Holmes is right about the differences between controversial and non-controversial articles, and having dealt with some of the characters who make editing an article such as WikiPedia:Anarcho-capitalism such a tremendous pain in the ass, I think I have some idea why. WikiPedia is based on a surprisingly simple and surprisingly robust consensus process, but consensus processes have problems when faced with belligerent fanatics and self-appointed hall monitors, and controversial articles attract both. (The kind of editing that instant in-place revisions on web content makes easy also encourages certain kinds of incoherent mishmash that accumulate when the hall monitors make several lazy edits that attempt to do away with controversy by piling on endless qualifying phrases.)

As for the complaint that WikiPedia contributors don’t have an incentive to help produce good articles because they don’t make a profit from a good outcome, there are two things that I wish I understood better. (1) First, “profit:” when you assert that WikiPedia contributors don’t have a profit motive, what do you count as “profit”? Does it have to be monetary? (2) What sort of outcomes do you have in mind that would qualify as “good outcomes” for an information source? (Is it a single characteristic, or are there multiple characteristics? If multiple, are there any trade-offs involved?)

I seem to remember something in the U.S. Constitution (that long discarded document) called Amendment III. It states: . . .

If Congress and the several states repealed Amendment III, and authorized the Marines to force innocent people to quarter soldiers in their home, without their consent, would that make it okay to do so?

If it would, how in the world would it do that? If it wouldn’t, then who cares whether the Constitution says anything on the matter or not?

Hugo: Anyone on the pro-choice side want to make a case that what this woman did was morally defensible?

Yes. If you think (as I do) that abortion is part of a woman’s moral right to control her own body, then why would you have any particular indignation about Amy Richards’ decision?

Your reaction makes sense on one common anti-abortion view (the view that abortion is a grave evil, but that women who feel constrained to choose it by dire circumstances deserve compassion rather than condemnation). It doesn’t make very much sense on the most common pro-choice views. It seems to me that the disagreement on this case will have a lot to do with general attitudes towards abortion and very little to do with Amy Richards’ circumstances specifically.

The pro-choice position does not depend on whether you feel sorry for the poor girl or not. It’s based on respect for women’s choices.

candace: And the sad thing is, I would bet that Amy Richards’ little boy would, too.

This is preposterous arrogance. You don’t know Amy Richards and you almost certainly will never know her “little boy.” He didn’t ask you to speak on his behalf and I can’t see where you got any particular knowledge or authority that would make it appropriate for you to do so. If you want to make a case against abortion you should feel free, but using a stranger’s child as a ventriloquist’s prop in trying to make it only undermines your efforts.

joe: In getting off the topic, I was hoping to draw a comparison to those of affluence (education) and those less affluent (little education) and its impact on society. Do the enlightened ideals of abortion and contraception, which are probably used mostly by the well-to-do, a benefit to society?

There’s no need to speculate about who “probably” uses abortion and contraception. Data is publicly available. As it happens, you’re correct about contraception but mistaken about abortion: poor and low-income women are more likely than “well-to-do” women to have abortions (see: Alan Guttmacher Institute: Patterns in the Socioeconomic Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions in 2000-2001 in the Findings under “Women’s Characteristics”); the rate of abortion per 1,000 women decreases fairly steadily as annual income increases. Anyway, I’m unclear what any of this has to do with whether abortion should or should not be legal. If birth rates decline in proportion to increases in female literacy and education, then that must mean that women, given the resources and options to make a meaningful choice, are choosing not to have as many children as they had previously had. The women making these choices are human beings, not machines for maximizing whatever demographic statistics you happen to find important; each and every one of the women in question has her own life and her own reasons for choosing to have fewer children, and I can’t imagine where policy-makers would get the knowledge or the virtue or the right to tell her that she needs to abandon those reasons in order to make quota.

murky thoughts: Are philosophers of law allowed to look for rights outside the constitution?

Sure, unless all legal inquiry terminates decisively at the prescriptions of the Constitution. You might think that it obviously does (or ought); but obvious or not, it is a substantive position within the philosophy of law, which needs a reasoned defense. The final authority of the Constitution is not unquestionable, and in any case it’s both contingent and parochial (we could have had different small-c constitutions, and other people do have them). If you want to argue that in our territory, as things actually turned out, the Constitution is decisive on all legal questions on which it speaks (and maybe even some on which it does not), then you can argue that, but you will need just that—an argument. And the reasons given in the course of the argument would themselves be reasons within the province of the philosophy of law. (As you may have guessed by this point, they should not be reasons taken from within the text of the Constitution itself, since the authority of the Constitution is precisely what’s in question; you can’t just cite the Supremacy Clause without begging the question in a particularly crass manner.)

murky thoughts: Isn’t Article 1 the end of the story about why we have intellectual property rights?

No. If you do take the text of the Constitution to be decisive on legal questions within its scope then that at most only authorizes Congress to devise intellectual protectionism schemes; it doesn’t mandate any particular scheme, or any scheme at all, and it doesn’t recognize a “right” that the government or anyone else is bound to respect. You can have plenty of arguments over whether Congress ought to make use of the power that it is granted, and whether it ought to make use of it in this way or that.

If, on the other hand, you don’t take the Constitution to be decisive in any final way, then the text of Article I has no special authority to settle the matter anyway. (This happens to be my view; Bell is right to suggest that intellectual protectionism may undermine property rights in ordinary tangible property, and as a very famous lawyer once argued, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Constitutions are not prior to natural rights, and have no proper authority outside of recognizing and protecting them.)

Well, I think it’s obvious that there is some problem to be considered here, but I’m a bit puzzled that you treat “teaching and evaluating” all of a piece. I took a class in statistical methods that my father taught several years ago; the arrangement that we worked out was to ask the Department Chair, as a favor (since it concerned a single student only, and the course was in his area of specialty, it wasn’t that big of one to ask) to grade the exams that I took. It may not be possible to arrange something of the sort in every situation; but if it’s not possible to arrange a third-party auditor for the kid’s grades, well, that’s as good a reason as any to have the kid enroll in somebody else’s section.

It seems likely to me that there are some parts of the student-teacher relationship that are worth taking a harder line on than others.

If the referendum was free of fraud, would that make the statist constitution drafted by a Vichy regime any more legitimate?

Since when did anarchists start believing in government elections?

Just out of curiosity, have you ever read any of Andrea Dworkin’s books? (I mean, actually read the whole thing from cover to cover.) If so, which ones?

But I would like you to consider the Rwanda scenario or some other humanitarian scenario. … I think what you would like to say here is that we are fighting a defensive war on behalf of the citizens of Rwanda. Which sounds kind of right, but it also seems very odd to call such a war a “defensive” war.

Well, would it sound any less odd to call it an “aggressive” war? “A war in defense of the Tutsis,” on the other hand, doesn’t sound odd at all.

As a side note, I do agree with you that there are cases — and the genocide in Rwanda is one of them — where massive violations of human rights could, in principle, justify war by third parties in defense of the victims. But it is important to remember that there are lots of different ways of conducting wars, and that signing on, in principle, to a war by third parties doesn’t mean signing on to any kind of war by any kind of third party. (For example, liberal interventionists usually use cases like Bosnia-Hercegovina or Rwanda as exhibit A in the argument for justifying large-scale wars by alliances of governments, especially the global powers, with aerial bombing and typically a period of foreign occupation. But all of these terms are debatable. Wars don’t need to be sponsored or conducted by governments, let alone alliances of them, and don’t need to be conducted by means of the usual full-scale military assault that the Great Powers typically engage in. Maybe the genocide in Rwanda would justify a military intervention by NATO or a UN-sponsored coalition, but I think that’s very much less obvious than many people seem to think, because it is much stronger than the claim that some kind of war or another would be justified than many people realize.)

“So I see three options when discussing appointments by the other team: a) brilliance is always more important than policy-moderation. b) Policy-moderation is always more important than brilliance c) It depends on the position.”

Can I freely substitute “correct positions on questions of policy” for “policy-moderation,” if I don’t think that the correct positions are usually “moderate” ones? If not, then I have to think that all of (a)-(c) seem to me to miss the point; after all, why should anyone care about moderation for moderation’s sake, and if there is no reason to care about it, then why should we worry about what sort of trade-offs to make between it and legal brilliance? If, on the other hand, I can substitute, then I’ll bite: the answer seems obviously to be either B or C. I’m inclined to think C, but for the moment I don’t intend to try to settle the issue between the universal (B) and the existential (C) claims.

“For C, I’m kinda curious what people think what positions we should value competence or moderation more?”

Here’s a couple of plausible candidates that have, in the past, come before the Court, and where clever men did a lot of harm through some audacious legal reasoning:

1. Slavery (cf. Dred Scott v. Sanford)
2. Genocide and ethnic cleansing (cf. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia et al.)

If you believe that abortion is murder or some other form of gross violation of human rights, you should probably add abortion and Roe v. Wade to the list. I don’t, so I won’t; but since I do regard banning abortion as a form of slavery, I would put any hypothetical reversal of Roe v. Wade, no matter how brilliantly argued, under (1).

(You could probably add torture and extra-judicial killing onto the list of issues where having the right position is more important for a judge than a brilliant legal argument on the topic.)

I think there’s a general principle here: human rights are more important than sharp legal argument, and there are at least some issues on which being on the wrong side of the line just has to be a defeater for being entrusted with any kind of power to enforce your legal reasoning.

In any case, from what I can gather, Miers is neither on the right side of most issues nor possessed of a brilliant legal mind, so what are we arguing about, anyway?

Patrick,

The primary claim above is not that all wars of aggression are unjust (although I do, as it happens, think that that’s analytically true). It’s that “aggressive” and “defensive” are contrary terms, whether the object of the defense is yourself or others, so that if your justifications for a war all appeal to the defense of others, then you are presenting evidence that the war wasn’t aggressive, not that it is both aggressive and just.

As for whether wars in defense of others could in principle be just under some set of circumstances or another, I suspect that very few people would disagree with you. But it does seem to me that there are pretty good reasons for saying that when a war is not justified by self-defense, there’s a correspondingly higher standard that needs to be met in order to justify military action (for a lot of reasons, moral, epistemic, and practical). And all that the anti-war movement needs to make a general case against these kinds of interventions is to show that the standard that needs to be met is high enough that governments intending to go to war generally don’t meet it. (And if that is their point, I think they are quite right.)