The Pinkerian Case for Campus SJWism

Last week, courtesy of a commercial offer which I am shamelessly and ruthlessly abusing, I was able to attend a talk by Steven Pinker discussing his new book Enlightenment Now. I haven't yet had the time to look beyond the opening pages, so if you want a review on the book you should go to the one written by his ultimate fangirl. However, after the talk I was able to ask him the question:

"Many people who accept the trends you point to argue that due to the decline of religion and of thick communities, it is harder for individuals to find meaning and purpose in their lives. Do you agree with this assessment, and either (a) why not? or (b) do you expect it to continue?"

He disagreed with this assessment, giving two counterarguments. The first, which I don't find especially compelling (although IIRC I found it rather more compelling when Peter Singer said the same thing in a book I was otherwise disappointed by) was that people can find meaning in making a better world in general. People are not, in general, motivated strongly by the prospect of making the universe better. (Ctrl-f "charity"). There definitely are some people who are, and more power to them, but I don't think universalism can play the role in people's lives that, for many years, deities did.

His second, more convincing response was that people are finding new ways to build meaning in their lives. The example he himself gave was social justice movements on campuses - a purpose which many people choose for themselves as a purpose to which they can dedicate themselves. People may no longer identify as Christians, but they are very happy to identify as feminists.

Listening to American Pop Music and Buying Their Blue Jeans

One of my favourite Marginal Revolution posts is "The Baffling Politics of Paid Maternity Leave in India". Alex Tabarrok, currently making use of his sabbatical from GMU to teach in Mumbai, observes that Indians often favour policies which make sense in an American context, but not at all in India. Quoting directly:

When I gave a lecture at a local university, for example, I apparently shocked the students when I said matter-of-factly:

India would be a better country if it were richer and more unequal.

I think India’s extreme poverty makes this obviously true in a utilitarian sense, i.e. better for Indians, but it wasn’t so obvious to the students some-of-whom discussed inequality in terms that could easily have been duplicated at Berkeley. The inequality conversation has jumped the pond in ways that seem to me to be completely inappropriate.

Writing in the Times of India, Rupa Subramanya gives another example, a bill for paid maternity leave that has just passed the Indian parliament (waiting only on the president’s signature). As I pointed out earlier, by far the majority of Indians are self-employed and in the informal sector. The very idea of paid maternity leave, therefore, is bizarre.

I'll stick with the example of inequality. The USA, having one of the highest GDP-per-capita-s on Earth, can afford significant redistribution and may find it appropriate to do so even if this harms growth. (This is a moral mistake, of course, but we'll bracket that for now). India, being around 9 or 10 times poorer than the US, should be concerned with achieving greater wealth first and foremost; if this increases inequality, then so be it. Become rich now and redistribute later is immensely preferabe to redistributing now and never becoming rich. This ought not, one would hope, to be too controversial when presented in its entirety.

(I am of course presuming that there is a trade-off between redistribution and economic growth. This is not a claim to which I am married, we're just taking it for the sake of argument here.)

(Also, note that the UK is distinctly at the lower end of high-income countries. If we were part of the US, we would be the poorest state. Does this mean that, although not to the same extent as India, we ought also to prioritise growth over combating inequality?)

Yet because inequality is an issue in the US, other countries follow the lead. Tabarrok attributes this to a desire for positive PR: these policies are not aimed at combating the objective problems faced by India, but at showing to the west that India is an enlightened, modern and progressive nation. This, I think, attributes too much intelligence and strategic thought to the Indian political class. Is it not simpler to model most people as having a one-size-fits-all view of politics: the policies which suit the US must also be the policies which suit the India, with perhaps an allowance for past history and the dangers of changing too quickly?

I think similar dynamics are at play in the UK: people hear or read things which were true or at least plausible when describing the US, but are simply false on this side of the Atlantic. This seems the most charitable way to understand talk of "rising inequality": by the best measure we have, the Gini coefficient, UK income inequality fell sharply following the crash of 2008, rose ever so slightly for a couple of years, and then went back to falling quickly. Admittedly the data only goes up to 2012, but that which we have is emphatic. Duncan Weldon, no right-winger, has commented that "insisting that UK inequality rose in the last decade is basically the intellectual equivalent of climate change denial". It seems fair to suspect that many people who learn their politics from US sources implicitly assume that US institutions, norms, and indicators must be universal - or at least, fail to explicitly consider different countries separately. This is especially bad in countries such as the UK and India where English is a main language of politics.

Should the UK #SpendTheSix?

EDIT 2017/10/07: A claim made in this essay has been subsequently found to be untrue - specifically, that the British Empire routinely spent 7% of GDP on the military even during peace. I do not think this affects the general thrust of the argument, but it was remiss of me to make the claim without checking it at the time - and I apologise for this - and would be even more remiss of me were I to let it go uncorrected.

Sabisky's campaign for the UK to #SpendTheSix - that is, to spend 6% of our GDP on the military - gained some mainstream coverage today when he presented a short film defending it for the Daily Politics show on BBC2. I've tweeted a few times about it before, generally positively, so I feel I should express my misgivings too. Hence this post, setting out in brief what I see as the best case for #SpendTheSix, and why it might be problematic.

Isn't this proposal utterly ridiculous?
It's bold and eccentric, but I don't think it's ridiculous. True, 6% is more than any other developed nation, in most cases by a long way - most European countries spend under 2%, the mighty US military consumes only 3.3% of the world's largest economy. Even Israel, threatened on several sides, spends only 5.4% of GDP on the military (although in less peaceful decades gone by, the figures was considerably higher).

But by historical standards, it's not at all unprecedented. Typical practice during the days of the old Empire, as best we can tell, was to spend around 7% of GDP on the military. True, back then Britain was exercising global influence if not dominance, whereas we can now hope to be at best a second-rate power. But the point is hopefully made: 6%, while high by peacetime standards, is not utterly ridiculous from a historical perspective.

What does this have to do with defending the United Kingdom and its interests?
I'll be honest: not a great deal. The UK faces no imminent danger of invasion by any foreign power, and protection of UK business abroad is a service to big business whose cost there is no particularly good reason for passing on to the taxpayer. Terrorism is a salient threat to the UK, but not a very dangerous one, representing a trifling number of domestic deaths each year. (Moreover, the stated aim of Jihadism in Europe is to separate European powers from the US, so it is at least plausible that a more isolationist UK would not suffer Islamic terrorism at all).

If you see the purpose of Her Majesty's Government as being the promotion of British interests, you should probably favour lower defence spending. I do not hold such a view however, being rather more cosmopolitan in my moral perspective.

So why should we #SpendTheSix?
There are two plausible reasons in favour. First, liberalism is an ideal worth fighting to defend and indeed spread. Forcing countries to be more peaceful and liberal is not oppressing them, as anti-colonial activists would claim: rather, it is preventing local elites from oppressing their fellow countrymen. Compelling Egypt by force to adopt liberalism would be no more an attack on Egyptian freedom and self-determination than preventing Serbians from killing Bosnians and Albanians (or at least trying to do so, and not very hard) was an attack on Yugoslavian freedom and self-determination.

Second, one can appeal to the importance of collective self-defence between the countries of NATO. Estonia and Latvia in particular are threatened by Russian expansionist nationalism, and our current best estimates are that, even with the NATO forces currently stationed in these countries, they would be overrun within a mere 36 hours. These countries cannot defend themselves, so it is our duty to aid them - which requires a larger defense budget.

Two other points fold into this. Firstly, the EU in general is very poorly equipped to handle a Russia that goes properly on the warpath: the only significant EU militaries are those of the UK and France. (On paper, the German army is numerically very large; however it is - and has been for many years - poorly funded, poorly supported among the public, and known for drunkenness more than competence). Given that the UK is currently in dire need of both goodwill and bargaining chips with the rest of the EU, pledging towards the military defence of the Balkan states is a genuine way in which UK interests may be served through higher military spending.

Secondly, if Russia actually does go on the warpath, we will very likely be spending rather more than 6% of GDP on the military. During WWI, UK defence spending peaked at around 47% of GDP; during WWII, it at one point exceeded 50%. I doubt we would go so high again, but it would not be at all astonishing to see perhaps 15-20% of GDP going to the fighting of a major war. Putin starting a war in the Balkans is unlikely, but genuinely possible, and it will be easier to mobilise properly if we already have a large and well-established military program.

Then what's the problem?
If, several centuries ago, you had asked me to make the case for Britain colonising various parts of the world, the argument I would have made would not be so very different from the arguments above. I would have stressed the need to spread liberalism, common law, and individual self-ownership across the world - in contrast to Napoleonic civil law, Chinese absolutism, and a whole host of tribal despotisms. This is not a modus tollens of the argument: the British Empire remains, among non-Britons, underrated. (Among Brits, it is of course vastly overrated).

But it should give us pause that despite the existence of people making such arguments - John Stuart Mill, Rudyard Kipling, arguably John Locke - the actual considerations which motivated it were self-interested, and practice reflected this. Cecil Rhodes talked a fine talk about how we were spreading civilisation and governing other peoples for their own good, and I daresay he believed it - the Rhodes Scholarship and his advocacy of the Cape to Cairo Railway are both pretty consistent with such a view - but do we really think that, in his heart of hearts, he passed the Glen Grey Act (which displaced numerous black farmers) or escalated the Second Boer War because he honestly thought it would be good for the natives? I don't think so.

Similarly, we can point to numerous figures back home, from a range of periods including the last decades of the Empire, who advocated deliberate maintenance of colonial poverty in order to enrich Britain. Britain does not bear sole responsibility for the continuation of grinding poverty in India - Gandhi and Nehru bear as much blame, if not more - but British imperialism in India is certainly nothing to be proud of.

Similarly, one can defend British militarism on universalistic grounds of the promotion of liberal democracy and peace and freedom and all that, and it's not that the argument is wrong. It's that in practice, there is a severe danger of providing intellectual cover for people who have thoroughly despicable goals in mind. Mill's defence of colonising barbarous peoples wasn't wrong, morally speaking, but it was deeply naive about the way in which colonialism was practiced.

This is not at all a knockdown argument. Firstly we are (I think?) more moral than we were 150 years ago, so one would expect a British military publicly justified by universalistic values to stick more closely to those values than did the military of the old Empire. Second, while the British Empire was in many ways an awful thing, it is far from clear that the world was left worse off for it: apart from the places which clearly benefited from it (e.g. Hong Kong), the years 1815-1914 were by historical standards remarkably peaceful. But one should not advocate such policies without at least some unease.

Also, why specifically six per cent?
No idea. Ask Sabisky.

Christiano's Renewed Defence of Democracy; or, Rule By The People For The People, Except Without The People

These are interesting times at CEU, but that did not prevent a public lecture by the famous political philosopher Thomas Christiano from going ahead. Christiano is perhaps the world's leading democratic theorist, having put more sustained thought and brainpower than anyone else alive into the defence of this ideal. His talk was specifically responding to a series of critiques made in recent years by Bryan Caplan, Jason Brennan, and Ilya Somin, all of whom argue that democracy is undermined by the poor quality of voters.

Christiano began by briefly setting out a key claim, difficult to dispute, that on a variety of metrics - economic growth, protection of human rights, avoidance of war - democratic nations have tended to enjoy greater success than alternative regimes. This is something that our social scientific theories ought to be able to explain.

He followed this by introducing Caplan's theory of the "rational irrationality" of voters. This theory emerged as a response to the "rational choice" theory of voting behaviour, which held that voters behave in their own interest - that is, voting for the parties and policies which stand to benefit them, as individuals, to the greatest extent. Caplan noted that this assumes voters already know which parties and policies best serve their interests, and pointed out that due to the vanishingly small chance that one's vote could ever change the outcome of a national election, the expected benefit of voting wisely could never exceed or even equal the costs of acquiring such knowledge. Indeed, from a rational choice standpoint, it is difficult to explain why one even takes the ten minutes to walk or drive to and from the polling station. So we have a morass of deeply uninformed voters, who are in no way suited to the task of choosing a government and its priorities. Caplan's argument is borne out by multiple surveys which find the average member of the public to be comically ignorant of fairly basic facts of day-to-day politics. If one cannot name the chancellor of the exchequer, what hope does one have when trying to assess complicated macroeconomic theories which do not even command agreement among experts?

Next, Christiano discussed Brennan's argument for how ideology corrupts our political judgements. Brennan provides three models of individual voters: "Hobbits", "Hooligans", and "Vulcans". Hobbits correspond largely to Caplan's picture of people with no clue of even the most trivial facts of politics; Hooligans are arguably worse, possessing some degree of political knowledge but also being highly ideological and more interested in ensuring the victory of their team than in seeking the best outcome overall. Vulcans, by comparison, consider all available evidence in a relatively impartial way, and contribute honest and valuable information to democratic decisions. A democracy of Vulcans might very well be a good system, Brennan says - but the world in which we live is one in which most people are hobbits, the overwhelming majority of the rest are hooligans, and Vulcans - if they even exist - are a microscopic minority. This is all backed up with social science to demonstrate that most people are as Brennan claims them to be. So while it might be nice to live in a world of Vulcans, Brennan says, that fact is that we do not - and our institutions ought to reflect this, in a way that universal democracy simply does not.

From here, Christiano said, Brennan, Caplan, and Somin - libertarians all - conclude that we ought to adopt alternative systems, with Brennan and Caplan suggesting the rule of experts and Somin suggesting a sharp reduction in the role the government is allowed to play in our lives. In particular, all three advocate a greater role for markets in decision-making.

I don't think this is really a fair characterisation of their positions. In fact, I would say it is an outright misrepresentation of Brennan's position. It is unfair on several counts:
-By "epistocracy" Brennan doesn't mean confining politics to the elites with no-one else able to break in. Rather, he has in mind tests of political knowledge, which one would be required to pass in order to vote.
-More fundamentally, Brennan does not actually advocate epistocracy! Rather, he suggests that it is a potentially-viable alternative to democracy, and that our institutions should not be built on the assumption that all citizens will behave as Vulcans. This is an understandable mistake, given Brennan's other writings; on the other hand, both he and Caplan are avowed anarcho-capitalists, so the only sense in which they can possibly be seen as supporting epistocracy is as an improvement over what we have rather than as an end goal.
-While they indeed believe that markets should play a greater role in our society, and believe (in line with the evidence showing that both social and economic liberalism correlate positively with both intelligence and with being politically informed) that the effects of a higher-quality voting population would be to give markets such a role, this is not (at least for Brennan) a core claim. The argument is that better voters would give a better set of political institutions, without any claims about what those institutions would necessarily be except as illustrations of how our current institutions are ludicrously sub-optimal.

Christiano then boils the debate to the following argument:

(1) Voters are subject to rational irrationality, ideology, and other such biases.
(2) If voters are subject to rational irrationality, ideology, and other such biases, then democracy will fail to work well.
(3) Democracy will not work well.

This, then, is the anti-democratic theorists' view in its simplest form, as a simple modus ponens. But, as he said at the beginning, the conclusion is false! Therefore, since the argument is valid, we know that something must be awry with at least one of the premises. Christiano suggests that Brennan et al overplay the evidence for (1), but does not wish to challenge it too much. The problem, he suggests, is therefore with the assumption that these various biases preclude voters from making good choices about who to vote for.

How can this be? To point towards a solution, Christiano attempts to turn his opponents own arguments against their views, by suggesting that the same problems which they attribute to democratic choice apply in the same way to ordinary decisions made within markets. There is then a dilemma for the anti-democratic theorists: either they admit that markets are just as flawed and so democracy may nevertheless be the best system we can get, or we identify some mechanisms by which individual ignorance can be translated into rational decisions.

There is undoubtedly some small truth to this. I have no idea how to repair a car, but this lack of knowledge on my part does not prevent me from hiring a mechanic - that is to say, from outsourcing the relevant expertise. I do not have the time to form opinions on an especially wide range of books, but I can outsource this to people whose comparative advantage lies in quickly reading and accurately assessing the merits of books.

So, Christiano suggests, such sources of information exist for politics. Moreover, they are often available at little or no cost, and include the following:
-newspapers and television
-political parties.
-friends and colleagues.
-many educated people need to understand political events for their work, and so understanding it for voting purposes comes at no marginal cost
-labour unions
-churches

One worry he admitted to this is that these institutions for informing people need "warning lights" for when they are failing to accurately transmit information. When one goes to a mechanic, it is usually quite clear whether the mechanic genuinely has their claimed skills, due to the success condition in which your car starts moving again (or passes its MOT, or whatever). It is not clear exactly what these are intended to be with regard to politics - The Guardian criticises Theresa May but as a left-wing paper they would say that, wouldn't they? And if one takes the criticism seriously, then without becoming something of an expert oneself, how can one establish whether or not the criticism is accurate?

One possibility, which I'm reading into him though not, I think, unreasonably, is for there to be legal requirements of neutrality or truthfulness applying to political broadcasters, as exist in the UK and Canada but not, infamously, the USA. The big worry with this, as Christiano notes, is that in principle democracy is rule by the people made on their own terms. Is it not contrary to this spirit to compel certain terms of discourse upon them?

OK, so that's Christiano's perspective, presented in what I think is a fairly reasonable and sympathetic way. I have a fair few criticisms, and will work up form smallest to largest.

First, his admittedly-only-a-hypothesis about the role of unions seems highly dubious. He suggested that the decline of unions made working-class populations vulnerable to demagoguery and so is responsible for the current malaise of "the US, the UK and France." But this just seems empirically ridiculous: first, demagoguery was just as potent a force in the days when union bosses would trip into Number Ten for beer and sandwiches. Second, Thatcher gutted the unions in the 80s: why did it then take more than thirty years for demagogues to come along for the working class vote? And finally, France suffering from not enough unions? Are you joking, or are you merely unaware that their transport systems are routinely shut down by disgruntled farmers, taxi-drivers, or whoever else is the angry industry of the day?

Second, I think Christiano overestimates the extent to which even intellectually demanding jobs require one to know about politics, and the extent to which such knowledge represents a very thin and impoverished of the infinitely complex reality. As an example: my dad works in estate and property management for the University of Birmingham, and had a great grievance with the EU that whenever he wished to outsource some work, anti-corruption legislation originating in Brussels required him - as an employee of an organisation recieving significant EU funding - to put it out to tender (including, of course, an expensive advert in a Brussels-based EU-approved journal) and placed certain restrictions upon who he could hire. As a result of this, such outsourcing decisions became vastly slower and vastly more expensive, since in the absence of such regulations he would simply have called up a handful of small local firms, asked for quotes, and gone with the cheapest who he thought could actually deliver at the price they gave. (Of course, the regulations require that he hire the cheapest firm, with the result than from time to time they will not manage to keep to the agreed price, and it is rare that this situation does not end up costing the university further money).

My dad has a deep knowledge of one particular aspect of the way the EU affects Britain. Does this equate to a knowledge, or even a reasonable idea, of what the EU is like as a whole? Of course not. (Incidentally, my dad was turned off by xenophobic messaging of the Leave campaign during the last few days before the referendum, and ended up abstaining; since the referendum, he has been quite enthusiastic about its result).

Third, and moving on to more serious criticisms: Christiano appears to go straight from the uncontroversial claim that democracy correlates with various desirable outcomes to the highly dubious claim that democracy works well, i.e. that it is causally responsible for these outcomes. I've seen a plausible case that democracies can enjoy lower borrowing costs, but otherwise this seems entirely to get the causal direction the wrong way round: countries liberalise economically, this creates a growing middle class, and so a demand for democracy. The economic success of the Asian Tigers is not to be explained in terms of their (anaemic) democracy but in terms of their liberal economic institutions. (And before one tries to argue that they have failed to respect human rights, (1) be careful you're not assuming your conclusion by taking democracy to be a human right, and (2) economic growth is highly underrated as a means to securing people's vital rights to food and shelter).

Fourth, Christiano seems to me to ignore, in an utterly irresponsible way, the quality of information being received. To quote him almost word-for-word: "In the US, I find that I agree with the values of the Democrat party... and this means that they can act as a way to distill complicated information to me." If I had not heard this from his own mouth, I would have assumed anyone attributing these words to him to be creating a strawman. Yet on the grounds that they share his goal of helping the poor more explicitly than their opponents, he is apparently willing on precious little further authority to commit to controversial views on a wide range of topics - the optimal minimum wage, the optimal response to global warming, the optimal level of US involvement in the Middle East...

Fifth, and to the extent that it succeeds most damningly, how different is what Christiano proposes from that which he opposes? If all were to vote the party line, we would have an esoteric epistocracy in which the relevant measure of knowledge would be "Are you a party leader?" It will not be this extreme, of course, with hopefully a range of alternative media sources. But insofar as his vision of democracy is parties telling voters what to think, and the voters consequently choosing parties to implement their policies - why not cut out the middleman, and let the social elites get on with ruling the country untrammelled by the inconvenience of needing to face election? (This, I should note, is the criticism in which I have least confidence).

Perhaps an argument could be made that voters don't really need the knowledge that Brennan thinks they do. More information is not always good, after all.  Apart from this, there are plausible cases for democracy which do not rely at all upon claims about its ability to make decisions. But Christiano's case for this is thoroughly unconvincing, to the point where I was inclined to wonder if his claims to know little of day-to-day politics were not, in fact, just modesty.

Why Benatar is (Trivially) Wrong

David Benatar is a philosopher who appears to delight in controversy, and in that sense is a man after my own heart. Unfortunately, his arguments for the thesis his most celebrated work, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, are not only sufficient to establish his conclusion but in fact do not even provide support for it. Much of my forthcoming MA dissertation will be showing problems with his arguments; this post discusses one central issue, of whether or not it is conceptually possible to benefit from coming into existence.


I: What does Benatar believe, and what is his argument for this?

Benatar argues for an "asymmetry of pleasure and pain" such that "existence has no advantage over, but does have disadvantages relative to, non-existence". I understand this to mean the following set of claims:
(a) When one comes into existence, one inevitably suffers some bad things (e.g. pain) and in most cases enjoys some good things (e.g. pleasure).
(b) Pains are harmful relative to the alternative of non-existence.
(c) Pleasures are not beneficial relative to the alternative of non-existence.
(d) The combination of (a), (b), and (c) entails that coming into existence is in all cases overall harmful.

He thinks that we should accept this on the grounds that it provides the best explanation for several other asymmetries which he takes to be rather more intuitive. (I do not share all of these intuitions). These are:
(1) That there can be a duty to avoid bringing someone into existence if their life would be characterised by suffering; there is no duty to bring someone into existence merely because their life would be a good one, nor would there be even if doing so came at no cost to oneself.
(2) One might decide not to bring a child into existence on the grounds that the child would suffer certain harms; it would be strange to cite, as a reason for bringing some child into existence, that the child would enjoy certain benefits.
(3) One can regret bringing a person into existence for that person's sake; while one can regret failing to bring a person into existence, one cannot do so for the sake of the person who would have existed.
(4) We feel sad when thinking about people living far away whose lives are characterised by suffering; we do not feel sad that various uninhabited places are not full of people enjoying happy lives.

If one accepts Benatar's asymmetry, then one will believe that so long as one's life contains anything at all that is bad for you (which it will, since someday you will die) you are harmed by being brought into existence.


II: Being more precise about Asymmetry

In the dissertation I draw several distinctions between different types of asymmetry, but here I will look at only one distinction: between "strong" and "weak" asymmetries. Benatar defends what I call a "strong" asymmetry, according to which coming into existence is always bad. A "weak" asymmetry would agree that coming into existence is never good, but would deny that it needs to be bad. If the good in one's life outweighs the bad, then one is neither benefited nor harmed by being brought into existence.

In other words: while pleasures are not independently good relative to non-existence, they can cancel out pains that would otherwise render existence harmful.

I do not defend weak asymmetry either: my view is that one can be either benefits or harmed by being brought into existence. The point here is that Benatar's arguments, as we will see, support only weak asymmetry.


III: Problems for Strong Asymmetry

Benatar's conclusion that coming into existence is always harmful is already pretty weird and extreme. A further problem, which I don't think anyone else has previously picked up on, is that it gives very strange judgments about how bad it is to come into existence. Compare two lives: one is a long and generally happy existence, while the other is very short and very painful with almost no pleasure at all. Due to their longer life, the first person undergoes greater total suffering; however, if asked they would confidently say that the good in their life vastly outweighed the bad. Intuitively, the second person was harmed by being brought into existence whereas, if the first person was harmed at all, the harm was fairly trivial.

This is not what Benatar's view implies, however. According to Benatar we count only the pains and ignore the pleasures, with the result that the person with a happy life suffers greater harm in existing than the person with a miserable life.

Both of these problems go away if one rejects strong asymmetry in favour of weak asymmetry.


IV: Why Benatar's arguments only support Weak Asymmetry

There are two important things to note about the intuitions from section I: firstly, that they are all explained just as well by weak asymmetry as by strong asymmetry. Second: they concern the existence of people whose life are characterised by suffering, not merely by people who suffer at some point in their lives.

There is probably a duty not to bring into existence someone whose life would be generally unhappy; there is no intuitive duty to avoid bringing someone into existence merely because they would experience suffering at some point in their life. Perhaps it would be strange to bring someone into existence so that they could enjoy life (though Benatar merely asserts this without defending it in the slightest), but it would be just as strange to avoid bringing someone into existence merely because in some moment of their life they would be unhappy. One would not regret bringing someone into existence merely because that person was briefly sad. And we are not sad about far away people whose lives are generally happy but include moments of sadness.

All this suggests that strong asymmetry does not really explain our intuitions in these cases. Benatar elides the difference between strong and weak asymmetry, providing arguments for weak asymmetry and then mistakenly claiming that this constitutes support for strong asymmetry.


V: Why this is a problem for Benatar

What does this mean? Well, Benatar goes on to mount a general defence of anti-natalism, the view that we ought not to reproduce. He defends a "pro-death" view of abortion, according to which abortions are not merely permissible but in fact mandatory. He argues that humans should attempt to extinguish ourselves. But neither of these conclusions follows from weak asymmetry.

Weak asymmetry still concedes far too much to the anti-natalist, in my opinion. But the fact that strong asymmetry is unsupported by his arguments, and has highly counter-intuitive implications which weak asymmetry does not, is sufficient to refute the argument that Benatar actually makes.

A (Relatively) Brief Note on Animal Suffering

Despite discussing animal welfare, Singer doesn't really go into wild animal suffering much in Practical Ethics, so I didn't really go into it in yesterday's review. However, in the EA memes group it is one of the main topics of discussion, and it's potentially a genuinely very important consideration in how we ought to behave towards the natural environment. While writing this, it occurred to me that much of it probably applies to domesticated animals as well.

There is a long tradition of people arguing that human life is universally terrible. The most famous person to have argued this is probably Arthur Schopenhauer, although David Benatar has also made an argument of this sort as part of his general case against child-bearing. (At some point I will write a post going into detail on why Benatar is wrong, for he is and it's quite obvious that he is once you see the problem. But enough about my MA dissertation...)

Sometimes they appeal to the great sufferings that we endure in life. Sometimes they start with an axiological approach to "what the good life consists in" and argue that it is rarely met. Either way, the fact is that plenty of people have made these arguments, and yet the fact is that the vast majority of us are glad to be living.

I think a large problem with these kinds of arguments is that while they may allow us to come up with a rough ordinal ranking of lives, there is no cardinal value of a life - and therefore no objective "zero point" at which one should be indifferent between existing and not existing. That's not to say there is no such point, indeed I think there clearly is: rather, it is to say that where this point lies is a subjective issue. A life which I consider worth living may not be one that anyone else would consider worth living, even if there is no disagreement either upon what that life involves or on the value of the life and its components.

(The obvious response to this claim is to ask whether it is really plausible that one could rationally prefer an existence of utter misery to non-existence? I would say two things in response: first, I would be inclined to revise to the slightly weaker claim that the extent to which pleasure balances out pain is subjective, hence a life must include at least some pleasure to outweigh the inevitable sufferings. Second, quoth Hume: "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the wntire world to the scratching of my finger. 'Tis not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. 'Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter." - A Treatise of Human Nature, book II, part iii, section 3. To say someone ought not to consider a life of almost complete suffering to non-existence is to accuse them of irrationality, but rationality is at least primarily, if not entirely, concerned not with what one takes as goals but rather how one seeks to achieve them. Such a preference ranking would be strange, but not irrational).

Arguments for the importance of animal suffering tend to presuppose a roughly hedonic view of the good life - which is fair enough, given that most animals lack the requisite cognitive resources to have a conception of whether their lives are happy overall, rather than merely whether they are happy in any given moment. They then proceed to detail the many sufferings undergone by animals: cold, starvation, being eaten alive, etc. What we have, then, are two challenges to this kind of argument:

(1) it is impossible to simply compare pleasure with pain. These two phenomena may occur in the same subject, but unless that subject is sufficiently advanced to see itself as persisting over time and have opinions on this, there is simply no fact of the matter as to whether the pleasure outweighs the pain or vice versa. Hence while we might think that the improvement of animal conditions is a morally good thing, and the worsening of their conditions a morally bad thing, one cannot say that an animal life containing both pleasure and pain is either good or bad as a whole.

(2) philosophers have tended to make a particular kind of argument to the effect that humans generally suffer by existing, yet we know empirically that these philosophers are wrong. We should therefore be highly skeptical of such arguments when made in relation to animals.

How to be Practically Perfect in Every Way

Practical Ethics (3rd Edition)
Peter Singer

There is a great danger when reviewing a book on a contentious subject that one ends up concluding "the bits I agreed with were good, the bits I disagreed with were bad". This review won't quite say that, but comes closer to this sentiment than I am really comfortable with.

I came to Practical Ethics with mixed expectations. On the one hand, it came highly recommended by people whose opinions I take very seriously, and after all there's a reason why Peter Singer is widely considered one of the greatest philosophers of our time. That said, I've been disappointed by some of his writings in the past, and had kind of got the impression that while he has great and original ideas his attention to detail was not always the greatest.

Well, that's a highly unfair characterisation of him. The first half of Practical Ethics, at least, is a masterpiece of clarity. He discusses the possibility of racial differences in cognitive abilities dispassionately, demonstrating that belief in it is utterly consistent with a liberal worldview. I didn't really learn much from that discussion, having thought about it plenty beforehand, but it was remarkable to see it discussed with such courage by an important, politically-left-of-centre public intellectual.

Similarly, his discussion of abortion demonstrates the problems with the main arguments advanced by both sides of the debate. Ultimately I disagree with Singer - he really ought to give moral weight to benefits enjoyed by individuals whose existence is dependent upon the decision we make - but he demolishes thinkers regardless of which side they are, and while the position he arrives at (support for post-natal abortions) ought to be a reductio of his premises we are left in no doubt either of his sincerity in advocating it, nor of his understanding the issue on a very deep level. (Personally, I'm in favour of something slightly stricter than the UK system - abortions being available on demand up to about 20 weeks of pregnancy, and after that in cases of medical emergency only).

One passage I found particularly illuminating of his discussion of what is particularly wrong with murder. Prior to reading Practical Ethics I had a vague sense that we ought to take the interests of non-human beings into account (i.e. concern for animal welfare) but that actually holding rights was something to do with being human and a full agent. I'm now much more persuaded by Singer's view, which is similar but attributes the possession of rights to those beings which conceive of themselves as existing through time. I can't say I'm 100% convinced, but Singer acknowledges the weak points of his view - e.g. the implication that murder is not so much a wrong to the person murdered but rather to the other people around - and, unlike many philosophers who paper over the holes in their arguments and hope we won't notice, draws attention to this problem.

With all that said in defence of the book, it's worth noting some issues I had. The first is in his discussion of equality: Singer defends his utilitarianism as "equal consideration of interests". That's one form of equality, to be sure, and it sounds a lot nobler than "equal marginal utility of consumption" (as Amartya Sen amusingly describes utilitarianism). But does it really come close to our ordinary notions of a worthwhile conception of equality? Utility monsters are one problem for this view - Singer ends up committed to the view that we really ought to give them all of our resources and debase ourselves before them - but more fundamentally, equality talk is at least somewhat about grabbing. It's about preventing one member or group within society from coming to dominate the rest of us. The union gangmen may not represent an admirable form of "equality", with their happiness (for example) to beat up anyone who dares vote against the party line, but ultimately that's what our equality instinct developed to achieve. Singer should either accept this, or he should find a genuinely noble ideal (like pure happiness! It's not difficult) upon which to base his utilitarianism.

Second, his discussion of the social discount rate - while drawing attention to a severely neglected issue, and not so far from the truth on the issue - failed to mention the absolutely crucial difference between what Tyler Cowen calls the "pure preference rate" and differences in the marginal utility of consumption across time. One cannot simply compare £50 now to £1000 in 100 years, observe that the one is a much greater number, and conclude from this that it is to be preferred. If we replace pounds with utils, then of course such a comparison is appropriate - but this is not what Singer did, and his chapter on the environment suffers in clarity for it. (My discussion here is much less exact than I would like, relying upon vague memories of a Cass Sunstein paper that my google-fu skills have failed to turn up).

Overall, though, the book is very much worth reading - both as an introduction to the subject of applied ethics, and as a contribution to the ongoing debate. I note also that there are several sections which are very much of use to my thoughts, but which (unlike e.g. his argument for post-natal abortions) I would not have picked up just from reading reviews. So this is at least one data point in favour of reading whole books rather than just review of them, even on relatively-easily-summarised subjects such as philosophy.

Various splurges on localism, devolution, state-building, and standardisation

NB: quite possibly conflating issues which are superficially related but really ought to be kept separate. Anecdotal evidence and guys with blogs remain anecdotal evidence and guys with blogs, and should be treated as such.
Also, names have been changed.

Back for Christmas, I've recently been catching up with various people I grew up with. In particular, the half a dozen or so lads who are my age or slightly older at the church in which I grew up. Lucias is my oldest friend, who was my best friend in primary school. He studied Maths at Bristol, did a one-year Masters, and is now doing a Ministry Traineeship at his church there. In a few months he will be getting married to a girl he met there.

Jason and Thomas are a pair of brothers who studied Engineering at Cambridge and Geography at Durham respectively; again, I believe they both have Masters' Degrees. They are now both living in London - Jason putting his degree into direct use in designing things, while Thomas (who was a keen athlete in school, having once placed in the top 30 of the Birmingham half-marathon) is now working in sports marketing - he enthused that next year's World Athletics Championship, which he is involved in promoting, will be Usain Bolt's last race as a professional.

Simon and John are the two older siblings of their family. I can't remember exactly what Simon studies, but am fairly confident that Spanish was part of it; he now works in London. John did Geography and French at Manchester, and is now working for the council there while angling towards going for a Master's.

Finally, there's me. PPE at Manchester, then jetted off to Budapest to study for a Master's in Philosophy. Currently applying for PhD programs, with an eye on Toronto. Long-term, intending to move back to the UK and very vaguely hoping to find a job at Oxbridge.

What, apart from our Christian upbringings, do we have in common? We're all bright, well-educated young men who remember Birmingham fondly and want it to do well. But none of us see our futures here.

This is, I think, the kind of thing Tom Forth likes to go on about on Twitter. We'll come back at holidays, maybe chip in to things - my own contributions are primarily playing piano and organ at church, but people really like hearing that organ played, mind you - but in terms of the lasting contributions that any of us could make to our communities, those contributions will be made elsewhere. Thomas noted that of his friends from Durham, "like 99% of them" have also moved down to London. That's simply where the jobs are.

This doesn't seem good for Birmingham. I don't endorse brain drain as a reason to compel people to stay in the third world, and nor do I endorse it as a reason to compel people to stay in Birmingham. But we've received a lot - of the six people I describe, five of us went to schools run by the King Edwards Foundation - and it's hard to see what, if anything, our home city is getting back.



An interesting essay linked to yesterday by Byrne: "The Strange Death of Municipal England". Key claims:
-government should be doing lots of things
-however, these should be done specifically by local government
-in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was what actually happened
-however, since WWII local authorities have increasingly had powers nationalised
-the tendency is now towards privatisation of such things, to the detriment of quality/equality of service

The essay is good and worth reading, but at the end I was left with a feeling that if you asked the author why (say) libraries should be government-run but food shops should not, you would not get any kind of a convincing answer. Most egregious is the following passage:

In truth, Britain no longer has a government, but rather a system of governance, the term political scientists use to describe ‘the relationships between governmental and non-governmental forces and how they work together’. This is another way of saying that we live in a half-democracy. 

David Schmidtz has the most articulate and developed response to this way of thinking, which is (roughly) that the fact that we aim to realise particular principles with our institutions does not mean that the institutions ought to aim specifically at the realisation of those principles. This is a line of thought going all the way back to Adam Smith, with the immortal line (and also the only line of The Wealth of Nations that I actually remember):

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, baker, or brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.

That's my key point of disagreement with the essay: I don't think the changes it herald are necessarily bad. But that's not why I bring it up here. It's because of the tension it argues for between the national and the local, and the argument (which I am entirely open to, perhaps even favourable to) that nationalisation of politics is bad for most local areas.



The other evening, I had an exchange with Tom Forth on Twitter. We agreed that there are many types of policies which, in terms of total impact, are bad, but are good (or at least perceived as good) by the communities which make them. Examples include import tariffs, US cities bribing sports teams to stay in town, favouring domestic companies for fulfilling government contracts, etc. We agreed it is good that the EU prevents member governments from such practices. Our disagreement, I think, is whether the UK government should prevent localities from such practices. (I'm not certain what these would be, but let's assume that they exist and that more powerful councils would practise them). I, motivated by an overriding moral commitment to the wellbeing of individuals, think that it should. He, motivated by a belief in democracy and in particular local democracy, thinks that it should not. (At least, this is how I understand the disagreement).

If such beggar-thy-neighbour policies exist at the city level, it seems at least plausible that the success of London relative to the rest of the UK is to a fair extent due to it being the only city able to pursue them. Let us suppose that this is a good model for how the UK actually works. In that case, there are three obvious choices we could attempt:
(a) No-one, including London, gets to play beggar-thy-neighbour
(b) Everyone gets to play beggar-thy-neighbour
(c) The status quo: London, and no-one else, may play beggar-thy-neighbour

(a) and (b) have the advantages of moral consistency: (c) is desperately unfair on everywhere except London. But (a) may be entirely impossible to practice, and (b) is surrendering to the collective action problem. So (c) may well be the best option available; indeed, given this empirical model of the world, I would take (a) to be impossible and so advocate (c): in practice, clamping down on decentralisation.




A discussion of the increase in federal power, in particular since WWII, in the US. Worth reading for itself, but a real "huh, that seems obvious in retrospect" moment for me was the point that what we think of as common law bears little to no relation to law as experienced by most people for most of Anglo-American history. Rather, there was a whole mess of conflicting local norms, which in the early 20th century were standardised and codified by reformers.

On a related note, the professor in a Gender Studies course I audited this semester noted that we have records of men in 19th century England selling their wives. Clearly this wasn't a common thing, but it happened in certain places. Legal standardisation, of course, put a stop to that.



The point that I'm getting towards, I think, is an attempt at rebutting the arguments made by James Scott and Jacob Levy against centralisation of power. Or rather, I want to accept all of their claims about what High Modernism causes, and say that it was probably worth it. Or maybe it wasn't. The problem is perhaps inherently unsolvable, since it is very difficult to know what the average state of society was prior to the building of the nation-state. The standardisation which destroyed local knowledge and practice was also what made it possible, even in principle, to assess how individual people's lives were going.

Some people - including people I know personally - would argue that communities ought to be protected and preserved, even if they are what we would regard as backward. But again, I state my belief in moral individualism: people are what matters, and communities are only a means towards the flourishing of people. Perhaps they are important, even crucial means, but when society holds its members back, society is to be cast into the fire.

Does legal standardisation relate to modern devolution? I think it does, in a sense. Forcing the young men formerly of St. Stephen's Church to stay in Birmingham would have been good for Birmingham, and quite possibly good for the other people of Birmingham. But it's no way to treat individuals, it's no way to turn London into the growth engine which will eventually realise the post-scarcity society (or as near to that as possible), and... I don't know. The world is complicated, I don't know. I don't know.

On Terrorism Against the West

The recent rash of attacks in the West by terrorists, beginning in Nice and most recently occurring (dare I say ending?) in Saint-Éttiene-du-Rouvray, have injected a great deal of tension into political debates over multiculturalism, immigration policy, and domestic security. Some people have begun speaking of a "war" between Islamism and civilisation. These worries are not unfounded, but nor are they in proportion with those which a rational observer of the facts would entertain.

First, let's remark on the generally petty level of the violence involved. Today's attack killed one person and left another fighting for life. Sunday's bombing in Ansbach injured fifteen, but killed no-one. Nine people died in the shooting in Munich last Friday. The attack in Nice, of course, killed 81 innocents, but such attacks are rare, coming perhaps two or three times a year at their most frequent. These numbers perhaps sound bad in the abstract, but let's make some comparisons. Each year in the UK, which has the second safest roads in the world, more than 1700 people die in traffic accidents. (That itself is a massive improvement on the past: 2006 was the first year since records began, 80 years previously, that the figure was under 3000). If we can absorb 2000 deaths from traffic accidents every year, I think we can similarly absorb a couple of hundred deaths from terrorism.

Second, we could prevent most terrorist violence if we really wanted to. With the (admittedly large) exception of the Nice attack, every perpetrator of a notable terrorist attack in the West has been known to domestic intelligence (example). Why aren't the attacks stopped, then? Because doing so would mean arresting people based on suspicion that they might commit a crime, rather than evidence that they had already done so. We could stop most terrorist attacks, but this would come at a cost in civil liberties.

I don't want to say that such costs should never be paid. Going back to the traffic example, we don't ban people from driving in order to prevent traffic accidents - but we do require them to wear seatbelts. There may well be low-hanging fruit to be had: policies that will, with minimal expense or inconvenience, reduce the incidence of terrorism upon our societies (note: preventing thousands of people from entering the country they want to live in does not count as "minimal inconvenience").

At the same time, though, we should note the possibility that we have already gone too far down this route. Airport security, for example, incurs vast costs in time for gains in security which are small to non-existent, and of dubious necessity: air travel is in fact considerably safer than road travel.

Laying my cards on the table: I think we should basically just ignore terrorism. (In the first world, that is: in the Middle East it's actually a very serious problem, although what that means for our politics I don't know). It is genuinely possible that there exist low-hanging-fruit policies which we ought to implement - mandatory detention of people returning from ISIS is very plausibly one, along with state attempts to promote moderate Islam and perhaps even some censorship of violently Islamist views (although my liberal side is very worried by this last idea). But understand that there are no two ways about it: if this becomes a war, Islamism will get curb-stomped.

The Shift from Polyamory to Monogamy

Today the following paper abstract has being going around Twitter:

The original paper, The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson, is here. I intend to read the paper in full, but before doing so I intend to write out my own theory of why there has been a transition from polyamory to monogamy. This theory is one I have held for a while, and which is probably not original to me, but I have not seen it made fully explicit anywhere. (It is heavily influenced, however, by my reading of Matt Ridley's The Red Queen). The general thrust of my argument is that household structures are for the most part chosen by individuals - and especially by women - in a way that seeks (roughly) to maximise their genetic footprint. The key changes which cause different choices to be made are essentially economic: hence the dominant cause for the move to monogamy is the industrial revolution and associated rise in the incomes of the general population.

What do women want?

Females of sexually reproducing species require a male contribution in order to pass on their genes to the next generation. The contribution of males can be neatly divided into two parts: the genes, and what we will call "paternal investment".

Genes make a contribution firstly in the obvious sense that reproduction is sexual. But it is also important to not that not all genes are created equal: some are more useful than others for passing on genes, in that these genes will lead to stronger, healthier offspring. If a female is able to assess which of two prospective mates will give her more vigorous young, then this is a strong reason for her to favour reproducing with that one.

Anything which is passed on genetically from parents to children is a potential source of assessment for males. Height is a good example of this: if it is advantageous for a woman to have tall children, then she will be more attracted to tall men.

Paternal investment represents a vast array of things a male might provide for a female in exchange for her bearing his young; what he offers varies massively according to species and environment. If the female will be vulnerable while raising his child he might offer her protection against predators; if the environment is harsh then he might supply her with food; in humans, a considerable part of paternal investment consists in emotional support for the mother.


How do these affect family structure?

The more important genes are to the choice of male partner,the more likely a species or society is to be polyamorous. Imagine a group of women are asked to vote on who, in their personal opinions, is the most attractive out of a group of men - none of the men or women ever having previously met each other. The women will come to their personal choices based on a variety of metrics - height, looks, intelligence, charisma - and while it is unlikely that they will unanimously agree on the most attractive men, it is unlikely that they will disagree wildly either. In species where genes are the only contribution of the male to his children, the average "family" consists of a man, his harem, and their children.

In many species, however, there is some measure of paternal investment. The nature of this investment will effect how far the species moves away from monogamy. In particular, investments which are difficult to provide for multiple females tend to push in a monogamous direction.

An investment which is relatively easy to provide for multiple females is protection. Species where the sole contribution of the male after conception is protection are typically not so different from those where the male contributes only genes. Examples of this include many mammals, such as lions.

Resources such as food are rather harder to provide for multiple females. Food provided to one mate is food which cannot be provided to another mate; hence environments in which food is scare are often conducive to monogamy. Indeed, in some extremely barren environments, where multiple men are needed to support a single woman, we have seen polyandry: wives having multiple husbands. To give you a preview, my claim will be that changes in the availability of food and other such resources are the key reason for societies moving from polyamory to monogamy.


The changing economic environment

Prior to industrialisation, famine was an ever-present threat. A bad harvest might kill all of your children. This meant that your wealth could have a very considerable impact upon your ability to raise children to maturity. Since a lord or king could be hundreds of times richer than an ordinary peasant, then, he could maintain hundreds or even thousands of times more wives or concubines. These men would maintain harems consisting not only of their wife but also of servants and "ladies-in-waiting" - and perhaps also, to some extent, the wives of the men around them. Ordinary peasant men might not marry at all, and if they did it would frequently be only once they had been earning for some years.

Then, between the late eighteen century and the mid twentieth century, there developed what we now refer to as the first world: the wealth of the average man shot up, and in the 1900s there emerged welfare states which defrayed many of the financial costs of raising children. It was no longer important for a woman to marry a rich man, so long as she married a man who was gainfully employed. The choice between men, then, would be made on a number of metrics: men with good genes would typically have the first pick of women, but even those with poor genes obtained a wife. Wealth did not cease to be important, but higher wealth would now get you a more attractive wife rather than getting you multiple wives. Furthermore, paternal investment could take non-monetary form: being an interesting person to be around, for example, might aid a man in obtaining a woman of his choice.

One prediction I will make based upon this theory is that, as women increasingly come to out-earn men in the workplace, paternal investment in general will become less of a factor. Consequently, genes will rise in relative importance, and so we will see an increase in polyamory.


Advantages of my theory

My theory has, as I see it, two big advantages over the theory of Henrich et al. First, I avoid postulating group selection. Second, I have an explanation for why polyamory used to exist. Going by the abstract, Henrich and his collaborators have an explanation for why monogamy emerged but not one for why it took until a relatively recent point in history to emerge instead of being the natural human condition. Or perhaps they do - I'll have to read the article and update based on that.

Raz on the Value of Democracy

Over the weekend CEU hosted a conference on "The Values of Liberal Democracies: Themes from the Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz". The keynote speech, given by Raz himself, was an attempt to articulate why he thinks democracy is such a good system. His answer? Because people think it is.

That's an oversimplified way of putting it. To slightly flesh out the argument:

• People tend to believe that democracy is both necessary and sufficient for democracy.
• Clearly democracy is not inherently just and legitimate: actual democracies contain and indeed rely upon many anti-democratic elements (e.g. independent, unelected judiciaries)
• However, the combination of democracy and a belief in democracy's legitimacy allows us to achieve certain benefits, in particular relating to the stability of political institutions and the peacefulness of political transitions.

Although Raz did not draw out the political implications explicitly, he hinted at some and there are others which I think one can reasonably read into the argument:

• Monarchy is not necessarily contrary to the values of democracy. (One might even argue that constitutional monarchies tend to be more stable than presidential democracies, although you might have trouble establishing the direction of causation there).
• What I believe he was getting at: it doesn't really matter if supra-national institutions such as the EU and the UN aren't really very democratic. Most of the benefits of democracy are to be achieved at the national level, and in any case what we fundamentally want out of political institutions is not that they are democratic (though this may well be desirable) but that they work.

An argument for the subjectivity of reasons

Suppose a man enjoys shooting. In particular, he is into "blind-shooting", in which he shoots in conditions of limited visibility: he sets up a target, along with a mechanism to wave a rattle directly in front of the target, and he aims based upon his judgement of where the sound is coming from.

He is unable to afford an area of private land in which to practice this sport. Instead, he goes out into a public right-of-way area at night to shoot. This is of course a grossly irresponsible sport. We might like to say that, given the risk of hitting someone, there is a strong reason for him not to shoot. Of course, if he could be utterly sure that no-one was in the vicinity, then this reason would go away.

It is simply false to say that if there is a person who could be hit, he has a reason, and if there is not, then he lacks a reason. The reason for not shooting comes from his personal, subjective inability to confirm that no-one is in any danger of being shot.

Some Thoughts on Cohen and Rawls

Political Philosophy is the study of ethics as it applies to political action. This means it asks questions about which political institutions ought to exist and how they ought to act, but also about how individuals ought to act under political institutions. One important question of the latter kind is how far the force of egalitarianism, which is typically taken to bind state actions, should influence the actions of individuals.

Rawls thought that the principles of justice should apply to "the basic institutions of society", and was always slightly ambiguous about what this meant. Was it intended to mean coercive institutions - such as the state and particular distributions of property rights - or rule-giving institutions in general, such as marriage and religious authorities? The basic intuition in favour of the former view is that we usually want to avoid placing especially demanding political duties upon people beyond compliance with the basic laws and rules of society. If someone pays their taxes, drives on the correct side of the road, and avoids trespassing on the Royal Navy's battleships, then isn't that enough?

On the other hand, this seems to deny that considerations of justice might apply within the family. A hundred years ago this might have been seen as a virtue of the theory, but now that more-or-less everyone accepts that second-wave feminism was basically correct this view is hard to sustain. So if justice applies to individual actions in the context of family, why shouldn't it apply in a whole range of contexts?


One way of thinking about this is to consider what the origin of our moral duties is. (NB This need not be the same for all duties). I would broadly categorise the theories as such:

1. Moral duties are pre-institutional. Political institutions, insofar as they are justified at all, exist as a mechanism to enforce the carrying out of these duties. Nozick can be seen as a paradigm case of this view, although it is consistent with a stronger conception of distributive justice: for example, I assume that Peter Singer would hold a view of this kind.
2. Moral duties in some sense exist prior to institutions, but only become binding upon individuals when there exists a political community. Thomas Nagel holds a view of this sort, suggesting that it is unreasonable to expect individuals to deliberate as though their own interests are no more important than those of other people but that politics can act to achieve some form of equal consideration of interests.
3. Moral duties come into existence only when there exists a political community. Hobbes would be the classical advocate of this view.

I would venture to suggest that (2) represents the mainstream view among political philosophers, at least with regard to issues of distributive justice. It has the advantage compared to (1) of explaining the particularity of our political obligations - of why individuals are attached to particular political institutions and not others. If you take (1) to be the case, it is hard to see how one can legitimise redistribution of income and wealth within the community without also legitimising global redistribution on the same scale - an implication that citizens of rich countries, including most political philosophers, are keen to avoid.

The disadvantage of (3) is that it is hard to explain why there are principles that all political institutions must follow. Whereas (2) suggests that political community simply activates pre-existing principles, (3) implies that the principles to be followed by a community are made anew each time a political community comes into being. This view fell out of fashion as communitarianism became less popular.

Nevertheless, all three views are somewhat popular within the discipline.

If you accept a view of type (1), then you will presumably think that the failure of a state to enforce a duty has no bearing upon whether or not one is morally obliged to comply with the duty. To take a duty where I think the truth of (1) is uncontroversial: one is obliged not to murder others, and this holds whether or not one will be punished for doing so.

If you accept a version of (3), then there is simply no way to say, outside of a particular context, what the duties of individuals are. This is not to say that there is no answer; rather, it means that this answer is one to be answered not through philosophical reflection upon the nature of morality, but through interpretation of a particular culture's practices.

But what about (2)? In this case we still do not know what the duties of individuals are, but in a different way from in (3). If (3) is true then it may be the case that members of a particular community have extensive moral duties, but this has little to no bearing upon what the duties of people in different societies are. If (2) is true, however, then people's duties should be more-or-less the same regardless of which society they inhabit.

This doesn't really answer the question, but I think it has helped to clarify my thinking on the topic. In particular, I am now aware of a couple of tensions in my beliefs. Firstly, I am attracted simultaneously to the views that there are limits to our duties, that there are some (admittedly small - I'm a sufficientarian, not an egalitarian) requirements of distributive justice, and the type (1) theory - that states should exist only to enforce pre-existing duties, and cannot create new duties. The joint coherence of these views is doubtful.

Second, in a part of this essay which I have deleted, I suggested that this might have to do with whether or not we conceive of justice as a substantive property or merely as the absence of injustice. I tend to believe the latter view, since surely injustice requires an actual victim rather than merely the potential to create victims? I thought that this might have some effect on which duties we still ought to respond to as individuals, but it is now not at all clear to me that this is the case.

On "Integration" and the Current Migrant Crisis

I'm never quite certain whether, when people refer to integration of immigrants, they mean making those immigrants into full members of our civil society or whether they just mean persuading immigrants not to blow us up or sexually assault women. These correspond to two different views of potential immigrants: as people who look different but otherwise completely like us, or as the products of less advanced societies who hold correspondingly backward views.

The way many high liberals talk about the topic - as though integrating some migrants is the duty of a civilised society, but it is not something we need do with every single person who wants to enter the country - seems like it works far more with the second view of migrants. But these same people would be deeply uncomfortable with the implicit picture of migrants. Say what you like about Steve Sailer and such people: at least their view of immigrants is consistent with their politics.

Given that I'm on record as a supporter of open borders, it would be very convenient for me to hold the second vision of integration but the first view of migrants. This seems to be roughly what most open borders people believe, and with regard to your typical economic migrant I think it is probably the most reasonable view. But the "typical economic migrant" is selected for being relatively ambitious and cosmopolitan; the people fleeing Syria are simply trying to get away from a warzone, and do not appear to be selected for anything much other than being young and male. Obviously the pictures of migrants I presented at the start of this post are both exaggerations, and all actual migrants will fall somewhere between the two, but in general we might expect that the direr someone's circumstances are back in their country of origin, the closer they are likely to fall towards the uglier end of the spectrum. This is an uncomfortable fact for anyone trying to come up with a compassionate immigration policy.

This is rather unfortunate, and I don't really have a good answer to it. One option would be to take the deontological "immigration is a basic right which may never, under any circumstances, be denied" line, but I forfeited that principle long ago when I failed to apply it to Israel. Another option is to suggest that yes, there are costs to taking in immigrants, but ultimately we have to apply a sense of proportion: the benefits to the immigrants, most of whom are entirely law-abiding, vastly outweigh the costs to host societies. This is definitely the option to which I am most inclined, but it is not without its problems.

A photo taken last Thursday in central Budapest. From left to right:
Damjan (Macedonian), Oshadie (Sri Lankan), Nino (Croatian),
Olesya (Ukrainian), myself (British), Puja (Indian), Rachel (US),
Errol and Christy (US, though they met while teaching in Japan).

First is the fairly explicit cosmopolitan worldview. This is not to say that I believe cosmopolitanism to be wrong - entirely the opposite. Rather, it is very easy for me, who grew up in one country, currently live in another, plan on moving to yet another to do a PhD starting in 2017, have no idea where I will eventually end up, and live on a corridor with people of more nationalities than I can count, to endorse this kind of globalist worldview. The average person, if their culture is disrupted by foreigners - something which is distinctly more likely for them than for me - has nowhere else to go.

Second, there are the worries about cultural collapse. Social trust really is an important resource, even though I think conservatives tend to overestimate its volatility, and immigration really can harm it. Especially when the liberal authorities refuse to take genuine complaints about migrants seriously. Having read Haidt I do take this argument seriously, but what it really needs is to be put into quantitative terms. Social trust is, as with everything, the subject of a vast empirical literature, so how about we try to, however roughly, measure (a) the extent to which social capital is damaged by immigration, and (b) the extent to which other things we care about are damaged by loss of social capital? Perhaps we also place an inherent value on social capital, in which case that's also something to be factored into the equation.

In sum: I remain convinced that under normal circumstances, the UK ought to accept vastly more immigrants than it currently does. These are not normal circumstances, and I'm still trying to understand the implications of that. Deporting students - who are especially well-selected for liberal values, SJWs aside - is still stupid. But again, that's easy for me to say.

Drop your Bombs Between the Minarets

This evening (sort of. It's still the same day in the UK, although won't be by the time I've finished typing) the UK House of Commons voted, by a large majority, to join the military coalition against ISIS. The decision followed an all-day debate, most of which was (so I am told) pretty dull until, near the end, Hilary Benn delivered a rousing speech in favour of the motion, prompting tremendous applause from both Labour and Conservative MPs. The issues raised are too many for one blog post, so I will go over some of the more important questions in individual posts.

Should we bomb ISIS?

The question is not "should ISIS be bombed?" but "should the UK join in fighting alongside the US and France?" There are several lines of argument to say that the UK should, none of which convince me but a couple of which I am not in a position to reject, either.

The Basic Consequentialist Argument: Bombing ISIS will help bring peace to the Middle East.

Sure, but France and the US will do that. The marginal effect of the UK intervention is probably close to zero. (This also hangs on the assumption that bombing will make things better, but I'm happy to outsource my empirical beliefs regarding Middle Eastern geopolitics to the generally pro-intervention Anonymous Mugwump).

The Fungibility Consequentialist Argument: (1) UK bombing will reduce the amount of bombing by other powers. (2) The collateral damage of UK bombing will be less than the collateral damage that would have been caused by the bombing which is funged away.

(1) is probably true to some extent, at least with regard to France and the US. I doubt Russia will bomb less just because the UK intervenes, since (as I understand it) they are after all bombing a different faction. (2) is less convincing - I know of no particular reason why we would expect UK strikes to be better target than those of France or the US. That said, it's certainly possible. Mark this argument down as a "maybe".

The Kantian Argument: If no-one bombed ISIS, then bad things would happen. So, in accordance with the categorical imperative, we should bomb ISIS.

Firstly, Kantianism can't necessarily be applied to states in the way it can (supposedly) be applied to individual people.

Second, the application of universalisability is always finicky. Clearly one can (for example) work as a carpenter, even though if everyone were a carpenter then we would starve. So where there's something that needs doing by someone, a better rule might be "do this thing if it is your comparative advantage". In which case, it really isn't obvious that the UK has that advantage.

Third, for Kant's maxim to apply it is not enough for bad consequences to apply - this state of affairs has to be self-contradictory. Murder is forbidden, according to Kant, because you can't kill people if you have yourself been killed first. Theft is forbidden because if everyone were a thief, the concept of property would cease to have meaning. Homosexuality is forbidden because it's disgusting. If no-one bombed ISIS then they would grow, which would be bad, but not self-contradictory. Honestly, what do they teach in the Oxford Philosophy Curriculum these days?

The We Can't Just Let This Happen "Argument". File under "Copenhagen Fallacy".

The Membership of NATO Implies Obligations Argument.

As a philosophical anarchist I'm sceptical that the UK public could have an obligation to pay for a war based upon a treaty signed by their government. Leaving that aside, if France were genuinely threatened then I would (with about 90% confidence) advocate intervening to defend them. But they're not! This isn't the Third Reich in full Blitzkrieg mode, this is an unusually violent tinpot little Middle Eastern theocracy. France is perfectly capable of defending itself without the UK getting involved, just as it is capable of managing its own police force without us sending over a corps of bobbies.

The National Self-Interest Argument: The UK needs to be actively involved in international affairs, or else will be subject to whatever other nations decide to do to us. In this case, that means bombing ISIS.

This is, for me, the most compelling argument. It's easy to overstate the costs of isolation - in fact, the form of this argument that I endorse is fairly similar to the last one. If the UK had no mutual defence treaties with France, I would definitely not advocate intervention. Given that we do, it's probably better that we avoid being seen as betraying our friends. (What would the consequences of being seen this way be? It's hard to know. Earl Bute's treatment of Frederick of Prussia in ending the Seven Years' War and Britain's resulting diplomatic isolation was a significant contributing factor to the loss of the American colonies. This being the twenty-first century, we wouldn't get invaded by anyone if we were isolated, but we might get fewer trade deals, for example).

Conclusion

@roreiy @Sam_Dumitriu That argument aside, my preferred policy is "roll up, drop half a dozen bombs, then bugger off for tea and medals."

— Andrew Pearson (@adrwtp) December 2, 2015

I would have advocated a minor intervention for the sake of show. More than that seems pointless, but (given that the marginal effect will after all be very small) no more impermissible than most things that governments do.
That was not, of course, an option. The only people with votes were MPs, and they only had the options of voting for or against. Were I an MP with a free vote, I'd probably have decided that France and the US will get over it, especially if David Cameron wanted to join them but couldn't get parliamentary support. They seem to have got over the last time this happened, back in the dark mists of 2013.
Were I a Tory MP, I guess I'd have gone along with the three-line whip to vote in favour. Rebelling all the time might keep your hands clean, but that's about all it does. Freak accidents aside, a consistent rebel will never be able to lead the party in their preferred direction - and when those freak accidents do occur, you can hardly expect your "colleagues" to be any more loyal to you than you were to them. That doesn't mean you never rebel, but it means you pick your battles with care.

A Challenge for Heath on Coercive Institutions

I'm a massive fan of Joseph Heath's work, and in particular his article The Benefits of Cooperation I have found to be remarkably clear and illuminating. However, it occurs to me that the arguments he gives in that essay would justify arranged marriages. Unless he is willing to bite that bullet, there must be a problem with his broader argument for the welfare state.

Arranged marriages have tended to be seen as a way for the men of a society to reinforce their control over the family. Hence, it is precisely the kind of social institution that liberalism was supposed to abolish and feminism to eviscerate. Using Heath's tools, however, we have a powerful defence of this institution. I'm not disputing Heath's account of how such arrangements might be socially beneficial; rather, I wish to challenge the idea that, given the beneficial nature of these arrangements, individuals are morally obliged to comply.

In the article Heath identifies five (somewhat roughly defined) ways in which we benefit from the existence of other people: economies of scale, gains from trade, transmission of information, risk-pooling, and self-binding. He argues (I forget whether he makes this argument here or whether you have to move onto The Welfare State: Three Normative Models) that the imperative of efficiency means people can be bound by rules which are designed to achieve these efficiencies, even if they do not actually consent to these rules. His defence of the welfare state, then, is a means of achieving risk-pooling among society at large and of achieving self-binding among people with poor self-control.

(To be clear, in political theory the welfare state - at least as traditionally understood - is marked by two features, both of which are normally taken to require justification: (1) coercive redistribution of income from wealthier members of a polity to poorer members, and (2) that redistribution to take place in the form of in-kind benefits such as healthcare, pensions and food stamps, rather than in terms of pure money. Heath claims that (1) is really just a massive risk-pooling arrangement, and (2) is about self-binding.)

Here's another area of massive risk: choice of spouse. Making a poor choice of spouse can wreck your life and destroy your happiness, as we all know from innumerable stories. (And that's hardly the worst of it. I sometimes joke that I will propose to my future wife with the words, "I love you. Will you become the person most likely to kill me?")

So we have an area where it is massively important to make the right decision. Furthermore, people who are in love are not exactly known for their judgement. So from an efficiency perspective, perhaps you want someone else making - or at least having significant influence over - who any given person marries.

Obviously you can't just let anyone make that decision. So for a person X, what are the ideal characteristics of X's marital-decision-maker? They should know X well, should be in some way invested in X or otherwise motivated to help X do well, and should have reasonable experience of what makes for a good marriage. Who better than X's parents? Hang on a moment, this is starting to look an awful lot like traditional arranged marriages!

As a sociological account, this is reasonably persuasive as an explanation of why arranged marriages came to be (although I doubt many feminists will be receptive to the idea that women forced into arranged marriages are so coerced "for their own benefit"). And perhaps the modern, more liberal forms of arranged marriages (in which both prospective partners have the option of refusing) aren't really so bad. But it does raise some uncomfortable questions: firstly, given the theorem of the second-best and the fact that a transition towards a more liberal system might be difficult if not to achieve, does this mean that people living in a society with coercive arranged marriages must go along with them? And second, does this mean that advocates of a welfare state ought also to advocate for a return to arranged marriages?

Perhaps one might try denying that parents really do operate in the interests of their children, and instead use arranged marriages as a way to threaten the daughter and to shore up familial alliances. But this problem is limited by the fact that parents who make utterly awful choices of son-in-law or daughter-in-law will have fewer grandchildren and so, over generations, will pass on fewer of their genes. Furthermore, real-world states of the kinds that Heath thinks we must obey are themselves far from ideal. Many regulations have a basis less in promoting efficiency than in creating work for lawyers, both in compliance and in enforcement. Other regulations exist due to regulatory capture (for example, most restrictions upon Uber - most egregiously, the recently proposed law in London which would require Uber drivers to wait five minutes before picking up a given passenger, a law with no possible purpose other than protecting the interests of black cab drivers at the expense of everyone else). Taxes go to fund not only the welfare state that Heath defends, but a whole host of programs of dubious utility (e.g. immigration restrictions, military interventions in the Middle East) and even boondoggles. So Heath faces a choice between either denying the duty to obey the law, or affirming the duty to participate in arranged marriages.

If he were a utilitarian, this would be simple: just say that while there's no actual duty to obey the law, the state is nevertheless justified in compelling obedience - if necessary through outright violence. But when you're a deontologist, it becomes harder to reject the intuitive claim that if you lack a duty to do X, no-one can force you to do X. I don't mean this as an endorsement of utilitarianism - that system has its own weird and unpleasant implications - but it's one possible way out of the dilemma.