Discussion

Speaking of non-ideal theory (or ideal theory in less than ideal contexts)… I am curious to hear whether my fellow public reasoners believe that the recent US Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance should have any impact on our work as political philosophers.  To be clear, I don’t mean to start a debate over whether or not the Supreme Court ruled correctly, or whether campaign donations are speech, or even whether corporations are people who have rights like you and me (though I do have opinions on such matters).  Instead, I want to consider whether the American legal landscape should guide our work on theories justice or democracy.

Here’s what I have in mind. Liberal political thought, to this point, has largely ignored a set of concerns that were central to many Labor movements, which might be called concerns over “workplace democracy” or what is sometimes called “democratic corporatism.”  With some notable exceptions (Pateman, Gould, Mansbridge), frequently offered by those operating in a Marxist framework, political philosophers have instead focused on issues of distribution or issues of legitimacy in terms of public reasons or political dialogue.  Relatively little attention has been paid to whether a society with profound inequalities in wealth, where corporations are dominant players in the political landscape, can be meaningfully democratic. There are a number of reasons for this omission, I think, including the assumptions that (1) if distribution problems are taken care of the rest will take care of itself or (2) the ideal society will have stringent campaign finance laws, public election financing, or some other way of insulating the political sphere from the economic sphere.  Given the economic and, following the Supreme Court Ruling, political-legal realities in the US for the indefinite future, I no longer believe that such assumptions will do.

Instead, I believe that if corporations are going to be dominant players in the political landscape for the indefnite future, more work needs to be done to consider whether such organizations need to be more democratic.  Are CEOs or Boards of Directors the “free speakers” for corporations, at liberty to use corporate money to influence election outcomes and policy debates?  Do campaign contributions require the approval of the majority of shareholders?  Do they require the approval of employees? There are of course reasons to favor discretionary decision making by executives - taking a vote for all decisions may leave firms unable to respond efficiently to market demands. Nonetheless, there are also substantial reasons to provide protections for workers or stockholders from what may be arbitrary or self-servingly indefensible decisions made by a board of directors. Also, the need for such rapid, discretionary decision-making with regard to political contributions is far from clear.  Treating corporations, in theory or in practice, as individuals with a right to free speech completely ignores these issues.

Later in his career Rawls himself more clearly distinguishes a property-owning democracy from the idea of a welfare state. A recent symposium in the Journal of Social Philosophy considers the implications of this distinction, in a way that is frequently relevant to the issue at hand. Given Citizens v. FEC, however, I believe that more work on the moral and political implications of corporate involvement in contemporary politics, and the ways in which workplace democracy can further democratic equality without unduly sacrificing market competitiveness, is necessary.  It is no longer plausible (if it ever was) in the American context, to believe that campaign finance law will insulate the political sphere from the economic sphere, such that inequalities in one need not entail inequalities in the other.

Any thoughts?

Many of you have probably seen Simmons’ article just out in PPA on ideal and non-ideal theory. Simmons defends Rawls’ account of the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and his paper is a must read. That said, I have been ruminating over a slightly different take on the debate over the nature of the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and so thought I’d throw an idea out there.

Drawing on John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice many have suggested that the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction is akin to the full/partial compliance distinction. In creating his ideal theory, Rawls assumes that people will comply (almost) perfectly with the requirements of justice. He then uses his original position argument to conclude that his first principle of justice should have priority over his second. Next, Rawls weakens his ideal theory assumptions, adding the constraint that people may not abide by the requirements of justice. He concludes that we should only embrace his general conception of justice in non-ideal theory.

Unfortunately, the canonical examples of ideal and non-ideal theories cannot be fully characterized as full and partial compliance theories respectively. As Simmons and others note, even Rawls says ideal theory requires more than perfect compliance. In creating his ideal theory he assumes, for instance, that the circumstances do not prevent justice from being secured. Furthermore, others have more recently provided ideal and non-ideal theories that are not full and partial compliance theories (respectively). The main thing that distinguishes Allen Buchanan’s and Michael Blake’s non-ideal theories from their ideal theories, for instance, is that their non-ideal theories assume that there will be states and consider what we should do given that we are confined to a statist system. Similarly, the main thing that distinguishes Ronald Dworkin’s non-ideal theory from his ideal theory is that he assumes that people only have different talents and disabilities in his ideal theory. Blake’s, Buchanan’s, and Dworkin’s ideal theories do not require perfect compliance. Assuming that there is something to the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction and these authors are not just using the terms in completely different ways, the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction cannot just be the full/partial compliance distinction.

Reflecting on the many ways people seem to use the terms, one might despair at the thought of trying to unify such disparate ideal and non-ideal theories. In the draft of his book manuscript Michael Blake suggests, for instance, that the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction is not that useful because it can mean many different things. He implores others to be careful to explain just what assumptions they are making in advancing any theory. Perhaps this is part of what drives Simmons and others to argue for one or another of these ways of thinking about the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction.

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According to the BBC, in the latest twist in l’affaire du foulard/voile, a French parliamentary committee has recommended a ban on women wearing Islamic face veils in public [Correction: the proposal applies to public facilities, such as hospitals and mass transit, and not walking about the street]. The reasoning behind the report seems to be that face veils are contrary to the values of the republic, as symbols of women’s repression and extremist fundamentalism.

The proposal strikes me as a very bad idea in a number of ways. I don’t see how the law liberates women from whatever social pressure there exists to wear a veil. Will wearing a balaclava in public be illegal too? If not, then won’t the law just force a change of attire? Nussbaum has some discussion of this general issue in her Liberty of Conscience, pp. 346-53, invoking the ability of Chicagoans (and the Dutch, and presumably the French) to conduct normal social interactions with their faces covered in winter.

What if feminists who believe that make-up is just a manifestation of the objectification of women in patriarchy, and hence symbolic of repression and degradation, are right? Is there a way to support the veil ban, but not think that this claim about make-up would justify a make-up ban?* How about t-shirts with sexist imagery and messages? Quite apart from dress codes, we can recognise prostitution as degrading, and hence contrary to the values of an egalitarian republic, without thinking it should be illegal, primarily because making it illegal may very well just make the lives of those women, so degraded, even worse.

So, a question: can anything be said in support of this proposal (from ideally a feminist perspective), that does not run into these and other problems?

*[I should add I think having to wear a burqa is worse than feeling compelled to wear make-up.]

So, another query: Should the US defend Google?  Why or why not?US to protest formally to China over Google ‘attacks’

A question: do people think international humanitarian intervention (or any international intervention, for that matter; perhaps even any intervention at all) has to be coercive?  That is, as a conceptual issue, is intervention necessarily coercive?

PBS‘ Frontline this week aired an interesting episode on the credit card industry, which began with a discussion of some of the controversial practices initiated by Providian and soon adopted by the bulk of its competitors. I think the episode raises some interesting philosophical questions about the nature and moral force (to borrow Alan Wertheimer’s term) of exploitation.

For instance, one of the practices Providian is said to have developed involved substituting what they called “stealth pricing” for explicit annual fees. Instead of charging all its customers a flat fee of, say, $50 per year, Providian offered cards with zero annual fee but with steep penalties for late payments, going over your credit limit, etc. To many customers, Providian’s cards thus appeared to be free. But Providian knew that many of its customers - especially the low-income, high credit-risk customers it was targeting - would wind up paying much more in penalties than they would have with a flat annual fee, even if most customers (wrongly) believed the opposite to be true.

So, at least at first glance, it looks like Providian was exploiting several kinds of vulnerability on the part of these customers.  First, the customers were vulnerable insofar as they were likely to do the things that would incur penalties. And secondly, they were vulnerable insofar as they tended to underestimate the extent to which they would do this, and hence underestimate the true cost of the cards Providian was offering. Providian took advantage of these vulnerabilities to enhance its own profit (which, at its peak according to the documentary, were around $1 billion per year).

Is this a case of wrongful exploitation? It might be, but the story raises a few questions in my mind.

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Meet my neighbors, the Kazans. Stan and his wife Jan live together with their three grown children (one daughter and two sons) who are there until they can afford places of their own. They are a decent family, and they are friendly and cooperative with the rest of the neighborhood, although some of their practices trouble me. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin asked me to post these comments which I had hoped would make it onto the Molinari web page a long time ago. They provide a short response to some replies by Jan Narveson and Roderick Long to some comments I made on a symposium at the APA last year. Whew… anyone get that?

Just in case you are confused, here is the run down. The commentary I gave focused on a collection of essays on libertarianism and anarchism edited by Tibor Machan and Roderick Long. In it, I advanced a new argument for the conclusion that libertarians should endorse some kind of welfare liberalism.

Here were the comments I made: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-hassoun08.htm

Several people responded. Here are Narveson’s comments: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-narveson08.htm

Here are Long’s: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-long08.htm

Here are Thomas’s: http://praxeology.net/molinarisoc-thomas08.htm

Perhaps I should also say that I post my reply to these here only because I did not succeed in getting them on the Molinari web site and there was some discussion of the relevant argument in the commentary I posted here a while ago. This was the commentary: http://publicreason.net/2008/05/23/why-libertarians-should-be-welfare-liberals/

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Ok, if the mathematics discussed in my last post are right, here’s the upshot:

Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (in its original formulation) says that in an election between A and B (where A  is the right choice and B is the bad choice), for an electorate in which each voter has an independent probability p>.5 of voting for A (the right choice), then as the size of electorate increases, the probability that the electorate will elect A (the right choice) approaches 1. Even for a low value of p, such as p=.51, the probability that the electorate will choose A approaches 1 rather quickly. For instance, with 10,001 voters, the electorate already has about a 99% chance of picking A.

Some epistemic democrats defend democracy using Condorcet’s Jury Theorem. They claim that democracies are adequately modeled by the Jury Theorem, and that the average voter is more likely than not to make a good choice. There’s debate about whether democracies are well-modeled by the theorem (e.g., whether voters make statistically independent choices, and if they don’t, what impact that has). (E.g., see the chapter “The Irrelevance of the Jury Theorem” in Estlund’s [i]Democratic Authority[/i].) I’m with Jerry Gaus and Estlund–I don’t think actual democracies are adequately modeled by the theorem, so I don’t think that we can use the theorem to conclude that they tend to make good choices. (Nor can we use it to conclude that they tend to make bad choices. Note that if p>.5, then as the size of the electorate increases, the theorem says that voters are certain to choose the bad choice. And I think the evidence, if anything, points to p<.5. So, from my perspective, it’s a good thing Condorcet’s Jury Theorem doesn’t apply.)

;However, suppose you do believe that democracies are well-modeled by the theorem. If so, then it’s worth asking how many voters you really need. After all, the probability that the electorate will make the right choice shoots up near 1 pretty quickly, even when p is only slightly higher than .5. Every additional voter adds some small probability that the electorate will make the right choice. However, we get diminishing returns. The question is how rapidly the returns diminish. After all, in a high stakes election, the net value of A over B might be, let’s say, on the order of $10 trillion.

 Imagine that, just like the other voters, my p is .51. Still, suppose that my vote increases the likelihood that we’d make the right choice by 1% or even .001% Because the value of making the right choice is so high, then my additional vote counts for a lot–it has a lot of expected utility. [The expected utility of my vote in this case is the difference in value between A and B times the marginal increase in the probability that the electorate will make the right choice.] So, for example, the 1001st voter is adding only about .02% accuracy to the electorate, but that means her vote is worth $2 billion! [Note: I have the exact number at work, but I’m typing this at home. So it might a little off.] Think of the electorate as being like a machine making a choice that’s worth $10 trillion or $0. If you increase the likelihood that this machine will make the right choice by .02%, you’re increasing the expected utility of the machine’s choice by $2 billion.

So, at what N is the Nth voter only contributing a few dollars worth of accuracy? Let’s suppose that every voter has an opportunity cost of $100. That is, during the time she votes, she could have done something else worth $100 either to her personally or to promote the common good. At what N does adding additional voters become wasteful?

Now that it seems like I’ve gotten Mathematica to cooperate, it looks like for this example, where each voter has a p of .51, the net value of making the right choice is $10 trillion, and where we’re calling votes wasteful when they have an expected utility under $100, votes become wasteful at about N=100,001. (This isn’t exactly right–it’s just about the order of magnitude where the value of a vote is in the 10s. In fact, I’m calculating the value of 100,001st voter at about $26.) Note that if p is higher than .51, the net value of the right choice is lower, or if opportunity costs are higher, then N will be lower. So, N=100,000 might be a high estimate.

So, if you defend democracy using the standard formulation of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, it seems that you should think having 120 million Americans vote is kind of a waste of time. It would be far better just to have a small number of people vote and have everyone else go about their day. 119,899,999 of these people are just adding unnecessary accuracy to an already impressively accurate machine. They should go do something else instead. We just don’t need mass democracy. It doesn’t do us that much additional good. The first 100 thousand voters contribute more than the next 100 billion. Etc.

Of course, you might say, “Well, if only 100,000 people voted, they might not vote for the common good but for their self-interest at the expense of the common good.” Maybe so. But if you’re saying stuff like that, I take it you don’t think democracies are well-modeled by Condorcet’s Jury Theorem.

All this hangs on my having done the mathematics correctly. So, I’ll double-check the results when I get back to work on Monday.

If the conditions of the Condorcet Jury Theorem hold, then every additional jurist/voter adds some marginal amount of accuracy to the jury as a whole.  However, this jury experiences diminishing marginal returns.  If every juror has a 51% chance of being accurate, then the jury of 101 members has about a 57% chance of being accurate, a jury of 501 members has a 67% chance of being accurate, a jury of 1001 members has a 73% chance of being accurate, a jury of 5001 members has 92% chance of being accurate, and a jury of 10,000 members has a 99.99% chance of being accurate.I’d like to know what the marginal value (in terms of her contribution to accuracy of the jury) of the Nth voter is when N is rather large.

The accuracy of a jury of N members when each juror has  a 51% chance of being accurate is given by the formula below:

Pa (probability the jury is accurate) = SUM [upper bound = N, lower bound = (N=1)/2] (N!/(N-i!)i!) * (.51^i) * (.49^(N-i))

Since that’s likely to be unclear, here’s a link to a nice print out of the formula:http://books.google.com/books?id=CdIOKZWc3oMC&lpg=PP1&dq=public%20choice%20iii&pg=PA129

It’s easy to calculate Pa using Mathematica for values where N < 6500.  After that, Mathematica and other programs can’t handle it. So, what I’d ideally like to do is find some program that can calculate Pa for higher values of N, such as N=50,000, N=500,000, N= 1,000,000, etc.

Alternatively, if there is some way to find the first derivative of this function, that might be helpful as well. Does anyone know how to do this?

What I’d really like to know is what the optimal number of jurors/voters is when the conditions of the Condorcet Jury Theorem obtain.  Even tiny increases in accuracy can have significant value if the value of being accurate is high enough.  So, for example, the marginal value of the 5007th voters is about 0.002%.  But if picking the better candidate is worth, let’s say, $1 trillion dollars, then the expected value of that vote is quite high.  But what’s the marginal impact of the 50,000th vote?  The 100,000th?  The millionth?I’m wondering if you think that democracies are adequately modeled by the Condorcet Jury Theorem (you shouldn’t, by the way), what’s the optimum number of voters?  Let’s say that the net value of being accurate is $1 trillion, and that adding additional voters is suboptimal once the marginal value of a vote goes below $1.  In that case, the optimal number of jurors (N) is given by the formula:1,000,000,000,000 * [Pa(N+1) - Pa(N)] = 1

Alas, despite trying many things over the past week or so, I have no idea how to solve this without a supercomputer.

Another alternative would be to find some upper bound and prove the the actual number is below this (already low) upper bound.  But I’ve been unsuccessful at that.

Yet another alternative is to calculate the real marginal value of votes at a bunch of Ns that Mathematica can handle, then run some regressions to find a function that models the marginal value well, and use that as substitute.  I’ve done that with a few different functions, but the problem is that these functions are of questionable accuracy for high values of N.Any ideas?

Here are some questions I’m thinking about, and I wonder what you think.

Suppose, for the sake or argument, I’ve established that voters have a duty to vote for candidates or policies which they justifiedly believe will promote the common good.  Otherwise, they have a duty to abstain from voting.

Suppose that vote buying and selling are not illegal.  Now, suppose when Alf votes, he only votes for candidates whom he justifiedly believes will serve the common good.   So long as Alf does that, is there anything wrong with him selling his vote?  Is there anything wrong with paying him to vote that way?

In the current draft of The Ethics of Voting, I argue that it’s not wrong.  So long as Alf is justified in voting a particular way for free, then it’s permissible for him to take money to vote that way and it’s permissible to pay him to vote that way.

I’m curious why anyone would think otherwise.  I’ve looked at the literature on vote buying, and I haven’t found any good objections to Alf’s vote selling.  Much of the empirical literature and the a priori public choice models describe vote selling as harmful, but that’s only because they discuss what happens or would happen when people don’t vote to promote the common good.  So while I think these arguments are good arguments for legally prohibiting vote buying, they don’t say much about Alf’s case.  For instance, many (but not all) public choice economists think legal vote selling would lead to rent-seeking, but these arguments assume that voters will vote in self-interested ways rather than abide by a duty to vote for the common good.

Rather than go on about why I think Alf’s case of vote selling is permissible, and rather than discuss some of the objections I consider, I’m just curious why some of you might think Alf would do something wrong in selling his vote.  It may be that I’m overlooking some killer objection.  Thanks!  -J

This post is a continuation of my earlier post from December.

Last week President Obama give this excellent speech to the National Academy of Sciences.  He pledged to invest 3% of GDP for science research (basic and applied research).  He also vowed to improve education in math and science.  This represents the largest investment in scientific research and innovation in American history.  With such a monumental investment being made in science one has to wonder:  what do we (i.e. political philosophers) have to say about all this?  Is such an investment just or unjust? And why?

Surely the National Academy of Sciences are part of the “basic structure” of society and thus an investment of this scale must raise some important questions of justice that we can contribute some insights to.  Do we have some developed ideas about such issues?  Do we equip the students we teach with the tools for thinking rationally and critically about such issues?

Here is an exercise I hope you might entertain trying.  Imagine that a reporter has contacted you about President Obama’s investment in science and innovation.  You are asked, as a political philosopher interested in issues of justice, to offer some comments about this policy.  Please consider using the “comments” section to this post below to add your insights and thoughts.  I think this might be a useful exercise to help stimulate interest in this neglected area of the field. 

Cheers,

Colin   

If you are really struggling to come up with anything to say here are some basic questions to consider to help get the juices flowing:  (1) What is science? (2) what is science for? and (3) how large are the stakes involved between the worst possible science policies a government could implement and the best policies? (and what constitutes the worst and best here?)

Though I’m a political philosopher, Marxism/Socialism is not my area of expertise.  Still, I was surprised when, while teaching an essay by Kai Nielsen the other day, I discovered that I really don’t know what a means of production is supposed to be.

The claim that the means of production ought to be owned publicly, rather than privately, seems to be one of if not the defining characteristics of socialism.  So it seems pretty important to be clear on what it refers to.

On the most natural reading, a “means of production” would be anything that’s used to produce.  But that seems very, very broad.  Sure, factories are means of production, but so are muffin trays.  So is my brain, and my muscles.

Do socialists hold that even these things should be publicly owned?  Does it depend on how we use them?  Nielsen says that a socialist will allow for personal private property - and muffin trays seem about as personal as one could get.  Does this mean that we’re allowed to bake muffins for ourselves?  For our neighbors?  For our neighbors in exchange for wine?

How, in other words, does a socialist (Marxist or otherwise) demarcate legitimate personal property from means of production?  Or can the two be reconciled in a principled way?  If public ownership of the means of production can be reconciled with private personal property, can it also be reconciled with some notion of self-ownership?

Hi everyone,I’m currently writing a book called The Ethics of Voting, and thought I’d ask you for advice and comments about what you’d like to see and what you think is important.  The book will cover the personals ethics of voting (questions concerning how individuals should behave) but not, for the most part, the political philosophy of voting (e.g., questions concerning who has the right to vote or how best to structure government institutions).

So, the basic questions of voting ethics that I plan to respond to are 1) Do I have an obligation to vote?  2)  If I do vote, do I have obligations to vote in particular ways?  3)  Is it acceptable to buy, trade, or sell my vote (not my right to vote, but my how I will vote)?  Related questions concern the source of any obligations, epistemic or other justificatory requirements, issues concerning whether citizens should be directed toward the common good or some other end, and so on.

As I’m envisioning it now, the chapters will roughly go something like this.  The introduction explains why voting is morally important.  Chapter 1 articulates various arguments in favor of a duty to vote and shows why they fail.  However, it also produces three arguments that seem pretty plausible and don’t look like they fail.  Chapter 2 articulates a theory of civic virtue and of citizens duties which refutes these remaining three arguments.  So the conclusion is that citizens don’t have an obligation to vote.  Chapter 3 discusses cases where citizens should refrain from voting rather than vote.  My view is that citizens have duties regulating how they vote if they do vote, but not a duty to vote.  In particular, a necessary but not sufficient condition for good voting is that citizens must be justified in the beliefs they base their votes upon.  Chapter 4 considers a wide range of objections and issues having to do with deference, autonomy, and abstention.  For instance, it considers issues about whether abstention involves a loss of autonomy, or whether one should always defer to known epistemic and moral superiors.  Chapter 5 argues that citizens have an obligation to vote for the common good rather than narrow self-interest, at least under normal circumstances.  It also gives a liberal account of the common good.  Chapter 6 argues that there is no special ethics of vote buying, trading, or selling.  Instead, what determines whether these things are right and wrong is specified by the obligations we have not to vote badly and to vote for the common good when we do vote.  So long as we don’t violate these rules, we don’t do anything wrong by buying, trading, or selling votes, though doing so may not be admirable.  (For what it’s worth, I haven’t written chapter 6 yet, so I might change my mind about these conclusions once I sit down to defend them at length.)   Chapter 7 will discuss relevant social scientific research to ask, in light of this research and my theory, how good are actual voters.  Finally, I might have a chapter 8, which will go over some issues of policy, such as compulsory voting.  I’ve written drafts of the introduction and chapters 1-4 at this point.So, that’s roughly what I expect to do.

 My question for you, if you’re interested in helping me shape the project, is what do you think I should cover?  What are some important issues or questions?  Obviously I didn’t specify everything that will go in the book (e.g., I will cover tactical/strategic voting), so if I didn’t list it, it doesn’t mean I haven’t thought of it.  However, there’s no doubt that there’s at least one obvious thing that I’ve overlooked. If you were writing the book, what would you talk about? How would you organize it?  So, I’m open to any and all suggestions.

Thanks!  -J

PS. For what it’s worth, I’m already spending a few pages in the current draft responding to an objection from Aaron Maltais that he posted here in response to my “Polluting the Polls” post. So, I really do find your suggestions helpful.

Hi public reasoners. So, as you all know, GA Cohen let rip an attack against the fact-sensitivity of fundamental political principles in his 2003 PPA article, “Facts and Principles,” and then in his book Rescuing Justice and Equality.  People have responded to this in a number of ways (e.g., Thomas Pogge’s essay in response to Cohen, found in a special issue of Ratio dedicated to Cohen’s book is both excellent and hilarious).

Well, I am going to throw my hat in the ring. What I’ve appended here is a thought-piece - something I am just throwing out there - for discussion.   It’s a little long for a blog post, so it’s in paper format.  I’d like to get people’s take on this stuff.  So, I hope that people will read it and start commenting. The basic idea is this: As a conceptual matter, it could be the case that political principles are fact-sensitive.  Cohen never considers this option.  So his argument fails pretty badly - more or less right out of the gate.  I hope folks will be interested enough in this to read it and offer some discussion pointers.

Thanks,Matt.

fact-sensitivity.pdf

Hi All,

This isn’t really my area, but I’ve been thinking a bit about public reason lately (in preparing to comment on a paper at the APA) and I could think of no better place to put my thoughts than here. I must say, first, that I’ve only taken a quick look at jerry Gaus’ and Chirstopher Eberle’s books so I must apologize to them if I misconstrue anything they say in what’s below. I should also say that, after the APA, I think I better understand what is going on with justificatory liberalism than when I wrote this up. I think I see the crucial premise underlying the view: that coercion on the basis of reasons people could never accept is so important that it trumps all (other) controversial moral concerns. What I’m still not seeing, though, is the argument for that premise. Though I agree that there is a pro tanto reason against such coercion, I don’t see any reason to think it is definitive. So, I guess what is below is a request for help in locating this argument. Here goes:

Liberalism is defined by a commitment to some kind of freedom. But there are many different ways of understanding freedom and, hence, liberalism. On some theories, each individual’s freedom from arbitrary interference is of primary importance. On others, negative freedom is important but people’s positive freedoms or capabilities also merit consideration. Yet other theories balance a concern for different kinds of freedom against other things of value.

On one particular brand of liberalism, justificatory liberalism, respecting others’ freedom requires advocating policies only on the basis of public reason. Many justificatory liberals believe that religious reasons are not appropriately public. Recently, justificatory liberals have turned toward epistemology arguing that the best epistemic theories support accounts of public reason that yield their desired ethical results. Some justificatory liberals suggest, for instance, that liberalism requires advancing policies only on secular bases.

Learning this, I was at first a bit taken aback, for it had not occurred to me that settling a debate in epistemology could decide a debate about whether it is appropriate to appeal to religious principles in justifying public policy (for instance). And, upon reflection, I see little reason to think, epistemology should bear that kind of weight. I am wondering if anyone might help me see why it should. (Though, my primary objective in this post is to suggest that a complaint that seems to be hidden in the appeal to public reason against relying on religious principles in policy debates is a poor one).

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Fellow Public Reasoners,

I recently posted an essay, “The Ironic Tragedy of Human Rights,” on the Social Science Research Network (at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1330693). As you can see from the summary below, the argument amounts to a very radical critique of human rights. This has left me wondering: have I missed something obvious? Needless to say, I’d appreciate any thoughts you may have.

Charles

SUMMARY

With the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the idea of human rights came into its own on the world stage. More than anything, the Declaration was a response to the Holocaust, to both its perpetrators and the failure of the rest of the world adequately to come to the aid of its victims. Since that year, however, we have seen many more cases of mass murder. Think of China, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. Of course one could always claim that such horrors would have been even more frequent if not for the Declaration. But I want to argue otherwise. For I believe that human rights have contributed to making mass murder more, rather than less, likely.

To be clear, my concern is specifically with the language of human rights, not the values it expresses, values which I certainly endorse. The problem with this language is that it is abstract. And the problem with abstraction is that it demotivates, it ‘unplugs’ us from the ‘moral sources,’ as Charles Taylor would call them, which empower us to act ethically. After showing why, I then go on to describe how the rise of human rights has constituted an ironic tragedy of sorts for those philosophers who have attempted to lend it intellectual support. On the whole, they may be divided into two groups. One, led by cosmopolitans such as Martha Nussbaum and Thomas Pogge, tries to interlock rights within systematic theories of justice, thus fixing the priorities between them. The other, led by value pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams, rejects such theories as infeasible and asserts that the best we can do when rights conflict is to negotiate. Yet both approaches, I argue, are counter-productive.

 I would like to thank Alon for his comments on Chapter 7, especially given the importance of his own work on the topic of the chapter.  My conversations with him on this subject also have helped me to clarify my own thinking.  Nonetheless, there are some important points of disagreement.

Alon rejects the balancing approach when it comes to majoirtarian violations of many basic rights.  Although Alon leaves open the question of whether there might be such balancing in some cases, in his view, often when a majority violates basic rights that majority decision has no weight in terms of democratic legitimacy.  Alon gives us an example for instance of a plebiscite that would prohibit Corey Brettschneider from studying political science.  He argues that such laws not only violate rights but that there is no sense in which they are democratic.  He needs to make this last claim to show that such decisions have no weight or value on democratic grounds.

I am tempted to agree with Alon about this specific example.  But it seems to me that this example is a particular distinct kind of rights violation.  Namely, this law has the ad hoc character of the special laws that I argued in chapter 2 violated the most basic requirements of the rule of law in self-government.  Such a decision does not even result in the making of law, the most basic task of legislatures and plebiscites in a democracy.  Therefore such a policy has no weight because it does not even have the status of law.

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Thanks to Alex for his thoughtful and helpful post on this chapter.  His comments are especially helpful in thinking through how my account might respond to a kind of libertarian or “classically liberal” challenge. Specifically, Alex develops such a potential challenge from within the context of democratic contractualism. In particular, Alex wonders whether I am overly statist in my approach to welfare rights.  Citing Skocpol, he suggests that state involvement in welfare provision might weaken incentives of civil society groups to provide charity.  Why, he asks, should democratic contractualism rely on the state rather than charity to provide basic welfare rights?

I acknowledge the logical possibility that private markets might provide the kind of minimal welfare guarantees I defend in this chapter.  But absent any government involvement, I am skeptical that this logical possibility is likely.  More importantly, I have another worry about purely private provision of charity as a way of meeting these goals.  Although, Locke speaks of a right to “charity,” I worry that a system of purely private provision absent any state guarantees might undermine the notion that a guarantee of a minimum level of goods is in fact a right. Charity is often seen as a moral duty, but not a right required for political legitimacy.  On my account, however, it is important that these entitlements are, like the other democratic rights I defend,  necessary conditions for a legitimate state.  In sum, I acknowledge the logical possibility that these rights might be met be a market without a government safety net.  But I worry both that this is an unlikely empirical possibility and that such a system would weaken the claim that  a minimum provision of goods as a democratic right.

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I’ve been very negligent in replying to Ben’s and Andy’s excellent comments on my PPPS democratic leadership paper.  It being Christmas Eve, I’ve finally found time to hastily write up my thoughts!  They’re lengthy, so I’ve followed the pattern and uploaded them as PDF.  Here they are.  All further thoughts are, of course, not only welcome but greatly and enthusiastically appreciated.

(Have a good holiday, everyone.)

I’ve written some fairly extensive comments on the podcast that Paul Gowder posted a few weeks ago (or, more precisely, on the written paper (.pdf)).  Since they’re several pages long, I’ve decided to link to them as a .pdf rather than taking up oodles of space in a web post. I do think the paper is very exciting, and I hope that these comments will spur further discussion either here or below Paul’s original post.

Anyway: here are the comments.

Moral and political philosophers are concerned with how we ought to act, as both individuals and collectivity as societies.  So we ask questions like: What makes an action right or wrong?  What constitutes the “good life”?  How should society distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation (like wealth, and rights and freedoms)?

As philosophers, it is not surprising that we turn to the history of philosophy to help us grapple with these timeless normative questions.  So we turn to intellectual giants like Aristotle, Kant, Mill and Marx for guidance on how we can sensibly deliberate about the demands of morality and justice.  More recently, moral and political philosophers have engaged (and still do) in many a spirited debate relating to John Rawls’s theory “justice as fairness”, and topical applied topics like multiculturalism, animal rights, deliberative democracy and cosmopolitanism.  These are all interesting issues, topics I myself have published on and currently teach.  But something vital is missing…. 

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Many thanks to Jim Wilson for an excellent discussion of Chapter V, “The Rights of the Punished.”  I will focus on two issues raised by his comments.  Both concern the relationship between my own theory and more traditional accounts of punishment, in particular concerns about whether punishment deters future crime as well as the possible place of my account of punishment within the retributivist tradition.

First, Jim perceptively elaborates on Hobbes’ account of punishment and asks whether it might be more compatible with my own arguments than I allow.  In particular, he asks whether a defense of capital punishment on general deterrence grounds might be brought within the scope of democratic contractualism.  As Jim makes clear, it is important for Hobbes that any account of capital punishment cannot be justified within the contractual relationship between the condemned and the state.  The ties of the social contract are severed in cases of capital punishment because the state’s sole aim is to protect life.  Capital punishment fails to meet that goal for the condemned and therefore any justification of it must sever the tie of that relationship.  The result is that for Hobbes capital punishment is justified for the state and resistance is justified for the condemned.  But this kind of justification is distinct from those that take place within social contract.  Read the rest of this entry »

Is everyone else as amazed as I am about the recent decision by the Ladies Professional Golf Association [where 45 of the top 120 players on the circuit are South Korean] to demand that all players be conversant in English?  I am not prone to such comments, but I can’t help but wonder if this could happen anywhere other than the U.S.  I am particularly taken aback by how easily the association feels it can justify such a decision in branding/marketing terms.  Consider the quote from the deputy commissioner (via NY Times):

“We live in a sports-entertainment environment,” said Libba Galloway, the deputy commissioner of the tour, the Ladies Professional Golf Association. “For an athlete to be successful today in the sports entertainment world we live in, they need to be great performers on and off the course, and being able to communicate effectively with sponsors and fans is a big part of this.”

Nothing personal ladies, just business.  This explanation doesn’t seem too far removed from, “Our fans and sponsors would rather not see South Koreans win so many tournaments, so we will begin every tournament by penalizing South Korean players three strokes.  If they don’t like it, they can go home.  Nobody is forcing them to play.”

This makes me wonder, as a legal/moral issue, where the appropriate line lies between “workplace discrimination” and “responsible business practices given the needs/demands of your patrons.”  Clearly, it is illegal for a restaurant owner to not hire a server because he is worried about losing his racist patrons.  Conversely, Bucknell University is justified in expecting that its faculty members are able to teach in English.

The relevant question seems to be, “Is this characteristic/skill central to performing the job?”  According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,  “A rule requiring that employees speak only English on the job may violate Title VII unless an employer shows that the requirement is necessary for conducting business. If the employer believes such a rule is necessary, employees must be informed when English is required and the consequences for violating the rule.”

The language “if the employer believes such a rule is necessary” is quite striking, and seems to potentially be in conflict with the demand in the previous sentence that employers show that the requirement is necessary for conducting business. As the LPGA case illustrates, decisions regarding  “what is necessary for conducting business” can be quite controversial/potentially racist.

Any thoughts on these matters?  Can someone point me to particularly excellent literature on the subject?

Ah, Fall.  Classes here have started already!  Probably because of what I am teaching this semester I started thinking about the questions we (members and subscribers to this blog and potential members and subscribers of this blog) address.  It seems to me there are three basic questions of our field(s).

1. What should the social world be like?
This, I think, is the domain of social philosophy, properly understood.  One part of that domain, I think, is the political—leading to questions 2 and 3.  The domain of the social, though, is broader and includes how people act in social situations—i.e., here is where we should probably place questions about (non-governmental) power differentials and such (the parenthetical, of course, implies that we can differentiate between governmental and non-governmental power).  I suspect that those that call themselves “political theorists” are often more interested in other aspects of social philosophy than are those that call themselves “political philosophers.”  I’d be interested in knowing if others think that is right or wrong.

2. Should there be a government?
Perhaps this is the primary question of political philosophy.  If the answer is “no,” then the third question might not be asked.  (It might be asked even if the answer is “no” though since even if we should not have a government, we may not have a choice in the matter and would want to determine the best option possible.)  In any case, I think there are a number of elements to this question: Can anyone have a right to rule?  Does anyone have that right? Does anyone have a duty to obey?

3. What sort of government should we have?  This has, I think, 3 sub-questions:
a. Who, of those in a society, should rule?
b. What should the government have the power to do?
c. How should the powers be codified? Are they codifiable? How are the codifications to be understood and interpreted? (philosophy of law)

For completeness, I think we might also say:
The first question “What should the social world be like?” is a part of a broader question: “How should we be and what should we do?”  That, I think, means that Social Philosophy is properly conceived of as part of Ethics—which strikes me as right.  With that addition, we can recognize this tree (or something like it) where each lower field is a branch of the field above it:

Philosophy
Value Theory (as well as Metaphysics and Epistemology and …)
Ethics (as well as aesthetics and …)
Social Philosophy (as well as Normative Ethics, meta-Ethics, and applied ethics)
Political Philosophy (as well as race theory, gender theory, and …)
Philosophy of Law (as well as … )

What do people think about all of this?

I just wanted to make some quick comments on racial profiling.  While sympathetic to Keller’s idea that compensation is owed those wrongly stopped, does he propose to cabin this to racial profiling, or does he want all wrongful stops by police to be compensated?  The former would seem to catch the idea that there is something different and, prima facie, wrong with profiling - the latter erases the idea that there is anything particularly ethically problematic about it.  He might be interested - as might other people in this discussion- by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s article in J Pol Phil; by my response to Risse and Zeckhauser in the subsequent issue of PAPA (where there’s a terrific article on torture by David Sussman); and by the discussion in Criminal Justice Ethics, ed. by John Kleinig (vol. 26 no. 1 spring 2007) - with an article by Michael Levin that makes it clear what a fine line Risse has to ride in order to distinguish his arguments for profiling from those he would reject.  Risse there responds to Lippert-Rasmussen’s critique and mine; and I have another go at the topic.  Hope this is helpful and sorry for being self-referential, but didn’t have time to read the whole post, and thought the references might be helpful. annabelle. PS Applebaum’s article IS terrific.