me that Hume had it backwards.

But I think that's just emblematic of my broader point in this post, which is that the view that passions are bad has lost. Though I'm sure a lot of lingering religious institutions don't like this fact, it is unquestionably true that in modern Western society, people accept as a matter of fact that passions are basically good. We don't deny that they can have problematic consequences, and that one should avoid acting on one's passions if doing so will have problematic consequences, but fundamentally we just don't view the suppression of passions as an end in itself. Rather, we view the expression of passions as an end in itself, possibly the main point of life and at least one of the main ones. We live in the passionate society. The reading I'm currently doing is largely devoted to examining how the passion for material acquisition made the switch from being Bad to Good. Of, I think, at least equal importance and magnitude is the transformation in attitudes toward sexual and romantic passion. The passion for power is a somewhat different animal in the modern world than it was in the time periods I've just been reading about; for one thing, it's a lot less possible for one random person to gain meaningful political power except by holding office in the government of a nation-state, and for another, economic power becomes ever more important leading this passion to dovetail with the material-acquisition passion to ever-greater degrees. But even in the life of the American republic there has been a shift in attitudes toward political ambition. In the olden days, it was taboo to actively campaign for President. Yeah. 'Nuff said.

What I think is behind all of this is the basic hegemony of more-or-less utilitarian ethics. That's a very loaded word that means an awful lot of things, most of which I don't mean in this context, but what I do mean is that teleological and deontological ethics have become massively less influential over the past couple of centuries. Perhaps the best term for their competitor is consequentialist, but what really separates these kinds of ethics isn't their form. After all, one can express achieving one's telos as a consequence, and perform a pseudo-consequentialist calculus that will effect a teleological ethics, or express a pseudo-deontological ethical rule saying "don't harm other people" that would effect a consequentialist ethics. The difference is almost entirely that in consequentialist ethics, "good" is treated as almost synonymous with "advancing the interests of beings" for some class of beings and some class of interests. And the interests are typically things like pleasure or utility or happiness. Again, you can bend that structure back toward one of the old-fashioned kinds of ethics, but in practice people don't. Something is good if it makes people happy. Something is bad if it makes people sad. In that world, passions are the basic thing we're trying to satisfy. If two people meet up in a bar and go off to a hotel and have sex, and both enjoy the experience a lot, and then go their separate ways by mutual consent, that's great! They've both just satisfied their passions, and good for them. We only really discover "bad" when one person's passion interferes with another's.

Obviously I think this was a change for the better. But then I would: I'm a proud citizen of the passionate society. Good or bad, however, I do think that this wholesale shift in our society's philosophy of ethics and desire and pleasure is really interesting. I'll close this philosophical musing with a few lines from that great thinker, Angelus:

Passion. It lies in all of us, sleeping, waiting, and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir, open its jaws, and howl. It speaks to all of us, guides us. Passion rules us all, and we obey. What choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love, the clarity of hatred... and the ecstacy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dark. Without passion, we'd be truly dead.

No, Conservatism Is Not Individualistic

A number of discussions I've had recently have featured my interlocutor blandly asserting that the Republican Party, and conservative ideology, is individualistic. I would, therefore, just like to take a moment to point out that this is wrong. So that I'm not just making stuff up, I'll even link to a blog post of Kevin Drum's that quotes from a scientific(ish) study about the moral attitudes of liberals and conservatives. (That post is actually about misperceptions of the moral attitudes of ideological groups, but my focus is just on the evidence about the actual attitudes.) The money quote:

 "Liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity more than liberals do."

The way I'd put it is that liberals value individuals, and therefore, among other things, want group structures to benefit individuals. We want the community to help and take care of the individuals in that community, and the reason we want this is that we care about the individuals. We also want, insofar as it's consistent with the above goal and the welfare of other individuals, to let individuals do whatever they individually want to do. Conservatives, on the other hand, are opposed to the community-helping-individuals thing, at least if the helping is organized through a collective public entity (i.e. the government) rather than through individual private acts (i.e. charity). Basically (and this is painting with a bit of a broad brush) conservatives are okay with individuals helping themselves and individuals helping other individuals (if they want to), but they particularly care about individuals helping the group entity, for the sake of that group entity. Liberals want the group/individual relationship to run the other way. Which of these is more individualistic, do you think? Individuals pressed into service for the good of the group, or group structures created and maintained for the good of individuals? A mix of on-your-own-ism and patriotic-loyalty-ism is not individualism. One might almost call it anti-individualism, since there's very little interest in having public policy concern itself with the interests of the individuals who make up the polity. Or one might just call it conservatism, and admit that that word refers to a philosophy that opposes publicly-coordinated efforts to improve the lives of individuals (poor ones, at least) and favors the firm imposition of community norms and values upon individuals who might like to dissent from those norms.

So the next time you hear someone say that the Republicans are the party of individuals, don't believe them. It's not true.

Rory McIlroy and the Ghost of Bobby Jones

During the final round of last week's TOUR Championship, Rory McIlroy was in genuine contention to win the 2012 FedEx Cup, the payout for which is $10 million. Then, on a certain hole, he was setting up to his approach shot when his ball moved. According to Rory, he put his club behind the ball, and then backed away for some reason, possibly because he was afraid the ball would move, and then somewhat more than 10 seconds later it did in fact move. He called an official over to ask whether he had incurred a penalty. In the course of this discussion he said very clearly that the ball had moved because he put his club behind it, though there had been a substantial time delay involved. The rules officials decided the time lag was the controlling factor, and declined to penalize him.

Now, the TOUR Championship is held at East Lake Golf Club these days, which is where the great amateur golfer Bobby Jones learned the game. Among other things, like being the most dominant golfer of all time including Tiger Woods, Bobby Jones was famous for his extreme devotion to following the rules of the game. More than once he called a penalty on himself for having moved the ball at address when no one else on the planet could've noticed the movement, in the heat of competition in major championships. So, being somewhat of a Bobby Jones fan, I commented at the time of McIlroy's ruling that Bobby Jones did not approve, thinking to myself that it would be poetic justice if McIlroy played poorly from that point on. Which he did, and Brandt Snedeker won the FedEx Cup. Good for Sneds*.

But now I'm not sure if I didn't have the angle on Rory's little incident backwards. After all, McIlroy himself was basically saying that he had moved the ball. It was the officials who overruled him on this issue. In my opinion it's wrong for rules officials to hear a player say something like, "it was definitely because I put my club behind the ball" and then conclude otherwise, and I have a feeling that Rory McIlroy might agree with me there, and that this might have been at least somewhat responsible for his poor play thereafter. During a certain practice round with my high school golf team, I hit a beautiful long drive on the second hole to a great position, only to find my ball sitting at the very bottom of a big ol' divot. Now, normally I'd have looked at that as an interesting challenge, but I happened to be playing with my in-general-really-cool coach, who instructed me in no uncertain terms to remove my ball from the divot and place it on some nice ground nearby, on the grounds that the shot out of a divot is not an important one to practice. Of course, I obeyed him, as he had formal authority over me, and of course I hit that shot badly and of course I played badly for the next nine holes. Until, that is, the next round, when on that very same second hole I again hit a really nice drive that again went into a divot. Only this time I played the ball as it lied, I hit a nice shot, and I was back to playing well again.

To those of us who have a deep internal commitment to the rules of the game and to the spirit of those rules, getting an unfairly favorable ruling can feel much worse than getting an unfairly unfavorable ruling. (This is one of the things that mystifies me about a game like baseball, where gaining an unfair advantage by tricking the umpires into thinking you were safe or the other guy was out or whatever is considered somewhere between acceptable and obligatory.) It can weigh on your spirit, and having something weighing on your spirit makes it hard to play good golf. In a way, then, it was the ghost of Bobby Jones that caused Rory McIlroy to play his last several holes of the 2012 PGA Tour season badly, but it was the ghost of Bobby Jones as internalized by Rory McIlroy himself.


*This is actually what he's called. His cap says "SNEDS" on it. The first time I ever heard of him, at one of the majors several years back, one of the announcers said that "his friends and family call him Sneds." I find that quite unlikely, but it's still an awesome line.

Accuse People of Killing People More, People!

Apparently, Reince Priebus, RNC Chairman, said that President Obama has "blood on his hands" regarding Medicare cuts. The Huffington Post appears to have reacted to this as if it's some horrific over-the-top accusation of murder on Priebus' part. What Reince actually meant was that, whereas Paul Ryan has merely proposed cutting Medicare, Obama has actually done so, in the form of the roughly $500 in Medicare spending reduction in the Affordable Care Act. Now, one can bicker and argue all day about whether that counts as Obama cutting Medicare, since he mostly cut the wasteful spending that got added to Medicare during the Bush Administration (with much support from that noted deficit hawk, Paul Ryan). And I certainly think it's fine to use colorful metaphors in describing things like this; as with Obama's "you didn't build that" line, it's clear from context that Priebus wasn't saying anything about Obama being a murderer, having blood on his hands that all Neptune's oceans couldn't wash out like Macbeth.

But my point in writing this blog post is a stronger one than simply that colorful metaphors are okay. I think it should be much more common for politicians to say when they think their opponent's policies would result in people dying unnecessary deaths. After all, public policy is important, and lots of people die when it gets done wrong. That's important! Arguably it's the most important thing about public policy. Elections, therefore, might sometimes want to focus on it. So saying, "my opponent's policies will result in people dying" should be, when factually accurate, fine. Desirable, even, since it should help prevent person-killing policies from getting enacted. Now, actually using the word "murder" could be a little too intense/inflammatory, and there's always the general desire not to have people running around saying false things. But when you honestly think, with good reason, that your opponent's policies will lead to people dying, say so, please. If Reince Priebus thinks that Obama's Medicare cuts will kill old people, which is a defensible claim though I doubt it's true, he should say so, explicitly. If he wants to say that Obama has "blood on his hands" because of his Medicare cuts killing old people, good for him. Don't let's freak out because he dares talk about the idea that electing the wrong person gets people killed.

(Oh, and for the record, of course I believe that electing Mitt Romney will get lots of people needlessly killed, compared to re-electing Obama instead.)