Dictionaries are No Longer Useful For Argumentation

Historically, one of the most important tools for resolving any philosophical debate has been the dictionary. When you encounter a thorny topic like "do we possess free will?", a healthy first instinct is to consult your nearest or most authoritative dictionary in order to establish exactly what the words "free will" mean.

The reason for this is clear. Such debates typically lead to people attempting to twist the meanings of words in ways that are favourable to their views. The only answer is to outsource the business of defining these words to people who have training and experience in divining the precise meanings of words, and who do not have a dog in the particular philosophical fight.

Unfortunately, this is no longer true. See, for example, this recent tweet from Dictionary.com:

Well, actually, mansplaining refers to the practice of a man explaining something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner. #ItsNotVeryNicehttps://t.co/0DXbJWmj6Q https://t.co/Jy1tTJWNEz

— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) May 29, 2018

 This is far from an isolated example of the social media teams of online dictionaries intervening in political discourse. See, for instance this article of 10 times Merriam Webster has majorly trolled Donald Trump. The common factor to these cases, of course, is that they are intervening from a progressive standpoint. It's not just the social media teams - the very fact that a dictionary is willing to include SJW terms like "mansplaining" is a sign that they are no longer impartial arbitrators of our shared language.

The consequences of this are clear. We can no longer argue things "by definition" or "by looking up what the dictionary says", because these alleged "definitions" are being rigged. Moreover, any attempts to argue in this way should be taken as signs of braindead progressivism.

The Sufficientarian Case for Feudalism

Most people thing there is something morally wrong with the existence of poverty, to the extent that those who are in poverty - or at least, the government which represents them - is entitled to forcibly extract resources from other people to end, reduce, or ameliorate poverty. This is what is meant by "social justice".

Views of this kind are often described as "egalitarian", but in fact one of the most plausible such views has nothing at all to do with equality. Sufficientarianism is the view according to which there exists a level which is "enough" for people; people below this line are entitled to the resources which bring them up to it, while those above are obliged to provide. Sufficientarianism has a lot of intuitive appeal: it is easy to see how a starving beggar might be entitled to the charity of a billionaire, but it is much harder to see how a comfortable homeowner, who while hardly a billionaire has no concern about where his next meal is coming from, would be entitled to this charity. We might still think a world in which the homeowner and the billionaire were more equal would be better, but this falls quite short of implying that the homeowner or his government has the right to forcibly redistribute from the billionaire to the homeowner.

Similarly we might think that the higher one lies above the line of sufficiency, the greater is one's obligation to bring others above the line; but again, this does not require one to take equality as any kind of fundamental value.

One consequence of sufficientarianism, often considered counterintuitive and sometimes considered damning, is what it implies in a world of people who are all or mostly below the line of sufficiency. If the measure of a society is the extent to which it brings people above this line, this seems to imply that we should worsen the lives of some of those who are already below the line in order to bring some others above the line. In extremis, with a world of 100 people narrowly below the line, sufficientarianism may require us to utterly ruin the lives of 99 of these people in order to marginally the life of the 100th so that she reaches the line.

There are of course ways to avoid this conclusion, but I sometimes think we are too quick to reject it. Suppose 100 people are caught in a prison camp, and all would rather die than continue to endure this miserable existence. To wit, they hatch an audacious escape plan which will enable a small number of their fellows to reach freedom. Those left behind will be heavily punished and tortured for their roles in the plot, so the plan could hardly be less egalitarian - yet it is still worthwhile going through with, and it is worthwhile for those left behind to suffer for their fellows.

Is there a clear historical example of this? Indeed there is, and for much of history it dominated our planet. The idea that most people could live good lives is a distinctly modern one, a product of the industrial revolution. Before that, poverty, starvation, and abject misery were the norm and indeed the only possibility 99% of the world's population. Simultaneously, however, there existed classes of knights who enjoyed lives vastly greater than any villein or serf could have hoped for: eating well (by the standards of the time), enjoying education (such as there was), and without having to engage in backbreaking labour in the fields.

It is my contention that from a sufficientarian perspective, such arrangements made perfect sense: almost everyone below what should be considered an acceptable level of wellbeing, but by the sacrifice of the many a few were enabled to live  genuinely worthwhile lives.

In the modern world, with abundant food and water, with indoor plumbing and heating, it is hardly necessary to impoverish the masses in order to create lives worth living. But in the complacent post-scarcity society, it is easy to lose sight of the kind of sacrifices which were necessary for our ancestors. Feudalism was not a system of brutal oppression; rather it stands as the greatest monument to the nobility of the human spirit: the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the creation of lives which are truly worthwhile.

The Metaethics of the Harry Potter universe

The field of metaethics is broadly concerned with the following questions: are there any true moral facts? And if so, how can we come to know them?

As an example of what this would mean: take natural-rights libertarianism, as espoused by Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and legions of spotty teenagers. According to this theory, there exist certain facts along the lines of the following:

(a) The copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia upstairs is my property.
(b) For any entity X, if X is my property then others ought not to interfere with my usage of X unless my usage of X interferes with their usage of an entity Y which is their property.

Of course, a lot of attention in this kind of theory will be devoted to exactly what it means to say that an entity is someone's property. A standard response made by a non-libertarian philosopher would be to observe that the notion of property is entirely socially constructed. To bring out the difference between socially-constructed and non-socially-constructed features of things, compare the properties of belonging to a person and of being less dense than water. Whether something belongs to me or my neighbour is determined entirely by the beliefs of society: if everyone believes the copy of ASU upstairs belongs to my neighbour, it's not that everyone is wrong - it's that the book actually is my neighbours, and I will be obliged to return it to him at the next opportunity. If something is less dense than water, however, it matters not one jot what any of us believes - it will float, and all the assertions in the world will not change that.

Since property is socially constructed, then, perhaps we ought to construct it strategically so that it operates to the greatest advantage of all. Thus we might decide to agree that notions such as taxation are baked into the very notion of property: taxation is not theft, but simply the proper functioning of the property system. (There's a more ambitious version of this argument which holds that no property would exist without a state and so submission to the state in general is part of what it means to own property, but this is silly because (a) property has existed throughout history without the existence of states and (b) even if that were not the case, it's not at all clear how the move from an is to an ought is supposed to be occurring here).

One thing that would support natural rights libertarianism, then, would be if facts about property somehow turned out not to be socially constructed but to be intrinsic features of the world in the same way as density. It turns out that there is a well-known fictional universe in which this is the case: the Harry Potter novels, in which a key reveal towards the end of the last book is that the Elder Wand, a weapon of deadly power, never truly recognised Voldemort as its possessor - despite him having wielded it for much of the last book, ever since he ransacked the tomb of Dumbledore, a previous owner of the Wand. Instead, the wand recognised first Draco Malfoy and then Harry Potter as its true owner, despite neither of them having prior to this point even touched the wand. In the Harry Potter universe, ownership is not a social construct but a real and tangible feature of the universe - and so it may well be impossible, even if desirable, to move to a more socially beneficial meaning of the notion of "property".

Libertarians should not rejoice too quickly, however: the way the wand passes between owners almost always involves violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. Grindelwald stole it from Gregorovitch, Dumbledore kept it after defeating Grindelwald, Malfoy ambushed and disarmed Dumbledore, Harry burgled and overpowered Malfoy. While there are substantial facts about property, which stand in addition to the facts which are known through science and empiricism, they are surely different from the facts which libertarians would have us believe. Perhaps not entirely different - wands aside, most objects seem to behave much as they do in the actual universe with regard to owners - but not the same either.

As a final aside, it is interesting to note that this universe also contains one of the more notable examples of a society with markedly different but non-utopian rules concerning property. I refer, of course, to the goblins, who believe all objects to truly belong to their makers: one cannot purchase an object, only rent it for life. To pass on to one's heirs something that one did not produce oneself is regarded by goblins as theft. Unless the original maker of the Elder Wand is still alive (and according to tradition, the wand was in fact made by Death Himself), this theory must surely remain live as a possible metaethical truth about property in the Harry Potter universe.

Free Speech and Violence

Suppose Alfie hits Betty. We would hold Alfie responsible.

Suppose Alfie throws something which hits Betty - that is, the harm takes place at a distance. We would hold Alfie responsible.

Suppose Alfie throws something and doesn't check that he's throwing into an empty space, and consequently it hits Betty. The harm was not strictly intended. We would nevertheless hold Alfie responsible.

Suppose Alfie throws something which hits something else, which falls on Betty. The harm does not flow directly from Alfie; nevertheless we would hold Alfie responsible.

Suppose Alfie throws something which hits another person, who stumbles into Betty quite heavily. The harm flows through another person; nevertheless we would hold Alfie responsible.

Suppose Alfie throws something which hits another person. This person was menacing Betty with a knife, and consequently stabs her. The harm was worsened by someone else's actions. But we would still hold Alfie responsible.

Suppose Alfie throws some sound waves, conveniently produced by his mouth, at another person. This causes the person to commit an act of violence against Betty that they may not otherwise have committed. Obviously, Alfie is 100% innocent of any wrongdoing.

A Plea For Bullshit

I've been toying with the idea of creating a new academic discipline or field of study. The purely evil (or at best selfish) reasons for this are:

• it would sound impressive to be "the world's leading authority on X", particularly if X can be made to sound impressive in itself.
• it would be fun to try to relate all kinds of other debates to this, claim that opponents are unfit to comment on those questions if they don't have at least a working knowledge of my own field.

The basic plan is pretty simple: come up with a new field that is not immediately obviously bullshit (in Cohen's sense). Write a bunch of essays advocating different perspectives on it. Publish these online as a "journal", with most of the essays attributed to pseudonyms. Publicise it, inviting submissions to a second volume of the journal. Occasionally actually produce another volume.

Here, then, are some ideas for what this new discipline could be. I have not checked to see whether or not these are already being studied. Some of them I know to be discussed in places, but are not (so far as I am aware) fully fledged disciplines.

Numerical Mereology

Philosophers have devoted great energy to whether or not numbers exist, but relatively little to their internal structure. Russell and Whitehead defined numbers in terms of sets, but one can imagine a whole range of answers. Perhaps numbers consist of smaller numbers - but which smaller numbers? All of them? Their factors? Their prime factors? Perhaps they just exist, and have no parts. And does the same number exist in one way that is instantiated in many places, or should we adopt a "trope theory" of numbers according to which each number exists separately in each of its instantiations?

Example arguments: "Any account of numbers ought to shed light on what it means for one thing to be 'more than' or 'larger than' another. The best explanation is that numbers contain all smaller numbers; without this presumption, there is no way to explain the fact that 7 is strictly bigger than 5."

"If numbers consist of all smaller numbers plus the successor relation, it is hard to see what most of the numbers are doing. Allowing numbers to consist of their prime factors clearly explains why each component is crucial to the identity of the greater number."

Epistemology and Metaphysics of the Paranormal

Some people claim that ghosts don't exist. I would suggest we need to have a firm handle on exactly what ghosts are before we can make that kind of judgement. One might argue for:

  (a) reductionism: the paranormal is misnamed, and many paraphenomena can be explained in the terms of ordinary physics

  (b) the paranormal stands in contradiction to ordinary physics, and therefore

     (b1) there are no paraphenomena

     (b2) we should revise our beliefs about physics

     (b3) the laws of the universe are dialethic and contradictions are realised in the actual world

  (c) paraphenomena and physics are neither complementary nor in contradiction, they describe different aspects of the universe

Normative Architecture of Cosmology

Cosmology studies how the universe works. NAC studies the considerations going into the design of new universes.

Study of Autoethnography

Autoethnography has come in for a lot of stick, but very little in formal venues or in a clearly argued format. We would invite practitioners, defenders, and critics of autoethnology to engage on the ethical and methodological issues surrounding both the production of and the response to autoethnographies. In what ways does one's location within a situation give one special insights into that situation? If these insights can only be directly perceived from within a situation, how far can they be communicated to and understood by people outside the situation?

Normology

What makes something normal? Is there a property of "normalness" in which normal things participate? Or is normalness to be reduced to other properties? Why indeed should we suppose that "normality" is the default, rather than taking heterogeneity as the default and normality as something to be explained? Studying this would hopefully grant important insights into related issues, such as what makes something "transgressive".

Metaology

The study of studying. What is to study something? What makes a particular enquiry legitimate? (Should we study things with potentially harmful implications?) Is there a unity between the "correct" methods of inquiry in different fields of study, or is the correct method of study relative to a particular discipline?

The Scientology-Shaped Hole in our Hearts

There's an argument sometimes made for the existence of God, known as the "God-shaped Hole" argument. The basic idea is that our lives are often unfulfilling, that this un-fulfilling-ness ceases to be for those who place their trust in God, and that this constitutes evidence for the existence of said God.

This argument is most commonly advanced by Christians. However, I feel that taking this argument seriously entails taking it not just as evidence for a God in general, but more specifically for the God - or broadly religious doctrine - who is most effective at giving our lives meaning and satisfaction. If YHWH is the most fulfilling deity to worship, then this is evidence for Allah. If the Hindu pantheon is most fulfilling, then the argument supports Hinduism. And so on.

So - what is the most fulfilling religion? Empirical measurement will be very difficult, because adherents of every religion wish to claim that their particular faith is the most fulfilling, so direct testimony will be unreliable.

An alternative would be to ask adherents of each religion how happy they are, without letting on that this has anythng to do with religion, and seeing which religion has the highest average. But religion co-varies with all sorts of other things - income, social class, education - that also affect happiness. Any such survey will be horrendously biased in favour of the religions chosen by people who are already doing well.

Perhaps, then, we could attempt to correct for these other influences by only looking at people from similar backgrounds who follow different religions. But this introduces its own bias - adopting a religion other than your native one often comes with its own set of costs, and moreover the people who convert will tend to already be psychologically different from those who do not. The average middle-class white British Muslim convert will be very different from the average middle-class white British Christian or atheist!

What we should do, then, is look at which religions most effectively use the tools of which we are aware for creating meaning and satisfaction in people's lives. If we were truly created by some deity, presumably we were designed with the true religion in mind (or vice versa); either way, the religious practice ought to be well-tuned to our usual psychology.

There are two particular psychological phenomena that come to mind as relevant: sunk costs, and the hedonic treadmill. First, sunk costs. People are extraordinarily reticent to abandon past investment, and so even when the rational thing is to cut and run, many people will throw bad money after good. Following the true religion, then, should be expected to involve significant cost to disciples. Given the multiplicity of human desires, we expect these costs to exist in a variety of areas - there should be financial costs, social and reputational costs, and (for the truth-seekers among us) intellectual costs in terms of blatantly stupid beliefs which one is nonetheless required to hold. ("Hath God not made foolish the wisdom of this world?")

Second, the true religion should pay attention to the hedonic treadmill. It is well-established that people are not fulfilled by what we may call "objective success", but rather become inured to their present situation. In order to be happy, it is less important that one achieve a high standard of living that that one's standard of living should improve over time. Similarly, the true religion should not present all doctrine and revelation at once, but rather should reveal it over time as one becomes more accustomed to the religion. Perhaps there is a progression of levels, each granting new deep truths, but each of which requires greater commitment and investment in the religion.

There is one religion which fits both of these criteria beautifully: the Church of Scientology. People who join end up paying vast amounts of money, being mocked horribly by outsiders and face being rejected as a credulous fool, and has to proclaim remarkable stories about the alien king Xenu. Greater payments of money grant access to deeper levels of doctrine, the details of which the Church at least tries to keep from outsiders.

In conclusion, there is a deep longing in all of our breasts for the comforting truth of Scientology. Dianetics is the true path to nirvana, and I urge you, brethren, to sign up today.

Why Racism Against Oppressed Minorities Isn't Racism

When it comes to generating unusual and (to many people) offensive opinions about morality, scepticism about the ability of anything to affect long-run happiness truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

A relatively tame example is the idea that, since most lives are good, we should therefore devote our resources as fully as possible towards increasing the world population. The moral premises here are controversial but I think defensible - ultimately, total utilitarianism across the span of actually-or-potentially-existing moral patients.

An edgier way to take this is to observe that people from oppressed and marginalised groups are likely to be used to their subjugation due to having grown up in similar (or indeed worse) circumstances, and therefore to suffer far less from it than someone who is thrown into this situation. That is to say, the experience of a white person who suffers racial discrimination is likely to be severely more negative than the experience of a member of an ethnic minority who suffers similar discrimination. Combine this with premises about the interests of all counting equally, and you end up concluding that racism against whites is significantly worse than racism against (for example) black people.

This is a surprising conclusion, and my inclination before endorsing it even tentatively would be to go over the reasoning leading to it with a very fine-toothed comb. That said, if an SJW proclaims that racism is what occurs within a context of oppression and therefore is not significantly problematic when practised against privileged groups, it is fun to be able to argue that they are not only wrong but have precisely the opposite of the truth.

Trolling Should Be Equal-Offender

A couple of weeks ago, Vox.com released an article entitled "Pokémon Go is everything that is wrong with late capitalism". The article argued that Pokémon Go will lead to greater inequality of income and wealth, even if in terms of people's quality of life it is a significant boost to many people and especially those on low incomes. The solution to this, the article continued was looser housing policy, demand management, and perhaps increased redistribution of income. The article took a fair bit of criticism at the time, including this by Rob Wiblin. At the risk of flogging a dead horse, I'm going to add my own criticism of the piece.

Let's be clear: the article is highly tongue-in-cheek. The title alone should be enough to make it clear that they are comically exaggerating the importance of and the scale of their opposition to the Pokémon game. Indeed, I think that for this reason they can shrug off some of the other criticisms. My question is: why, if this is a light-spirited article, is its conclusion identical to those of Vox's serious pieces?

When you start a political argument with an absurdity, there should be no inherent tendency to reach any particular conclusion. (Perhaps there will be a greater tendency towards extreme conclusions, but that doesn't help Vox given that they're arguing for standard centre-left positions). If you consistently reach the same end-point regardless of your premises, then the suspicion has to be that you are starting with your political preferences and then working backwards to see how they might be justified by any particular set of circumstances. What you are showing when you argue, then, is not the strength of your political position but rather your ability to make arguments sound plausible.

This has a knock-on effect for your more serious arguments, too. If I know you can convince me that anything at all is evidence for X, regardless of whether it actually is, then I should not take your arguments for X as strong evidence for its truth - if I take them as evidence at all. Moving from the meta-level to the concrete, if Vox will argue convincingly that Pokémon Go is evidence for why we need to be more left-wing, then they will do that in any situation - and hence should not be trusted in any situation.

There's actually a real lesson to be learned here, which is that if you want to make both serious and joking arguments about the same topic, and you want your serious arguments to be taken in a serious manner, the conclusions of your joking arguments (and ideally your serious arguments too) should not always be for the same conclusion. If you're going to argue that libertarians should be taxed less than leftists, you should also talk about how the UK should invade other countries and take their wealth. If you're going to talk about how Trump should be assassinated, you should also argue that women should face longer prison sentences than men for the same crime.

A Conversation I'd Be Trying To Have Were I Back In The UK

Me: "The election of the anti-Semite Malia Bouattia leaves students of Jewish descent, such as myself, feely very threatened on university campuses. You need to stop harming us!"

Left-wing student politico: "I didn't know you were Jewish."

"Jewish descent. I got my genome sequenced by 23andme, turns out I'm 0.1% Ashkenazi."

"Oh, come on. That really isn't very Jewish. You're just playing victimhood politics here."

"Oh, so you admit to anti-semitism, but it's okay because I'm not a proper Jew?"

Fury and Raging

This is disgusting. Apparently the secession to the legitimate throne of Austria-Hungary excludes women. There's the minor matter of how sexist this is, but vastly more important is that it removes a golden opportunity for me to get my descendants onto a royal throne.

Consider this: marrying into the British throne is currently difficult if not impossible for a 21-year-old male, since the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge are both married and straight. The next in line after this is the young Prince George, who may not turn out to be straight but is undoubtedly male. Even if (a) he did turn out to be gay, (b) I were willing to overlook my own straightness, it's far from obvious how that leads to my own biological descendants getting onto the throne. So the British throne is more-or-less out, at least until I have children who could marry the next generation of royals. The best I might be able to do is marrying Princess Beatrice, currently 7th in line, but (a) she'll move further down if/when Will and Kate have more kids and when Prince Harry, Prince George and Princess Catherine starting having children of their own, (b) would you really want to marry someone who wears a hat like this?

What other major monarchies are there? The obvious choice would be the monarchy of the country where I actually now live, i.e. Austria-Hungary. The Hapsburg family has been decimated by a variety of causes - primarily incest - but the line of Lorraine-Hapsburg still exists, though they have officially speaking renounced their claims to the throne. But get me in there and we'll change all that.

The youngest generation of Hapsburgs is very convenient: the eldest daughter of the current head of the House is but a month older than I am. She's not first-in-line of course, that would be her younger brother. But he's a racing driver, which is of course an awfully dangerous occupation - if you know what I mean. So the path is clear: contrive a way to meet "Jelena Maria del Pilar Iona Lorraine-Hapsburg", marry her, and then arrange an unfortunate accident for her younger brother. (Unless he looks like having children, obviously I shouldn't assassinate him until the secession of my children is guaranteed - creating the collateral damage to your schemes while failing to reap the benefits is immoral. This is why I found Raskalnikov so utterly unlikeable in Crime and Punishment, he murders the old pawnbroker but fails to steal her possessions. It's like, what was the point of it all?).

Except... that wouldn't put dear Jelena onto the throne; instead, the next-in-line is the Archduke George, brother of the present ruler Karl von Hapsburg. It seems that women are utterly excluded - not merely placed behind males of the same generation, as was the case with the UK monarchy until shortly before the birth of Prince George, but utterly excluded. What bullshit. I guess I'll have to create my own dynasty.

How to assault human rights like a shitlord

Sarah Conly advocates a One Child policy - officially on environmental grounds, but the Straussian reading is that she's actually really concerned about dysgenics and wants a way to impose fines which will limit poor people's ability to reproduce while not significantly reducing procreation among the middle and upper classes.

Is Economics a Science?

Based upon the fact that this was submitted to /r/science, I would guess that economics is a science if and only if it supports the political goals of the speaker.

(This is not, of course, to say that the article linked to is wrong. Indeed, it seems entirely plausible to me that the phenomenon it describes is real. Monarchs were not renowned for their generosity, the welfare state - or its precursors - is/were not about redistribution, and in general it seems likely that higher segregation by income will lead to lower social cohesion and trust, which are likely to play a large role in determining how generous people are. Or indeed, perhaps higher inequality means that it's harder for rich people to comprehend that there are other people who are considerably worse off than they are).

An actual defence of homophobes

A (himself gay) friend of mine wrote a blog post entitled "In Defence of Homophobes". I have a problem with is his post: it's not an actual defence of them, merely an argument that we should not be getting them fired from jobs (outside of politics) for their views. As it happens, I pretty much completely agree with him, but for the record, an actual defence of homophobes, one that actually attempts to defend the thing which distinguishes them from the population at large - their homophobia - instead of merely treating it as an unfortunate flaw, would look rather more like the following:


Any minority group within society which cannot interact romantically with non-members of that group places its members at a severe disadvantage. Such groups include homosexuals, most Christians, and probably a fair few other groups which I have less exposure to. In a society of 100 men and 100 women, where exactly 8 members of each sex are homosexual, each straight person has 92 potential partners whereas each homosexual has only 7. Straights are therefore able to be more selective about their chosen partner, and so their relationships are likely to be better optimised for happiness. Moreover, the assumption when meeting someone in whom you have a potential romantic interest is that they are straight, which means that in order to find a partner a homosexual will generally have to go to some specialised place. For example, this is why there are specialised nightclubs for gays - it's not that gays have systematically different tastes in music to straight people, nor is it that they are more fussy about the décor - it's to facilitate a hookup culture in which gays do not face a 90%+ chance of being rejected without any consideration.

Of course, homosexuality is not something that is chosen, so it is unfair to blame homosexual people for the position in which they find themselves. But that doesn't mean we can't try to shift people's preferences towards being more straight. If there is less talk about homosexuality, then it is at least plausible that reduced exposure to the possibility of finding someone of the same sex attractive will cause people to think less about being homosexual, act according to a "straighter" set of sexual preferences, and hopefully find more satisfying relationships as a result.

It should be noted that the argument would apply the other way if homosexuals were the majority and straights the minority. Indeed, the ideal would be for everyone to be bisexual, which would raise each person's number of potential partners in the example above from a mean of 85.2 to 199. But because a) currently the majority is straight, which provides as easy coordination point, and b) it's easier to reproduce (if not necessarily to actually raise children) within the context of a straight relationship, it just so happens that barring a major shift in favour of bisexuality, it makes sense to push towards a greater homogeneity around heterosexuality.


There are counter-arguments, of course. Given that there are significant similarities between members of the same sex which do not exist across the sexes - e.g. men supposedly having a greater appetite for sex than women, and tending to be more interested than women in things like sport and computer games - homosexual relationships could have a natural hedonic advantage over straight relationships. Without doing empirical research I really don't know which effect would be larger; the point is that an actual defence of homophobes - as opposed to an argument that they should be tolerated - would treat them as reasonable people with reasonable grounds for their beliefs and actions. Of course, no actual homophobe holds his/her position because of the reasoning I have laid out above.

Positive Rights for Animals?

In response to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, her former landlord and accomplished translator Thomas Taylor wrote a satirical book entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, which took the arguments Wollstonecraft had made in favour of women's rights and applied them to animals. Clearly in this context, The Rights of Brutes was intended as a reductio ad absurdum: back in the late eighteenth century, no-one in Britain would have taken seriously the proposition that animals had rights comparable to those of humans.

However, given many ideas which are nowadays commonly accepted I suspect that we are grossly hypocritical in our unwillingness to provide for the apparent positive rights of animals. My argument is roughly along these lines:

1. Humans possess positive rights.
2. There is some property which humans possess, by virtue of which they acquire these positive rights
3. Animals also have this property, if not to the same extent as humans
4. Therefore animals possess positive rights, if not as extensive as those of humans

I shall simply assume (1): personally I an not convinced that I agree with it, but it seems to be fairly widely accepted nowadays that there is a "right" to education and a "right" to healthcare.

(2) seems surely true if we accept (1): the idea that humans just *have* rights, and that there is no good reason for it, is strange if not contradictory. The question which we need to answer is, what is this property? I shall consider a number of examples and from this demonstrate the truth of (3), from which it seems that (4) follows logically.

Why might humans possess positive rights?

By saying that a person X has positive rights, I mean that others around them have an enforcible duty to provide certain goods and services to X if X does not or cannot provide them-self with such goods and service. If X has a right to healthcare, this means that should X fall ill and need healthcare then the people around them are morally obliged to pay for it.

Perhaps the most popular justification for such rights among modern political philosophers is simple membership of a society. The assumption tends to be that all members of a society implicitly contribute to all value created by that society, and therefore have a rights to some share of that value created. Can animals be considered part of a society? If by "society" we mean a group of persons/organisms providing each other with value, then yes: animals provide value as pets, as food, as entertainment. But when political philosophers talk of a society they more often mean something like "a group of people, all bound to a common set of rules". If animals follows these rules too, then this seemingly allows them, so perhaps our political philosopher might also impose some condition of consenting to these rules too. Requiring any kind of actual consent would go too far, since that doesn't exist even for humans, so we'll have to rely on hypothetical consent: "If humans were presented with these rules, they would agree to follow them." Even that is too strong - many of us wouldn't - so there will have to be something about a veil of ignorance to prevent us from consenting or not consenting on an individual basis. But if we're going this far away from real humans for their consent, then it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that animals should be considered in such a situation, as though they too were "as reasonable as rational beings" asked to consent to a set of rules.

In any case, this particular justification of positive rights is (in my opinion) complete hogwash. If people have positive rights, it is surely because there is something about humans which has intrinsic value. Claims about societies incurring duties for their members is silly as a political claim on numerous grounds (lack of voluntaryness, economic interaction has massive cross-society impact, etc) and moreover it suggests that we have no duties to those with whom we do not generally interact, such as isolated peasant communities, despite the fact that these are usually the people most in need of help! If someone is part of a community then they have an opportunity to improve their situation through trade and commerce: if we have a duty to help anyone it is the person without a society, isolated and compelled to be self-reliant.

Perhaps positive rights might be justified on grounds of agency? People make choices which can help or hinder others, and perhaps this somehow requires a certain standard of living in order to be properly informed about the choices they make. (I'm not bothering to put the argument in its strongest form, on the grounds that I see no need to knock it down). But if we accept a Compatibilist view of free will - the majority view among philosophers - then surely animals possess some kind of agency too? When confronted with a small child, a dog has the option of barking, of biting, or of lying on its back and waiting to be tickled. Obviously animals don't have as detailed a grasp of action than humans - a dog is unlikely to have much in the way of a system of ethics beyond "If I pee inside/ bark loudly at night/ run off when we're not at the park, then my master will shout at me," - but they are still capable of making these choices, which suggests that if we see agency as the source of the value of humans, animals also have this value.

Perhaps the ground of human value is more subjective - it is simply that we value humans, therefore they have value. In that case, animals - or at least some animals - obviously have value, because we value them enough to keep them as pets. And animals can value other animals - not just their children, but also animals in symbiotic or mutualistic relationships - so there's another source of value.

There are probably numerous other accounts of why humans are valuable, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to trawl through all of them. To finish, I'm simply going to point out that the idea that animals have positive rights is probably not as ridiculous as it sounds. Animal needs are presumably less diverse and easier to satisfy than those of humans - food, some kind of shelter, the option of socialising with other animals. And perhaps an iPad...

A taxation policy proposal

The higher your income, the more the state taxes - not just in absolute terms, but as a proportion of your income. This is generally agreed to be because richer people have a lower marginal utility of wealth: an extra £1000 a year is worth less to you if you're already earning £50,000 per annum than an extra £100 a year if you're earning £5,000 per annum.

But income isn't the only thing which affects the utility you gain or lose from changes in your income. For example, if you are on the political left then you are likely to view your tax payments as an excellent chance to help those worse off than yourself; if you are a libertarian, you are more likely to regard them as tantamount to theft. All else being equal, a libertarian will lose more utility from being taxed than a leftie taxed the same amount. It follows that libertarians (and perhaps to a lesser extent right-wingers) ought to receive tax breaks.