Reflections on the Role of Battle in Warfare

Context: I intend to listen to an interview with the author of The Allure of Battle, and want to set my own views down first to note where I agree and disagree

What is the contribution a won battle makes towards victory in war? The answer may seem obvious: you kill a load of them, so there's less of them left to fight back. Actually, I don't think it's so clear.

• change over time in what we mean by a battle - in particular, as war has turned into a process rather than a series of events
• most battles, even decisive ones, involve relatively small casualty ratios - and frequently not all that lop-sided. 10% on each side would not be atypical
• armies being wiped out often historically led to surrender, even when the population at large had changed little. Kill 20,000 Austrians - so what? There are millions more! Why should that lead to surrender if war is about destroying enemy strength?

• at very small level, a fight is determined by what we may call "strength". Most obvious at the level of 1v1. Look at lion coalitions, where power is largely about how many male lions can bear to live alongside each other.
• as fights get larger, it becomes less about overall strength and the ability to coordinate and concentrate it in one location
• given an absence of opposition, it doesn't take all that much force to control an area and its people. See the el-Amarna letters, in which 50 men is sufficient to pacify Canaan
• battles, then, are as much about disrupting the enemy ability to coordinate as about killing them. This can happen by scattering them, by capturing/killing their leaders
• This is a primary reason why cavalry were important - not for fighting (horses are easily scared!) but for pursuit (and also scouting, which was key to success in battle - although my topic here is why battles were important, not how to win them)
• total war, and war becoming a process, are fundamentally a result of state capacity - the ability to lose one army and build another, Diplomacy-style.
• Also arguably due to the fact of generals being behind the line - meaning that defeat is less likely to mean disruption to the command structure

Social Foundationalism in Epistemology

There is an ancient problem in philosophy known as Agrippa's Trilemma, which many parents will have encountered with inquisitive children. Ordinarily if one is asked how we can know something, we will appeal to underlying beliefs which support it. But this raises the question of why we should believe these underlying beliefs - and if there are even deeper underlying beliefs, why we should believe those. There are three responses which can be taken to this:

• Infinitism: the idea that is possible for human knowledge to be founded upon an infinite regress of reasons, in much the same way that the earth is stacked upon an infinite column of tortoises.
• Foundationalism: the idea that there are some beliefs which you just have to accept, and these form the foundation for other beliefs.
• Coherentism: the idea that we operate on a "web of belief", and it doesn't matter if there is no ultimate ground to it if the beliefs are mutually supporting.

I am myself a determined coherentist: it's not that there are no beliefs which don't require further support, it's that once you've gone "I think, therefore I am" it's rather difficult to spin that up into much more. But the debate between foundationalists and coherentists continues, with the occasional "foundherentist" peacemaker like Susan Haack and the occasional infinist troll.

What strikes me, however, is how completely dominant coherentism is in the field of ethics. Under the name of "the method of reflective equilibrium" it is basically the method for trying to establish truth. We combine judgements from a range of levels - from practical judgements like "if a child is drowning in water next to them, you are morally obliged to rescue the child" to highly abstract judgements like "if states of the world A, B, and C are such that A is morally better than B, and B morally better than C, A is necessarily better than C" - to create general theories which aim to explain as much of the moral universe as possible. A couple of possibilities as to why this difference exists between fields:

• Taking a foundationalist approach feels more respectable, and probably more likely to be successful, when the foundational judgements are highly general and widely applicable. Foundationalist epistemology, for example, would take mathematics to be foundational; whereas the most widely agreed judgements which we aim to expand from in ethics tend to be very practical and narrow in nature, e.g. "it is wrong to torture innocent children for one's own pleasure."
• Ethics is generally accepted to be a social enterprise - it's about how we should behave, less about how I as an individual should behave. In particular, the existence of other moral agents is not generally taken to be in doubt. By comparison, epistemology is much more easily framed not as "what are the reasons for believing/doing X?" but "why should I believe X?"

I don't know that I particularly believe either of these. Maybe my initial observation is off, for that matter. If the second explanation is true, however, then given the rise in popularity of social epistemology in the last couple of decades, there's probably some mileage for a new defence of foundationalism - not that individuals should take certain beliefs as basic and unquestionable, but that societies should.

The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Carthage

Carthage. Carthage! It was a major trading post in the ancient world, founded in the location now known as Tunis by Phoenician(1) merchants, which rose to eclipse Tyre as a major port of the Mediterranean and indeed the primary Phoenician city. At its zenith it controlled Sicily, Spain, much of North Africa, large parts of the south of the Italian peninsula, and the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca roamed northern Italy with his army - famously with a contingent of elephants - and utterly destroyed two major Roman armies at Trasimene and Cannae. But he was unable to bring Rome itself under siege, and was forced to return to Africa to defend Carthage from invasion by the Roman general Scipio - who defeated him at Zama, forever breaking the back of Carthage as a power. In the Third Punic War, some fifty years later, Carthage was razed to the ground, and famously the Romans salted the earth there, that nothing might grow back.

The Decline of the Carthagian Empire, JMW Turner; Tate Britain

...Except that it did grow back. Not immediately of course, and only because the Romans allowed it to. The New Carthage was founded by Julius Caesar in the years before his demise. But Utica, the Roman ally which was appointed the new capital of Roman North Africa, was soon overshadowed, and the new Carthage soon became once again the greatest city in North Africa - indeed one of the greatest cities of the Western Roman Empire. What was it about this location which made it such a natural site for great cities?

The answer, I believe, comes from two things: first, a look at a map of the Mediterranean, and second, some facts about ships of the ancient world.

Carthage, as mentioned, was in what is now Tunisia - notably, near the narrowest crossing of the Mediterranean (though still a solid 100 miles across the sea from Sicily). This was in an era when sailing ships might achieve 50-60 miles on a good day of sailing. Crucially, ships of the day had to take to land every evening in order to dry out the wood. This had a number of consequences: for example, ships would not carry more than a day or two's supply of food with them, but would instead land in ports and acquire food (2).

Consider what this means for journey times and possibilities. Journeys from the north of the Med to the south are obviously greatly shortened in many cases. But this also gives opportunities to sacrifice directness for security. Someone sailing from Algeria to Egypt has the option to avoid the less-populated, less secure Libyan coast, and instead to coast around the north of the Med through well-known trading waters.



(1) This could be an interesting debate in itself. In the recent Princeton University Press sale I eventually did end up buying Josephine Quinn's In Search of the Phoenicians, which argues - as best I can tell - that the Phoenicians did not exist as such, but rather that there were various seafaring people who were all given the same label. This would be a very plausible hypothesis, and deeply appealing to me as someone who wishes to emphasise the vast diversity of past societies which has been flattened out by modernity in general and capitalism, mass media, and nationalism in particular, were it not for a book I did get: Taco Terpstra's Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean, whose second chapter argues that long-distance trade in the Ancient Med was facilitated largely by the existence of Phoenician minority communities in cities around the Med. Trade relies upon trust, which would have been very difficult to achieve in the absence of enforcement mechanisms - except that local ethic Phoenicians were able to send messages back to Tyre and to other Phoenician colonies and obtain justice - and were obviously subject to the justice and tolerance of the local majorities.

(2) Thus, towards the end of the Peloponesian War, the Athenian fleet happened to be caught on the defensive near the home-in-exile of their former general, Alcibiades, perhaps the chadliest man in all of Classical Greece. Alcibiades advised the Athenians to move their pitch closer to the town, on the grounds that their sailors would then spend less time away from the ships buying food and other supplies; this advice was ignored, and the fleet was soon lost, definitely knocking Athens out of the war.

Can Prediction Markets Reduce Sexual Harassment?

Recently the @litenitenoah twitter account observed that:

Prediction markets for sexual harassment accusations don't seem very ethical, but I bet they would successfully expose a lot of real harassers.

— Probably not Noah Smith but you never know (@latenitenoah) May 11, 2018

I'm not certain what ethical objections not-Noah has in mind, and suspect that I probably don't care about them. If prediction markets in sexual harassment (henceforth PMSHs) have the effect of reducing sexual harassment, then this is good and it will take a lot to convince me that the markets are overall not worth having.  (There used to be a prediction market in terrorism, which was shut down after outrage from politicians.) That said, it remains an open question as to whether or not PMSHs actually will have this effect.

After a couple of weeks of on-and-off thinking about this, I want to suggest that any PMSH will have both some specific advantages and some specific disadvantages. At present my fear is that the disadvantages win out; however,  The size of these effects will of course depend upon the precise way in which these prediction markets are implemented. One of my aims with this post, then, is to open up discussion about how exactly these markets can be designed so as to maximise the good and minimise the bad.

It is also worth stating, as a preliminary, a couple of limitations on all of this. Firstly, prediction markets are means of aggregating information, but they are not by themselves a means of governance. They can function as part of a government mechanism, as in Robin Hanson's futarchy, but only as a part. What this means is that while PMSHs may give us a reasonable idea of which men are abusers, it does not in itself provide a means towards actual trying men who may be guilty: any trial will require a concrete accusation from a concrete victim. This does not mean PMSHs can't reduce harassment, however, as we will shortly see.

Second, it is typically assumed in discussions of prediction markets that the existence of and odds given by markets do not affect the outcome being predicted. This may well not hold in this case - a victim might be emboldened to speak out against her harasser if the prediction market says he is probably a harasser, or might alternatively conclude that someone else is likely to come forward and there is no need to subject herself to examination in court. The fact that prediction market odds can affect the outcome is not by itself a problem - one might imagine a prediction market for individuals' health and life expectancies, with individuals buying bullishly on themselves so as to have a financial incentive to eat well and exercise - but it can cause problems, which we will discuss later.

Lastly before getting onto the ins and outs: I shall be proceeding on the assumption that prediction markets are basically efficient at aggregating information. If you disagree with this premise, please take that up elsewhere with Robin Hanson or someone, and accept it for the sake of argument in this post.

The case in favour

In my view, there are two large advantages which any PMSH would have, and two other advantages which PMSHs might have depending upon their design and size, and one other advantage whose size is difficult to gauge.

Firstly, there already exist informal whisper-networks, mostly though by no means entirely between women, about which men are not to be trusted or enabled. These networks can enable women to reduce their vulnerability to potential harassers, and can enable concerned third-parties to jump in to head off and stop harassment at an early opportunity. The effect of a prediction market would be to make this information, in an admittedly less-finely-detailed format, available to all concerned. Women should not have to change their behaviour to avoid being harassed, but since in some cases they can having access to PMSHs would give them a better idea of when this is necessary; concerned friends, similarly would be in a better position to know which men ought not to be left alone with young women for significant lengths of time, and which men really are harmless.

Second, harassers are frequently enabled by the institutions in which they work or serve. Larry Nassar, the former medic at Michigan State University and USA Athletics, was able to abuse over 300 women and girls because of silence surrounding his activities which had been going on since the 1990s. Such silences can only be maintained because institutions and the people within them have plausible deniability about whether they were truly aware of abuse going on. PMSHs would remove that deniability: having a high predicted odds of being accused of harassment would be an instant red flag that would make it much harder for institutions to engage in the kind of motivated ignorance which allows abuse to continue over extended periods of time.

An advantage which I think would be real, but can only speak for anecdotally, would accrue to men with prediction markets on their own odds of being accused of harassment. I do not wish to harass women; being of imperfect social intelligence, however, I frequently struggle to identify which behaviours will be taken as playful flirting or everyday platonic compliments, and which will be experienced as threatening by the women at whom they are directed. Of course I try to err on the side of safety, but I can hardly pretend that I have always succeeded here. Having an external evaluation of how threatening I am seen as would allow me to better calibrate my behaviour - was that girl giving of signs of distress that I didn't pick up on and the other guy did, or did he just want her to dance with him instead? Do I need to reduce the amount of alcohol I consume when going out on the town? Certainly I'm not alone in asking myself these questions - more than one male friend has expressed similar concerns in private conversations.

I wish to mention two other ways in which PMSHs might - might - serve to reduce sexual harassment. One of the biggest problems in tackling sexual abuse is that victims are, entirely reasonably, unwilling to publicly accuse their abusers because doing so will mean exposing deeply personal aspects of their lives to strangers. Whether you consider this to be the Patriarchy in action, an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of having a well-functioning justice system, or a bit of both, this is the constraint within which we have to work. PMSHs would allow women to provide information about their abusers anonymously, by buying bets that the abuser will in fact be accused.

The advantage I am most doubtful about - and which I think a PMSH would ultimately have to jettison - is that it may provide some material compensation to women who do expose their abusers. A woman who has bought bets on the man who harassed her may stand to make money by actually going public, which may make her more likely to go public and/or may alleviate her loss of privacy, for example by allowing her to spend a while in a new location without running down her savings.

The case against PMSHs

There are two issues with this, however, which I suspect mean that a well-functioning PMSH would have to prevent women from financially benefiting by accusing men. Firstly, it is not clear that this incentive would only affect cases where abuse actually did occur. This may therefore create cases where men are falsely accused of harassment by women who want to make money out of the accusation.

This is unlikely to be an especially widespread problem - while false accusations of rape do occur, they are at most a small minority of actual accusations. That said, the prospect of such accusations means that there will be an obvious new brush with which genuine victims can be tarred - any man accused of harassing women may simply claim that his accusers are mercenaries trying to destroy his reputation for money. This will both create extra stress for genuine victims, and may lead courts to wrongly fail to convict a higher proportion of genuine abusers.

It is possible that we may come up with a way to prevent false accusers from financially benefiting from their accusations. Suffice it to say, however, that I have not yet thought up such a way, and this is my greatest worry as to why PMSHs may ultimately be unworkable or counterproductive.

A second major concern is that rich abusers may be able to cover up perceptions of their threat level by buying all bets on their being exposed. This is not the absolute worst possible scenario - it would at least mean that they would pay some price for their misdeeds - but it might allow them a pretence of harmlessness which the informal whisper-networks would have quickly dissipated. We all know stories of rich artists who have raped young women and got away with it; while it might be better that they were in prison, at least their reputations provide a warning to other young women who fall into their orbits. These men might be able to counteract or upend these reputations by betting financially on their not being accused.

There are other, smaller, objections, mostly of the form that PMSHs do not go far enough or are insufficient - that they would only take into account abuse of women with money, or that only men who are already in some way notable would have PMSHs surrounding them. These objections might well be correct, but they are not reasons to oppose PMSHs, merely to think that they must serve as part of a whole package of measures we might take to reduce abuse.

Conclusion

My current suspicion is that the disadvantages win out - that PMSHs might well, on balance, make it easier for men to get away with abuse. There are ways to combat this - for example, by preventing men from betting on their own behaviour, and by preventing people from both holding bets that a person will be accused and accusing that same person. If these are even achievable, however, they may undermine the advantages that are supposed to make PMSHs useful.

This should not be the final word. I would welcome any suggestions as to how PMSHs can be designed so as to avoid incentivising false accusations - and as importantly, to avoid giving the impression of incentivising false false accusations - and as to how they can prevent rich abusers from rigging their own reputations. But it seems clear to me that such suggestions are sorely needed before PMSHs can serve as a tool for making women safer.

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.

Parellels Between the Great Transformations?

Two of the greatest transitions in human history were the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The Neolithic Revolution was the move from hunting and gathering naturally-occurring crops to agriculture, and paved the way for numerous other changes to society. For example, once one was committed to a particular area of land, it became worthwhile to build dwellings, and so we advanced from nomadic tribes to settled villages.

One curious feature of the Neolithic Revolution, however, is that despite paving the way for great human advancements it was probably a severely negative experience for the people who lived through it. Compared to hunter-gatherers, farmers were shorter, weaker, more-disease-prone, harder-worked, and shorter-lived. This raises something of a puzzle: given that becoming a farmer would make your life worse, and in a one-on-one fight any hunter-gatherer would have a large advantage over a farmer, why would anyone become a farmer?

The answer is that while the Neolithic transition was awful at the individual level, it was enormously powerful at the group level. An agricultural society could extract vastly more food from any given area of land than could a tribe of hunter-gatherers, allowing it to support a substantially larger population. Furthermore, a sedentary group could increase its population towards capacity much faster than a nomadic group, since mothers were now able to concurrently raise multiple young children in a way that was impossible when reliant only upon human milk and when young children had to be carried everywhere.


The Industrial Revolution of the late-18th and 19th centuries is better documented than the Neolithic Revolution, but still we know rather less than we would like. One ongoing debate among historians is why precisely it happened in England in the late 18th century, and why it didn't happen in previous civilisations to approach similar levels of technology (such as China and the Netherlands). I wish to very tentatively suggest that dynamics similar to those of the Neolithic Revolution were in play.

Did people's lives improve or get worse during the English Industrial Revolution? It's hard to say, and it's very easy to underestimate how poor living conditions were for most of agricultural history. But our best estimates are that while they did in time improve, the early decades of the industrial revolution involved little to no improvement in wages. It is true that overall life expectancy was improving, but expectancy appears to have been rather higher in the countryside than in the new urban centres, where not only was disease able to spread like never before but there were introduced a host of new unhealthy occupations (factory work, coal mining). Moreover, there was a trend of increasing life expectancy prior to the industrial revolution, so credit for greater longevity is more probably due to the agricultural revolution than the industrial revolution.

So why did people go along with this? My suggestion is that in most cases, they didn't. This is why previous civilisations which could have industrialised did not: no-one wanted the work it involved, and few people were desperate enough to take it on. England was the first society to be in a position to industrialise and to have social circumstances - presumably the Enclosures - which compelled people to take on industrial work.

I don't think the group-selection mechanic which helped explain the spread of the Neolithic Revolution will do much work here, however. More plausibly, other countries came to industrialise after England had already gone through the horrendous early decades and industrial productivity had begun to skyrocket. If one was living on the proverbial $1 per day as an agricultural labourer, one might quite reasonably refuse industrial work that paid $400/year (the average British wage in 1860) but leap at the chance to do similar work for $800/year (the average British wage a century later).

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.

Wherefore Christmas Cards?

There is a familiar economistic critique of Christmas presents, arguing that the practice of spending money upon each other (as opposed to each spending money on ourselves) destroys large amounts of value. More recently, Mike Bird has launched a crusade against the various deserts that we traditionally serve at Yuletide. If these puddings were really so good as to ever be worth eating, Bird asks, why do we not eat them year-round?

Let's suppose that these arguments go through. Should we in addition to dropping present-giving and Christmas puddings also cease to exchange Christmas cards? If the average person spends £15 and an hour or two writing cards, many of which will be noted for a few seconds only and thrown into the rubbish shortly after Christmas, can this really be an efficient use of our limited time and money?

It should be noted that, as with presents, the waste is probably at a Molochian social level rather than an individual level. For an individual to unilaterally cease giving Christmas cards could invite negative social consequences, at least in cases where one has a previously established habit of sending cards. But if we could all agree not to send cards and to recognise that failure to send a card does not mean one does not care, would we be better off?

I see two possible defences of cards. The first is that they can serve as nice decorations. But if this is really the value they give, then why do we outsource the choice of cards to people who neither have to live in our houses, nor have any idea of what other cards there will be?

The second defence, and I think the much more plausible one, is to suggest that while Molochian zero-sum status games exist and showing-you-care can lead to such traps, there is also a need for, or at an advantage to having, a bare minimum standard of showing-you-care. Saying "I hope you have a good morning" to people doesn't lead to a race for the most generous greeting, ending phone conversations with "goodbye" rather than just hanging up shows basic respect without creating long-winded rituals. Perhaps abolishing Christmas cards would create a need for a new, and more costly, way of intermittently recognising and appreciating people who you like but don't often go out of your way to talk to.

(Why then would we give cards to people who we do go out of our way to see? Because if we didn't, it would be clearer to people who did receive cards that they're not in the inner circle. In many cases this wouldn't cause any offence, but in some it's better to maintain plausible deniability. Plus, the fact that you consider someone part of your inner circle doesn't mean that they think of you in the same way. Better to avoid the risk of discovering that.)

I don't know how you'd test this without actually abolishing Christmas cards. If you did, perhaps you would avert a quite considerable waste. Perhaps you would see the development of an alternative ritual for recognising people. Perhaps such an institution would be needed but fail to develop, and you would harm our valuable, valuable social trust.

Nonetheless, E-cards seem a quite significant step forward. The decorative function is lost, but we can maintain the signalling while reducing resource consumption.

More ambitiously: perhaps Christmas cards keep us trapped in an inferior recognising-others ritual? Instead of sending people cards, make more of an effort to spend time with them. Assuming you actually enjoy someone for who they are rather than what they can do for you, why would you think that a cheap-but-still-overpriced piece of paper is a good way to interact with them?

Anything You Can Screw, I Can Screw Better

A party question for politically moderate Anglo-Saxons: which would be worse, Corbyn as Prime Minister with a substantial majority, or Trump as President?

I'm not going to answer that here. However, a couple of remarks:

(1) Prime Ministers are much more powerful than Presidents, due to the absence of checks and balances. Obama, a reasonable and essentially centrist President, has achieved virtually nothing since 2010 due to Republican majorities in Congress. Trump is a plain and simple fascist, so one would hope will face greater opposition.

(2) Trump is also known to have a very short attention span. The idea that he would have the endurance to push major law changes through is a dubious one.

(3) For that matter, Corbyn has proven consistently unable to even produce a policy platform. Imagine what he would be like if he not only had to think of policies, but put them into legalese and defend them against some former Oxford Union debating champion.

(4) Therefore, our fear of what Trump and Corbyn would be like should be rooted less in what we think either of them would do, but rather in what they wouldn't do. (e.g. defend the Baltic Republics/Falkland Islands).

(5) This fact, combined with Trump and Corbyn being the least qualified candidates for governing their respective countries since at least 1900 and 1983 respectively, ought to raise a few questions for libertarians.

What's Happening?

I’m going to sketch a model of what is currently going on in European and Anglosphere politics. It probably has some explanatory power; at the same time, there are weaknesses that I will mention. Very little of what is in here is original to me, so I should thank various people (mostly on Twitter) for the discussions leading to these ideas. As most people with internet access know, the left-right spectrum is a poor measure of political positions. You can make it a bit more sophisticated by including two dimensions - one mapping the traditional left-right divide in economic terms, and one mapping social liberalism versus (for want of a better word) authoritarianism.

Due to the pressures of electoral politics - and especially the First Past The Post system - these two dimensions have tended to be bundled together in the form of an economically left-wing, socially liberal party (Labour, Democrats) and a pro-capitalist, authoritarian party (Tories, Republicans). This left people who are leftist plus authoritarian (call them “populists”) and who are right-wing plus liberal (“neoliberals” will do) without a clear party, and so they have tended to split between left and right largely according to personal preference.

Since the fall of Communism, though, the economic dimension has been becoming less important. It’s true that parties talk about increasing or decreasing regulation and redistribution, but fundamentally there has been an acceptance - especially among élites - that capitalism is here to stay. Meanwhile, the social dimension has been growing in importance, in particular due to the continuing influence of feminism and identity politics. One measure of this is that in the 1970s a book called A Theory of Justice could be primarily about the optimal amount of redistribution, whereas nowadays the phrase “social justice” is synonymous with LGBTQ+ advocacy. (Immigration may also have something to do with this: I suspect that it used to be viewed primarily as a social issue, i.e. “They’re criminals” vs. “That’s racist”, and is now seen primarily as an economic one: “They’re taking our jobs” vs. “But they’re also spending their paychecks and hence creating jobs”.) This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t model Blairites and Labour moderates as economically left-wing; however, it does mean that as compared to fifty years ago the distance between an élite leftie and an élite rightist is much smaller. What this means is that you see increasing tension pushing for populist and neoliberal parties. In the UK the Labour Party is being taken over by dinosaurs who want to bring back genuine socialism but are at best unconcerned and at worst deeply regressive on social issues. The SNP are authoritarian in the truest sense of the word, and are to the left of the pre-Corbyn Labour party. In the US you have people like Donald Trump (a populist if ever there was one) and Bernie Sanders (who admittedly isn’t a proper socialist, but is still willing to describe himself as one). Tony Blair and his heir David Cameron are UK representatives of neoliberalism; Bill and Hilary play this role in the US. The implication of this is that we are somehow likely to see a move over time towards having populist parties pitted against neoliberal parties. At this point I’ll note two caveats: (1) this is very vague and doesn’t offer anything like a timescale for predictions, and (2) it is likely to rely upon a corrupted meaning of “social liberalism”: are safe spaces illiberal censorship or just a way to respect oppressed minorities? If some Islamic communities force their females members to wear the hijab, practice gender segregation in public, and encourage homophobia, what is the socially liberal response? Another thing to note is that in general, élites are fairly neoliberal. For the last thirty-five years or so we’ve had considerable success through left-wing governments tinkering with economy but massively reforming social institutions (e.g. Tony Blair) while right-wing governments have either been much the same (e.g. David Cameron) or have focused upon economic reforms (e.g. Margerate Thatcher). In some cases we’ve even had ostensibly left-wing parties delivering market reforms. But what happens if, through a change in the political system, all of the neoliberal élites end up in one party and that party isn’t in government? What if a Trump or a Livingstone actually gets into power? How well can democracy be restrained in such a case? Some more problems which didn’t really fit in earlier: (1) How much of what I’m claiming to explain is just straightforward political polarisation, e.g. for reasons given by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind ? (2) Any account of UK politics should mention the EU. This one doesn’t, and what’s more this issue doesn’t fit the two-dimensional political map at all neatly. My impression is that orthodox leftists tend to be fairly pro-EU, but all three other groups are divided. (3) Even two dimensions isn’t that many. We could also include foreign policy, divide economic stuff into a regulation spectrum and a redistribution spectrum, etc.

The Virtues of Inequality

In The Myth of Ownership, Murphy and Nagel recognise that one can indeed put intrinsic positive moral value on markets. They suggest one might the market as "a mechanism that makes each of us as economic actors responsible for the allocation of effort and resources in our own lives, and that makes the benefits we derive from those choices systematically dependent on their costs and benefits to others". (Murphy & Nagel, 2002, p.68). Despite this, they conclude that markets cannot be inherently justified, at least as the sole locus of the distribution of income in society, because people have unequal starting points in terms of their upbringings and abilities. This, they suggest, means that some amount of redistribution is also needed in order to correct for the initial iniquity.

I wonder if one might take a different tack: one focused on virtue ethics. The idea is something like this: one thing we might want out of our situation in life is the capacity to develop specific virtues. Moreover, the virtues we wish to develop will vary from person to person. Courage is an important virtue in some contexts, but for the average citizen in a liberal democracy it is going to be of little to no use. Integrity is one of the most important virtues of a statesman, but has little relevance to most people's everyday life. Generosity becomes a more important virtue as one obtains more to give away - if one is poor enough then it generosity may in fact be a self-destructive vice.

In particular, there are a number of virtues which are most relevant to those who suffer or have suffered. Being forgiving is perhaps the most obvious of these.

With this, then, we may be in a position to argue that havng a disadvantaged upbringing allows one to cultivate certain virtues which would not be open to oneself otherwise.

There are a lot of problems with this view as it stands. First, there's the sheer unpleasantness of the suggestion that people should suffer in order to "be better people" afterwards. Second, presumably by having the disadvantaged upbringing one loses the ability to develop other virtues which are most available to those with advantaged upbringings.

Perhaps this argument can be given legs, perhaps it can't. I think most likely the latter, though I'd be interested to see attempts at developing it.


A related - and in my view much stronger - argument is inspired by an article in Ethics last year arguing that the "shape" of a life has moral value. In short, it is better to start off badly and end up well than to start off well and go downhill. Combine this with the empirical fact that, for a variety of reasons, people tend to get richer as they get older, and you could have a very solid defence of economic inequality.

A Modest Proposal for Upper-House Reform

One perpetual complain in British politics relates to the undemocratic nature of the House of Lords. This House has very considerable power within our supposed democracy, and yet its members are mostly appointees of the Prime Minister. Surely it ought to be reformed so as to genuinely reflect the will of the people?

The counterpoint to this is that the House currently plays an important role of review. Very few current members inherited their positions; rather, they were appointed on account of their expertise in particular topics important to our politics. Making them elected would turn them into simply a body of puppets of the party leaders.

Here's a suggestion for how we might attempt to combine these concerns: make the House of Lords into an epistocracy. Maintain universal suffrage for the House of Commons, but also introduce a test which one must pass in order to gain the right to vote for the membership of the House of Lords. The questions would be a mixture of reading comprehension, numeracy, and factual knowledge about a range of topics (geography, the nature of the British constitution, uncontroversial things from economics - comparative advantage, definitions of various things, the current UK GDP per capita). In order to vote, you would have to achieve a particular score - say, 70%. In order to stand for election to the upper house, you would have to achieve an even tougher score - say, 90%*. Upon taking the test you would be informed if you had passed to a sufficient level to vote or stand for election, and if you had then you would receive a right which would need to be renewed every five years.

Every citizen would be entitled to take this test, free of charge.



* Alternatively, perhaps we might say that in order to vote one would have to be in the highest-scoring 10%, and in order to stand one would have to be in the highest-scoring 2%. I'm not committed to any particular formulation of this idea, I'm just throwing it out there.

On Democracy

(Partly inspired by reading Richard Arneson's "Democratic Rights at the National Level")

Democracy is not magic. It does not make political action virtuous, it has no inherent superiority to other forms of government. The right to vote is not itself a morally important freedom. But given the indelible association in many people's mind between freedom and democracy, democracy is nevertheless an inevitable result of people being made free.

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).

All government departments are useless, but some are more useless than others

From a description of the Taxpayers' Alliance's proposed budget:

the Plan makes for sobering reading. An implementation of the first, less stringent, programme would, among other things, see the abolition of no less than three government departments (the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; for Culture, Media and Sport; and of Energy and Climate Change), an end to national pay bargaining in the public sector, and a sizeable cut to Scotland’s grant from the UK government.

Compare those departments: the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is basically a highly inefficient  way of subsidising big business, The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is an undeniable waste of taxpayers' money. The Department for Energy and Climate Change is despised by conservatives and libertarians, and is loved by lefties. Global Warming is a politically polarising issue in the UK, with everyone from the centre-right to the far left viewing it as a massive threat demanding government action and everyone right of there denouncing it as a myth.

The average left-winger will struggle to find much to say against cutting the first two departments there. If you were constructing a bipartisan deal to slash government, then they would be prime candidates for destruction. The inclusion of the DECC, however, firmly stamps this proposed budget as "right-wing". Quite apart from the issue of whether Climate Change is something that the government needs to respond to, trying to get rid of the DECC is a middle finger raised at the political left which will obstruct this contribution to debate from being taken seriously.

My philosophical views

Having an hour to spare and nothing better to do, I've decided to write down my current answers to the questions on the PhilPapers survey of philosophers' views. First, a couple of notes and caveats:

• At first, I wasn't going to look at any (potentially new-to-me) arguments for the positions while doing this. However, upon reflection it seems strange to reject a chance to be motivated to learn.
• One of the options on the original survey was "insufficiently familiar with the area." This really ought to be my default answer - I am, after all, a mere undergraduate student - but where would be the fun in that. Instead, for any given issue you should assume that I am probably not as familiar with the issue as I ought to be.

A Priori knowledge: yes or no?

Umm... lean no, maybe? I lean towards the view that logic, maths etc are constructed rather than discovered, and given that they are supposed to be the paradigm cases of a priori knowledge, I guess that places me in the No category.

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Is this asking whether I believe that there are no abstract objects, or which of these positions I lean towards on a greater number of subjects? I'm not willing to completely rule out abstract objects (fictional objects in particular strike me as things which might exist but be abstract) but I don't believe in the existence of numbers, of propositions, or of many of the other abstract objects which have been postulated to exist. Put me down as leaning towards nominalism.

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

I have actually put serious effort into trying to work out why anyone might think that aesthetic value is objective, and the closest I've seen to an argument is SEP's mention of the fact that "people tend to agree about which things are beautiful." Sigh. Accept subjective.

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

I don't believe in it, the only question is whether I go down as Lean No or Accept No. Quine was very convincing... go on, put me down as Accept No.

Epistemic justification: Internalism or Externalism?

I can never remember which is which. Assuming I correctly understand the issue, one of them is the view that knowledge-seeking has intrinsic value, the other is that we should seek knowledge because it is useful to us. Yudkowsky put this very nicely in the Sequences, saying that seeking knowledge out of curiosity has a certain purity to it, but the advantage of seeking knowledge because it is useful is that it creates an external criterion by which to measure our success. Accept whichever one it is which says we should seek knowledge because it is useful.

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-sceptical realism?

Accept non-sceptical realism. You can't achieve absolute certainty that you aren't being deceived by a demon, but (a) there is no reason to believe you are either and (b) in any case, suppose you were. You don't know anything about what the demon wants, so there's no particular reason to change the way you act.

Free-will: compatabilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

I'm fairly well convinced that if determinism is true, then (a) people cannot act differently than they do but (b) they are still morally responsible for their actions. I believe this makes me a compatibilist, although it strikes me as a bit weird that this is counted as believing in free will rather than denying that free will is necessary for moral responsibility.

God: theism or atheism?

Damn, no option for deism. Lean deism if that's acceptable, otherwise I place higher probability mass in atheism than in any of the "revealed religions".

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Given that I deny a priori knowledge, it would be rather odd if I were to say rationalism. (At least, it appears that way; perhaps this is one of the many things on which I shall come to be corrected.) Accept empiricism.

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

No familiarity with the subject area.

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?

Accept Humean.

Logic: classical or non-classical?

This is an interesting one. As said above, I lean towards the view that logics are constructed rather than discovered, and that different logics may be appropriate for different purposes. The philosophical justification for intuitionistic logic is something I find very appealing, so let's say Lean non-classical.

Mental content: internalism or externalism?

No familiarity with the subject area.

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

I lean towards constructivism. I believe this makes me a moral realist, although that's a bit weird since I started working out my metaethics by explicitly assuming there were no genuine moral facts floating around.

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Is the question "Which is it more fruitful for us to assume as a default?" or "Which do I beliee is actually true?" Accept naturalism on the first, lean non-naturalism on the second.

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?

Next to no familiarity with the subject area.

Moral judgement: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?

I looked at this at some point, but I can't remember much of what it was about.

Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?

Is this related to the amoralist's challenge? I've been thinking about that for ages, and still don't have a satisfactory answer despite reformulating my metaethics at least partially in an attempt to produce an answer to this question.

Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?

Accept one box. Although even if I were the type of person who would two-box, would I go around telling people that?

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Virtue ethics, subject to deontological constraints, and with the choice of virtues justified on pluralist-consequentialist grounds. Yes, really.

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

When I studied this in first year, it seemed like a slam-dunk for sense-datum theory. However, given that (a) that was before I had read The Sequences, (b) I can't even remember what the first two of these were or if they were even mentioned, and (c) I have rejected almost every other view I picked up on that course (belief in the a priori, epistemological foundationalism, free-will libertarianism, near-universal scepticism... I must just about hold to a sensitivity condition regarding knowledge, so not quite everything), I'm inclined to take that past belief with rather a lot of salt.

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?

I don't hold to a biological view, but I' not greatly satisfied by the leading psychological accounts (though if I had to choose one, I would go with Schechtman's). I don't even know what the further-fact view is, and looking at the relevant SEP and Wikipedia articles suggests that either I'm misunderstanding the question, or that there is something odd about it. I was reading section 3 of Reasons and Persons, but my Kindle has gone missing.

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?

Accept libertarianism. Have you read my blog?

Proper names: Fregean, or Millian?

I prefer the Millian view, and I believe that Nathan Salmon's discussion of "guises" solves most of the problems for it; that said, I need to do more reading, so put me down as merely leaning Millian.

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Scientific realism. Because, you know. Duh.

Teletransporter (new material): survival or death?

Can I suggest the answer is somewhat subjective? Personally I would regard it as survival, but I'm very open towards difference of intuitions and I think that the disagreement is more to do with people having different values than to do with some (or all) people being wrong about an actual fact in the world.

Time: A-theory or B-theory?

B-theory is the one which holds all times to be equally real, and suggests that we move through time rather than time itself moving, right? Accept that one.

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?) 

switch or don't switch?

I would lean towards switching. I'm not entirely comfortable with it, but David Friedman's variation on Fat Man (in which both the Fat Man and yourself are required to does a fair job of convincing me that we should probably be willing not only to turn the trolley, but to push the fat man in its way.

Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?

I read The Simple Truth and it sounded sensible. Then again, I haven't done a great deal of engagement with the views other than correspondence - certainly I could not explain what they are - so I'll have to just say I have insufficient engagement with the subject area.

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

Again, especially insufficiently familiar, but leaning towards one of the not-metaphysically-possible positions.

Sketch for an attack on a self-interest view of the basis of morality

1. We cannot be worse off for having more information.

For the purposes of this premises, X is defined as a constant level of utility.
2. If we have a choice between helping one person to an extent X, or helping 100 people to the extent X, with both of these options incurring equal cost to ourselves, we should help the 100 people.
3. If we have a choice between helping an extremely utility-poor person to extent X, and helping a considerably better-off person to extent X, with both of these options incurring equal cost to ourselves, we should help the utility-poor person. This holds regardless of our own level of well-being.

4. According to a self-interest view of the basis of morality, if given a choice between helping two sets of people, we should help the one we would expect ourselves to fit into. (e.g. helping family/country before foreigners)

It is my contention that, for a well-off person, premises, 3 and 4 are inconsistent - a well-off person would expect themselves to be helped more by a strategy of helping well-off people than one of helping the downtrodden. The objection that our principles should be devised at a level where we are ignorant of our positions within society conflict with my first premise. This will need a lot of tightening up, and I'm far from convinced that premise 1 is indeed true; however, it's something perhaps worth thinking about.

(This occurred to me while reading Jan Narveson's paper "We Don't Owe Them A Thing!"

Knox, Sollecito, and various morally reprehensible people

As you are probably aware, an Italian court has reinstated a verdict of Guilty on Amanda Knox and Raphael Sollecito. My guess is that Knox will be able to avoid being extradited to Italy, but Sollecito has already been taken in. This whole post is based upon the assumption that both Knox and Sollecito are completely innocent of the crime. From the reading I've done on the case (the Wikipedia page and a couple of pro-guilt and pro-innocence sites) this seems pretty obvious. To claim that their guilt is "beyond reasonable doubt" is stupid and, in view of the fact that it condemns them to a decade or more in prison, evil. In this post I am more interested in the motivations of various people than in rehashing the evidence.

First, there's the police. I have low prior expectations of the honesty and commitment to epistemic rationality of police in general (combination of a state license to use violence and a lack of accountability) and given the mire of corruption that is Italy, these expectations dip even lower. (There's an anarchist slogan that the state hates organised crime because it doesn't like having to face competition; in the case of the Sicilian Mafia, I would suggest that this is pretty literally true). Why are they pursuing a case against two clearly innocent people? Presumably because they have a theory and because changing your mind is difficult, often painful. People in general don't like to admit they are wrong, and the police are presumably more comfortable sending innocent people to prison than they are practising good epistemic hygiene.

What about the judges and lawyers involved in the case? Lawyers are another group who I would tend to be suspicious of, and this wouldn't be the first time that lawyers have taken advantage of a case to make vast amounts of money.

The judges are less obvious. This whole post is speculation, and given that I have limited knowledge of the Italian legal system I don't hold out much hope of being right in this particular guess.

The jury, I guess, are just subject to many of the common biases that affect us. I remember that, before I read about the actual evidence, I just blithely assumed that Knox was basically guilty. There are a whole load of pro-authority biases we tend to suffer from, and these would encourage the idea that "If the police say they're guilty, then I'm sure they must be guilty." At least part of the motivation for this assumption was that Kercher was British ("us") and Knox was American ("them"), and it's at least possible that some members of the jury hold anti-American sentiment similar to that which I used to hold. Overconfidence bias almost certainly plays a role; and then finally there is the determined campaign of character assassination to which Knox has been subjected.

Finally, what about Kircher's family? Her brother and sister were at the trial, and their lawyer described the re-conviction as "a victory for justice". It clearly isn't - indeed, it's a travesty of justice that Knox and Sollecito have been imprisoned. Their imprisonment does not bring Meredith back. I can understand the desire for revenge, but a) it's not a very healthy desire and b) Knox and Sollecito are innocent, so it's not revenge. It seems to me that Kircher's family, who must surely be familiar with the evidence, are morally reprehensible for endorsing the continued persecution of innocents. Perhaps not as reprehensible as any of the parties with actual power, but then again one shouldn't expect much good from police.


Is it reasonable to describe all of these people as morally reprehensible? I'll grant an exemption to the jury - most people (regardless of intelligence) have no idea how to weigh evidence and they are just people who have been forced into this. But otherwise, these are people who for the sake of not admitting that they were wrong are willing to subject two innocents to decades of imprisonment. And I believe we need to have more shaming of people who use their own poor methods of reasoning as an excuse to force their views on others.