Jill:

Ah, I love this talk of prevailing social values and community standards. Kind of how community standards dictated that blacks had rights about equal to those of livestock; or how community standards clearly didn’t want black children going to white schools; or how community standards decided that Jews were sub-human and could be killed by the millions; or how community standards dictate that if a woman is raped, she’s an adulterer who deserves to be punished as such.

David Thompson:

When the prevailing community standards held such, the law reflected those beliefs. When the community standards changed, the law changed in accordance. In a voluntary society, the laws are the mechanism to promulgate and regulate social mores; otherwise they are merely arbitrary diktats without the legitimacy conferred by social assent and respect.

You need to think harder about this. “In a voluntary society,” everyone affected by the law has a voice in making it. Jews under the Nuremberg Laws and during the Holocaust, Blacks under slavery and Jim Crow, and women in contemporary Pakistan didn’t have any meaningful voice in making the laws inflicted upon them — this was an essential part of the political structure that the Nazi regime, white supremacy in the United States, and male supremacy in Pakistan created — so describing the imposition of them as anything less than “arbitrary diktats” is tendentious to say the very least.

“The legitimacy conferred by social assent and respect,” if “social assent and respect” means nothing more than the assent and respect of the numerical majority of people, or a numerical minority that happens to have enough guns to dominate the discussion by force of arms, is precisely zero.

Three clarificatory questions. First:

I have no problem with government coming down hard with its iron fist against those who commit violent crimes against person or property.

Question: What do you think justifies the “iron fist” of government in the specific form of the death penalty for whatever crimes you think merit it? Vengeance for the innocent? Punishment of the guilty? Defense against some kind of threat from the condemned? Deterrance of third parties? Something else? One or more of the above?

Second,

By the time someone stands for trial, odds indicate that they are not just likely to be factually guilty, but almost certainly factually guilty of the crime in which they charged.

Question: How do you know this?

Third,

If, for instance, we were to ensure that those convicted of capital crimes are executed within say 2-years of conviction, then that would pretty much guarantee some wrongful executions, after say the first 1000 or so people were executed. I’m not sure if that would be worth it.

Question: If you’re “not sure” an 0.1% chance of murdering an innocent person “would be worth it,” at what point would the odds be low enough that you’d consider it acceptable losses for whatever benefits you think judicial killing secures?

My understanding is that there are some aboveground markets in which organized crime outfits have historically been successful — for example, in vending machines, and in the financing and distribution of pornography.

Pornography is a special case, given that during the period of substantial Mafia involvement, it was constantly under legal threat, and social pressures contributed to a lot of economic features that made the market similar to black markets even when it wasn’t formally one. As for vending machines, I’m not sure where exactly the organized crime element came from — although I’ve heard plausible suggestions that coercive control over restaurants and bars (through various forms of racketeering) played a role, and also that getting into businesses oriented around large amounts of cash in small denominations aided in money laundering.

I think it grabs the attention of the fence-sitting archist, especially the statist male heterosexuals.

Like there aren’t enough drooling statist male heterosexuals in This Movement of Ours already.

I’m waiting for the upcoming beefcake calendar from those sexy Catallarchs, personally.

I was a bit worried that agreeing so much with an anarchiste would ruin my credentials as a tax’n’spend liberal, but then again, don’t let me starve or freeze or bleed to death on the street is also a demand ordinarily addressed to our fellow human beings. So I think I’m okay on that score. Phew.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you that “Don’t let me starve or freeze or bleed to death on the street is a (legitimate) demand that we ordinarily address to our fellow human beings. I just don’t think it’s (appropriately understood as) a demand for justice, but rather a demand for solidarity and kindness (or, in the very last resort, a plea for mercy). As an anarchist I don’t think there’s anything wrong or out of order with demands for solidarity or kindness (in fact I think that they are very important). Justice isn’t the only legitimate demand; it’s just the only demand that’s legitimately enforceable.

Brandon Berg: In fact, I think Scott did just this, as he said that he was not endorsing laws against suicide.

Again, this by itself does not prove that Scott regarded his claim as merely positive and not normative. All that it proves is that he’s open to regarding whatever value (whether some or none) efficiency might have as trumped by the value that something else has. (Normatively, being wealthy is better than being poor. That’s part of what “wealth” and “poverty” mean. But there are plenty of cases in which it may better to realize some other value, at the cost of being less wealthy, than it would be to maximize wealth. That doesn’t mean that “being wealthy” is a strictly non-normative category. It just means that it’s an overridable norm.)

David: Efficiency is not a normative term. In most usage it is actually a quantitative measurement, a car with greater efficiency gets better miles per gallon than a less efficient car.

This is obviously not true. Your ability to quantitatively calculate efficiency, as the term is ordinarily used, depends on you first identifying what counts as a benefit and what counts as a cost. An increase in miles per gallon, for example, only counts as an increase in efficiency because, in this case (but not in all) getting more of the dependent variable (miles traveled) for the same or less of the independent variable (gasoline burned) counts (prima facie) as a good feature for the car to have. Which is a normative judgment. (Which in turn depends on your identifying the dependent variable as a benefit, i.e., a good thing for the car to produce, and the independent variable as a cost, i.e., a bad thing for the car to demand, or something which is bad in itself and valuable only for its consequences. These are, again, normative judgments.)

There are in fact plenty of cases where efficiency involves getting less for the same or less for more (e.g. less exhaust for the same amount of gasoline, less waste heat for more revolutions of the turbine). The only thing that all of the cases of efficiency have in common with each other and not with cases of inefficiency is not any kind of quantitative positive relation, but rather the normative relation of increasing things good to have and decreasing things bad to have. The ordinary use of the term “efficiency” simply has no cash value denominated in purely quantitative terms.

Brandon Berg: If we suppose that we have a general idea of what people like and how much they like it, we can say that a particular arrangement will or will not be Kaldor-Hicks efficient. That’s a positive statement, not a normative one. Yes, we take preferences into account (possibly inaccurately). But we simply consider these as positive facts.

David: Better off and worse off are to the economist just a tally of what each individual under study thinks (or more appropriately reveals) of his situation. Yes, each individual must make a normative claim, but the economist makes no such claim, he just tallies those claims.

Fine. So here’s a conventional textbook definition of Pareto efficiency. (Since Kaldor-Hicks efficiency is defined in terms of Pareto efficiency, we’ll leave that as a further exercise.)

(PE) A situation is Pareto efficient if and only if there are no available changes that would make at least one person better off and make nobody worse off.

Your suggestion is that we make Pareto efficiency non-normative by making “better off” and “worse off” refer to positive facts to the effect that the preferences that the people in question happen to have are satisfied or frustrated. So the more explicit definition is something more like:

(PE′) A situation is Pareto efficient if and only if there are no available changes such that (1) there is at least one person for whom the change would satisfy at least one currently unsatisfied preference, and (2) there is no one for whom the change would frustrate at least one currently satisfied preference.

Is this an accurate way of spelling out what you mean when you claim that economic efficiency, as Scott was using the term, is non-normative?

Diane: I couldn’t agree more. But more and more, I see myself as separate from so-called liberal interests. I not only find liberal warmongers repulsive, I also fight for the rights of non-humans. Those activities do not go over well in most liberal circles. Neither does any kind of non-superficial feminism.

Oh, I certainly agree. Insofar as I address myself to “liberals” (and for that matter “progressives”) at all these days, it’s because I think that some of them have some confused grasp of values, or at least pay lip service to values, that might lead them to see what I’m talking about — and thus lead them away from what “liberal” (and even “progressive”) mean these days, and move towards a more genuine and worthwhile form of Leftism, feminism, etc.

Anon: They were given the chance.

Who was given a chance? The victims of the bombing? I don’t recall that Japanese civilians had any particular control over the militarist dictatorship’s actions in March – August 1945.

Maybe you mean that the Japanese command was given the chance, and, having (in your judgment) spurned it, the civilians over which they maintained dictatorial control were fair game for massacre. If so, I think that’s a despicable way to treat innocent people.

That said, one of the background premises you’re operating on is also factually incorrect.

Anon: Remember it took two bombs not just one to end the war and that was a Japanese decision to not surrender.

Even if you think that the incineration of Hiroshima was justifiable or even excusable (I don’t), that does you no good with respect to Nagasaki. Only three days passed between the bombing of Hiroshima and that of Nagasaki; the Emperor and the War Council had not even received on-the-ground reports of the level of destruction at Hiroshima until August 8 (the same day that they were informed that the Soviets were entering the war), and they did not meet to decide what to do until 11:00am on August 9 (the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki at 11:02am). There is absolutely no reasonable defense for the massacre of 75,000 civilians simply because of the failure to communicate surrender terms to the Americans less than a day after the War Council was fully informed of their situation, or less than 2 minutes after they had convened the meeting (as it happens, the War Council was unanimous, solely in light of Hiroshima and the Red Army’s advances in Manchuria, that Japan should surrender. They were divided only over the conditions under which they should surrender.)

Of course, even if the United States had waited weeks and the War Council had duly communicated that they refused to surrender, I don’t think that would have justified the massacre of 75,000 civilians who played no part in that decision. But as the facts stand, your own attempt at a justification or excuse for the bombing fails to give any good reasons for Nagasaki.

Anon: Japan would have fought to the last person had there been an invasion.

This presupposes that the U.S.’s demand for unconditional surrender, followed by occupation, by any means necessary — or, at least, by means up to and including the massacre of 500,000 – 1,000,000 civilians by atomic, incendiary, and high explosive terror-bombing — was a necessary or proper war aim in March – August 1945. I deny that it was. Japan was clearly defeated in March 1945 and there was absolutely no justification or excuse for standing on the Potsdam demands at the cost of civilian lives, whether to starvation due to the blockade, “conventional” firebombing, atomic bombing, or a hypothetical amphibious invasion.

Generally speaking, before you can justify this or that enormity in terms of “military necessity,” you first have to show, at the very least, that the war aims for which the enormity was supposedly “necessary” were in fact just aims to pursue by those means.

David, I’m well aware of the technical definitions of “efficiency” in economics and of the party line that given these technical definitions, economic claims about efficiency are strictly non-normative. But I’m disputing that party line, and what I’m asking for is an elaboration of those definitions that doesn’t fall back on normative terms. (As for Samuelson, I think there is simply philosophical confusion, both by him and by his colleagues, about what he is doing. He might very well think that his claims about economic efficiency are strictly non-normative claims; but that’s hardly demonstrated by his endorsement of policies he knows to be economically inefficient on other grounds. That only demonstrates that he thinks that there are other norms that trump whatever normative weight “economic efficiency” may or may not carry.)

For example, Pareto efficiency is standardly defined as a situation in which no further Pareto improvements are available, and a Pareto improvement is defined as a change that makes at least one person better off and nobody worse off. But “better off” and “worse off” are themselves normative terms. Schuele specifies that he means to refer to Kaldor-Hicks efficiency. But Kaldor-Hicks efficiency is standardly defined by direct reference to Pareto efficiency. Scott didn’t use the standard definition for K-H efficiency, but instead glossed it in terms of “wealth,” but “wealth” is itself a normative term. (Having a large pile of something only counts as being wealthy if the thing you’ve piled up is a good thing to have lots of.)

So the challenge is: explain to me what Schuele meant, or plausibly could have meant, by “economically efficient” without falling back on normative language. If you are using Kaldor-Hicks efficiency as standardly defined, or as glossed by Scott, you will have to explain how you are using the terms “better off,” “worse off,” “wealth,” or whatever in such a way that they are not in fact normative, in spite of appearances.

Thanks for the link. Liberals’ and lefties’ ongoing failure to name Truman and LeMay as two of the worst evildoers of the past century (whether due to inattention or to unwillingness) is definitely galling. I’m increasingly beginning to think that if antiwar folks want to make some serious changes to the intellectual and political climate, we need to spend less time harping on obvious disasters like Vietnam and more time taking on the hard cases — like the “Last Good War” mythology surrounding U.S. conduct in World War II. Lots of people who think of themselves as liberal, leftist, or progressive sorta kinda realize how horrible some aspects of the U.S. war effort were (internment, say; maybe also the atomic bombings, depending on whom you’re talking to), but very few seem to realize it in any way that puts the pieces together or makes a serious difference to how they judge that war effort in particular or the basic tenets of modern warfare in general. And it seems increasingly to me like that’s a big part of what we need to work at changing. What do you think?

Incidentally, it looks like the cut-and-paste wires got a bit crossed, though; the link under my name goes to one of Jill’s astonishingly cute dog photos. My addenda to the lists I’ve seen going around are at GT 2006-01-04: Evildoers.

Schuele claimed that laws against suicide might be “economically efficient.” In ordinary language, “efficient” is a normative term, not a purely positive one; “efficiency” is a virtue and “inefficiency” a vice in any method that can be so described.

Of course, you could claim that the “economically” qualifier indicates a term of art, not the ordinary language use. Fine, but the technical definitions of both Pareto efficiency and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency typically appeal directly to normative categories such as “better off,” “worse off,” “wealth,” etc.

Exercise for the writer: give me a definition of “economic efficiency” that both (1) makes it a positive rather than a normative category, and (2) justifies the normal use of the term in economic analysis and advocacy. (Until you have done so, your claim that Kennedy is confusing positive and normative claims seems unfounded.)