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?

Jamie:

This song is nothing but about the conquering of us Southrons and the pervertion of our Christianity.

Come off it. Here is what the “Christianity” of the Southern secessionists meant:

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states [Texas Declaration of Secession]

With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. … It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. (Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy)

The sooner that such “Christianity” was perverted and destroyed, the better.

Lydia:

I would be willing to concede that the leaders of the initially seceding states probably didn’t think slavery was “all that bad,” and furthermore that it was one of the specific issues in which, they suspected, the curtailment of states’ rights would begin.

There’s no need to speculate about this matter. The secessionist leaders were quite clear. Four of the seceding states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas) issued Declarations of Secession which explicitly cite the protection of slavery and white supremacy as their primary reasons for seceding. (South Carolina and Mississippi mention no other reason at all.) There are voluminous notes from secessionist conventions and speeches from leading figures such as Alexander Stephens which state that “all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization … was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” and that race slavery was to be the “cornerstone” (Stephens) of their new government. The primary reasons mentioned are (1) the increasing defiance of federal fugitive slave laws in the Northern states, (2) attempts by Northern states to emancipate slaves that were carried into their borders by slaveholders, (3) the federal government’s restrictions on the expansion of slavery into the territories, (4) the growth and spread of abolitionist sentiment, (5) fear of slave uprisings inspired by Northern abolitionism, (6) the victory of Lincoln and the Republicans in the elections of 1860, which believed would worsen (1)-(5). Issues such as the tariff and abstract concerns about growing federal power vis-a-vis the several states were mentioned, but hardly portrayed as the chief reasons for the break and rarely discussed in any detail until the former Confederates began to write their post-war, post-Reconstruction memoirs in the 1870s and 1880s. If you look at the statements they were making at the time, however, these issues drop distinctly into the background. (The most the tariff receives in any of the declarations, for example, is three paragraphs; South Carolina’s and Mississippi’s secessionists were so far from giving a hoot about abstract principles of states’ rights that they complained about the “nullification” of federal Fugitive Slave Laws by Northern states as one of the reasons they gave for seceding.)

(Note that none of this means that Lincoln went to war to free the slaves. He clearly did not. But that does not mean that the secessionists did not secede in order to protect slavery from the alleged threats posed to it by the Northern states and the federal government.)

Lydia:

Think about it: What “Dixieland” says is that the singer loves his home region, that one of the reasons he loves it is because old times are not forgotten there, and that he intends to live and die there.

Context, please. “Dixie’s Land” was written by Dan Emmett in 1859 for his blackface minstrel show; here are the actual lyrics of the first verse and chorus, as they were originally sung:

I wish I was in land ob cotton, Old times dar am not forgotten, Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land. In Dixie Land whar’ I was born in, Early on one frosty mornin’, Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land. CHORUS: Den I wish I was in Dixie, Hoo-ray! Hoo-ray! In Dixie land, I’ll take my stand to lib and die in Dixie; Away, away, away down south in Dixie, Away, away, away down south in Dixie.

Now besides the “moonlight and magnolias” caricature of the romanticized South, with the clever euphemisms of “land of cotton” and “old times there are not forgotten” conveniently used to paper over the reality of plantation slavery—which ought to be creepy enough in itself—it is also worth noting that the song was written by white men for white men in blackface to sing, putting the words into the mouths of caricatured Black slaves. The singer is singing about his love for the land of his bondage and his longing to return there as soon as possible to “lib and die” on the plantation.

If you don’t find that creepy, I don’t know quite what to say.

Lydia, again:

Now I know, I’m all ready for the liberal outrage. How dare I say nice things about Dixieland (or even about “Dixieland”) when the old-time customs the southerners really wanted to preserve were slavery, discrimination, Jim Crow laws, and sundry other nasties, right?

But there is an odd double standard here. Saddam Hussein’s old-time customs were hardly nice, yet Dubya is probably one of the most Left-hated Republican presidents of all time on the grounds that he took it upon himself to go in without any immediate provocation and effect regime change so that, among other things, Saddam wouldn’t go on doing unpleasant things to his own people.

(1) How many of those Leftists go around singing the praises of “Land of Two Rivers” (the Iraqi national anthem under Saddam Hussein)?

(2) I mention (1) because there is actually a change of subject between the first paragraph above and the second. In the first you mention an objection that might be raised against praising the Confederacy; in the second you say that someone who condemns the Feds in the Iraq War ought to also condemn the Feds in the Civil War. That’s a perfectly just reply, but it’s not a reply to the objection raised in the first paragraph, because condemning the Feds and praising the Confederacy are not the same thing. You can (and indeed, I think there are awfully good reasons to say that you should) condemn both the Feds and the Confederacy.

Stephen Carson:

Cole, you ask a good question: “the South didn’t secede over state’s rights (I mean, what, were they just doing it to prove a point?)” I believe there is a good answer. As probably best documented in Tom DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln, there was ongoing contention over tariffs imposed on the South by the North which came to a head with the election of Lincoln whose whole career had protectionist tariffs as its theme (bet you never knew that… I didn’t). The upshot is that the South, with good reason, felt that the North was draining the South and spending the money on themselves.

Stephen, it is certainly true that protectionism, and the tariff in particular, were mentioned as injuries that the Southern states had suffered at the hands of the Northern states and the federal government. But the efforts to portray this as one of the chief causes of secession are frankly indulging in fantasy. South Carolina’s and Mississippi’s Declarations of Secession never once mention the tariff; indeed, neither mentions any reasons for secession other than the preservation of slavery and white supremacy. (MS: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.”) Texas’s mentions protectionist legislation in passing; here is everything that they had to say about it: “They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.” Besides that single sentence, the declaration spends 13 paragraphs discussing slavery and the Federal government and Northern states’ hostility to it. (“She [Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery— the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits— a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time”; also: “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”) Georgia’s Declaration spends the most words on discussing protectionism; that is to say, it mentions it in 3 paragraphs and suggests that Northern commercial interests were behind anti-slavery agitation in the North after their political program of protectionism was defeated. However, it also spends 13 paragraphs discussing slavery, which it names first and last as the primary cause for secession. The records of the secession conventions and an analysis of the Confederate Constitution seem to reveal similar results. Vice President Alexander Stephens, it seems, was right when he declared of that Constitution, that “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas [from those of the Declaration of Independence]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. [Applause.] This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

It’s certainly true—as DiLorenzo, among others, reveals—that Lincoln’s motives, in going to war against the seceding states, were far from noble. However, it’s vitally important to realize that that doesn’t mean that the Confederates’ motives were any more noble than Lincoln’s.

Chris:

You [Cole] say, “The North didn’t fight to end slavery.” But remember the Battle Hymn itself—“As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” That’s what they were singing, after all!

I suspect that Chris and Cole are both right but that they are discussing different things under the rubric of “the North” (which was not, literally speaking, a participant in the war, but rather a geographical region). “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and its predecessor “John Brown’s Body,” were soldiers’ songs, and it’s true that many soldiers who fought for the North saw themselves as fighting to end slavery. It’s equally true that, for the first half of the war at least, Lincoln (together with his administration) saw himself as fighting to crush secession, and not to end slavery (and that if he could save the Union without freeing a single slave, he would do so). Here, as elsewhere, it’s important not to conflate the thoughts, reasons, and judgments of government leaders with those of the rest of the country.

Kennedy: “I’d also note that if a male teacher had been having sex with a thirteen year old student he might well do hard time instead of nine months.”

I agree. The difference in treatment is indefensible. The crime ought to be punished equally severely, or equally leniently, whatever the gender of the older and younger “partners.”

Lopez: “Arguments for ‘age difference’ alone don’t hold water.”

Indeed. Which is why both age difference and the youth of one of the “partners” was mentioned above. A substantial age difference is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for what I said to apply. (It’s necessary because there’s an awful lot less reason to think that another 13 year old is sleazy for sleeping with a 13 year old than to think that a 28 year old is.)

Ghertner: “If the teen has the capacity to give meaningful consent, then how is it vice, sleazy, or exploitive?”

Because there are more vices than there are crimes, in sexual ethics as in all other kinds of ethics. Fulfilling your obligation not to rape anybody is important, but why would you think that there aren’t any other moral obligations that you have? If you think (as, indeed, you should) that sexual relationships ought to take place within something at least vaguely resembling a context of equality, reciprocity, and mutual responsibility, then there are plenty of good prima facie reasons to think that 28 year olds who sleep with 13 year olds are pretty sleazy.

N.B.: I don’t think that it’s usually true that a 13 year old has the capacity to give meaningful consent to a sexual encounter with an adult twice their age. But you can apply the above at whatever age you like, depending on where you think the age of meaningful consent is and where you think the age is at which sexual encounters with much older adults stop being sketchy.

Ghertner: “Is it exploitive for college professors to sleep with college students?”

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking.

If you’re asking about students who they encounter in an academic setting (e.g. in their classes or in their departments), then yes, of course it’s unethical for professors to sleep with those students. If this isn’t obvious, it ought to be.

If you’re asking about students and professors who happen to meet each other without having any particular academic relationship to one another, then I don’t know whether it’s sleazy for the professor to sleep with the student or not. I imagine that it depends on the specifics of the case.