Morgaine, I agree with almost every thing that you suggest here about the strategy that Democrats need to adopt if they’re going to get anywhere, and I agree with you that it draws on the better half of the Democratic Party’s tradition. But I’m puzzled by the way that you act as if this better half were the only history that the “mainstream” Democratic Party “leadership” has.

It’s certainly true that the Democratic Party leadership eventually came around to a position that sometimes vaguely resembled justice. But that doesn’t change the record that the Democrats racked up from their foundation right up to about 1965. When you say (emphasis mine): “Democrats always had one thing going for them” and add “It was the party that said you have to let everyone drink from the same water fountain,” it’s puzzling; puzzling because as you well know, almost every single politician who led the campaign of “massive resistance” against integration, and for militant white supremacy in the South, was a Democrat at the time (cf. Senator Strom Thurmond, Senator James Eastland, Senator Richard Russell, Governor Orval Faubus, Governor George Wallace, et al., not to mention the long history of Democratic leaders such as President Woodrow Wilson and all the way back to the chieftains of the slave power in the 19th century). Moreover, these men were not minor players in the national Democratic Party or marginalized by other Democrats. They were the Party leadership in their states, jealously guarded their power in national Party committees and the Democratic Caucus in the federal House and Senate, and in return for it were pampered and catered to by many other Democrats (such as Roosevelt or Kennedy) who did not share their beliefs, but just didn’t give enough of a damn about Black people to risk their electoral prospects on challenging them. (When Democrats wax nostalgic about the “national party” or the “solid South” that used to win them elections, they are waxing nostalgic about the congealed power of Southern white supremacy.)

When folks like the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party said “No more,” and took on the militant segregationists within the Party in 1964, mainstream Democrats like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey didn’t get their back; they were apoplectic and did everything they could to marginalize the campaign. The effort to break the back of the Klan Caucus of the Southern Democrats was won at last by oppressed people who were marginalized, disdained, and ignored by the national party leadership, quite against the will of the “mainstream Democrats.”

In a similar vein, I’m also unclear on what the Democratic Party leadership ever did to end the Viet Nam War. I do know that they started it.

If Democrats want to win they have to come out for justice. But when they do so, they will be building something substantially new, not recovering some past glory.

Charlie (Colorado):

If every president had to resign every time the federal government wasn’t as effective at something as its critics think it should have been, they’d have to take official portraits with a polaroid camera.

You say that as if it were a bad thing.

So some scheme or another means that Presidents would have to resign often. This means that we wouldn’t have any one President for a very long period of time. And then… what?

(In order to have a successful reductio ad absurdum, you have to point out at least one consequence of a position that is actually absurd…)

You’ve probably already gotten the invitation you need, but for future reference Gmail recently changed their policy so that anyone with a mobile phone that can receive text messages (or a friend with such a mobile phone who can relay the text message to them) can sign up for an account without needing an invite.

Enjoy the wonders of Gmail!

eric w. pleasure wrote:

i’ve always thought of it as the belief that morals can be cast aside when it’s necessary, or merely convenient.

Well, relativist arguments probably encourage this kind of opportunistic thinking; and people are probably also often attracted to relativist arguments because they help make excuses for opportunistic thinking. But strictly speaking they are not the same claim; what you mention here is more properly a form of situational ethics.

A consistent cultural relativist, for example, need not hold that white slavers could ignore moral principles when they were enslaving Black people if they could get good results from it. What they hold is that, since the culture in which the white slavers lived generally approved of slavery, there were no true moral principles that condemned slavery for them in the first place. (The relativism happens as soon as you presume that that “for them” can be inserted—that is that making a moral claim doesn’t bind you to holding that claim in all frames of reference.) They might also hold that moral principles can be ignored under the right circumstances, as a separate claim; but they might just as consistently be absolutist cultural relativists (i.e., they could believe that you are always obligated to do what your culture morally approves and avoid what it morally disapproves, whatever the circumstances are).

Here Radgeek mention a criticism of Williams that utilitarianism is bad because “utilitarianism seems to obliterate me and my projects in favor of rigidly impersonal rule-following”. What this objection misses is that doing rigidly impersonal rule-following is bound to decrease the total happiness in the world, since people highly value their life projects. Thus, utilitarianism actually prescribes that we shouldn’t ignore our life projects and goals in favour of mindlessly hedonistic or permanently altruistic practises.

Well, Williams has a straightforward reply to objections like this; to wit, if utilitarianism is true, then emotional investment in projects that aren’t productive of happiness (according to a rigidly impersonal utilitarian calculus) is irrational.

To take an example, suppose that Jones is a committed vegetarian (for utilitarian reasons; she includes the suffering and happiness of non-human animals in her utilitarian calculations); suppose that she also has just lost her job and is facing penury for herself and her family if she can’t find a new one. She’s having trouble, but there is one place that’s always hiring: the local slaughterhouse. Now, suppose she sits down one night and determines, using exacting utilitarian calculation, that the benefits that financial security from the job distinctly outweigh whatever contribution her taking the job will make to global suffering (a pretty miniscule one, since if she didn’t take the job someone else surely would). Since the fact that she, personally, is doing the killing plays no role in utilitarian calculation, in and of itself (the only thing that matters is whether an action is productive of global happiness, not who is doing it), it seems that utilitarianism would demand that she take the job at the slaughterhouse in spite of the fact that it would violate her every conviction on a daily basis. Here’s where you might object: but wait, the fact that it violates her every conviction on a daily basis would make her miserable, so if she also accounts for her being miserable every day in her calculation, she’ll find that the utilitarian calculus demands she not take the job after all. But the Williams reply is that there are two ways you could deal with being miserable over working in a slaughterhouse when you’re a vegetarian: you could (a) not work in a slaughterhouse, or (b) stop being miserable about it. The question is which you should do; and Williams argues that if you’re a good utilitarian, you should do (b), since on utilitarian grounds it’s irrational to let your conscience make you miserable over a course of action that would otherwise be more productive of global happiness than the alternatives. (You might say that she can’t be expected to do (b) instead of (a) because her emotional reactions are not under her control but her actions are. But that’s certainly not so; she came to have the emotional reactions to slaughtering animals that she does because of a voluntary process of ethical reasoning, and there’s no reason that she couldn’t come to a state of emotional indifference about her, personally, doing the slaughtering by a voluntary process of ethical reasoning as well.)

I only alluded briefly to how I think that Moore could actually get on Williams’ side of this objection rather than being stuck on the business end of it with Mill and Bentham; to be a bit clearer, I think that Moore has two things in his form of consequentialism which may exempt him from the Williams critique: (1) he doesn’t think that goodness is either reducible to, or even proportionate with, the quantity of any other observable property (like pleasure or intensity of desire or evolutionary fitness or …); and (2) because he thinks that the consequences that matter for determining goodness as a means include every consequence into an infinite future, he thinks that it is next to impossible, at least without making some possibly unwarranted metaphysical assumptions, to determine the full consequences, with respect to value, of any particular act. Both (1) and (2) dramatically undermine the idea of ethical calculation for Moore; and they put such a wide gap between what ought to exist and what I ought to do that it’s unlikely that Williams’ objection — which is based on the fact that the utilitarian answer to the first question rigidly excludes any considerations other than an impersonal accounting of global pleasure or suffering, and the fact that for utilitarians the second question is so tightly bound to the first — gets a grip. It’s true that Moore has a rigidly impersonal account of what makes a partiular outcome good, but since we cannot be in a position to calculate the degrees of goodness in the outcomes of different possible actions, he explicitly makes a lot of room in his account for cooperation in social projects, and implicitly makes a lot of room for commitment to personal projects as well.

I don’t think, incidentally, that this is the best way to deal with Williams’ objections; the best way is to become a virtue ethicist. But I do think it’s interesting how Moore’s consequentialism, for all its faults, fails to be vulnerable to many of the classical objections raised against utilitarianism and other forms of consequentialism.

You wrote: Libertarian anarchists complain that the Katrina disaster was “caused by” the existence of the State (principally the federal government, but really the State as such). This criticism, however, is radically incomplete in the absence of a worked-out account of how things would have been better in the absence of the State.

What, precisely, is it that you are criticizing here? The causal claim, the use of that causal claim as grounds for a criticism of governments as such, the use of such criticism as a negative reason in favor of libertarian politics over the alternatives, or all of the above?

If your complaint includes a complaint against the causal claim, then what has the lack of blueprints for a alternative libertarian solution got to do with whether the evidence for the causal claim is complete or not? (X can be rightly listed among the actual causes of Y even if Z would have caused Y anyway in some remote possible world.) To justify the claim that the structure of government as such contributed to the disaster as it actually happened, you just need to provide evidence from the facts on the ground and some theory connecting those facts with the sort of incentive problems and knowledge problems that government officials have. (Of course you could disagree on the claims about the facts or on the theory; but that’s not the same as saying that the account is incomplete.)

If your complaint is directed against the use of the causal connections to criticize government as such, then it might seem like you have a stronger case; but it only seems that way because it’s easy to mix the criticism up with the use of that criticism to defend anarchy over government. In fact if you’ve succeeded in justifying the causal claim you’ve already done most of the work you need to do in establishing grounds for blame. (Even if it turned out that anarchist responses would fail just as badly — although I don’t think they would; see below — that doesn’t undermine the criticism of the structure of government. If Anytus, Meletus, et al. hadn’t accused Socrates, somebody else probably would have done so anyway; but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be blamed for what they did.)

On the other hand, if your complaint is directed against the use of the causal connections to justify radical libertarian politics over competitors, you’re right that anarchists do need to give some reason to believe that a government-free response to the disaster would have been better than the actual government response (and probably some other government responses that plausibly could have happened). That’s fine; but why in the world do those reasons have to take the specific form of a detailed blueprint that demonstrates a superior, practical response to the situation in an anarchist society? I mean, certainly that would be handy for demonstrating the point. But if there are reasons to believe, from general principles (e.g., general laws of economics or historical or sociological generalizations) that government-free disaster responses are likely to be better, and unlikely to be worse, than government responses, then I see no reason at all why the specific detailed blueprint is necessary to keep the criticism from being “radically incomplete.” (I don’t know how to spell out, in detail, how a medical researcher could go about developing an effective HIV vaccine — if I did I might be a contender for a Nobel Prize — but I do know that you are more likely to find it by doing scientific research than by reading chicken entrails or praying for relief from Heaven.)

Again, you can argue that the anarchists’ are wrong about the general principles that support their claim that free market responses would tend to be better than government responses. But again, that’s arguing that the explanation is wrong, not that it’s incomplete.

You also wrote: I so far have not seen an adequate libertarian-anarchist discussion of that topic.

Just out of curiosity, have you seen an adequate non-libertarian-anarchist discussion of how to appropriately respond to disasters such as Katrina? Do you think that proponents of the State have some kind of leg up here, or just that anarchists don’t have the leg up they think they have?

Let’s say you have a glass vase, and one day when dusting the mantle you knock it off. As it turns out—thank the Good—you’d left a cushion from the couch on the floor earlier when you were vacuuming, and the vase lands on that instead of the hardwood floor. You’re relieved because your vase didn’t break, even though it very well could have.

So, you say, (1) “My vase could have shattered (although it didn’t)!” You’ve just said something true. But if I’m not misunderstanding you (and I fear that I am) it seems as though you’re worried that (1)’s truth makes trouble for somebody who believes that true statements need truth-making facts. But why? Because claiming that there actually exists some fact to the effect that there is possible shattered glass all over the floor or that there are possible worlds in which the vase (or vase-counterpart) is shattered which exist in the actual world, requires you to utter some pretty queer things? Well, maybe.

But if this is the way you are arguing, aren’t you skipping over some pretty commonsensical candidates for the fact that makes (1) true? Here’s one: “My vase could have broken” is true because my vase is fragile. You hardly need a philosopher’s armchair to find out that that’s a fact; you can do it by examining, or dropping, a glass vase. The most plausible candidate for a truth-maker for this particular modal claim is not a part of metaphysics, but rather mechanics.

(I imagine you could do the same thing, mutatis mutandis, for “It was possible for me not to be reading this post right now” and the fact that I have free will.)

So where’s the problem for somebody who believes both in truth-makers and in simple explanations for simple phenomena?

If the Constitution did have an article or amendment authorizing Congress to force people to pay for disaster relief, would that make it O.K.?

If so, how does a scrap of paper make violations of natural rights O.K.? If not, then remind me again why I should care whether the program is constitutional or unconstitutional in the first place?