Oh, so he means that Democrats are likely to weaken the State-enforced regime of monopoly profiteering that currently subsidizes new pharmaceutical research.

Well, sure. So what?

Mankiw:

My interpretation: The Dems will likely give us lower drug prices and less research into new drugs. Good news if you plan to be sick soon. Bad news if you plan to be sick in the more distant future.

I wasn’t aware that the United States Congress was “giving us” pharmaceutical research at all. Who knew that we were electing biomedical researchers instead of legislators?

Kennedy,

American policy does a lot of bad things. Call me selfish, but I’m far more concerned with the bad things it tries to do to me. The Iraqis are way down my list.

There’s nothing wrong with looking out for yourself. My point was just that this…

We’ve lost a couple thousand soldiers in Iraq and 5K people to 9/11.

… is not a complete list of the effects of foreign policy. (And the reason that the list was left incomplete may have something to do with whoever the hell this “we” is supposed to be.)

Foreign policy mostly affects us in what shows up in the newspapers. We’ve lost a couple thousand soldiers in Iraq and 5K people to 9/11. Big whoop-de-do.

I hear that American foreign policy is having some effects on Iraqis.

Brandon, this:

To this end, the attempt to move farmer’s markets into poorer neighborhoods seems good, as does the idea that opposition to big grocery stores in urban neighborhoods should be dropped.

… is not a description of a “market failure,” at least not in the sense that you’re thinking of. The first part entertains one form of entrepreneurship within the free market (moving where you set up your market). The second part is a description of government obstruction through zoning and planning authorities. It may very well be true that a free market in groceries in urban areas still wouldn’t result in American-born poor people buying a lot of fresh produce. But the ability to calculate whether it would or would not is hampered by the fact that there isn’t a free market process in place right now, since (among other things) larger grocers are often forcibly excluded from the market.

Daniel,

The use of the terms “utility” and “utilitarianism” in ethical philosophy are a bit different from the use of those terms in modern economics. Here’s how John Stuart Mill defined “utilitarianism” in his book, Utilitarianism:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded — namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. (Ch. 2 ¶ 2)

“Utility” is typically used by utilitarians to mean “conduciveness to pleasure” or “conduciveness to happiness,” not economic preference-satisfaction, and “utilitarianism” (sometimes “classical utilitarianism”) is broadly used to refer to any theory of ethics that answers all questions of ethical value, either directly or indirectly, in terms of what maximizes total pleasure (or total felt happiness) for everyone. Thus Francis Hutcheson, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, etc. are all classical utilitarians; philosophers such as G. E. Moore, who answer all questions of ethical value by reference to effects, but deny either that pleasure is always good as an end, or the only thing good as an end, or both, are consequentialists but not utilitarians. Since classical utilitarianism, unlike consequentialism broadly, entails ethical hedonism, you can refute classical utilitarianism by demonstrating that hedonism is false.

Constant:

If “you should not do this” means only, “this is wrong”, then I don’t deny that certain things are wrong, but I’ve given an explanation of what a wrong is which is the very conditional statement which you are uncomfortable with.

This is a very odd maneuver. Scheule’s point was to contest your explanation of what a wrong is, so of course if he means to say “this is wrong,” there is no reason for him to accept the conditionalized explanation of wrongs that you offered.

Scheule:

I don’t think I need a God to back up that command, anymore than I need a God to back up the law of gravity.

Constant:

A command logically entails a commander: a command is something commanded, and “to command” is a transitive verb with a subject (the commander) and an object (the recipient of the command).

Yes, but there’s no requirement that the commander and the recipient of the command be different people (let alone beings on different planes of existence). Some people, in fact, have thought it quite important to the nature of morality that the imperatives which issue from it are, first and foremost, self-regarding. I’m not a fan of centering the notion of “command” within ethics, for various reasons, but the theory hardly entails theism, let alone Divine Command theory, in the way you suggest.

Constant:

One rule of thumb I use is that law (and morality) is (normally) about prohibition. … If you find yourself talking about what we should do, there’s a chance you’re not talking about law or morality any more and are talking about recommendation.

I think that the point about law depends on little more than linguistic gerrymandering. (Should you say “You shouldn’t steal,” or “You should make an honest living?” Well, who cares?) And I think the point about morality is plainly absurd. While there is a sense in which all legitimate legal obligations are negative (since all libertarian rights are in some sense negative, and the only legitimate legal obligations consist in respect for libertarian rights), morality includes plenty of positive obligations. Charity is a duty, and so is gratitude; as are courage, kindness, faithfulness, honesty, etc. All of these virtues involve positive obligations, and some could not even be expressed non-trivially in negative terms. (You could give someone the rule, “Don’t be ungrateful.” But that’s at most a rebuke; the only way to actually spell out what not-being-ungrateful entails is to give some positive notion of what sorts of acts you should do in order to express gratitude.) Libertarians of all people should be careful not to conflate law and morality: justice is the only virtue which is legitimately enforceable, but it is very far from being the only virtue.

Dave,

I’m afraid that you may have confused things more than you have illuminated them.

This argument is not primarily an argument about empirical psychology. It’s about ethics. It may well be that Joe has views about the psychology of motivation that are different from those that natural rights folks such as Kennedy or I have. But the meat of the dispute is over value, not people’s psychological motivations. It’s not over what people are or are not motivated to seek, but rather what it is good or bad for people to seek. Unfortunately, in this vale of tears, the two aren’t always coextensive.

Joe:

He [John Stuart Mill] spends most of Utilitarianism rejecting appeals to intuitions, and while he is less dogmatic in his rejection of natural rights theory than is his godfather, he nevertheless does reject it.

Mill rejects something that he calls “the intuitive school of ethics”, which he associates with deontological theories, but I don’t know why you are leaning on this. Intuitionistic method is neither necessary for endorsing natural rights theory (cf. John Locke, Ayn Rand, Jan Narveson, etc.) nor sufficient for rejecting utilitarianism (cf. Francis Hutcheson, Henry Sidgwick). I’m personally quite comfortable with intuitionistic method, but many if not most natural rights theorists aren’t, and my influences on that score actually come more from consequentialists (Francis Hutcheson, G. E. Moore) than from deontologists.

Maybe you think that natural rights go along with intuitionistic method because you need to grasp at some sort of mystical revelation at some point to support the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that you think natural rights theory requires. But if so, you can hardly expect either natural rights theorists or intuitionists to agree with the picture you present.

In any case, given the dispute between you and Kennedy over what file to drop J.S. Mill into, maybe it would help to clarify terms a bit. What do you think are the necessary components of a “natural rights” theory? Which of those do you think Mill fails to endorse?

(Kennedy, the same question, mutatis mutandis, goes for you.)

Joe,

I think the issue with Kennedy’s question is to bring the commitments expressed in your post into greater relief than was provided for by the cases you set out. Not to change the subject to whether or not those commitments would lead you to commit rape under the a given set of circumstances. I also think you misunderstood my reference to “stealth,” which was purely to refer back to Kennedy’s point (that there are plausible cases where a rape might never be noticed by the victim), not to introduce any new considerations.

The main point of my remarks is to suggest that it is not even remotely spooky to suggest that there are depraved pleasures, which are worth abstaining from independent of any further considerations about the effects of the acts or rules or life-stories or whatever necessary to produce them. Pleasures derived from hurting, degrading, or violating innocent people are one such example. (I think pleasures derived from, say, necrophilia or bestiality are another.) These distinctions are not spooky or unfamiliar; they are part of common-sense morality. While common-sense morality may be mistaken, and may need to be revised on particulars in light of rational criticism, the burden is on you to produce some argument that it does need to be revised on this point. I don’t see where you’ve done that; all you’ve done thus far is point out that everybody seems to prefer pleasure in the abstract to pain in the abstract. (That’s true enough, but so what? That doesn’t rule out people valuing something else as an end in itself in addition to pleasure, and it doesn’t rule out the possibility of particular instances of pleasure turning out to be evils.)

And no, I don’t think that describing rape as a wicked act begs the question. I’m referring to a pre-reflective judgment that rape is wicked. I happen to think this judgment is part of the data that any possibly correct theory of ethics would need to explain, not a conclusion that needs to be derived from the theory — if your theory could justify raping uncnoscious women, then that’s as good a reason as any for thinking that your theory needs to be chucked out. But whether or not you share my views on philosophical method in ethics, the point of referring to the pre-reflective judgment was merely to explain the general distinction that I was making amongst pleasures, not to invoke any particular view about which acts are in fact wicked or how you ought to discover that. (Specifically, to make a three-way distinction amongst 1. refined or wholesome pleasures, 2. coarse or hollow pleasures, and 3. depraved pleasures. Part of the point of the distinction was to suggest that common-sense morality generally judges the pleasantness of 1. to be a good but the pleasantness of 3. to be, if anything, an evil. Another part of the point was to suggest that your reflections on “elitism” didn’t actually address the issue of depraved pleasures. Whether or not it’s justified, scorn for the pleasures of “sports entertainment” is quite a different beast from scorn for the pleasures of rape and pillage.) In any case, if you don’t like the word “wicked” you could get a less precise but more wertfrei statement of the distinction by substituting “depraved pleasures taken from hurting, demeaning, or violating other people” for “depraved pleasures taken from wicked acts.”

Are you advocating privately funded and privately conferred prizes here, or are you advocating Stiglitz’s actual suggestion, which amounts to reviving the Stalin Prize in science and engineering?

If the former, then, sure, why not. If the latter, though, then the whole idea raises the question of where the governments of the “industrialized nations” (either severally or jointly) got the knowledge, the virtue, or the right to put themselves forward as qualified arbiters of the usefulness or importance of new drugs. The sort of “status” that a panel of professional blowhards and usurpers could convey on scientific geniuses deserves their contempt and nothing more. Any scientists who would be motivated by such “prizes” are perfect examples of the psychological deformities imposed by a sick culture, and we’d be better off convincing them of the hollowness of political honors than setting up State Prize committees to pander to their vanity.