August 18, 2004

5 Watts of Illumination

I just can't get enough of Grant McCracken. Today he blogs his refrigerator. Awesome.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technology Liberation Front

Check out the new group blog on technology policy by a bunch of geeky libertarians.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

If desert works, then why?

I liked this summary of the debate on desert from Lindsay Beyerstein.

Wilkinson claims to have found a conflict between common sense morality and Rawlsian theory. If so, this undercuts Rawls' claim to have codified common sense justice. Wilkinson argues that instrumentalism doesn't really explain our intuition that a hard worker deserves her reward, though it may explain our intuition that it would be expeditious to give it to her.

The instrumentalist position needs to be supplemented with a non-metaphysical theory of desert. It turns out that a contractual/procedural theory of desert explains our intuitions just as well. We don't have to argue desert in terms of free will and moral responsibility. Sometimes promises beget desert. Our society wisely promises people that they will be rewarded if they work hard and contribute a lot. So, justice demands that we make good on that promise by rewarding the high achievers. Instrumentalism explains why it is a good idea to make that promise.

I think this is pretty good summary of my argument. And I'm glad to see DeLong copied it on his blog. (Thanks Lindsay!) However, I don't think our intuitions about desert are necessarily rooted in the social practice of promising, although people obviously do deserve things in virtue of promises and contracts. I think that I can deserve thanks from my friend in virtue of having done him a favor, or deserve love in virtue of the love I have given. Anyway, I've claimed that anti-Rawlsian intuitions about desert run deep part in our moral psychology. (I see that Lindsay is involved in experimental moral psychology, so maybe she can test this!) The argument that it's utility promoting, or instrumental to some other end, to treat people as if they actually deserve things raises the question of why this practice is utility promoting or instrumentally useful. My argument is that treating people as if they deserve things promotes utility because the practice aligns itself with their moral self-conception -- their reflective judgment that they do deserve things. A practice or set of social principles that failed to respect this self-conception will be confronted with resistance and non-compliance, and will tend to be self-undermining. Now, the way I see it, if a practice based on people's moral self-conception turns out actually to make people better off on the whole, then that just shows that our moral self-conception in this regard is justified, and establishes the moral facts of the matter. If we think we deserve things, and our acting on that conviction tends to make us all better off, then we really do deserve things. That is, then desert claims have real normative teeth. If vulgar consequentialists, like DeLong, buys the pragmatic argument for respecting desert claims, then he shouldn't be skeptical about the existence or authority of desert.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

August 17, 2004

Second Letter to a Young Objectivist: Human Sociality

Objectivism advertises itself as a "philosophy for living on earth." Objectivism rejects the theory/practice dichotomy and holds that a true philosophy, that is, Objectivism, is a necessary instrument to a successful, happy life. The clear implication is that a consistent, integrated practitioner of Objectivism ought to be more successful and happy than people who do not espouse and practice Objectivism. However, one need only leave the house to see thousands of happy, well-adjusted people who know nothing of Objectivism, and one need only attend an Objectivist conference to observe a depressingly high ratio of the awkward, alienated and unhappy to the well-adjusted and happy. The fact that most successful, happy people are not Objectivists, and in fact espouse philosophical opinions opposed to Objectivism, ought to give Objectivists pause. But it doesn't. Why not?

Because Objectivism rejects the theory/practice dichotomy, it makes a falsifiable empirical prediction. Depending on the correct interpretation of the Objectivist standard of value, Objectivism predicts that Objectivists should either live longer or have happier (more successfully flourishing) lives than non-Objectivists. But there is no reason that I know of to believe that Objectivists live longer than average well-educated, middle class and wealthy white people (Objectivists are almost all middle class and wealthy whites). And, based on my own experience, Objectivists are not happier or in better psychological health than other people. Indeed, none of the happiest, most flourishing people in my experience are Objectivists, and I've met a lot of Objectivists.

The Objectivist can respond to this in number of ways. Here are two. First, she can say that few self-professed Objectivists (or "students of Objectivism") have properly integrated the philosophy. But if this is the case, one wonders why a philosophy that is so hard for actual people to successfully implement is especially good for "living on earth." Second, the Objectivist can say that insofar as non-Objectivists are doing well in life, they must be acting, perhaps unwittingly, on premises that are consistent with Objectivism. This is arbitrary and ad hoc. There is a great deal of evidence that many successful, happy, long-lived people in fact act according to premises Objectivism rules false and therefore impractical. If your mystical, other-focused, self-sacrificing grandmother dies happy at 95 years old, what are we to think of Objectivism’s empirical conjecture?

This brings me to my main thrust of today's letter. Objectivism has risibly inadequate picture of human nature. It is therefore unable to provide truly useful practical guidance for non-fictional human beings. Objectivism's most serious problem in this regard is in seriously addressing the essentially social nature of human beings and accounting for the values and virtues of human sociality. A good text in anthropology, social psychology, or evolutionary psychology can be read as an extended argument for the inadequacy of Objectivism as a practical philosophy for actual human beings.

This objection goes very deep. But some of the problems are right there on the surface. If Objectivism is a practical philosophy for real Earthlings, then what is the Objectivist theory of the family? What is the Objectivist theory of the value of childrearing? This is no small lack for a purportedly practical philosophy. Almost every human being for the entirety of history has lived and raised children in extended family groups. As a good first approximation, that just is human life. And Objectivism has nothing to say about it.

At a deeper level, Rand's failure to understand and integrate the evidence of biology and anthropology into her picture of human nature leads to a distorted picture of our psychological constitution. Take family and children. Our very existence depends on built-in psychological dispositions to create and raise children. It's a bizarre over-intellectualized distortion of our nature to understand the human desire for sex and physical intimacy as reflecting personal philosophical premises. Furthermore, the evidence is that human beings are naturally coalitional (tribal, if you will), obsessed (like all primates) with status and dominance, and that huge portions of the mind are devoted to the problem of navigating the social world. Furthermore, we have deep needs for casual physical and emotional intimacy. We need to feel welcome and included in groups. We need to feel liked. Social disapproval makes us very sad and often angry.

But Objectivism has very little to say about these facets of our social nature, other than to provide over-intellectualized rationalist just-so stories about the implicitly philosophical dimensions of phenomena that are in fact largely non-cognitively emotional and biochemical. (The relation of trust and cooperation to oxytocin levels, for example, does not appear to be an especially intellectual or philosophical matter.) There is useful insight in the Objectivist critique of "second handers" and "social metaphysics," but this insight is mostly useless absent a better understanding and accommodation of the natural human tendencies that lead so many of us to fall into these traps.

If there is one thing that made it so that I could no longer take Objectivism very seriously, it is the failure of Objectivism to come even close to doing justice to the social nature of human beings. For a philosophy devoted to reason, there is a marked tendency to simply dismiss empirical evidence about human nature that is inconsistent with Ayn Rand's idiosyncratic vision. Now, I think it's perfectly natural and predictable that coalition human beings will be subject to confirmation bias and will tend to discount argument and evidence that threatens their intellectual and emotional commitments. It's just what people do. But one can't help but enjoy the irony in the Objectivist's case.

Thankfully, there is in fact some slack between theory and practice. People can often get along fine with false beliefs (and can arguably get along better, depending on the belief.) And Objectivists, being humans, know more about living decent lives among other humans than Objectivism allows. So I don't worry too much about my Objectivist friends. That said, a philosophy for living on Earth really ought to be able to do a better job of helping us think about what we ought to do given what we really are.

[I'll have more to say about the Objectivist view of human nature on my next letter on the Objectivist ethics.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:19 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (1)

August 16, 2004

Thirds for Desert

Chris Betram replied to my reply to his reply to my TCS piece (scroll down in comments). And I'd like to, well, reply. I'd also like to reply to Brad DeLong, who I don't think understands what he's talking about. Economists are usually like that -- confused -- when they dabble in moral philosophy, with the exception of Buchanan, Sen and a few others, like Tyler. For now, let me just quote from Chris:

One reason why I framed things in terms of the political turn was that Will has endorsed that part of Rawls’s work. So I think it worth repeating that to the extent to which conceptions of desert are the object of reasonable disagreement, they can’t be incorporated into public standards of justice. Will ought to agree with that.

I do endorse the idea of political liberalism. What I'm arguing is that the anti-desert party is violating the spirit of political liberalism. The content of our sense of justice, the content of the "reasonable moral psychology" of citizens of North Atlantic liberal democracies, is that people deserve rewards roughly proportional to their input to mutually advantageous cooperation. This is, of course an empirical claim. But my argument is that Rawls is simply wrong about the content of our considered moral judgments on this score, and Rawlsians about desert are employing a tendentious metaethical argument contrary to the content of a reflective sense of justice.

More from Chris:

There’s also the “tracking” point, which he doesn’t address in his response. I asserted, following Hayek and Rawls, that the free market doesn’t do anything like reward people according to desert. Does Will disagree? If he does, it would be nice to hear an argument. If he doesn’t then it would seem that he is hoist with his own petard, since libertarian principles will also fail to frame a stable social order, and for the same reasons.

I think this is a complicated question. Now, I think Chris is quite wrong that the market "doesn't do anything to reward people according to desrt." In fact, I think this is a rather absurd conclusion. The distributional changes that occur on the heels of voluntary market exchanges are more likely to track desert than any other mechanism I know of. The idea of desert based in mutually beneficial cooperation is, I think, the most neutral notion of desert available, and is reflected generally in our moral psychology.

The careful reader will have noticed that I didn't actually defend meritocracy in the TCS piece. I simply defended the possibility of desert, and, implicitly, the idea that meritocracy is not appalling as an ideal. I think there is a totally intractable epistemic problem in discovering who merits what and to what extent. And this is in addition to the problem of settling on a public standard for merit.

Market exchanges, because they are voluntary and presumably mutually advantageous, generally split to gains of cooperation according to mutually agreeable terms. Whether people get what they deserve according to whatever the correct standard is . . . who knows? But if someone believes that the terms of cooperation and exchange are unfair in the sense that they will not be getting what they deserve, they can refuse to cooperate, and people often do. So it is reasonable to believe that market exchanges at least roughly track desert.

Now, I agree that the overall pattern of distribution in a market order will not tightly track desert. There is an assymetry in the nature of entrepreneurship, for example. People who make entrepreneurial bets that pay off seem to us to deserve what they get because they were willing to bear the risk of the bet, and ended up providing something that has enhanced others' welfare on agreeable terms as evidenced by their revealed preferences in the market. People who make reasonable (not foolish or negligent) bets that don't payoff don't seem to deserve to be bankrupt. And the failure of their bet provides useful information to other entrerpeneurs, who in some sense don't deserve to have this information. So here's a case where the overall distribution of rewards tracks desert partially, but not very tightly.

Now, most people have some idea of the deserving and the underserving poor, of who does and doesn't merit our charity and assistance. Because the standards of desert here are unlikely to be shared publicly, unlike our conception of desert in mutually advantageous exchanges, the political libertarian argues that the mechanisms of redistribution ought to be largely private. Some people deserve what they receive on the market. It's not the job of the state to decide that they don't. And some people deserve our aid, and it's not the job of the state to decide that they do. So I think the tracking point is an argument in favor of political libertarianism, and an argument against infecting the general social principles of association with sketchy metaethical premises about determinism and desert.

Of course we might ask which of two social orders, a Rawlsian one or a free-market one, would diverge most flagrantly from the desert criterion that Will endorses. Note that under both systems the hard-working talented will, as a matter of fact, often earn more than those of an average talent and an average disposition to work, just so long as their talents are actually valued by others at or around the time they’re deploying them. This despite the fact that neither system contains an intention to reward such deployment for desert-based reasons and that the “fit” will be extraordinarily loose. But which of the two “maps” better? My money would be on a Rawlsian “well-ordered society”.

My argument is precisely that a Rawlsian well-ordered society just is a political libertarian order, once one eliminates the elements of Rawls's theory, such as his metaphysical musings about desert, that are flatly inconsistent with his own methodology. I want to see the argument that Rawls is entitled to use his thoughts about desert in devising a distinctively political set of principles based in a reflective sense of justice.

Now, I've noticed that no one has disputed my argument that if the luck argument negates the moral right to unequal material holdings, then it also negates the moral right to unequal political power. That was my main argument, and I guess it stands. So even if Rawls is right about desert, which he is not, then we get a kind of political nihilism in which nothing much -- the right to rule, the obligation to obey, etc. -- is justifiable. Should I take it that this much is simply granted by the critics of my piece? If so, I'm pretty happy.

About DeLong, well, I need to go just now. Let me just say that I think I know exactly what Yglesias thinks about this issue. Matt's a friend, a neighbor, and we've argued about it face to face.

[Note: Removed the little story about MY, which took place under conditions not particularly conducive to philosophical rigor, and should be off the record. Anyway, I thought it was funny.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:42 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)

Free Government Money!

I'm proud to report that rent-seeking entrepreneur Matthew Lesko is sitting on a couch about seven feet behind me. Wearing the question mark suit, as seen on TV!

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 11:19 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

August 15, 2004

Blog of the Week

I see that I'm the Adam Smith Institute blog of the week. Cool. Thanks Alex!

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Victims of Communism Memorial

Consider giving to this worthwhile cause. Tim Sandefur has information, and a stirring quote from Allan Kor's great essay "Can There be an 'After Socialism'."

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 13, 2004

Seconds of Desert

Wednesday's TCS piece on the desert seems to be getting around and eliciting some useful discussion. Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Betram takes me to task for (1) writing for TCS and (2) misrepresenting Rawls. There's good debate in the comments.

Let me say that I'm very flattered that Chris thinks I am a mind of sufficient quality to lend what he takes to be undeserved intellectual legitimacy to TCS's enterprise.

This very fact [that WW has a column up at TCS] is regrettable, since Wilkinson is smarter, saner, and more interesting that the average TCS columnist and hence will serve to cover-up — somewhat — the nakedness of this astroturf operation.

And then again:

One of the functions of columns at TechCentralStation is to pander to the psychological needs of a certain stratum of society — gas-guzzling SUV? No need to feel guilty, global warming is a myth ! — but such pandering would be rather unseemly coming from a political philosopher of Wilkinson’s ability, and I’m sure it wasn’t what he intended.

I'm touched (not joking) by Chris's charitable estimation of my abilities, but, of course, I'm not thrilled to be pegged as a dupe and a shill. And, as they say, "some of my best friends" write for TCS. Anyway, I'll leave aside the charge that I'm playing a (unwitting?!) part in reinforcing the false ideological consciousness of the ruling class, and just thank Chris for making me feel as though my productions matter more than I could realistically hope.

As to the substantive objection to my piece, Chris writes:

There are no doubt one or two sentences in A Theory of Justice that encourage such an interpretation. But, as Wilkinson surely knows, the argument in which Rawls asserts that “no one deserves his place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society” (which Wilkinson cites, selectively, from the first edition of ToJ) concerns the choice of a co-operative scheme for a whole society. In the passage in question Rawls is not addressing the question of whether those who are better-endowed with natural assets or who have “superior character” ought to get more within a co-operative scheme, he’s writing about whether their better endowment ought to be reflected in the choice of scheme under which they co-operate with others. And his answer is, that no, the more talented have no special right to have their interests given greater weight than those others.

First, I want to make clear that I did not intend to write a piece of Rawls exegesis. Whether or not Chris is right in his interpretation of the import of Rawls's argument about desert in ToJ, it cannot be denied that many people have read Rawls as making a philosophical argument intented to undermine claims of desert generally, have been influenced by this argument, and have made it part of their dialectical arsenal. I was specifically addressing Yglesias's thoughts on the matter, which I took to be representative of a certain class of philosophically sophisticated welfare liberals. Matt indicates in the comments of Chris's post that he takes my reading of Rawls to be the "natural" one. So at this level Chris's claim that I've misinterpreted Rawls is irrelevant. If he's right, then I'm not attacking Rawls, per se, but rather attacking an argument that many people who have misinterpreted Rawls have deployed to undermine claims of desert and to justify redistribution. I do admit, however, that I should have been clearer that my way of reading Rawls in the column is disputed.

I understand and agree with Chris's claim that Rawls's argument comes in the context of the choice of the overall principles of association. But I don't understand Chris's appeal to Rawls's "political" turn. First, Rawl's understands his own argument in ToJ to be rooted on a partially comprehensive theory, which is why he later rejected the argument. It is not unreasonable as a matter to interpret Rawls's argument about desert as a piece of comprehensive philosophizing on par with his comprehesive-ish claims later in ToJ about the nature of autonomy and personhood. And as Jacob Levy points out in the comments, ToJ is an extremely influential book, which has been far more widely read than the rest of Rawls's works. It's not unreasonable to criticize it in isolation from Rawls's mature view, given that so many people have been influenced by it in isolation from Rawls's mature view.

OK, I want to draw attention to the fact that Rawls is making a claim about our considered judgments. Now, it's hard to keep the cast of characters in Rawls straight: the theorist and the rest of us real people, the model conception of the person (the citizen of the well-ordered society), the parties to the original position. The claim about our considered judgments is an emprical claim about us. (Tryst doesn't have a copy of ToJ, so I have to wing some of this. I'm sitting next to the bookshelf, and do see a copy of the New Testament, but I doubt it's going to help my case.) The character of the model conceptions, such as the original position, must justified by the method of reflective equilibrium (RE). Once we've our CMJs (considered moral judgments) more or less into RE with our model conceptions, we run the thought experiment of choice in the original position (OP). If it turns out the OP delivers principles out of RE with our CMJs, then we just go back and amend some aspect of the model conceptions until we get prinicples out of the OP that is in RE with our CMJs. My point is that given this procedure, it seems to me that Rawls's argument has a great deal to do with how things work out within the basic structure. It says that principles for distributing cooperative surpluses need not take into account our sense that some people deserve more of the surplus in virtue of contributing more to the creation of the surplus.

I don't dispute that we don't deserve our natural endowments or the social position we find ourselves in. Who would, indeed. I dispute what seems to be Rawls's next step: that we thus don't deserve our character (some of us do, we worked at it, and some of us don't). And I vigorously dispute the next step, whether or not Rawls takes it, that we thus aren't responsible for and don't deserve what we have worked to achieve. If he does take it, and it seems to me, and many others that he does, then he's just wrong. If he's not just wrong, then he has at least (in the argument on desert) abandoned his usual method of working from within our moral conceptions rather than dabbling in metaphysics-tinged metaethics.

My claim in the TCS column is that our CMJ that people ought to be rewarded roughly in proportion to the value of their contribution to cooperative endeavors, and have moral title to such rewards, runs extremely deep. The implication is that principles of justice that fail to respect title to these deserved rewards -- that expropriates and redistributes goods acquired according to this kind of principle of desert -- will fail to be in RE with our CMJ, and thus are fail as acceptable principles of justice.

Exactly why principles that fail the test of RE fail is another question. I don't think the method of RE offers a theory of the epistemic justification of moral beliefs. RE has to do with human sense of justice in a way that is more practical than epistemic. The sense of justice is both the source our considered moral judgments and the source of our motivation to act according to fair terms of social cooperation. I think the function of RE is to tie together the cognitive and motivational dimensions of the human sense of justice to create a social structure that we both recognize and affirm as moral, and which we are disposed to sustain through our willing compliance to the principles of justice. The point of RE is to deliver principles of justice that are sufficiently aligned with the sense of justice to produce motivationally effective individual reasons for action that will tend to scale up to macro-level stability.

That said, a principles of justice that run roughshod over our deep-seated intuitions of desert will therefore fail to gain our affirmation and compliance, and will thus fail to frame a stable social order. That's why a principle of justice out of RE with our CMJs fails.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 08:03 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (2)

The Company of Strangers

This looks like an interesting book. It's hard to get the right balance between maximization and reciprocity to enable broad, complex social cooperation. I think that if more people had a better grasp of the huge benefits of effective social coordination, together with the delicate balance of cognitive and emotive capacities needed to sustain it, then there would be much much less mystification about morality.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 10:10 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

August 12, 2004

AL QAEDA PLANS TO DROP GAY BOMBS!

I believe this is what happened to 17th St.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

First Letter to a Young Objectivist

Tuesday night I observed a debate on subjectivism and Objectivism (as in Randianism) in ethics. Ed Hudgins of the Objectivist Center defended the party line. Max Borders of the Institute for Humane Studies argued for a sort of anti-realist subjectivist contractarianism. I found a great deal to disagree with in both arguments. But I think I was a little surprised to find myself almost completely exasperated by Hudgins's fairly orthodox summation of Objectivist ethics. It's been years now that I've felt little affinity to Objectivism. However, that's where I started out in philosophy, that's how I was inducted into the tradition of classical liberal thought, and Objectivism provided my first sense of serious intellectual community. I feel an intellectual debt to people like David Kelley, my friends and teachers from TOC seminars, and folks on the Objectivist mailing lists (the ones that didn't try to kick me off, that is). And I feel a bond with a good number of self-described Objectivists, and I have no desire to have them think of me as, you know, "the other."

I remember when in the middle nineties how Mike Huemer's set of essays on "Why I am not an Objectivist" had me up in arms. I don't intend to write my own version of Huemer's explanation (which, for what its worth, I still think differs with Objectivism for mostly the wrong reasons.) That said, I do want to set down some of my differences with Objectivism in the hope that it might prove helpful to someone much like me about a decade ago. In fact, I'll address my arguments to Will Wilkinson circa 1996, taking for granted what I know he knew, and aiming for what I know to be his soft intellectual underbelly. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, then it's probably because I'm not talking to you. I'll do one of these every few weeks or so, as the spirit moves me.

So, let's start with free-will.

Continue reading "First Letter to a Young Objectivist"

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:00 PM | Comments (35) | TrackBack (2)

August 11, 2004

Farenheit 9/11: Indispensibly Incoherent

Irfan Khawaja calmly points out the dumbfounding contradictions in the reviews of Michael Moore's latest tour de sophisme. For example:

Todd Gitlin’s review in Open Democracy calls Fahrenheit 9/11 a “shoddy work”: the film’s “sloppy insinuations, emotional blackmail and all–around demagoguery,” he argues, are an affront to one’s “conscience,” and make it the moral equivalent of a beer commercial. The same conscientious concern induces Gitlin to describe Fahrenheit 9/11 somewhat paradoxically as a moral necessity. Meanwhile, he lionizes Moore himself as a “master demagogue.”

Check out the rest for more smart meta-reviewing.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Real Wages/Income

Thanks to those few who replied to my request for stuff on calculating real wages. Here's what I've got so far:

Paul Krugman, "Viagra and the Wealth of Nations,"

Arnold Kling, "How Much Worse Off Are We?," TCS, July 2004

Amartya Sen, "The Welfare Basis of Real Income Comparisons", Journal of Economic Literature,1979 (available through JSTOR)

Jack Triplett, "Hedonic Indexes and Statistical Agencies, Revisted," paper presented to the BLS, June 2000. [PDF]

And a bunch of other possibly relevant stuff from Triplett here.

Bureau of Labor Statistics FAQ about the Consumer Price Index.

Krugman gets very close to what I'm thinking about, but the end of his piece skirts the real issue about the extent to which economics relies on implicit psychological and moral theories. I'm still looking for something that's more deeply reflective about the philosophical dimensions of this issue. I'll let you know if I find anything, and please let me know if you know of anything.

[Update: More Citations]

William D. Nordhous, "Do Real Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not"

The Boskin Commission Report, "Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living," Report to the Senate Finance Committee, 1996.

Robert Gordon, "The Boskin Commission Report and Its Aftermath," NBER Working Paper 7759

Thanks so far to Tyler Cowen, Ryan Seals, Erin Shellman and Alex Taborrok.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Meritocracy: The Appalling Ideal?

Over at TCS I try to parry the thrust of this Matt Yglesias blog post. I argue that it is in fact possible to deserve what once has worked for, and that there are in fact self-made men who deserve credit for their achievements. I don't believe these are controversial propositions, aside from a few sholastic dissenters. But I think this is a case where it's worthwhile bolstering common sense.

[NB: I have nothing to do whatsoever with the red donkey illustration.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 11:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Speak the Truth, as Long as You Don't Think It's Persuasive

Three groups are filing an FEC complaint against the folks putting out the SwiftVets ad. I think the ad is extremely effective. I have no way of independently verifying any of the claims therein, but it hits the right buttons and made me pretty willing to believe that Kerry plays with his war record to suit his political aspirations.

So, naturally, the ad, and the "soft" money that paid for it, is being interpreted as an attempt to influence the presidential election. This is, I understand, illegal. However, Mike Rusell from Swift Boat veterans for truth maintains:

The ads are not meant to influence the presidential election. The ads are meant to tell the truth about John Kerry's service record so people can make their own decisions.

Now, surely this is a lie. The ads ARE meant to influence the election. The point is, Mike Russell shouldn't have to lie about this, but McCain/Feingold makes him a liar.

No doubt the ads "are meant to tell the truth about John Kerry's war record." Suppose you are one of the men making a claim in the ad and you speak truly. The difference between what you know and what Kerry claims may be sufficient ground for thinking Kerry disqualified for office, and, suppose, on this basis, you wish for him to lose the election. You believe that if others had your information, then voters might wish to alter their estimation of Kerry's fitness for the presidency. The people with whom you have shared your knowledge about Kerry's record and who have financially supported the ad campaign share your desire that your knowledge of the matter be made available to broader public.

Isn't it just disturbing that this may in fact be illegal? If I publish a scientific article that cites empirical data in order to refute a competing theory, I also intend this to have some impact on the opinion of the scientifc community. I intend to influence their beliefs about what theory to support. This may in fact be my main motivation for gathering data in the first place: I want to persuade. This is, of course, OK.

But, strangely, in the political arena, which relies on argument and the free play of claims and counter-claims for its proper function, publicly airing what one believes to be true can under certain circumstances be illegal. Doesn't it seem that if one want to tell what one believes to be true, it shouldn't matter where the money comes from?

I want to see the counter-ads. I want to see other vets saying that Van O'Dell and Jack Chenoweth are liars, and telling me why. I want to hear eyewitness reports about the time John Kerry saved the life of a dying child with one hand while fending off VC with a machine gun in other, all while shouting brilliantly improvised orders despite the blood running into his eyes. Even if it takes soft money to do it.

Anyway, was it really Kerry's best idea to push his stint in Viet Nam (or Cambodia, or wherever he was) to the front? Sadly, I think it was.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:09 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

McCain/Feingold as Argument Against Democracy

Let me follow up on the above with a couple thoughts. Isn't the dim, manipulable nature of the voter a premise of McCain/Feingold-like legislation? It strikes me that it must be. One can only "buy" an election by running a ton of ads if the ads really work. But is this a problem that can really be allayed by banning certain means of manipulation? If people are dim and manipulable, then their opinions already likely reflect their dimness and history as victims of manipulation. How is it, then, that an opinion changed by an advertisement financed by "soft" money is somehow less authentic than an opinion changed because of social pressure or a sophistical argument from the mouth of one's sister at a family reunion? How do restrictions on well-financed mass speech do anything to change the picture about the legitimacy or democratic character of outcome?

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 10, 2004

Question for Economists: Calculating Real Wages

Can someone point me to the state of the art on methods for calculating real wages, especially how changes in technology are accounted for in changes in purchasing power. How, for example, is the availability of a drug or labor-saving appliance or new source of entertainment that was not available 20 years ago included in the estimate of the real wage? I know of several sources of information on this problem, largely in the semi-popular press, but am largely interested in discovering if there is a definitive academic article or book (or several) that deals seriously with this issue, and is recognized as the latest and most definitive word. Thanks.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

August 09, 2004

The Avant Garde: Kiling Themselves, so You Don't Have To

Grant McCracken's interesting post on "Cultural Innovation: The Benefits and Costs" reminds me a great deal of this post of mine from a couple years ago. Grant links to the weird and disturbing Memorial List of alumae of Franconia College, an experimental college from the 60s & 70s. But check out Grant's post first to get the context.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Trade not Aid

M'Town homegirl Melinda Ammann has a good piece in the Washington Times on the benefits to Africa of ending agricultural subsidies and tariffs.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

August 06, 2004

Partay

I'm absolutely terrible at remembering to invite people to parties. If you should have been invited to our shindig Saturday, then you're invited. You know who you are.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:20 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Rational Ignorance

Canadian young adults show signs of having their priorities straight.

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August 05, 2004

Too Rich for Our Own Good

There's lots of good stuff today on the extremely pressing problem of being too rich. Julian notes the lousy Barry Schwartz essay at TNR. Arnold Kling takes on Robert Frank at TCS.

The arguments basically come down to something like, "The value of the marginal dollar declines, but people irrationally keep working to get dollars, which they really want less than lots of stuff they could have, therefore. . . a single-payer national heatlh care system (or whatever one would like to see the government do.) Now, I take the premises seriously, and really don't think there is any good reason to believe that people always know what is in our interest, or always behave rationally. However, the conclusions to Schwartz/Frank-style arguments remain shining examples of the bowel-loosening non sequitur.

The first response to the S/F arguments ought to be that they've really missed the hard nugget of wisdom at the heart of the theory of public choice. The nugget is not that people are rational utility maximizers, which is certainly false, or that politicians are vote maximizers, or that bureacrats are budget maximizers, or whatever. The hard nugget is that the nature of human behavior is general, and that a theory that applies to market behavior is going to apply to political behavior, too. I call this, pithily enough, the principle of behavioral uniformity. The blatently ideological and sub-scientific character of this kind of research is manifest in the failure to apply a general theory generally and to question the ability of voters to know what is in their interests and to make rational and not self-defeating choices in the voting booth. Why don't Frank and Schwartz discuss the likelihood that politicians and policymakers will stay apprised of psychological research about well-being, or will be motivated to act in accordance with their compendious understanding of the mainsprings of happiness?

Nothing follows about policy from the fact that people make sub-optimal choices, and it's an intellectual fraud to pretend that it does.

In his NRO essay, Schwartz writes:

The point is simply that we now know there is some significant subset of people likely to be made better off through heavier taxation, and that these people reside at the top end of the wealth distribution. Given that a concern for people's welfare has traditionally been one of the chief moral objections to taxing wealth (at least among those sympathetic to redistribution in principle), a policy of heavier taxation for the very wealthy may be the only moral course of action.

The point is simply that we don't know this. To say that people would be happier if they had fewer choices is not to say that they will be happier if they are stripped of choices. We know that people are very very loss averse, and so increased taxation may well be a deep source of grievance, anxiety, and agitation, even if things would have gone better for the poor rich sods if they'd never gotten that rich in the first place. If people are in general happier with fewer than four children, you do not make them better off by stripping them of excess offspring and shipping Jan, Bobby, and Marcia off to the homes of sad, childless couples.

The flailing Kierkegaardian leap to state solutions when faced with problems of choice in a culture of plenitude is evidence of not only sloppy thinking (for there is no reason to think state action will improve upon private action) but of badly retarded imagination. The future belongs to those who seize what is in effect a huge entrepreneurial opportunity.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:34 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (5)

August 04, 2004

Snippet Contra Feser 1

I don't have the time right now to reply to all of Feser's reply all at once. So I'll post snippets about various points as I get to them. Let's start here:

But there are two problems with this characterization that reflect Wilkinson's failure seriously to address my argument. First, his definition doesn't say anything that an egalitarian liberal or non-libertarian conservative couldn't agree with; indeed, many egalitarian liberals and non-libertarian conservatives do in fact endorse "a relatively small state governed by a rule of law that protects rights to personal autonomy, contract, and private property from within the context of a robust and free market economy." So Wilkinson's definition fails to capture anything distinctively libertarian. The second, related, problem is that what counts as e.g. "rights to personal autonomy, contract, and private property" and a "relatively small state" -- something Wilkinson would have to elaborate upon in order to make his definition informative -- is itself extremely controversial, and controversial not only between libertarians and non-libertarians, but even among libertarians themselves. It is therefore no good to point to a commitment to "rights," "the rule of law," and the like either as the common core of all libertarian theories or as the one thing that all members of a pluralistic modern society can agree on, because the content of these ideas is precisely what everyone disagrees about. Wilkinson might as well argue that libertarianism, egalitarian liberalism, socialism, and communism are all really varieties of the same doctrine, because they "overlap" in their commitment to "freedom." Finding some terminology that adherents of various positions all use hardly suffices to demonstrate that there is some substantive view they all have in common; what needs to be shown is that they use that terminology in more or less the same way.

Feser is sort of right; I wasn't putting a great deal of weight on the distinctively libertarian notion of liberal order. I intend to be talking about liberal order, to which I take egalitarian liberals and classical liberal conservatives all to be committed. Political liberalism, of which political libertarianism is a specific instance, is intended precisely to provide a common intellectual framework from within which egalitarians, conservatives, and libertarians can constructively debate and deliberate together in public.

Feser is worried that this or that -- rights, rule of law -- have no non-controversial specification. I thik he's still missing the point, and wants to argue against political libertarianism as if it's something that it's not. Political libertarianism just isn't a substantive, highly specified doctrine; it's an abtract framework for liberal order. Last night at dinnner Julian suggested that political liberalism is to a particular substantive comprehensive conception something like the scientific method is to a particular scientific theory. Feser's argument has something of the flavor of the claim that the scientific method is a failure (or there is no scientific method at all) because there remains heated, recalcitrant controversy over the possibility of integrating relativity with quantum mechanics.

The libertarian conception of liberal order differs from the welfare liberal version and the conservative versions in exactly the way you would imagine, and in exactly the way I mentioned near the end of my TCS piece. The welfare liberal believes fairly extensive and deep-reaching redistributive and regulatory mechanisms are a necessary condition for stable liberal order. The conservative believes that a considerable number of restrictions on personal choice are required to maintain the conditions for the flourishing of the family, which is a necessary condition for stable liberal order. The libertarian thinks we need neither extensive and deep-reaching regulation and redistribution, nor considerable restriction on personal choice in order for liberal order to hum along quite nicely. Various views about the nature of rights and the rule of law are consistent with the libertarian view.

Feser in general seems to be obsessed with borderline cases, and how exactly to mark out the boundaries of categories. He should relax and acquiesce to the wisdom of ordinary use. While I don't insist on self-identifying as a libertarian, other people identify me as a libertarian because I have a set of views that are characteristically shared by libertarians. That said, I believe in the possibility of a legitimate state. I believe in the desirability of some small-scale redistribution. I am not opposed to all paternalistic restrictions on behavior. I'm no purist. But people have no problem identifying me as a kind of libertarian. If my views shifted along one or another dimension, I might become more like a welfare liberal or a classical liberal conservative than a libertarian. The point on the continua where I would be best classified as something else, like the point of hair-loss at which I man is best classified as "bald", is obscure. Nevertheless, I don't imagine Feser has a problem identifying the bald. And I don't suppose that people who identify me as a libertarian are confused.

More to come.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:45 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)

August 03, 2004

Yet More Political Libertarianism

For TCS readers arriving from Ed Feser's rejoinder to my rejoinder, you can find further discussion of political libertarianism here and in the comments, here.

I expect to have a reply to Feser's latest up later today or tomorrow.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 10:10 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

July 31, 2004

Human Nature and Guassian Morality

I am anxiously awaiting the publication of David Buller's Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychlogy and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature(link to PDF table of contents). I took Buller's evolutionary psychology course in 1997, and I think it was the best course I've ever had. David's amazing crisp clarity enabled him to convey huge amounts of empirical information while simultaneously framing the philosophical debates surrounding philosophy of biology and evolutionary psychology in vivid and compelling terms. David's been working on this book since then, at least, and I expect it to be outstanding.

It's because of this course that I gave up on my facile Randian views about "human nature." If I'm not misremembering, I think an earlier iteration of the book's tite was . . . the Persistent Myth of Human Nature. I'm not sure if this is David's own view, but I was eventually persuaded, despite very strong initial resistence, by the Hull/Ghiselen argument that species are not really natural kinds at all, but are rather a special kind of individual, like a very old club.

The members of a species are not members of a kind bound together by a shared essence. Members of a species are more like members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, bound together by a geneological fact. You and I are both part of the club of humanity because we have a shared ancestor: the first human. This, however, implies nothing about our having a metaphysically deep shared natured. Evolution works on selection over natural variation. That is, evolution works because members of a species are not homogenous. So at any time, there is simply a distribution of traits throughout a population. Maybe the distribution is a normal curve. Maybe it isn't. In any case, the distribution changes over time, and thus so do the traits of the "typical" member (if there is one). There simply is no non-contingent common core of traits that ties us together other than our shared lineage and consequent genetic similarity.

This is why I find the idea that there is a right way to live according to nature extremely dubious. (This is all me, from here on out, and not Buller, or anyone else.) We have no "deep" nature. Right now, in this neighborhood of our evolutionary history, there is a distribution of traits that one might call "typical" in a statistical sense. But this has no more deeply normative significance than would the fact that 90% of us prefer almonds over pistacchios. It makes no sense to argue that we thus ought to prefer pistacchios. People with statistically "deviant" behavioral dispositions are by definition not "normal," but their behavior is not a scintilla less "natural" than that of the normals.

This is not to say that our contingent, temporary statistical "nature" is normatively irrelevant. Far from it. Our intuitions about morality, justice, and so forth, and our behavioral dispositions arise from within this "nature." Our understanding of what we have reason to do isn't seperable from what we happen to be like. The ends we take ourselves to have reason to pursue depends on what we happen to be like, and what we happen to be like tells us a great deal about the necessary means to those ends. Given the ends that most of have, and take ourselves to have reason to realize, together with what most of us are like, it is possible to get fairly stable general principles about what we ought to do.

But we mustn't kid ourselves. These principles simply aren't universal, or universally binding, because there is no unviversal human nature. Some "deviants" will find a society hospitable to the lives of "normals" incompatible with their needs. And this is simply tragic, no more, no less. The deviant will either be unhappy or will act contrary to the principles of normals. If the latter is threatening to the order required by the normals, then they will lock up, institutionalize, or otherwise rid themselves of the deviant menace. But it is important to see that although the deviant is acting wrongly from the perspective of "morality," construed as the system of rules that facilitates decent life among the normals, from a broader perspective they are just very unlucky. Foreign cells rejected from a host body have done nothing wrong; they are just incompatible with the principles governing the local order.

There's a lot more to say about this, but that's all for now.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:48 PM | Comments (21) | TrackBack (1)

July 29, 2004

Shindiggedy

If you're reading this, then you already know, or can't go, but Blogorama is tonight. Rendevous Lounge. 18th & Kalorama. Starting in about 20 minutes. Hugs.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 07:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

More Political Libertarianism

I'm happy and flattered to see that Randy Barnett of The Volokh Conspiracy has linked to and quoted approvingly from my TCS piece.

Judging from the comments thread at TCS, it seems that I failed to adequately convey that political libertarianism is by no means an amoral theory. Political libertarianism assumes that a peaceful, stable, fair, extended social network of mutually advantageous cooperation -- liberal order -- is, if not morally good in itself, at least good as a means to other moral ends. The point, however, is that people with different commitments can support a liberal order, and can account for the moral value of the order in different ways. When you live in a large, incredibly pluralistic society like ours, the problem of how we all can live together, despite our differences, is a serious problem no matter what you happen to believe. A minimal set of social principles that accomodates the broadest array of commitments and worldviews can be seen by all sorts of people as the best solution to that problem.

This also does not imply that comprehensive justificatory strategies are false. Suppose, say, Ayn Rand is right. Then Ayn Rand is right. But the probability that everyone comes to agree with Ayn Rand is, well, zero, give or take. (The probability that the people who claim to agree with Ayn Rand will come to agree with each other is probably no better.) Whatever the correct comprehensive theory is, it's probably never going to be the case that everyone believes it. An authoritarian order can probably coerce agreement, to an extent, by restricting freedom of thought, speech, and inquiry. But that's not the kind of society we want. And a small, homogenous community, a group of Hutterhites, for example, might share a common conception of the good. But we're talking about a huge, diverse society.

So, one might arrive at the one true theory of the good, and even do a bang up job of spreading the word, but still be swamped by Babelian pluralism. The problem simply isn't how to get everyone to agree on fundamentals, because it's a problem that won't get solved in a big, free society. What we're left with is a sort of engineering problem. What terms of association, what social principles, can accomodate all these people, and all these diverse commitments, in a manner (almost) everyone has reason to affirm. The hypothesis is that political libertarianism is the best solution to the engineering problem.

Now, I'm by no means sure that this hypothesis is correct, or even exactly what political libertarianism entails (and thus what the hypothesis really is). I think I'd just want to call my own view liberal minimalism. I'm receptive to the idea that some small-scale redistribution might be a condition for stable liberal order, putting me in the company of Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Loren Lomasky. While people tend to identify these thinkers as libertarian, people also tend to think libertarianism by nature rules out redistribution. So I'm not quite sure what to call myself, not that it matters much.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:29 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack (0)

If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

It seems that I'm constantly getting into arguments--arguments that don't even interest me that much--about whether moral behavior is even possible if people don't believe in God, or Aristotelian natural ends, or natural rights, or whatever. It's boring because, well, it's just plain as an Amish girl that you don't need to believe in anything special to do the right thing. Nevertheless, I often hear arguments that go something like this:

"If people don't believe in God, then we won't be afraid to do terrible things, and won't have any motivation to do good things, and then there'll just be CHAOS, which would be horrifying."

To which I usually sit with a stunned and expectant look on my face. Because the next step seems perfectly obvious to me. If chaos is so terrible, isn't that reason enough for people to, you know, avoid it. No one much wants to step over corpses on the way to Starbucks, or hose the blood off the sidewalks each morning. We'll all be much better off if we constrain ourselves in certain ways, and if we exert a little extra effort in certain cases.

So isn't this all we need to believe: that being good is a net winner over baby-raping anarchy? God, natural rights, or whatever, don't seem to get you anything extra. The horribleness of immorality does a pretty good job of making morality look pretty good without any special help. So why all the insistence on overdetermination? Insurance?

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:45 AM | Comments (35) | TrackBack (1)

July 28, 2004

Marx against the Marxists

I found Brian Leiter's explanation of the intellectual relationship of Marx to the Critical Legal Studies movement pretty interesting.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 04:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

I Sold my Bicycle for Democracy

Matt Welch's convention rant had me literally pumping my fists in the air and yelling "Yeah!!!"

I'll stop linking to little Reason pieces as soon as they stop being so choice.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Surreal Awesomness of Gmail

When there aren't many good ads to show you, Gmail instead serves up helpful links to "Related Pages" - that is, related to the text of the email thread you currently have open. Well, in a set of emails to the editor of TCS regarding my piece in TCS, Google gives me this related page:

How freakin' cool is that?

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

Political Libertarianism

Check out my rejoinder to Ed Feser's trainwreck of an anti-libertarian essay at Tech Central Station, which Julian so ably thrashed last week.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:12 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

Don't Just Vote, Do Something!

The convention provides a welcome occasion to reflect on the ways in which politics distorts our identity, sours our relations to others, and makes our lives generally lousier. Brian Doherty's lovely essay sounds a lot of themes I've been harping on. I especially like the point of the opportunity costs of political activism. Since electoral political activity has almost zero impact, why not spend that time just trying to live the way you think everyone ought to? The point of thinking you know how you ought to live is that you live that way, not that you waste your life trying to get other people to live that way, since wasting your time telling other people how to live probably isn't part of what it is you think you know about how to live.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:28 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)

July 27, 2004

Uffdah

Peter Northrup at Crescat makes the important point about the fact that Norwegians don't go to work a lot.

(Couldn't find a picture of a viking in a hammock.)

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

More Mansfieldiana

Rob Light, who I guess likes to sends me stuff he knows will aggravate me, sent me a little sermon Harvey Mansfield delivered at Harvard and published in the Summer 2004 Claremont Review of Books. It's reproduced after the jump, for those who want to get a bit clearer on what Mansfield is really saying about science: it should be religion's bitch.

Continue reading "More Mansfieldiana"

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 03:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

July 26, 2004

Echo . . . Echo . . . Echo . . .

Nick Gillespie drops mad Star Trek scientifics in his argument for the essential similarity of Bush and Kerry. On other "The Election Matters Not So Much" fronts, Anton Sherwood in the comments delivers this link to a lovely first-person account of bureaucratic autonomy.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Attention National Press!

I will not be blogging the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. I will be denigrating Harvey Mansfield, in addition to tackling sundry other non-convention topics. I am a fount of information about what it is like to have nothing whatsoever to do with the convention. Please direct press inquiries to the comments section.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 12:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

What Kind of Seriousness is This?

The Big Trunk from Power Line posts an excerpt from Harvey Mansfield's Weekly Standard review of Stephen Rhoad's Taking Sex Differences Seriously. Let me tell you what I think of this bit:

What evolutionists think is the closest we usually get to the notion of nature these days. But it is not close enough. For evolution sees everything as organized for survival and cannot recognize our better, higher nature. Thus it sees no difference in rank between the male desire for an active sex life and the male interest in being married, or between the promptings of desire and the instruction of reason. What kind of seriousness is this?

Right back atcha Mansfield. What kind of seriousness is this? You know, I've heard this stuff about "seriousness" before from Strausseans. It's really got to be said that Mansfield and his posse are masters of "seriousness," which is a kind of painfully earnest self-congratulating pose. But he apparently cares very little about seriousness, which is involved in things like finding out what nature is like, as opposed to jacking off over Machiavelli.

Anyway, get this: "What evolutionists think is the closest we usually get to the notion of nature these days. But it's not close enough." Wow. I think I just shit my pants. Seriously (not "seriously"), who does this guy think he is? Sure, sure: William R. Kenan Professor of Government at Harvard University. But where does the Kenan Professor of Government get off announcing that what evolutionists, people who study nature in a systematic and methodical way for a living, aren't close enough, to the "notion of nature?"

Apparently Mansfield, master of the classics, knows nature. Mansfield knows, a priori from the well-appointed comfort of his study, that a sufficient approximation to the "notion of nature" includes a satisfactory account of our "better, higher nature." What is this exactly?, you may find yourself asking. Better than what? Higher than what? Well, whatever it is, I guess an account of it is a constraint on any theory of nature. Somebody call the biology department! Call MIT! Does Steven Pinker know?

If by "better, higher nature," Mansfield means our capacity for benevolence, sacrifice, sense of honor, dignity, spirituality, integrity, loyalty, love, friendship, longing for transcendence, etc., then the evolutionist has exactly zero problem recognizing our better, higher nature. It's data. It is something to be explained.

Mansfield's beef is this: actual factual mind-independent nature, the thing that people who specialize in studying nature, like evolutionists, specialize in studying, that thing, out there, is not normative just all by itself, and thus lacks "ranks" and differences thereof.

Disappointingly, an evolutionary (or any naturalistic) explanation of our longing for transcendence, for example, will not be an account of the existence of a transcendent reality in which we as beings are finally made whole through reunification with our creator. An explanation of love is going to say something about pair bonding, babymaking, oxytocin, vasopressin, credible commitment in a high stakes cooperative game, and so forth, and NOT, that we were all once roly-polys ripped asunder by Zeus's lightning bolts and left longing for our lost halves. Or whatever. That is, an account of our nature that has something to do with truth, i.e., correspondence with the world, and not "Truth," i.e., a certain profound feeling of affirmation and enlightenment, will be an explanation that is not built from within the first-personal moral-psychological conceptual scheme.

Now, most of us understand the difference in rank between a desire for an active sex life, which is clearly sensible, moral and good, and the desire to become married, which tends to be a disastrous mypopic choice stemming from a desperate desire to avoid confronting one's own panicked emptiness. And we all know about the promptings of the desire to heed the insructions of reason and the instruction of reason to heed the promptings of desire, and which is better than which. So the problem isn't that we don't perfectly well know how to rank things.

The point is that ranking things is something that we do, not something that nature does. We have hopes and dreams and all sorts of "higher" emotions that play into the way we represent and engage with the world. If we were built differently, and we held the rest of nature constant,--if we had other needs, a different kind of psychology,a different set of emotions--then we'd ranks things differently, and we'd be right to do it.

In any case, Mansfield, like most Straussians, is a rhetorician, not a philosopher. So he is not, strictly speaking, arguing. He is exhorting us to imagine his moral opinions as lines in the book of nature. I decline. It's a good book as it is. Take a look Harvey!

[Note: Thanks to Robert Light for the link. The picture is Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:08 AM | Comments (33) | TrackBack (0)

July 25, 2004

Grant McCracken

I love his blog. He make me want to be an anthropologist!

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

State Autonomy and Electoral Triviality

Almost everybody thinks elections are events of immense importance. I think this is evidence that almost nobody understands how we are in fact governed (or ruled). The distinction between the government and the state is simple enough, but it seems that nobody really really gets it.

The point is that if Kerry wins, just suppose, then we'll get a new slate of political appointees in the agencies of the executive branch. But the overall turnover will be negligible. Now, political appointees matter, but not THAT much. The lifers rule.

When Congress passes a law, it's out of their hands. It's up to the bureacracy to interpret it, which they can do faithfully or perversely, and to enforce it, which they may choose not to do at all.

I once went on a date with an EPA lawyer. (Yay Nerve.com!) I said to her, more or less, this is my guess about what you do. . . A new environmental law is passed. The EPA people decide whether they like it or not. If they like it, they enforce it. If they don't like it, they think, "What would we like the law to mean?" They then try to find a way of interpreting the language to reflect their, rather than congress's preferences. The lawyers then think about who will sue them if they interpret the law this way, and whether they would win the suit. If they can't win, they reinterpret it in a way that maybe doesn't reflect their preferences as much, but which is more likely to stand up in court. Once they've got a winner, they implement, and prepare for the likey suit.

She said, "That's almost exactly what I do."

I wanted to know whether she, a good liberal, considered this anti-democratic. She didn't. Not at all. Democracy is beautiful! It's just that the representatives of the people tend not to know their elbows from their assholes, are subject to all sorts of distorting electoral pressures, and so pass laws contrary to what they would pass if they knew more and were directly motivated by a desire to promote the commonweal. So democracy is great, except when it's not, due to ignorance and bad motivation, which is almost always, in which case the bureaucracy, who really do know what they're doing, has to fix things.

Now, I found this to be an astonishing . . . tension. (No, we never went out again.) In any case, I'm quite glad things work this way. You may never hear another libertarian say this, so listen up: I think the United States of America has an absolutely wonderful bureaucracy! That is, wonderful relative to most actually existing bureacracies in the world, which should be the relevant comparison class, not the Meinongian bureacracies of our dreams.

Anyway, we elect the government, not the state. Governments comes and go. The state persists. We should count ourselves lucky to have a decent state that is pretty much competent, and does a fairly good job of undermining democracy in a generally salutary fashion.

That said, when a President tells the Army to go invade a country, they go. A president that didn't do this might be nice.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:22 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

July 24, 2004

Geechy

Can someone please explain to me what 'geechy' means? Thank you.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:56 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

July 22, 2004

Cuddle Party!

Does the DEA know that oxytocin is addictive?

934 Westminster is so having a cuddle party! The rules:

1. Pajamas stay on the whole time.

2. No SEX. (Yep, you read that right.)

3. Ask for permission to kiss or nuzzle anyone. Make sure you can handle getting a no before you invite or request anyone to cuddle or kiss.

4. If you're a yes, say yes. If you're a no, say no.

5. If you're a maybe, say NO.

6. You are encouraged to change your mind from a yes to a no, no to a yes anytime you want.

7. NO DRY HUMPING!

8. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

9. If you're in a relationship, communicate and set your boundaries and agreements BEFORE you go to the Cuddle Party. Don't re-negotiate those agreements/boundaries during the Cuddle Party. (Trust us on this one.)

10. Get your Cuddle Life Guard On Duty or Cuddle Caddy if there's a concern, problem, or question or should you feel unsafe or need assistance with anything during the Cuddle Party.

11. Crying and giggling are both welcomed and encouraged.

12. Outside of your personal relationships, it's nobody's business who you cuddle, so please be respectful of other people's privacy when sharing with the outside world about Cuddle Parties.

13. Arrive on time.

14. Be hygienically savvy.

15. Clean up after yourself.

16. Always say thank you and practice good Cuddle Manners.

My guess is that any party where you have to emphatically proscribe dry humping is a party in which there will be some dry humping.

Objectivist bonus: CuddleParty.com is apparently the copyright of an entity named "Atlas Spooned." Which makes me think: If Rearden would have just taken some of his seeting psychosexual frustration and just cuddled with Dagny . . . I mean, jammies stay on, and they just spoon. I think our Promethean giants of industry might have been a lot less stressed out about all the parasites, moochers, and whim-worhsipping second handers, and everything would have turned out a lot nicer for everybody. Rural Colorado gets pretty boring after awhile.

Want to know some words I learned from Ayn Rand: bromide; instransigent.

[Link from Gene, who I think could use a good cuddle.]

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 05:05 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1)

July 21, 2004

Rich in Love

A friend (who may or may not want to be named) points to this WebMD article summarizing the economic value of sexual activity. It turns out that extra money doesn't make us that much happier, but sex makes us quite a lot happier, so if we're putting a money value on units of happiness, sex is worth a lot of money.

After analyzing data on the self-reported levels of sexual activity and happiness of 16,000 people, Dartmouth College economist David Blachflower and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England report that sex "enters so strongly (and) positively in happiness equations" that they estimate increasing intercourse from once a month to once a week is equivalent to the amount of happiness generated by getting an additional $50,000 in income for the average American.

My first reaction to this is that prostitutes are undercharging. My second reaction is pretty much the same as my correspondent, who writes:

There should be a tax on all that undeclared income! -- after all, all those people are getting the benefit of that money, isn't that the same as actually having the money? How can that $50,000-equivalent benefit be redistributed so that everyone can benefit 'equally'?

It seems like a good joke, but it really is more than a joke from the perspective of distributive justice. Take a similar case. Those of us who prefer leisure over money, once we've passed a fairly low threshold of money, gain all the benefits of society without paying much in through taxes.

Suppose that after $15,000 annual, the marginal value of a dollar for me plummets sharply, while the value of an hour of leisure remains very high. If I could be working 40 hours a week, and making sixty big a year, but I'd rather have the leisure after working only 10 a week, then those extra hours are worth at least forty five grand to me. So I buy a lot of leisure for the price of my opporunity cost. But, unlike the guy who likes owning a Cris Craft and a high-end stereo more than reading library books, taking long walks, and writing poetry, the value of my leisure can't be taxed. But this seems patently unfair. People who happen to have leisurely preferences just luck out.

How to rectify this? Well, we could just force people who like leisure to work and give the proceeds to the state, but that makes us sort of uncomfortable, as we're then caused to think a little too hard about what taxes really amount to.

Well, I guess it turns out that getting a weekly rather than a monthly is worth about $50G. And it also turns out that having more money doesn't get you more laid. So, suppose I like leisure, as above, AND I like sex as much as most people do. (Suppose.) If I manage to fit a weekly into my fairly relaxed schedule, then I'm looking at the equivalent of close to $100G in non-taxable income. This is clearly the way to go! People who work sixty hours a week to make $100G taxable, and as a consequence of all that time working and all that stress, only manage a monthly... well, those people are suckas! They're paying like 30-ish% of their income, and while I'm not literally rollin' in the Benjamins, I'm rolling in the endorphins, which is just as good.

This isn't fair! Maybe I have some control over my preference for leisure. Maybe I cultivated it by reading Marcus Aurelius or something. But my ability to swing a weekly? Well. Suppose (counterfactually, of course) that I'm ruddy and good looking, and the ladies are just irresistably drawn to my animal charisma. Well, I didn't do anything to deserve my mojo. By babe magneticity turns out simply to be an unredistributable resource. Nice for me! But hardly fair.

Maybe because I won't be so depressed, which we also find (also, that ladies ought to consider that OrthoTri-cyclen is cheaper than Prozac and condoms), it'll turn out that I contribute to the surplus of social cooperation by means of my sunny attitude. Everyone likes a guy with a spring in his step. But really, the folks paying for all those public goods, which I happily enjoy, with their labor and their lousy sex lives are certainly getting a raw deal. Notice that if they state provides things like health insurance, and so forth, then I'm really kicking it, and things have gotten even more unfair.

Seriously though, what do egalitarians think about this? Should we legalize prostitution and give people vouchers? Should we have mandatory national sexual service? Or can we just ignore certain deep kinds of inequality if the detection and enforcement costs are too high? That would be interesting.

I'm sure I've gotten ahead of myself here, but, you know, good times.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:30 AM | Comments (40) | TrackBack (1)

July 20, 2004

Choose or Lose

Has anyone considered that this may be an inclusive disjunction?

Meanwhile, P. Diddy is attempting to stir the nation's youth to action with his "Vote or Die" campaign. Now, Diddy, being a master logician, has had the foresight to pick a disjunction that is certainly true, if only contingently so. Everyone will eventually die, while it is perfectly possible (because actual) to neither choose nor lose.

Now it may be that Diddy intends an exclusive disjunction. (Either one or the other, but not both.) But I don't think he really wants to say that people who die didn't vote. He only wants to say that if you don't vote, then you'll die. Right? Well, we do know that only about half of the registered voters, to say nothing of eligible voters, failed to exercise their rights of citizenship in the last election. But Diddy's conditional entails that the non-dead voted, yet many non-dead non-voters are among us. So that can't be right. So he must be saying that if you don't vote, the probability of dying will increase. How about that? Well, we can check the death rates among voters and non-voters from the last election. My hunch is that the rate of death among voters is probably higher than among non-voters, since the elderly vote more reliably than the young, and the elderly tend to die more. So what is Mr. Combs trying to say?

Wonkette, takes it as a threat, "Vote or I'll wave a gun in your face in a midtown nightclub," which is frightening, but can't quite capture it, because waving a gun in someone's face doesn't entail their death. So it needs to be a bit stronger: Vote or I'll make you dead (whether with a pistol, a machete, a tank of water and a cinder block, a mortally frightening clown, whatever). I don't think this is the intended message, however.

Perhaps it is something like "There is someone such that if you don't vote, they will make you dead." This is a good possibility. But who could "someone" be? An avenging Democracy Fairy who slays non-voters? Well, the Democracy Fairy would have to be new, since we guessed that voters are in fact more likely to die than non-voters. Maybe the intention instead is "In a contest between A and B, if you don't vote, then A or B will make you dead." I think we're getting very close, and that this is entailed by the correct interpretation. I think it's more like, "In a contest between A and B, if A wins, then A will not make you dead, and if B wins, then B will make you dead, and if you vote, then you vote for A, and A wins, and if you don't vote, then B wins."

I wonder if Puffy knows something we don't. For my part, I suspect that B is . . . Michael Badnarik!

Or that the Diddy is subversively highlighting the majoritarian coercion implicit in democracy.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 06:58 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Rope Merchants

Koch Fellow Rachel Balsham has a smart post over at Obernews on the adaptation of the market to the prevalent distaste for the market. After a number of interesting examples, she predicts that

given the prevalence of vague anti-market preferences among bobos, the rise of bobo culture will bring about more creative ways to be capitalist without the aftertaste of oppression. And eventually, maybe private enterprise won't taste so bad to the cultural elite.

I think this raises all sorts of interesting questions, few of which I will raise here.

I will say that Balsham's Conjecture strikes me as containing a deep tension between the expression of preference in the market and in the voting booth. If enough people have anti-market preferences, then the market will, soon enough, begin providing goods and services packaged in a manner that appeals to those preferences. And if enough people have anti-market preferences, they will vote for anti-market policy. They are in effect buying the same thing in both cases: self-narrative coherence.

Rachel seems to think that once the market starts giving anti-market folks products that flatter their ideological self-conceptions, the edges will begin to rub off the classic anti-market tropes, and anti-market commitments will soften. But this might be backwards. The market may gratify anti-market preferences by selling products that affirm and entrench classic anti-market tropes, thus cementing or even sharpening anti-market preferences. These preferences, expressed electorally, are bad for the market.

As the Marxists were fond of saying, "The capitalist will sell you the rope with which to hang him." Or something like that. What we have, then, if we turn Balsham's Conjecture on its head, is a sort of ideological tragedy of the commons, where entrepreneurs race to profit from products that undermine the cultural conditions of entrepreneurship.

Oh, the contradictions of capitalism!

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 02:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

D'Alliance

Check out the newish blog from the Drug Policy Alliance (Reason! Compassion!! Justice!!!) written by Baylen Linnekin. Baylen was at an IHS seminar I stage-managed a few years ago, and I had the good fortune of running into him a couple months ago after some AFF thing. Baylen's a good guy. The blog is a very useful compendium of drug-related stories and entertainingly written. Go look.

Posted by Will Wilkinson at 01:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)