The paper I am presenting for this podcast symposium is part of an ongoing research interest of mine in how torture becomes institutionalized in military forces that are (in theory at least) committed to the prohibition against torture. I am particularly interested in how the processes of rationalization and normalization contribute to the use of torture, and how language, training, and torture methods effect the moral attitudes of those involved in the authorization and use of torture.

I was inspired to write this paper after noticing that the term “torture lite” was turning up quite frequently in the public debate about torture, used both by those who argue against torture and by those arguing that torture might sometimes be justified. I was interested in how the use of this phrase (and similar phrases such as “enhanced interrogation”) shaped the debate about torture, and in whether this term does pick out a set of torture techniques that are generally or always less severe than more violent torture methods. In particular, I began to wonder how the techniques described as torture lite (for example, extended sleep deprivation, forced standing, noise bombardment, isolation, and manipulation of heat and cold) shaped torturers’ (and others’) moral perception of what is being done to the victims and who is responsible for it. It struck me that so-called torture lite techniques share certain features that tend to mask the effects of these methods on the victims and minimize the torturer’s role in causing the victims’ suffering, and that this might play an important role in making such forms of torture seem more palatable to liberal democracies than would otherwise be the case.

I hope you find the paper interesting to read/listen to. I look forward to reading your comments, and many thanks to Simon May for organizing this symposium.

I haven’t included the footnotes in the podcast of the paper, and I have left some material out in order to make it a manageable length, but you can read the full version of the paper here

David Sussman’s excellent comments are available here

You can listen to the podcast below.

I of course wrote this article with my dissertation advisor and world-class political philosopher Jerry Gaus. The article was originally an invitation to Jerry to write an article that would be part of a symposium on public reason and religion in Philosophy and Social Criticism. Jerry and I had been talking about these issues for nearly a year, so he was magnanimous enough to invite me to be a co-author.

The article I’m reading to you today has the incredibly unwieldy title: “The Roles of Religious Conviction in a Publicly Justified Polity: The Implications of Convergence, Asymmetry, and Political Institutions.” I place the blame for this title squarely on Jerry’s shoulders. The delightful and razor-sharp John Quong will be our commenter. Thank you, John for your able criticisms.

I read the entire paper on the podcast, but I don’t read the footnotes. If you listen to the podcast, you’ll want to see the footnotes in the paper if you had additional questions.

With that said, thank you all for joining me and thanks to Simon May for putting together this very cool, very hip, very innovative and yes, very cheap philosophy conference.

Here’s the PDF.

Here are Jon Quong’s excellent comments.

I’ll post replies on Monday and Tuesday.

Incidentally, we’re hoping to get Jerry in on this, but he will be at a conference over the weekend going on about T. H. Green. (What? You don’t know who T. H. Green is? Well, you should!) I will pester him, but posting provocative comments will help draw him in!

The podcast is below. Enjoy my melodious Southern accent. The file is large (~6 MB) so patience while loading. Its probably better to download it to your computer or MP3 player.

Note: Please do not cite this article without permission from the authors.

Here’s the abstract:  Just because one has the right to vote does not mean just any vote is right.  Citizens should not vote badly.  This duty to avoid voting badly is grounded in a general duty not to engage in collectively harmful activities when the personal cost of restraint is low.  Good governance is a public good.  Bad governance is a public bad.  We should not be contributing to public bads when the benefit to ourselves is low.  Many democratic theorists agree that we shouldn’t vote badly, but that’s because they think we should vote well.  This demands too much of citizens.

So, in summary, on my view, citizens don’t in general have an obligation to vote, but if they do vote, they should vote well.  What I do in the paper is outline broadly what it means to vote badly, explain why I think you ought not to do it, and then answer various objections.

An outline of the argument is: 1.One has an obligation not to engage in collectively harmful activities when refraining from such activities does not impose significant personal costs.  2. Voting badly is to engage in a collectively harmful activity, while abstaining imposes low personal costs. 3. Therefore, one should not vote badly.

Some of the worries about this argument that I respond to are (among others): A.  If good governance is a public good as I say, shouldn’t everyone who benefits from this good contribute to it? B.  Don’t individual bad votes have incredibly low expected disutility, and if so, why bother prohibit bad voting? C. Does this position imply epistocracy (Estlund’s term, meaning the rule of those who know better) or something like it?  D. Is this view self-effacing? E.  What if citizens are good at judging character, even if they are bad at judging policies?

So, if people are interested, I’ll be writing more about this in the next few days.  Feel free to email me at Jason_brennan [at] brown.edu if you’d like a copy.  (I’ve got to make a final few revisions over the next few weeks anyways, so any comments would of course be welcome.)

[Update: I’ve added a bloggingheads video of Jason and blogger Will Wilkinson (Cato Institute) on this paper below the fold — SCM]

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At present, the JMP continues to be strong. We receive over 120 submissions per year minimum and our acceptance rate remains 10%. The majority of papers accepted are accepted after revisions. We currently use three referees for submissions and more than 80% of submissions are reviewed in two months or less.

The latest issue of the Journal of Moral Philosophy is now available. Please note that we have moved to Brill and our new website can be found here. (Our previously site with SAGE Publications is here.) All issues of the JMP can be downloaded from IngentaConnect here.

The contents are as follows:

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It should be mentioned that “Getting Duped” draws on a paper I co-authored with Scott Aikin that appeared in Argumentation titled “Two Forms of the Straw Man”.

Comments, criticisms, thoughts, refutations, etc. are of course welcome.

Lysander Spooner, the foremost legal theorist of 19th century American radical liberalism, might seem to have defended two distinct and incompatible theories of the relation between liberal legal norms and positive law. In early works such as The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1846), liberal legal norms appear to emerge from considerations immanent within the positive law; but in later works like Natural Law, or the Science of Justice (1882), liberal legal norms appear instead to function as an external constraint on the legitimacy, and indeed the legality, of positive statutes. I argue, drawing on earlier natural law tradition as well as on more recent analytic theories of language, and applying Spooner’s canons of interpretation to his own texts, that Spooner’s apparently distinct formulations yield a single consistent approach, a defensible and attractive radical liberal natural-law jurisprudence that transcends the internal/external distinction.

Comments welcome!

Also, I see that my 2004 article “Aristotle’s Egalitarian Utopia: The polis kat’ euchen” is now online in its entirety at Google Books, as a result of the relevant number of Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre’s being online in part.  It explores what Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, his merit-based system of constitutional classification, and his account of the role of philosophic contemplation in the good life might have to tell us about the character of Aristotle’s ideal state.

There was quite a lot that colleagues objected to in the essay, but a major worry concerns a summary of his views at the end of his essay. Scheffler says:

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“….The implication of my argument, then, is not that all of the political claims advanced under the heading of cultural rights or cultural preservation should automatically be dismissed, but rather that those claims should be redescribed in such a way as to make clear the values, ideals, and principles that are at stake. Ver often, I believe, these will turn out to be moral, religious, or philosophical values or ideals, so that the appeal to cultural will turn out to have been redundant … it may in some cases turn out that there was really no value at all at stake, and that the appeal to culture was sheer bluff: that it was simply an appeal to the brute fact that some people behave in a certain way, which by itself has no normative force….” (p. 124).

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I would be interested to hear what others make of this statement, but let me first offer a few observations. In essence, Scheffler’s argument is that what is of value about culture is not culture itself, but certain values that may (or may not) be present in a given culture. The suggestion is that rather than honour claims from culture, we should honour claims from values: “culture” should then drop from view.

This is a very curious understanding of culture. If I am a part of a culture and find significant a particular way of life relating to this culture, then it is unclear which parts of the culture I honour (or do not honour) based upon which foundational values are worthy (or not worthy) of recognition. It strikes me that “culture” comes to us as a package, perhaps as a package of values rooted in a distinctive way of life. It is a whole, rather than a variety of unconnected parts. Thus, a claim from culture does not pick and choose amongst a variety of values, but takes them together. As a result, Scheffler’s view of culture then strikes me as a bit too fast and loose in its efforts to set culture aside.

Again, I would be very interested to hear what readers think of what is surely an important essay.