Joe:

“But the badness of rape isn’t from the pleasure of the rapist. It’s from the pain of the person being raped.”

Kennedy:

That’s easily factored out for the sake of argument: Rape a woman who’s passed out drunk. She’ll never know.

No pain. Is that pleasure good?

Joe:

Maybe this deserves its own post, but what many of you are discussing (e.g., Constant’s game show, or JTK’s passed out woman) are problems if and only if one interprets utilitarianism to mean that one ought always perform whatever action has the greatest utility.

There are, however, good reasons for thinking that direct, act-utilitarianism is self-effacing. That is, there may well be (and I think are) good utilitarian reasons for abandoning act-utilitarianism. That’s why I said in an earlier comment that I think utilitarianism actually justifies rules that cannot normally be violated. We call these rights. And the most important of those rights is best expressed by something very much like the harm principle.

So, to JTK, the reason I don’t rape the drunk passed out woman who won’t know is that doing so violates the harm principle. And obeying the harm principle is what all-things-considered will maximize utility over the long run. And to Constant, the problem with the game show is not infinite pain of rape (which you rightly criticize); it’s that the game show violates the harm principle.

Joe, you just changed the subject.

Kennedy didn’t ask you whether or not you would rape someone who was drunk and passed out. (Or what your reasons for doing so or not doing so would be.) He asked you whether the pleasure that you would gain from the rape would be a good thing. (Or, more precisely, whether the fact that you received pleasure while no-one else received pain, would make for a net increase in the preponderance of good things over bad.) Gesturing at rule-utilitarianism, or to other forms of indirect utilitarianism, does not answer the question, unless making the gesture is also meant to imply “Yes, it would be for the best, but that’s only a problem if you think its being for the best would license me to do it. It wouldn’t, and here’s why.”

I can’t speak for Kennedy, but I certainly think that treating a sufficiently stealthy rapist’s pleasure as any sort of good at all is a problem, whether or not that conclusion would license actually trying to secure the good in particular instances. Whatever you may think of stupid or hollow pleasures (such as the ones you mention in your post), the idea that the depraved pleasures taken from wicked acts should not be dignified as “goods” is hardly wacky, spooky, or elitist. On the contrary, I’d suggest that denying such an evident truth can be explained by little other than dogmatic shamelessness.

Brandon:

I don’t have a problem with this. The simple fact that something is publicly owned doesn’t mean it must or should be a free-for-all. Government shouldn’t own parks, but as long as it does it should try regulate their use in ways that maximize public enjoyment.

I suspect that the new law will reduce enjoyment of the parks by the part of the public that happens to be homeless, or involved in charity for the homeless. Or do they not count?

hein:

I think Brandon is right. This is a property rights issue.

No it’s not. The city is not the rightful owner of the land and therefore has no legitimate authority over its use.

Constant:

And public parks are the property of the city.

No they aren’t. Public parks are built and maintained with stolen money, and very often located on stolen land. The parks are no more the property of the city government than a cache of buried treasure is the property of the pirate who stole it.

Who are you thinking of in particular?

It may just be that the church leaders you’ve been noticing lately have been from different denominations. The United Methodists have always had bishops; the Southern Baptists have never had them. Some Pentacostals (PCG) did change the title of their District and General Superintendents to District and General Bishops as of 2002, but the positions were already oversight positions; they just changed the name, apparently to make it sound more spiritual and less like secular upper management.

“To those admirers of the minimal state, perhaps now is a good time to ponder the puzzling thrill we get from the current union, a government that we long ago deemed morally impermissible …”

Is this a royal “we”? I, for one, certainly don’t get a thrill from the current union or the (perfectly revolting) theo-nationalist humbug perpetrated on its behalf. Of course, I am not a minimal statist, so maybe I’m not the target audience of this post.

I would note, though, that this is simply looking at the problem the wrong way.

If the question is one of risking your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor in the name of another fucking government, then it’s perfectly reasonable that nobody’s going to be very interested in doing so without layering a bunch of superstition and theo-nationalist humbug on top of the State apparatus.

However, if the question is one of risking your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor in defense of your own freedom against the menace of a would-be tyrant, then I hear sometimes people do get pretty excited about that, even when there’s no crown or flag or bureaucratic apparat involved.

Jim,

I’m one of the people who’s doled out such critiques. But I don’t think that Kos has anything like the same thing in mind. Thus:

Libertarian Dems are not hostile to government like traditional libertarians. But unlike the liberal Democrats of old times (now all but extinct), the Libertarian Dem doesn’t believe government is the solution for everything. But it sure as heck is effective in checking the power of corporations.

In other words, government can protect our liberties from those who would infringe upon them — corporations and other individuals.

He then goes on to explain how the New Deal State (minus gun control, I guess) “maximizes individual freedom,” as he sees it.

As I’m sure you know, anti-corporatist left-libertarians consistently stress that government power is the chief enabler and weapon of the robber barons, and they advocate the abolition of all forms of State economic intervention as the only proper response. The idea that Leviathan does or should or even could serve as a “check” on Behemoth is, from this standpoint, sheer statist fantasy.

Basically, as far as I can tell, “Libertarian Dem” is Kos’s new phrase for just another damn corporate liberal who likes to use Rooseveltian “Four Freedoms” talk. The contrast point is, apparently, an imaginary form of corporate liberalism which loves Big Government for its own sake and envisions no independent role for corporations or individual initiative. There is no actually existing corporate liberal who believes this (FDR, JFK, LBJ, Galbraith, Hubert Humphrey, Mario Cuomo, Ted Kennedy, and the rest of the crew certainly did not or do not; they all loved the idea of a properly “checked” or “coordinated” market), but it does make a useful rhetorical foil for passing yourself off as something new in intra-party power struggles.

How about the good old English word “preference”? Normally we use this to refer to what people have vis-a-vis preferred objects, not what the objects have vis-a-vis the people who prefer them. But I don’t know that that’s an iron law. In any case, if you don’t like saying e.g. that an additional diamond has greater preference on the margin than an additional unit of water, you can always play with verbs: takes greater preference, commands greater preference, enjoys greater preference, etc.

Or, if you want, there are always “preferred,” and thus “preferredness” in noun form. That’s an ugly word, but it’s certainly no uglier than “wantability.”

Patri,

I overstated your position. My bad. On the other hand, you’re understating the position you expressed earlier when you gloss it by saying “If immigrants were more illiberal than residents, then my personal feelings about the costs and benefits of immigration would be different.” In the post above, you didn’t just talk about “the costs and benefits of immigration;” you talked about “how libertarians should feel about actual immigration laws in the real world.”

As I’m sure you know, establishing that unrestricted X is bad is not the same as establishing a case for a law aimed at prohibiting, minimizing, or controlling X. But when you say that “how libertarians should feel about actual immigration laws in the real world,” and then talking about “pragmatic tradeoffs” allegedly involved in one country ending up with a higher ratio of illiberal to liberal residents, or in using systematic government violence to stop that from happening, pretty clearly suggests that you think libertarians ought to at least feel more positively towards government force against would-be immigrants — e.g. violence to harass and restrain immigrants trying to cross the border, and/or violence to round up, confine, and then exile immigrants already within the U.S. who haven’t been officially approved by the government — even if, on balance, those more positive feelings are overridden by other considerations about the negative effects of the policy.

So, allow me to revise my position. Suppose it were discovered that native-born American children were, on average, more illiberal than Mexican immigrants. (This may or may not actually be true, for all I know.) Would you then think that this ought to affect how libertarians feel about proposals for mandatory sterilization laws, forced abortion laws, mass deportation of American infants to Mexico, or any number of other schemes that we might cook up to lower the ratio of illiberal to liberal residents in the United States? (Note that I am asking you how you’d feel about government laws to lower birthrates. Not just how you’d feel about lower birthrates happening somehow or another.)

Generally speaking, there are all kinds of statist methods of making one kind of people disappear from a stretch of territory, all of which you could go around evaluating for cost/benefit ratios. The question here is whether there is any policy so horrible that you wouldn’t even consider the necessary consequences of the policy a candidate for a “trade-off,” or anything that you would consider not yours to “trade,” even if the pay-off were right.

If there are any such, then it seems like you’re engaging in special pleading when you accuse Roberts of “taking the easy way out” by refusing to consider a coercive policy that he considers categorically unacceptable. Or if you’re not engaging in special pleading, it can only be because you think there is something special about Americans, or child-bearing, or American child-bearing, that allows you to refuse to consider population control laws that affect would-be American parents, but leaves the question of immigration laws open for consideration.

If, on the other hand, there is nothing (not even other people’s lives and livelihoods) that you would refuse to consider yours to trade off, and if there is no policy so monstrous that it wouldn’t be at least a potential candidate for achieving your demographic goals, then your position will, admittedly, be consistent. But consistency in ruthlessness is not something to take pride in.

My earlier remarks about the demands of justice also stand.

As a side note, just out of curiosity: how does forcibly keeping these alleged anti-freedom people in (say) Mexico help the prospects for freedom and smaller government in Mexico? Or do you just not care what happens there?

Patri:

Now, there is plenty of room for debate about the resulting net impact. But if immigrants truly are anti-freedom, then the real question is how to evaluate this tough tradeoff. Not whether libertarians can have their immigration and a small government too.

There is no tough tradeoff here unless you think that justice only demands that you try to reduce the net quantity of coercion going around in your neighborhood, or in the world at large. I don’t think that; I think that justice primarily demands that you, personally, not coerce anybody else. There are lots of things that I might do to try to stop myself or my friends from being plundered or assaulted; but plundering or assaulting unrelated third parties, merely on the basis of the political views they are demographically likely to hold, doesn’t even rise to being a candidate for consideration, let alone an attractive one.

Patri:

Cornelius – you are assuming that the children of current Americans have the same orientation towards freedom as the incoming immigrants. And the entire argument is founded on the claim that the immigrants have a different attitude towards freedom than the residents.

I think you may be missing the point.

Let’s suppose that we accept the principles you lay out in this post. Since you supposed, arguendo, that one hypothesis was true (viz. whether immigrants are substantially more illiberal than native Americans), in order to argue for a general principle, then we are entitled to do the same with a different hypothesis (viz. whether American-born children are substantially more illiberal than immigrants) in order to test the same principle. So the question is: if it turned out to be the reverse, and American-born children were, on balance, more illiberal than immigrants, would you then be willing to accept government eugenics, mandatory sterilization, forced abortion, et cetera on American citizens, as a means to getting a society with a lower ratio of illiberal residents to liberal residents? If you aren’t, then what makes child-bearing, or Americans, or American child-bearing, so special that you’re unwilling to allow coercion there but willing to allow coercion against peaceful immigrants? If you are, well, then, I suppose we know what sort of a political theory is yours.

If “Brilliant” is meant non-sarcastically, this post may be the world’s first known instance of the Broken Laptop Fallacy.

I think that the primary thing that the “definition” demonstrates is the kind of gibberish that you get out when you assign writing tasks to a committee.

Pham, blaming the lack of non-white characters on the lack of non-white authors doesn’t really tip the scales at all. There’s no reason why white authors can’t be expected to write stories with sensitive and intelligent portrayals of non-white characters. If they can manage non-human races, they can surely manage to think up a non-white human if the existence of such people crosses their minds, and they put a good faith effort into it. If it doesn’t cross their minds, or they don’t put a good faith effort into it, then that’s something to worry about in itself.

Also, while the invisibility of non-white characters is one of the worrying things about Golden Age sci-fi, as far as race goes, it’s hardly the only thing. I can think of some pretty nasty cases of overtly racist stories from Golden Age heavies. To take a rather egregious example, Heinlein’s Sixth Column is pretty embarassing more or less from start to finish. (To be fair, Heinlein later on said he was really dissatisfied with Sixth Column, and that the idea had really come from John W. Campbell. But then, that only relocates the problem.)

Anyway, I’m not at all sure that this is what the Seattle school officials were referring to. Then again, I’m not at all sure that they were referring to anything concrete or identifiable at all.