Your tired, your poor

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

At the Becker-Posner Blog, Richard Posner proposes a return to intelligence tests for immigrants (just like in '21!), while Gary Becker prefers indentured servitude (let's make that 1721). Give them none of "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." The wretched refuse of your teaming shore? Wretched refuse indeed.

Rockin' fonts

Via Foreword, a trove of fonts based on the graphic identities of various rock bands. Metal and neo-punk are over-represented, but they're the ones most likely to go for edgier typefaces.

On another note, my in-laws sent me The Way Up by the Pat Metheny Group for my birthday. I'm about to pop it in the player, but I've spent the morning fixated on the visual design: a sequence of vertical elements—trees, posts, poles and the like—that carry the theme of the title through the CD booklet. You can see some of the pictures on the group's website. Coherent. Pleasing. Brilliant.

Dangerous doctrines

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Via Hit and Run, a defense of the intellectual competence of the college undergraduate.

No one seriously doubts that the average campus is a liberal enclave or believes diversity on elite campuses extends past skin color. But is it really so poisonous? The words "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" cannot possibly be less applicable to media savvy American students, and the idea that an 18-year-old is an empty receptacle waiting to be pumped full of Marxism is its own brand of absurdity. Harvard Yard is not a totalitarian state, and after a required helping of queer lit, a student can always switch to C-Span and watch a gay escort throw softballs to President Bush for a heady dose of conservative ideology.

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I agree with the sentiment and conclusions of the author. But I can't help but feel uncomfortable with the claim that mere exposition to ideas is either harmless or neutral.

The consensus among liberals (generously defined) is that there is nothing objectionable about being exposed to all kinds of information as long as you are not coerced into any particular conclusion. But even if we define coercion quite broadly—including psychological and social pressure of various kinds—the fact remains that knowledge can have profoundly disruptive effects.

My world-view was altered quite severely by reading J. S. Mill and Kant and Rawls. I recently rediscovered an old high-school paper in which I made a vigorous case for the subordination of the individual's selfish wants to the good of the community. After fourteen years of liberal theory, I no longer believe in the latter, much less give it priority over the former. Likewise with the idea of pluralism. The first day of Charles Larmore's Value Pluralism seminar he asked the students if they believed that it was possible to construct a single ranking of human goods or values that was universally applicable; I was the only one who admitted to this. Two years later I was not so certain, and currently a certain variant of value pluralism is a major part of the argument in my dissertation. No one coerced me into this change of heart—I know for a fact that Larmore still takes issue with my understanding of pluralism—but the mere exposition to a new idea deeply affected my thinking.

The argument against censorship in Academia should acknowledge this. Instead of maintaining—facetiously—that nothing will come from students listening to a lecture on the Problem of Evil or reading Das Kapital or The Descent of Man. We should respect students enough to let them change their minds, and not just dismiss them as "organization kids" too self-centered and thick-headed to give a damn. But we should also think them capable of making informed decisions, and not insulate them from the heterodoxies that pave the path of an educated life.

That's not to say that there's something right about "professors [ ] using the classroom as an anti-capitalist soapbox". Professors should be teaching, not preaching, and they should encourage debate, not command consensus. But that's an issue of professional ethics and the academic's self-understanding of her role as a scholar or an activist (I side with scholarship). Letting ideas affect us and expecting that they will affect others, and being honest about these effects, is the kind of liberalism we should espouse.

The end of innocence?

This is me on my first birthday. Tomorrow will be my thirtieth.

Strangely I don't feel especially anxious or excited about it, just a bit numb. For some time now I've thought that the third was a respectable decade, a time to set schedules, settle into routines and become a productive member of society. Graduate school allows some deferment of these prospects, but they still loom large, they press down harder every year, as a deadline that will soon have to be met.

Two years? Three? Perhaps academia was not as far removed from dehors as I expected. I have to update my vita.

About The Budget

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

I intended to post on this a week ago, but plainly forgot.

So I'm wondering: why is Bush's proposed budget printed in a deluxe, gold-foil hardcover edition? Isn't is just the proposed budget? Will the final budget be a handsome leatherbound edition with bookmark? (Is the federal bookbinding budget revealed within?)

(From "The Skinny", the Veer blog.)

Convergence watch

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Belle Waring at Crooked Timber is advocating loosening restrictions on the sale of Habitat for Humanity houses, while Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution worries about implementing a means-tested health care system. There's convergence towards the center, I tell you! The End is surely near...

A very private liberal

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Via Brad DeLong, Mark Schmitt asks where are the liberal privatizers in the current Social Security debate.

It suddenly occurred to me that, in addition to the missing Democrats on the Hill, there was also a faction entirely missing from the public debate: the pro-privatization liberals.

I count myself in this group, and agreed with pretty much everything Bob Kerey wrote in the WSJ a while back, and my reservations are similar to DeLong's: I don't trust the Bush II White House to do anything well.

The reason is the conceptual structure of trust, which, as I recall from a seminar that I took in college with Karen Jones, has two components: disposition and capacity. I don't believe that Bush II and his cronies have anything by way of a good moral disposition; and even if their hearts were in the right place, I doubt their capacity to pull a program through.

A mirror to princes bloggers

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Dan Drezner of danieldrezner.com has written a column on scholar-bloggers for the University of Chicago Magazine. It hits especially close to home, considering my recent long disquisitions on intergenerational justice:

When I started blogging, I feared that it would prove a distraction from my scholarly research. What I did not anticipate was that it would actually trigger new research avenues. My interest in offshore outsourcing, for example, started when I posted a few items about it and received impassioned responses. By the time I decided to write an article on the topic for Foreign Affairs, I realized that I had unwittingly completed a fair amount of my research via my blog posts.

Done properly, blogging can be a form of initial research in both the empirical and theoretical realms. Empirically, blogging is similar to clipping news articles or gathering information about a case study. Theoretically, blogging permits one to play with ideas?and even better, to get instant (and candid) feedback from readers. The feedback effect on blogs is much quicker than more traditional presentations of new ideas in academia. Because of these comparative advantages, blogging is seeping into scholarship. Already, footnotes referencing individual blog posts are appearing in both legal opinions and public-policy briefs.

Drezner was among the first academics to take blogs seriously as a legitimate subject of scholarly research. So go read the whole thing, will you?

On the irrelevance of future persons

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

On the last line of his post, Will Wilkinson brings up a deeper problem with intergenerational justice:

The institutions chosen now don't simply determine how things will be for people later. They determine who will exist later. That makes everything incredibly confusing. We runs smack into metaphysics. Is existence a perfection? If next generation's worst off are the children of this generation's worst off, can we make next generation's worst off better off simply by sterilizing this generation's? Etc.

The following post is copied almost verbatim from the most recent revision of a paper I wrote on justice between generations. The discussion was prompted by Charles Larmore's misgivings about my treatment of future persons in my M.A. paper, and expanded while writing a review of Axel Gosseries' Penser la justice entre les générations: De l'affaire Perruche a la réforme des retraites (Éditions Flammarion, 2004).

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The "non-identity problem"—most famously discussed by Derek Parfit in Part Four of Reasons and Persons (Clarendon Press, 1984)—arises because many of our present actions will not only have an effect on the conditions of life of future persons, but will also determine who those persons will be. (Parfit 359) If the morality of our actions depends on their consequences on particular individuals (i.e. if it is identity-dependent), it becomes impossible to compare the effects of two different actions when two different people exist because of them. Axel Gosseries has recently proposed that the concept of harm entails a counterfactual comparison: the situation of the victim after the action that caused the harm must be worse than it would have been had the action not occurred. (Gosseries 52) Take a child with born with a genetic ailment, Gosseries argues. The handicap suffered by that child is intrinsically tied to her existence: the two possibilities given to her are to exist with the ailment or not to exist at all. Her handicap cannot be considered a harm without abusing the concept, as there is no counterfactual to which to compare her present state. (Gosseries 53-54) Her life could only count as a harm if it was absolutely bad, not at all worth living, if it fell "below a threshold of dignity, for example if it was made of nothing but atrocious suffering". (Gosseries 72-73, my translation)

From this, Gosseries concludes that our ordinary identity-dependent concept of harm cannot be applied to issues of intergenerational justice. (Gosseries 85) If we allow that future generations have claims against present ones, he argues, we must find a way around the non-identity problem. Given that attention that this problem has received in the literature on intergenerational justice it is not surprising that Gosseries should take up its discussion. But, we should ask, is it truly essential to an argument about intergenerational social justice that we address this issue? The answer to this question depends, to a great degree, on who we take to be the subject of justice. Rawls famously took the principles of social justice to apply to institutions, and not directly to individual action. In defining the subject of justice, Rawls says the that "the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society, or more exactly, the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation." (TJ, 6) He later adds that "the principles of justice for institutions must not be confused with the principles which apply to individuals and their actions in particular circumstances. These two kinds of principles apply to different subjects and must be discussed separately." (TJ, 47)

A result of Rawls's institutional account of justice is the shift from an identity-dependent concept of obligation, harm and benefit, to an identity-independent perspective that looks not to particular individuals but to what Rawls referred to as "relevant social positions." (TJ, 81f)

The primary subject of justice, as I have emphasized, is the basic structure of society. The reason for this is that its effects are so profound and pervasive, and present from birth. This structure favors some starting places over others in the division of the benefits of social cooperation. It is these inequalities which the two principles are to regulate. Once these principles are satisfied, other inequalities are allowed to arise from men's voluntary actions in accordance with the principle of free association. Thus the relevant social positions are, so to speak, the starting places properly generalized and aggregated. By choosing these positions to specify the general point of view one follows the idea that the two principles attempt to mitigate the arbitrariness of natural contingency and social fortune. ¶ I suppose, then, that for the most part each person holds two relevant positions: that of equal citizenship and that defined by his place in the distribution of income and wealth. (TJ, 82)

This "positional" perspective is not far from our everyday moral conceptions; most laws, for instance, are not written with specific, identifiable individuals in mind but rather in generic language which is not identity-dependent. We may not know whether Anna or Ben has bought the house on the corner but we can be sure that whoever is now the owner is equally obligated to pay taxes on the property.

The social position of a "future person" is a relevant starting place in society. It is also not entered into voluntarily, but results from the "arbitrariness of natural contingency and social fortune." There is no reason in Rawls's theory not to consider it relevant, or at least as a special case when discussing intergenerational justice. The benefit of this approach is to render the "non-identity problem" irrelevant. To contemplate harm to a future person, why must we identify the particular individual who will actually exist in the future? We need only point out that there will be at least one such individual in that relevant social position, i.e. that the category of "future person" will not be an empty set.

Saving Rawls Two: Chains of Claims

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Continued from a previous post.

If neither pre-existing obligations towards third parties, nor the motivational assumption, not some sort of "inter-generational categorical imperative" can provide a satisfactory solution to the problem of savings, are we left with no obligations towards future generations?

We are, I think, left without any grounding for duties of justice to future persons, but we may still have duties of justice with regards to them. The distinction between the two has been made famous (or infamous, whatever is your fancy) by Kant's dismissal of direct moral duties towards animals in the Lectures on Ethics.

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If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.

Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, translated and edited by P. Heath and J.B. Schneewind (Cambridge University Press, 1997) p. 240 quoted in Lori Gruen, "The Moral Status of Animals"

Similarly, we may have no obligations to persons who will not be alive within our lifetime, but have duties towards our contemporaries that necessarily take those future persons into account. As Robert figures out, this calls up a concept of transitive obligation. Thomas Pogge has argued for something like transitive obligations in his elucidation of Kant's theory of perpetual peace: "it is enough that [any two persons A and Z] be interdependent, i.e. that there be a chain of persons between them, such that all persons in the chain have intercourse with their respective neighbors." Thomas Pogge, "Kant's Theory of Justice", Kant-Studien 4 (79): 427 (1988)

But for transitive obligation to produce the relevant principles across time as well as across space we need to add certain "general facts" to the store of knowledge that the parties in the original position posess. Rawls wants those parties to come up with principles of justice knowing little more than that the circumstances of justice, especially the conditions of moderate scarcity and conflict of interests (TJ 119; see also §22 for the circumstances of justice). But these conditions alone don't give us principles across generations.

Fortunately (at least for those of us who want to find some such principles), these are not the only conditions that apply to all of human existence. I propose considering at least two other "general facts": The first is the fact of overlapping generational succession; at any given moment many persons born at different times coincide in a given society; they have different life expectancies; some of them will have coexisted with persons now dead, others will coexist with persons not yet born. The second is the fact of inevitable dependency; infants and the very old are inevitably dependent on other members of society (as are those who become disabled) and a measure of reciprocity would allow them to demand some support from the general society to which, in all fairness, they have, or will have, contributed. Persons in the original position would not be hard pressed to conclude that they will eventually come to rely on their younger contemporaries, who will in turn come to rely on those not yet born. And those not yet born will face the same predicament: they will be contemporaries with—and thus have direct obligations to—some of the younger persons now alive, who themselves will be contemporaries with others still further in the future. As persons in the original position don't know the age cohort to which they'll belong, they'll be sure to make reasonable provisions for the institutions of a just society to not only extend into the future, but be able to perpetuate itself under conditions at least as satisfactory as those currently in place.

Those situated further in the future could claim the same savings of those who immediately preceded them. But they could demand something further: that the previous generation had itself made a claim on those who, in turn, had come before, not only to secure its own (present) well being, but also the well being of those who would proximately follow them. If a generation threatened to disregard its obligations towards its remote descendants, it would disown not only those far in the future, but also the younger among its contemporaries, as these would suffer the proximate consequence of their negligence. As every generation can expect to occupy positions of dependency and production at different stages in its life history (and doesn't know which stage it presently occupies), each would choose principles acceptable to all citizens at every stage. (I believe that Norman Daniels recognized something like this in Am I my Parents' Keeper? An Essay on Justice between the Young and Old [Oxford University Press; 1988] Pp. 64-65.)

What this approach doesn't do is make intergenerational justice dependent on the decisions of previous generations. That, I believe, is a non-starter. In the first place, because it leads us into the Pleistocene, as Will complained; Rawls himself noted that "[p]revious generations have saved or they have not; there is nothing the parties can now do to affect that" (TJ 121). In the second, because it doesn't solve the problem of the inaplicability of the circumstances of justice, which makes the whole enterprise morally meaningful.

At the moment of choosing the principles of justice we look towards the future: what will future generations expect us to have taken into account by the time we come to rely on them. To some extent we look to the past disposition of our older contemporaries—did they take us into account when discussing public policy with older generations now departed?—but the actual rate of savings that they set is much less relevant to us than the reasonable expectations of the younger contemporaries of our younger contemporaries. That rate needn't be too high at all, depending on the economic institutions in place; but "saving" the institutions of a just society must involve, at least, not nuking half the world into oblivion.

One score and twenty seven years ago

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Today is my fourth wedding anniversary, so I thought I'd share the first known pictures of me and my then future wife. The date is February 1978. The place is Champigny, just outside of Paris. It's my third birthday and she's the only one invited. Who knew, twenty three years later...

UPDATE: Another photo from that same day.

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Saving Rawls

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Will Wilkinson doesn't understand Rawls's just savings principle. I don't blame him. The problem has vexed philosophers since at least Kant's time. I've read quite a bit on the matter and still don't have a clear solution to the problem.

¶ I proposed a solution here, which I have since revised. The current version of the argument is here, although I don't think it will be the last; I still have doubts about the permissibility of a pension system dependent on payroll taxes paid by the currently employed to the currently retired, but that's another topic.

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The first thing to point out is that Rawls's principle of just-savings applies to the selection of principles of justice, and specifically leads to a qualification on the difference principle. It doesn't directly mandate specific institutions, but only indicates that, whatever institutions are chosen, they must ensure that a suitable rate of savings be maintained from generation to generation. By savings, as Wilkinson observes, Rawls means more than a budget surplus; rather he extends the concept to the institutions of a just society and the gains of science and culture. If society is understood as a "fair system of cooperation" extending conceivably into eternity, than the institutions that ensure justice in that society ?whatever they might be? must be saved for posterity. Certainly Rawls sometimes equivocates between institutional choice and choice of principles, but the end-point of the discussion about savings is merely the addendum to the difference principle on TJ 252-53. (All references are to the Revised Edition.)

But the question is not so much "how?" but "why?" Rawls conception of society, after all, is dependent on the contractualist's idea of reciprocity, and generations far removed in time can't be expected to reciprocate in any direct sense. In fact, the usual formulation of the problem of justice between generations has started from this befuddlement:

What remains disconcerting about all this is firstly, that the earlier generations seem to perform their laborious tasks only for the sake of the later ones, so as to prepare for them a further stage from which they can raise still higher the structure intended by nature; and secondly, that only the later generations will in fact have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a whole series of their forefathers (admittedly, without any conscious intention) had worked without themselves being able to share in the happiness they were preparing. But no matter how puzzling this may be, it will appear as necessary as it is puzzling if we simply assume that one animal species was intended to have reason, and that, as a class of rational beings who are mortal as individuals but immortal as a species, it was still meant to develop its capacities completely.? (GS 8:20)

Immanuel Kant, ?Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose? in Kant: Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 44

I suspect that some of Wilkinson's doubts (and Rawls's incongruities) stem from the insistence?inherited from Kant?to look back to the hypothetical first generation and somehow pull them into the social contract. Thus Wilkinson objects to Rawls's principle that "[w]e can require the parties to agree to principles subject to the constraint that they wish all preceding generations to have followed the very same principles" (TJ 111) by asking whether,

[i]f I?m in generation 1, I ask how much I wish generation 0 to have saved. Oh, but then, generation 0 will have been less well-off than generation 1. So then I have to assume I am in generation 0. But then the problem reiterates until I need to assume that I?m in the Pleistocene. What rate of savings do I want?

The cause of this reasoning seems to me to lie on the tacit or express reliance on the premise "that the earlier generations seem to perform their laborious tasks only for the sake of the later ones" or, as Rawls puts it, that "[i]t is a natural fact that generations are spread out in time and actual economic benefits flow only in one direction. This situation is unalterable, and so the question of justice does not arise." (TJ 254) Let's call this the "single direction of benefits" assumption.

The other relevant assumption to Rawls's theory is the "present time of entry" assumption: since the original position is to serve as ?a natural guide to intuition? (TJ, 120), it should not be thought of as "a gathering of all actual or possible persons", but rather as the point of view of those who, not knowing to which age group they belong, are nonetheless aware that that they are presently alive and, when the veil of ignorance is lifted, will be part of the same society as other deliberants. (TJ, 118)

If I know that I will not be a potential future person, but am a living, breathing human being at the time that the principles of justice are chosen, I will probably not feel compelled to choose conservationist principles that cover more than three or four generations into the future. Affection falls off quickly after that, and I don't know whether my line of descendants will thrive or whether I wil even want descendants at all. So the principles of savings that I choose will be at best limited, as Jane English observed in a 1977 article.

Rawls tries to get around this problem in several ways. First, he proposes that persons in the original position might have obligations to third parties. But that won't work because the original position is designed as a procedure of construction of moral principle among persons that find themselved in the "circumstances of justice"; third-party obligations and duties cannot be derived from the circumstances of moderate scarcity, etc. (TJ, 119)

Rawls' second proposed solution introduces a special "motivational assumption" in the original position. The parties are supposed to care about at least one person in the next generation, and each person in the next generation is to be cared about by at least one person in the former. The result is that the parties in the original position are no longer treated as individuals, but as representatives of family lines. In deliberating, they seek to advance the interests of the present and future members of their line, not only of themselves. But this goes against Rawls's postulate of "mutual disinterestedness".

[T]he postulate of mutual disinterest in the original position is made to insure that the principles of justice do not depend upon strong assumptions. [...] A conception of justice should not presuppose, then, extensive ties of natural sentiment. (TJ, 111-12)

The last option, that "the parties to agree to principles subject to the constraint that they wish all preceding generations to have followed the very same principles" (TJ, 111) seems more promising. But ultimately, it risks doing away with the present time of entry assumption, or at least make that assumption inoperative. If we are to assume what past generations did or did not do, are we not putting ourselves in their posistion and, in a rhetorical reversal, bringing them into the original position? Future generations are still left out, but wasn't the future of the society what we were trying to protect in the first place?

But why should present generations care about the future, even if they take the past into account, if the circumstances of justice don't obtain between contemporaries and those who won't be born for many centuries? If the circumstances of justice don't obtain, that's the end of the game; no justice need apply. Only beneficience can keep us from fiddling while Rome burns. Après nous, le déluge!

Continued in a subsequent post.



UPDATE: I clipped the post so it wouldn't take up so much space on the home page. The content is unaltered.

Free legal advice

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

I doubt that any political theorists will get into much trouble under the libel law. After all, saying that someone is a Kantian constructivist when you know damn well that he's an Hare prescriptivist because he yelled it over the Palmer House bar at the last MPSA isn't exactly actionable. But still, Eugene Volokh's post on blogging libel insurance should be gratefully received as a genuine public service. And for us shysters, it's delightfully geeky to boot!

More fun from the Fund

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

There's blogging, there's photoblogging, and then there's I-just-got-a-new-book-blogging. You know how I feel about the Liberty Fund. Well, I just received my spanking-new copies of Althusius's Politica and Jouvenel's Sovereignty.

Now, I've been told that the mark of a good women's shoe is the beautiful lining of the inner sole. Well, the same applies to LF books: the inside cover of each paperback is not plain white like an average mass-produced pamphlet, but is printed in a pleasing color and stamped all over with the amagi inscription.

But it's not just quality. Sometimes LF is the only place to go; it has some pretty exclusive editions of major classics of political thought. As far as I know, theirs is the only available version of the Politica in English, and —as of July of this year— they'll have the best (and only) English edition of Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pacis in print. I had to print and bind my own Grotius from this heavily abridged online copy for my qualifying exam in political theory, so my feeble mind can hardly conceive of a three volume 1,350 page annotated version.

An anatomical interlude

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

I am busy, busy, busy working on my dissertation proposal and have been unforgivably neglecting my blogospheric responsibilities. But I ran into a quotation just now that begged to be shared, not because the image therein was at all new, but rather because the metaphor had been expanded by the speaker in a most useful way.

The well-balanced economist is a normal human being with his warm heart on the Left, his practical work-a-day hand on the Right, and his clear and thoughtful head in the Centre.

From James E. Meade's Banquet Speech upon receiving the 1977 Nobel Prize in Economics.

The Conservative Philosopher

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Just to show that I can be gracious even as I "cling[] to false ethical theories," here's a link to The Conservative Philosopher, which I take to be the yin to Left2Right's yang (or vice versa). I'm not too savvy on the who's-who of American conservatism, but I recognized John Kekes among the crowd.