Category: Philosophy
What is theft?
Chris Hartman does a fill in the blank exercise on Google — "_______ is theft?" — and reports this:
It's #2 that warms my heart. Of course you'll note that it's publishers who appear on this list four times.
Addendum: Chris reports some additional results.
*The Rational Optimist*, the new Matt Ridley book
The subtitle is How Prosperity Evolves and you can buy it here. The book is due out in May. Excerpt:
In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls "bubble-up" evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order generated by an invisible hand of individual transactions, not the product of a top-down determinism. I have tried to show that, just as sex made biological evolution cumulative, so exchange made cultural evolution cumulative and intelligence collective, and that there is therefore an inexorable tide in the affairs of men discernible beneath the chaos of their actions. A flood tide, not an ebb tide.
This book will be adored by fans of Julian Simon. Ridley is an optimist about the year 2100 and one of the final sections considers whether Africa and climate change will be exceptions to the generally optimistic trends.
From the comments (at EconLog)
The last words of Socrates (according to Plato)
Shortly before dying, Socrates spoke his last words to Crito saying, "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt."
Here is one relevant link.
Critique of transhumanism
Here is one sample point:
First, that the Enlightenment project of Reason to which many transhumanists are committed is self-erosive and requires nonrational validation. Transhumanist advocates for Bayesianism and transcending cognitive biases need to confront the repeated implosions of the religion of Reason into romanticism and mysticism, and develop more sophisticated and nuanced defenses of rationality.
And this:
…while most transhumanists are liberal democrats, their Enlightenment beliefs in human perfectibility and governance by reason can also validate technocratic authoritarianism. Even staunchly libertarian transhumanists appear to be blithely unaware that arguments for government by benign superintelligent beings that know human interests better than we do recapitulate arguments for totalitarianism from the French Revolution through Marxist-Leninism.
Etc. I thank Kyle Munkittrick for the pointer. Here is my previous post on transhumanism.
The trials of Tony Judt
This is an excellent piece, excerpt:
The standing ovation was tremendous. "I was initially shocked by the disjunction between his intellectual capacity, which is completely undiminished and in many respects unequaled, and the physical degradation," says Richard Wolin, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who was in the audience. "But after five minutes, I lost sight of any physicality and focused on his words and their importance." He adds, "It was one of the most moving scenes I have ever witnessed."
Here is my previous post on Tony Judt.
The economics of advice
At times I believe the following propositions, in appropriately qualified fashion:
1. You don't know what a person really thinks until you hear his or her advice. Along these lines, if you really want to know what a person thinks, ask for advice and he or she will open up.
2. In philanthropy there is a saying: "Ask for money and you will get advice. Ask for advice and you will get money."
3. There are many exacting scholars who should be locked in a room, asked for advice of various kinds, and forced to speak into a tape recorder with no edits allowed. The advice-giving mode mobilizes insights which otherwise remain dormant, perhaps for fear of falsification or ridicule or of actually influencing people. All of the transcripts should be put on The Advice Website, with an open comments section, to limit the actual influence of the advice. Some famous people would be revealed as foolish in critical regards. The contents would be most interesting as non-advice and the site would carry a government warning that the advice is not to be taken seriously.
4. Often we do not trust people until we hear their advice. We suspect in any case that they wish to control us, and until we know what they have in mind, we remain wary. Sometimes it is necessary to give advice — even pointless advice — to establish trust.
These remarks are not intended to apply to medical or clinical advice.
Here is Bryan Caplan, offering direct advice to his colleagues (an excellent post). Brett Arends questions whether you should take advice from people who write for a living.
Unethical vs. “unethical”?
None of the funky clothing or art is priced, either. Mata says she knows it's "unethical," but she sizes people up and names a price that she thinks fits the client.
The link is here and I thank Jeremy Shown (rhymes with clown) for the pointer.
Cato dialog on Tom Palmer’s new book
Here is a YouTube of Tom Palmer presenting his new book, with yours truly commenting, at the Cato Institute. David Boaz summarizes part of my comment. Here is my previous post on Tom's new book and the book, Realizing Liberty, is available for purchase on-line, Tom points us to this podcast of him criticizing me; his comment reflects some of the differences in our points of view.
One question in the dialog was to what extent an adherence to liberty — at the level of an entire polity — is likely to be culturally specific. I see pro-liberty ideas as more likely to be Anglo-American than Tom does or at least more northwestern European. It is for this reason, I think, that he favors free immigration whereas I, although very pro-immigration relative to the political debate, favor legal limits in many cases, including the United States, Switzerland, and Iceland.
A second question is to what extent ideas about liberty can be supported without encouraging "the paranoid style" in American politics. Too often advocacy of individual liberty ends up bundled with the paranoid style of reasoning and overly simple good vs. evil narratives. I have yet to see a good explanation for why.
Overall I am more suspicious of "ideology" than is Tom. He sees ideology as having driven many very beneficial social movements, such as the abolition of slavery. I accept that point but still fear that ideological reasoning is likely to end up biased away from an emphasis on abstract concepts. That will mean ideology is often useful for ending very concrete social injustices, but that ideology is unlikely to bring people to a deep understanding of "better economics," especially when the distinction between the seen and unseen is important. The strongest ideologies also tend to be nationalistic.
The limits of good vs. evil thinking
Good vs. evil thinking causes us to lower our value of a person's opinion, or dismiss it altogether, if we find out that person has behaved badly. We no longer wish to affiliate with those people and furthermore we feel epistemically justified in dismissing them.
Sometimes this tendency will lead us to intellectual mistakes.
Take Climategate. One response is: 1. "These people behaved dishonorably. I will lower my trust in their opinions."
Another response, not entirely out of the ballpark, is: 2. "These people behaved dishonorably. They must have thought this issue was really important, worth risking their scientific reputations for. I will revise upward my estimate of the seriousness of the problem."
I am not saying that #2 is correct, I am only saying that #2 deserves more than p = 0. Yet I have not seen anyone raise the possibility of #2. It very much goes against the grain of good vs. evil thinking: Who thinks in terms of: "They are evil, therefore they are more likely to be right."
(Which views or goals of yours would you behave dishonorably for? Are they all your least correct views or least important goals? With what probability? Might it include the survival of your children?)
I do understand that this line of reasoning can be abused: "The Nazis went to a lot of trouble, etc." The Bayesian point stands.
Another example of misleading good vs. evil thinking stems from the budget. Many people believe:
3. "If the Republicans win, they will irresponsibly cut taxes and do nothing real to control spending." You may have even seen this view in the blogosphere.
One response to this is 4. "We should ensure that the Republicans do not win and criticize them every chance possible."
An alternative response is 5. "Sooner or later the Republicans will in fact win and I cannot prevent that. Right now the Democrats should spend less money, given the truth of #3. In this regard the Republicans, although evil, are in fact correct in asking the Democrats to spend less money, if only to counterbalance their own depravity."
I do not see many people entertaining #5. #5 implies that a group judged as dishonest should be granted some probability of speaking the truth on an important issue. (Nor will pro-Republicans be attracted to a claim which portrays their group as dishonest.) Note also that by accepting #5 you are admitting and partially accepting the ability of the Republicans to "out-game" the Democrats. That makes #5 even harder to accept.
Again, I am not asking you to buy #2 and #5 outright. I am simply suggesting they have a higher "p" than many people are willing to grant them. And that is because we are accustomed to judging the truth of a claim by the moral status of the group making the claim.
On Bryan Caplan’s ethical intuitionism
Bryan offers the most extensive version of his view I've seen him blog. On overall method and meta-ethics, I'm not so far from Bryan (and someday he will get a post in praise of him). But I usually disagree with his applications of the method. For instance he seems to argue that because employees are allowed to discriminate against employers, we should allow for a reciprocal right of employer discrimination.
My first objection is that we cannot judge an argument like this outside of a particular historical context. In some cases employer discrimination rights may be fine, in others not. I don't think ethical intuitionism, as could be represented by abstract reasoning from analogy. can do the hard work here. Rather we must look to the history to understand the meaning and long-term effects of the discriminatory act under question. In some cases the discrimination is effectively perpetuating a regime of evil and thus it is morally wrong.
Here is another part of Bryan's argument:
Suppose A and B be are dating. A has an equally good outside option.
B can't bear to live without A. A therefore has some bargaining power
– vastly more than most employers, in fact. Yet almost everyone thinks
it would be wrong to force A to stay with B.
If there is one intuition that many reasonable people have, it is that family and personal relationships are not, in moral terms, exactly like commercial or work place relationships. I get nervous when I see ethical intuitionists serve up simple analogies across these various realms. (In general I think Bryan creates too much license for analogical reasoning of this kind.) This is also why I am not convinced by all of the arguments in Steve Landsburg's Fair Play.
My overall view is that ethical intuitionism settles many fewer issues than most of its proponents like to think. That said, there is often nowhere else to go. We somehow need to come to terms with two propositions at the same time:
1. We need to think more rather than less ethically.
2. The content of ethical philosophy tells us less, in reliable terms, than most people would like to believe.
Benton’s smoky ham and bacon
It's equal to the best I've had, including what I've sampled in Spain. (I've also had especially fine ham in Slovenia.) You can read about it and order it here. It ships without incident or loss of value. It's what David Chang uses in Momofuku and its affiliated restaurants, by the way. It's not even very expensive.
Speaking of animal products, a few of you asked me a while ago how the eating of animals could possibly be morally justified. My primary objection is to how we treat animals while they are alive, especially in factory farms. The very rise and continuing existence of humanity is based on the widespread slaughter and extinction of other large mammals, not to mention other animals as well. I'm not saying we should feel entirely comfortable with that, but rather a "non-aggression" stance toward other animals simply isn't possible, short of repudiating all of human civilization, even in its more primitive versions. Everyone favors the murder of animals for human purposes, although different people draw the lines at different places. I don't know of any good foundationalist approach to these issues, but at the very least we should be nicer to non-human animals at the margin and less willing to torture them.
At the policy level we should tax meat more heavily and regulate farms more strictly, for both environmental reasons and reasons of animal welfare. I draw a line at where the life of the animal is "not worth living," but for me animal slaughter is not immoral per se.
There are a few things you can do personally, including:
1. Buy less from factory farms.
2. Eat better meat and in turn eat less meat, substituting quality for quantity. This is a common demographic pattern, so it shouldn't be too hard to mimic.
If you are a vegetarian, I think that is excellent. If you're not, Benton's is a step toward both #1 and #2.
The Big Questions
In The Big Questions, Steven Landsburg ventures far beyond his usual domain to take on questions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Beginning with Plato, mathematicians have argued for the reality of mathematical forms. Rene Thom, for example, once said "mathematicians should have the courage of their most profound convictions and thus affirm that mathematical forms indeed have an existence that is independent of the mind considering them." Roger Penrose put it more simply, mathematical abstractions are "like Mount Everest," they are, he said, "just there."
All this must make Steven Landsburg history's most courageous mathematician because for Landsburg mathematical abstractions are not like Mount Everest, rather Mount Everest is a mathematical abstraction. Indeed, for Landsburg, it's math all the way down – math is what exists and what exists is math, A=A.
Read the book for more on this view, which is as good as any metaphysics that has ever been and a far sight better than most. Moreover, Landsburg's view is not empty, it does have real implications. Since there is no uncertainty in math, for example, Landsburg's view supports a hidden variables or multiple-worlds view of quantum physics.
Speaking of quantum physics, The Big Questions, has the clearest explanation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that I have ever read. In fact, this is a necessary consequence of Landsburg's metaphysical views; since it's all math all the way down, the explanation of the uncertainty principle is the explanation of the math and any true uncertainty or mystery is simply a fault of our own misunderstanding.
Turning to epistemology, the theory of beliefs and knowledge, two chapters stand out for me. I learned a lot from Landsburg remarkable clear explanation of Aumann's agreement theorem–and I say that despite the fact that in the office next to mine is Robin Hanson, one of the world's experts on the theorem (see Robin's papers on disagreement and also his paper with Tyler, but read Landsburg first!).
Landsburg's skills of explanation are also brought to bear in a wonderful little chapter explaining the theory of instrumental variables and of structural econometric modeling – and this from an avowedly armchair economist!
Finally for those, like me, who loved The Armchair Economist and More Sex is Safer Sex there is also lots of economics in The Big Questions. Highly recommended.
Questions that are rarely asked: the Wikipedia paradox
Michael Nielsen has two of them:
Question 1: What’s the most notable subject that’s not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia?
Let’s assume for now that this question has an answer (“The Answer”), and call the corresponding subject X. Now, we have a second question whose answer is not at all obvious.
Question 2: Is subject X notable merely by being The Answer?
Do you see where this is headed? Must Wikipedia include everything? There is more analysis at the link and note that the more these questions are asked, the more likely we encounter a paradoxical answer:
…suppose I went to great trouble to convene a conference series on The Answer, was able to convince leading logicians and philosophers to take part, writing papers about The Answer, convinced a prestigious journal to publish the proceedings, arranged media coverage, and so on. The Answer would then certainly have exceeded Wikipedia’s notability guidelines!
I wonder, as do you, whether this notoriety extends in transitive fashion to the seventeenth round of deciding who or what is the marginally deserving entry: "Well, you're not really notable, or even close, but all the others who were marginal became famous through the process of having had their lack of fame debated. Mick Jagger now invites you to his party." Not!
At some point these people under debate, once there are enough of them, all turn into a big group of Wikipedia nobodies.
Ayn Rand
With two new biographies being covered in all the major newspapers, The Daily Show, and elsewhere, Ayn Rand is in the news. Yet all of the reviews that I have seen have focused on her personal life rather than her ideas. Nearly five years ago Tyler and I both wrote on Rand’s ideas on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her birth. It seems like a good time to reprise. Here is my post with links.
—
Here, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, are some thoughts on Ayn Rand. See also Tyler’s post and Bryan Caplan’s excellent series (links.)
It used to be commonly said that “Until Robinson Crusoe is
joined by Friday there is no need for ethics on a desert island.” Rand replied that it was on a desert island
that ethics was most needed because on a desert island you cannot free ride on
the virtues of others; if you are to survive you must yourself exercise the
virtues of rationality, independence, and productiveness. As her reply indicates, Rand was an exponent
of virtue ethics,
the Greek/Aristotelian idea that ethics is about how one should live. Indeed, although she does not get much
credit, Rand is the most prominent and lucid, contemporary exponent of virtue ethics.
I think Rand’s version of virtue ethics is compelling
because it is explicitly modern – where the recent literature still sometimes seems to focus
on the virtues required of a Greek olive grower, Rand’s virtue ethics is post
industrial-revolution, a virtue ethics for the capitalist world.
If ethics is about the virtuous man then politics is about
the social requirements for the virtuous man to exist (the modern literature
lags behind Rand in connecting ethics and politics). One can understand Rand’s novels as an
extended disquisition on virtue ethics and the political and social requirements
necessary to practice such an ethics. In particular, she argued that rights, a legal concept creating a protected sphere for
independent action, were a necessary condition to live a life of virtue.
One need not buy Rand’s deductive argument that laissez-faire
capitalism is the sine-qua-non of ethical action to appreciate her insights
connecting the good man and good woman with the good society. Relatedly, I do think that Rand was absolutely right to say that capitalism requires a moral
defense. Moreover, the only plausible defense must involve the virtue of
selfishness. It is all too obvious that
capitalism promotes and rewards self-interest and, Mandeville nothwithstanding, no defense which simply
excuses this fact will succeed.
Rand’s language hasn’t done much to advance her case and
indeed it has obscured areas where her insights are now widely accepted. Today, for example, you can find many books
attacking the evil of altruism. Surprised? Of course, the books
don’t use those terms, instead they call it the problem of codependency (or
some other such). Relatedly, it’s no
accident that Hillary Clinton was once an avid Randian (recall her political
career started with Barry Goldwater) because Rand
is an important feminist. Rand’s
portrayal of strong, independent, intelligent women is coming to be recognized
as a landmark in fiction but in addition Rand’s attacks on self-sacrifice have
special meaning in a culture that has long used the “caring ethic” to bind
women to the service of others.
Of weaknesses there are many, most of which flow from the combination of Rand as philosopher, novelist and powerful
personality. John Galt, for example, is
but one instantiation of the Randian/Aristotelian virtue ethic, an
instantiation which was created for a particular aesthetic purpose by a
particular person. Too often both Rand and
her detractors have taken the instantiation for the class thereby limiting
the vision.
The wise man expunges "positive v. normative" from his vocabulary. Ises and oughts are easily and naturally translated into one another, based on the purposes of the interlocutors and the discourse situation.
The words "positive" and "normative" do not mean nothing, but what they mean can always be expressed in better terms. "Normative" often means outspoken, unconventional, strident, etc. It can also mean loose, vague, and indeterminate.
Tell me "positive" or "normative" for each of the following:
(1) The minimum wage ought to be repealed.
(2) I think the minimum wage ought to be repealed.
(3) The minimum wage reduces social welfare.
(4) Wise people oppose the minimum wage.
The primary verb of (1) is an ought, while the primary verbs of (2), (3), and (4) are ises. But all four statements are really the same.
Coase used the term "affectation" for posing as "positive" and not "normative."