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January 10, 2007
My Head...Blogging
I've got a BloggingHeads up with Will Wilkinson today arguing everything from smoking bans to minimum wage bills to why Libertarians are such airy-fairy philosophy types. Check it out.
January 10, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
Good God, Ezra, I'm totally impressed that you can sit so patiently when that gasbag is talking.
Posted by: Cattyinqueens | Jan 10, 2007 10:44:52 AM
It's weird that wildly popular proposals, which enjoy majority to supermajority report, are sops to "special interest groups" as far as Will is concerned. Sure, if 60% of the public could seriously be called a "special interest", you might be able to see the Democratic party as one big lobbying group.
Then again, when your political philosophy has to juggle numbers to claim even 13% support, maybe you think that the majority is a special interest.
Posted by: Nick | Jan 10, 2007 10:48:30 AM
You already lose when you accept the libertarian premises on things like smoking bans. Bars and restaurants are already regulated to an extreme extent; it's hardly like this is some new unprecedented violation of our private party rights. Regardless, America does not have a libertarian structure; it's a democracy (a federal republic, for the nitpickers, but a democracy on smaller scales). We have a list of inalienable rights, but beyond that, states and local municipalities can pass laws by democratic majority. There are zillions of these things from fire regulations to zoning restrictions. If you don't like them, then vote against them. If you lose the vote, well, that's a sacrifice you make for living in a democracy. Smoking, because of the second hand smoke issues (which can be quite serious for many people, asthmatics in particular) are a prime example of something that goes well beyond any issue of fundamental rights. Fatty food, on the other hand, at least directly only affects yourself, and so comes closer to the threshhold. I'd vote for smoking bans, myself, but against fatty food bans. (And labelling requirements for transfats, probably).
Posted by: Aaron Bergman | Jan 10, 2007 11:25:26 AM
I don't trust people with 'shifty eyes', and Wilkerson is the poster boy for that. He starts with his 'position' (I wouldn't degrade the word philosopy to saying he has one) and then searches for 'facts', (wildly shifting topics to distract from his 'gasbaggyness - borrowing cattyinqueens observation). He's the pure ideologue, personified. Exactly like the PNAC types, except different focus.
I'm surprised you engage with him, since ideologues never grant that they might be wrong about anything, and misdirect/oversimplify any position other than theirs.
I almost couldn't watch till the end since Will is so sure he is right that my skin was crawling. At one point he was talking over you for what seemed like an eternity - after he had said the same things about three times. What a putz. Was a shower available after that session?
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Jan 10, 2007 12:34:52 PM
Will's going to lose here for the same reason Nixon did, more or less--his lighting or cam or something has him pasty-looking.
Posted by: Sanpete | Jan 10, 2007 2:22:47 PM
I'd love to hear you two talk some more, with somewhat different rules (if there were any). Too much leaning into the arguments, talking at the same time, too little of either of you developing your thoughts. Might be better to let one of you lead the conversation, ask the questions or make his points, and then the other, but not both trying to lead and make your points at the same time. A good conversation is usually more like a waltz and less like the McLaughlin Group. Still requires a good partner, of course.
I'd like to hear more on what you see as the needless or at least mysterious libertarian attachment to philosophy and Will sees as the lack of a coherent philosophical basis for the liberal agenda. Those do seem to be the same phenomenon viewed differently. I've run into this before with libertarians, who I think try to be more deeply consistent than others. Whether they really are is a further question, as is how important the effort is. Will was implying that the lack of philosophical mooring leaves liberals to be swayed by whatever pressure group they align with. One question is whether that's worse than being swayed by a philosophy that's far from certain, which is pretty much the case with all controversial philosophy.
Posted by: Sanpete | Jan 10, 2007 3:16:44 PM
Parsimony is nice when your moral theory has it, which is why liberals make some attempt to justify our policies with deeper principles even if we don't have an axiomatic system describing what we believe like some libertarians aspire to, but what good is consistency if it's consistently wrong?
Ultimately, I think the highest ethics would "feel" like aesthetics. We looked at paintings and philosophers tried to discover what makes the paintings beautiful, devising ever more complicated and elaborate theories of beauty, eventually realizing that beauty is subjective and relative to the viewer, to the creator, to the culture in resides, and probably to everything else. But subjective doesn't mean arbitrary, imaginary, or made up--there's a real cognitive process going on inside the mind of someone who listens to a song they find beautiful, even if he or she has no way to "prove" the song is beautiful.
Nor can we objectively "prove" that any set of moral principles is valid. We have intuitions of justice just like intuitions of beauty, and we select principles by setting up situations to test whether the principle is compatible with our intuitions. ("Is it okay to kill one man and use his organs to save five lives?" Stuff like that.)
The danger is that intuition and prejudice are easily confused--maybe I only think universal health care is a good idea because I'm afraid I'll lose my health care. But if I have a "coherent philosophy", if my moral system is highly algorithmically compressible, then it's unlikely that such a theory would happen to say exactly what my prejudices would also say.
But algorithmic parsimony not only shields us from prejudice, it also shields us from intuition--at least it does if, as I suspect, those intuitions are of infinite complexity just like aesthetics. Maybe there is some theoretic way to separate "good' intuitions from prejudice--though that seems doubtful as moral intuition presumably evolved for pragmatic reasons. But I suspect that the noble effort to separate the ego from morality will be less a matter of intellect and deduction than a matter of humility and soul-searching--we will need kenosis rather than logos.
It's highly doubtful that modern liberalism is anything remotely like that highest ethics I'm talking about (not that I'm claiming I'd recognize it if I saw it!), but it's the best approximation of morality that I've got today, in the same way that a crayon smiley face was the best approximation of a human face I could draw as a toddler. We're just vaguely groping and experimenting to find the truth.
It's not at all unreasonable that universal basic health care in an affluent society is an "end", in the sense that I'm not going to accept any moral system that doesn't require that, in the same way that most people won't accept any system in which it's okay to kill someone to harvest their organs.
OTOH, it would be unreasonable for, say, social security benefits without means-testing to be an "end".
Posted by: Consumatopia | Jan 11, 2007 12:13:25 AM
Interesting thoughts, Consumatopia. Since morality is prescriptive in a way that aesthetics typically isn't (morality typically has some kind of objective or categorical claim, for example), but the intuitions are (I think) ultimately no more objective in basis (so there is no truth to discover in the object in the way we do in, say, geology), there is a problem trying to use intuitions the same way in both fields. Some who have grown suspicious of the reliance on intuition in moral theory refer to it as "intuition mongering." But it usually isn't entirely escaped by trying to get back to a more basic theory to stick to, both because that theory will be based on some intuitions (this is true of any theory with objective pretensions, at least), and because applying it will typically also require some intuitions. Really, if you're logically inclined and see intuitions as subjective, moral theory is a big mess. But, given that, I like the way you work out some of the issues, even if I'm inclined to think the most reliable morality eventually would abandon reliance on intuition except for a rough guide to use when in a hurry.
Posted by: Sanpete | Jan 11, 2007 1:06:17 AM
Do you know that guy personally? He was something.
Posted by: Lynn | Jan 11, 2007 1:49:04 AM
Morality must be prescriptive because that's what morality is--determining how one should lead one's life. What's in question is whether prescriptive means categorical. Most moral systems do have categorical/objective claims, but I tend to think that's more an artifact of convenience: we tend to use moral arguments to justify our own actions, especially when those actions compel or forbid the actions of other people. That's going to be way more convenient if there's something objective for me to use to compel your acceptance--something that's not a matter of opinion. But more convenient certainly doesn't mean more ethical, unless morality is nothing more than species convenience overcoming individual convenience.
I imagine aesthetics would seem more like ethics if we could only have one painting in the same way we only have one society. If the world were ending and we only had room for one painting in our space ark, you would probably hear a lot of categorical and objective claims made about how we decide which painting to take, arriving perhaps at something vaguely "universal" like Voyager's Golden Record. Conversely, if we could live in multiple societies our ethics would come to look like aesthetics, as perhaps they are already starting to in massively multiplayer virtual worlds.
Which makes me wonder--does practical necessity clarify and purify the good or does it obscure and corrupt it? The right answer to questions like that tends to be the most annoying and uncomfortable answer available, and in this case that would be "both".
I sympathize with those who are suspicious of "intuition mongers", because it is incredibly easy for intuitions to justify convenient evils, and psychology is filled with countless examples of intuitions outright contradicting the truth. But reliance on theory can itself be a convenient evil, one that I myself have fallen prey to--doubt and uncertainty are painful, and it's so much more comforting to be able to point to something outside myself as the source of my claim rather than take responsibility for it myself.
Thus the reliance on theory becomes something like the drunk looking for keys under the street light even though he lost his keys elsewhere because the light is better.
Posted by: Consumatopia | Jan 11, 2007 10:47:26 AM
Thus the reliance on theory becomes something like the drunk looking for keys under the street light even though he lost his keys elsewhere because the light is better.
Very true. And the intuitions aren't where the keys are either, in my view. Consider what they would be intuitions of. An objective moral reality we intuit? No more likely than an objective aesthetic reality we intuit when we view a painting. The intuitions are a complex result of innate and learned factors, but they're ultimately projections we make onto things, to the extent they have that objective feel (which they typically do). Given their subjectivity, there is no reason to heed them beyond whatever subjective reasons we might have, e.g., because we happen to care about justice, or we care about something that justice is the best means to. If it's really that way, then it makes more sense to regard morality as something we've constructed, though without realizing it, and that we can treat as something we make to suit our purposes. (J. L. Mackie, in a very good little book on ethics, says morality is made, not found.) While aesthetics is a useful analog in some ways, a fuller parallel might be made to politics, where we bring our own individual and shared ends together and try to make something coherent and useful out of them.
A problem with such an approach is that it isn't just a convenience in any small sense to treat morality as objective, as having some claim on us beyond what we put into it. When it's recognized as more like politics and no more, we don't feel the same kind of obligation, we don't feel that objective claim on us, or if we do, we recognize it as an illusion of sorts. That might well leave us with fewer and less effective reasons to be moral. That's one reason I'm ambivalent about moral intuitions and their objective feel. Might be better on the whole to not challenge their authority as a whole, and not try to be so logical about it that we reason ourselves into a less morally successful culture, and thus presumably a less successful culture according to our desires.
does practical necessity clarify and purify the good or does it obscure and corrupt it?
I agree that it's both. We can see how the practical process of politics does both.
Posted by: Sanpete | Jan 11, 2007 4:27:43 PM
It's my view that all creation is discovery, and therefore even constructed things can be revelatory. We constructed it, but the fact that we were caused to construct this thing rather than another thing may reveal some fact about the universe.
Subjective doesn't necessarily mean unreal. The subjective experience of consciousness is real, even if it seems completely unreachable to external, objective analysis.
Without some kind of moral realism to intuitions, all morality is left with is pragmatism. Which means that even if intuitions are just brain artifacts, moral arguments still have to spend more time talking about empirical outcomes than worrying about logical coherence and parsimony--they become nothing more than useful heuristics. And moral intuitions are still worth paying attention to--even without moral reality, they still may be based on useful genetic and memetic adaptations.
Posted by: Consumatopia | Jan 11, 2007 5:38:35 PM
True enough. How recognizing them as subjective will affect their hold on us still bothers me, though. There's some of that "if God is dead then all is permitted" problem here.
Posted by: Sanpete | Jan 11, 2007 5:53:06 PM
That could be a problem. From my standpoint, subjective means unknowable or intractable rather than false or unintelligible. I think that changes the dead God problem completely--the lack of moral certainty is a strong component of thinking among both religious and secular pacifists, for they could never be certain that the enemy was not right.
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