Category: Philosophy

I found this fascinating:

If indeed my observation that ethicists hardly write short papers is correct, this might say something problematic about us. For example, that we are less sure of ourselves than other philosophers, and thus feel that we have to go on and on. Or that there is a pro-length bias in the guidance we give to our students; or in accepting ethics papers for publication. Or that the subject makes people feel that they always have to (pretend to) be very serious, because morality is such a grave topic. Or even that ethicists simply tend to have less fun. A while ago Mike Otsuka posted here asking about funny titles for ethics papers, and we all found it hard to find examples.

OK people, the challenge is upon you: what are some funny titles for possible ethics papers?  All of my thoughts in this direction are non-funny, such as "A Good Start," or "Here’s Why None of My Papers Have an Abstract."

For the pointer I thank Saul Smilansky.

It’s Sir Thomas Browne, one of my favorite writers I might add, circa 1672:

Again, Their individual imperfections being great, they are moreover enlarged by their aggregation; and being erroneous in their single numbers, once hudled together, they will be Error it self. For being a confusion of knaves and fools, and a farraginous concurrence of all conditions, tempers, sexes, and ages; it is but natural if their determinations be monstrous, and many waies inconsistent with Truth. And therefore wise men have alwaies applauded their own judgment, in the contradiction of that of the People; and their soberest adversaries, have ever afforded them the stile of fools and mad men; and, to speak impartially, their actions have made good these Epithets.

You’ll find the full passage here.  The point resembles Bryan but there is something about the spirit which reminds me more of Robin.  It’s one of my favorite pastimes to find passages in early texts which in some way presage Robin Hanson; this means having to reread Gulliver’s Travels every now and then.  By the way, the Burial Urn and the Garden of Cyrus are probably Browne’s most compelling works.

On the plane I was reading Stanislaw Lem’s famous essay on personoretics.  It occurred to me that if we are living in a simulation we can make Bayesian inferences about the intentions of the designer.  Let’s say many designers are creating many simulations.  Will the good or the evil designers be more productive in terms of numbers of simulations created?  If we define "good" as subject to some ethical constraints, I believe the good designers work under a competitive disadvantage.  It’s harder to produce cheap apples, for instance, if you pledge to do so only in a "green" way.  And so on.  Oddly the evil designers may be under a competitive disadvantage as well.  Intention has a cost and so in competitive settings it tends to fall out.  In our current world most things are made by indifferent machines.  I believe the rational inference about the simulation is that at least the demi-urge — and possibly the Master Creator as well — is indifferent to our plight.

Leif Wenar says yes:

You very likely own stolen goods. The gas in your car, the circuits in your cell phone, the diamond in your ring, the chemicals in your lipstick or shaving cream – even the plastic in your computer may be the product of theft. Americans buy huge quantities of goods every day that are literally stolen from some of the world’s poorest people.

…The very worst countries – the “sevens” – are places like Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Taking these very worst countries as the places where the people could not possibly be authorizing the dictators and civil warriors to sell off their country’s resources, we can measure the amounts of stolen resources that enter America each year. By these official U.S. criteria over 600 million barrels of oil–more than one barrel in eight – have been taken illegitimately from their countries of origin. Stolen oil may be in your car’s gas tank right now. Stolen oil might have been used to make the computer mouse in your hand.

That’s Leif Wenar, here is more.  He proposes suing Exxon to create a chain reaction, thereby lowering the value of dictatorial seizures of natural resources and perhaps preventing them.  I’m sure the Chinese are on board.  But no — read further: we must sue them too.  After all, their cheap toys are made with stolen oil.

JKottke, a loyal MR reader, asks:

Is taking a photo or video of an event for later viewing worth it, even
if it means more or less missing the event in realtime? What’s better,
a lifetime of mediated viewing of my son’s first steps or a one-time
in-person viewing?

If you take photos you will remember the event more vividly, if only because you have to stop and notice it.  The fact that your memories will in part be "false" or constructed is besides the point; they’ll probably be false anyway.  In other words, there’s no such thing as the "one-time in-person viewing," it is all mediated viewing, one way or the other.  Daniel Gilbert’s book on memory is the key source here.

Furthermore you don’t need the later viewing for the photo or video to be worthwhile.  It’s all about organizing your memories in the form of narratives and that is what cameras help us do, if only by differentiating the flow of events into chunkier blocks of greater discreteness. 

A photo that requires retakes might be more effective than a photo you get right the first time.

Personally, I take pictures of Yana only when she tells me to, which I might add is often.  I’ve never owned a camera, but for most people I recommend the photos. 

By the way here are 21 ways to take better photographs.

Zack writes to me:

You’re in an airport, about to go through the security line. You sneeze, which delays you by two seconds. It doesn’t just delay you by two seconds, though; it also delays everyone waiting in line behind you. And everyone who will show up while the people currently in line haven’t gone through yet. In fact, if you assume that the queue is never empty, which even at 3 in the morning is true for the major airlines, we’re talking about arbitrarily large quantities of wasted time.

I believe that airport queues do eventually empty out, if only at 4 a.m., so is there any setting where this result might hold?  And if so, what is your obligation to produce infinitely good outcomes, say by cutting off your nose?  On the philosophical side, you might find this debate relevant.  By the way, here is Zack on ranking the babies.

To think more objectively, become less allied.

That is Robin Hanson, the rest of the post is interesting as well.  Don’t forget that: "people ignore info more when they feel powerful."

I also like this (older) sentence from Megan Non-McArdle:

Once you believe your opponents are disproportionately powerful liars, you have completed the Devil Shift.

Here is more.

Let’s say a bunch of poor kids all pay to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball.  Wilt gets the money, the kids get to see the game.  At the end of the day Wilt is richer and the kids are poorer.  Since we wouldn’t object to any one of these transactions, why should we object to the resulting pattern?  Robert Nozick went further and argued that any "pattern-based" notion of justice would require continual and unjustified interference in personal liberties.  That was one of the most famous claims in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia; here is another summary of the argument. 

I’m all for the NBA but I’ve never been overwhelmed by this approach.  I agree that there is "nothing unjust" about the Chamberlain outcome but still perhaps we can do better in consequentialist terms.  Nozick’s argument defeats egalitarian leveling but does it really refute, say, mildly progressive taxation?  What if we could tax Wilt a bit and make life much better for the kids?  Without invoking public choice skepticism about government (which indeed is important), what’s so bad about that?  Is it morally wrong?  Wilt is still quite free and we get some social good in return.

I’m usually skeptical of moral arguments that don’t confront the question of "at what margin" straight up.  I will, however, buy this (abbreviated) argument:

1. A doctor is not required to devote his entire life, or even a part of it, to helping poor kids in Africa, even if he could create greater good by doing so.  Personal autonomy matters.

2. The right to keep the product of your labor — money! — is a big part of autonomy, even though it is not always recognized as such.

3. Barring end-of-the-civilized-world exigencies, no one should be forced to part with more than a certain percentage of his or her income, even when valuable public goods are at stake.  There is, after all, no end to good ideas for redistribution, not the least of which is the helicopter drop to Malawi.  We all draw the line somewhere, so it’s not enough to cite benevolence to defeat the claims of property rights and the demand for low taxes.

4. Adhering to such a percentage rule will have desirable consequentialist properties, given the public choice problems with government behavior.  Thus a kind of consilience supports this moral view.

That all said, I do not believe we have a very clear or very scientific answer as to what the right percentage is.  Furthermore "the proper percentage" is likely contingent upon historical circumstances.  I take that as representing a partial — but only partial — endorsement of Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument and of course I reject the deontological ("just don’t!") nature of Nozick’s approach altogether.

Warning to extreme libertarians: Don’t even try to argue that zero is the maximum permissible rate of taxation.  Would you abolish all taxation today, immediately, if it meant a rapid collapse into social chaos?

Warning to social democrats: You are used to citing beneficience arguments to argue for raising taxes.  But you reject beneficence arguments yourself, when you refuse to step into the shoes of Peter Singer and call for even more redistribution.  I want to make you feel guilty about this tension.  What you’d like to do is dismiss Singer with a separate argument and then turn your fire to the anti-tax types and feel that beneficence is always on your side.  It isn’t. 

Here is my earlier post on Nozick’s experience machine.  Here is Will Wilkinson with more on Rawls.  Going back to our earlier discussion, Ross Douthat has provided an excellent discussion of notable conservative books.  I am a big fan of Nozick’s book although a) I don’t consider it "conservative," and b) I like the obscure sections best, such as the discussion of anarchy and government in the first part.

I liked these ones:

The true poet reanimates in his work, in abbreviated form, the complete history of poetry.

The rose: how can it be naked and clothed, all at the same time?

In order to read many books, buy just a few.

I am humble among the serious, proud among the vain.

Here is a brief biography.  Here are more of his aphorisms.

The Difference Principle is not so much excessively risk-averse as excessively jerry-rigged.  OK, we can’t aggregate as utilitarians but then we resort to some notion of primary goods with intersubjective validity.  OK, the size of the worst-off group is itself endogenous to the contractarian process.  But just how big is that group supposed to be?  Can it be 99 percent of society?  OK, people behind the veil don’t know their particular identities, but just how "thin" is their knowledge supposed to be?  And must their choices be purely self-interested?  All these criticisms are well-known.  You might try to shore up Rawls on any one of these points but the entire apparatus is simply too wobbly. 

The bottom line is that you can’t get lexical orderings out of a moral theory unless you build them in upfront.  And without lexical orderings, well, Rawls, like many illustrious minds before him, does not succeed in
sidestepping the dirty mess of aggregation.  The critical moral question is how we should compare the interests of some people to others in a real world setting; don’t expect to find an easy way out of that one. 

Rawls’s Principle of Equal Liberty is if anything on weaker ground than the Difference Principle.  Equal Liberty?  Who says?  At what margin?  At what cost?  Lexicality can’t plug all the leaks in this shaky boat, and no it can’t save Robert Nozick either.

The biggest problem is simply why the imaginary agreement behind the veil of ignorance should have moral force.  Now I like preferences as much as the next guy, but imaginary preferences take me only so far.  That is just one piece of information in a much broader comparison of plural values.  I’m not even sure that imaginary preferences should override the very real preferences of very real people in very particular situations.  Why should they?  "Fairness" is just one value of many.

I read Rawls as a very very smart and intellectually honest guy, determined to resurrect Kant, avoid the aggregative problems of consequentialism, and move at least one step beyond Sidgwick.  He knew how hard it was to even attempt such a success and he makes all the requisite moves to get us there, albeit without, in the final analysis, squaring the circle. 

Matt Yglesias adds commentary; he notes, correctly, that for the current Left Rawls doesn’t offer such an inspiring vision.  I’ll put it this way: if you have to work that hard to establish "Sweden is great," you should be spending more money on plane tickets.

Just to clarify, there are at least three Rawls doctrines: "Justice as Fairness," TJ, and Political Liberalism.  I like the first one best, but won’t cast my lot with any of the three.  At the end of the day I come away thinking that it is Sidgwick (and
maybe Kierkegaard?) who is the central moral theorist of the last two
centuries.

If I don’t fly from London to my sister’s
wedding in New Zealand she will be upset, I will cause her pain and so
that’s morally bad. If I do fly to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand I
will put about four tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which
will contribute to climate change, which, according to the World Health
Organisation, already causes about 150,000 deaths every year. Clearly
that’s also morally bad. Which is the morally correct thing to do?

That question is considered by Will Wilkinson.  Don’t argue the facts of carbon emissions (you can choose another scenario if you wish), focus on the moral dilemma.  Will says fly, the plane is going anyway.  That makes my brain hurt with game theory and the probability of threshold effects and triggers.  (Isn’t there some chance that your patronage, eventually, sets another flight in motion, if only stochastically?)  Under an alternative approach, say you are allowed some quota of carbon emissions; otherwise suicide or residence in Iceland as a pedestrian would be required.

Your net carbon impact depends far more on the number of children you will have than any other variable; remember good environmentalism uses a zero rate of discount.  So people with no biological children should be allowed to fly a lot and people with lots of biological children should not get to fly so much at all.  Is that so far from the reality we observe?

Here is a good new piece on our carbon footprints.

A few days ago I was in a London taxicab when I noticed a possibly expensive purse in the seat next to me.  I climbed out of the cab and without much thought (shame on me) gave it to the driver.  I explained someone had left it there.  Of course I was intent on treating the driver like a decent human being.  But wait, I know I am honest and maybe he isn’t.  But wait, maybe I couldn’t have gotten the purse to the woman very easily.  But wait, I could have posted notice on this blog and had you help me track her down.  But wait, isn’t it my obligation to simply leave the woman no worse off than she was in the first place?  But wait, what is the default point for defining "in the first place"?  But wait, what would the driver have thought if he saw me taking the purse out of his cab?  But wait, isn’t a purse really really important?  But wait, what if the purse belonged to the driver?

If you get up late in the morning on weekends, you must think sleep is very valuable.  And if sleep is very valuable, that means we should go to bed early.  Because if you go to bed early, you always have the option of sleeping later — that is sleeping more — and getting even more sleep than if you had gone to bed late.  (You can’t just shift your sleep into any hours block you want, given the coordination issues.)  And if sleep is very valuable, the option to sleep more must be valuable as well.  Therefore it’s time to go to bed.  Now.  Early.

No response was forthcoming.  The argument, of course, gets at whether "sleep" or "postponement" enters the utility function as the final good.  There are some economic papers on procrastination, but overall postponement, or for that matter its closely allied cousin "preemption," is an understudied topic in economics.

The Atlantic Monthly had an interesting story on why women should settle for "Mr. Good Enough."  Eugene Volokh had some insightful comments.  I am sympathetic to the idea of modest expectations but I don’t favor cheerleading for settling.  More precisely I worry about The Paradox of the Underrated (is Shawn Marion still underrated?  Nope, and by the way Phoenix had nothing to lose from that deal).  If this article talks you into the prospect of settling, settling will start to seem pretty good to you.  If your expectations were too high in the first place you’ll keep your old set of unrealistic expectations (personalities and pathologies don’t change so quickly) and simply apply them to a new option, namely a marriage to a dullard.  "Settling" works best when you are stuck on a desert island and you do not expect so much from your surrender to the inevitable.  The AM article would do more good if it tried to convince people how terrible settling would be.  You just have to plant the idea in people’s minds, as they’ll make their own decisions anyway.

In other words, "have modest expectations — it will be great for you!!!" can’t really be winning advice.

The always-interesting Gretchen Rubin offers up this one-minute movie.  I take the point to be that we under-appreciate the routine time we spend with our family and friends.  Cherishing this time would give us better lives, it would seem.  But why is this time so hard to cherish properly?  Don’t we want better lives?  Are we passing up a free lunch?

In the movie the little girl says that she loved that time with her mother, namely doing the routines of taking the bus.  The routines are an investment in later good memories.

Are our memories determined by the value of the average bus trip, or by the value of the marginal bus trip?  (Of course to some extent it is a weighted average of both.)  I suspect the fun of the marginal trip weighs fairly heavily in our backward-looking assessment of our routines.  Most of the bus trips don’t get noticed or perhaps they are even a drag.  But whenever the pressures of the day occasionally slacked off, and the mother had more time with her daughter, that time seemed so wonderful.

So if you want good memories, should you make sure you don’t spend too much time with your kids?  If I ate chicken in mole sauce every day my memories of it wouldn’t be so special.  (Perhaps we measure peaks rather than computing the area under the integral?)  But now the making and tasting of the mole stands as an occasion to remember.  High total value equals low marginal value and perhaps poor memories.  Low total value equals high marginal value and better memories.  Of course if your total time with your kids is truly low, they will hate you and your marginal time with your kids will be crummy as well.