Tired of torture yet?
How do we make hard decisions?
Former CIA and congressional counsel Vicki Divoll makes an intelligent interjection in the ongoing torture debates in today’s New York Times.
First, she points out that the CIA notifying only four Members of Congress when it commenced coercive interrogations in 2002 essentially subverts the Constitutional allocation of power to Congress:
The framers of the Constitution gave aggregate, not individual, powers to the legislative branch. For the Gang of Four to have waved their arms and yelled at mid-level C.I.A. briefers, or written harsh letters to the president and vice president, would have been useless. Four members do not have the ability, on their own, to bring the great weight of the constitutional authority of Congress to bear.
This is a significant, but often overlooked fact in today’s political environment. Read more
Thomas Jefferson didn’t get into Harvard
Is legacy inegalitarian and un-American?
Notre Dame University has taken heat recently for inviting President Obama to speak at commencement and for offering to award him an honorary degree. The source of Catholic frustration is Obama’s professed defense of abortion.
Now it’s Obama who’s feeling the heat, this time from the left in the American Prospect.
Richard Kahlenberg and Steve Shadowen argue that Obama should give the Notre Dame ceremony a pass due to the university’s “legacy” admissions policy that reserves 25 percent of incoming seats to children of alumni. According to Kahlenberg and Shadowen, legacy “offends” the American principle of equality: Read more
Who does the United Nations represent?
States or Individuals? A lesson from Daniel Webster.
Sam mentioned Vaclav Havel’s op-ed on the absurdity of undemocratic, illiberal states sitting on the U.N. Human Rights Council. America’s founders have some thoughts germaine to this crisis.
In late January of 1830, Daniel Webster and Robert Y. Hayne debated the meaning of the U.S. Constitution–unscripted–and it was arguably the most important and eloquent floor debate ever heard in the 200 some years since the Capitol Building’s construction. Hayne, representative from South Carolina, argued that the States came together to found a constitution and a nation. As such, States had the right to nullify Congressional law. The Congress represented the States interests and if it did not do so, the States had a right to disobey. Webster, representative from Massachusetts, replied that “the people” founded the Constitution and a nation, not the States. The Constitution was supreme (Art VI, par. 2 says so) and the Supreme Court is the only body that can nullify acts of Congress (Justice Marshall said so in Marbury v. Madison). The people rule; the people founded a government based upon a Constitution that demands its supremacy over the States; thus, the States cannot nullify federal law.
John C. Calhoun, a supporter of State nullification, declared earlier: “The Union; second to our liberty most dear!”, which meant that States rights guaranteed liberty (by preventing a tyrannical central government), and those State interests took priority over the federal ones. Webster replied: “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!” His point was that individual interests and liberty were protected by a strong and centralized national government; because it was their government.
Havel speaks
Former Czech President Vaclav Havel writes in today’s New York Times that the way UN member countries treat the Human Rights Council says an awful lot about the value they place on human rights.
This is an important point of interface between political philosophy and practical politics. Philosophers can spend a lot of time defining abstract concepts, but process often adds (or subtracts) dimension from those concepts.
A nifty excerpt:
Like the citizens of Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia, I know what it is like to live in a country where the state controls public discourse, suppresses opposition and severely curtails freedom of expression. It is thus doubly dismaying for me to see the willingness of democracies in Latin America and Asia to sit by and watch the council further lose its credibility and respect.
Activists and journalists in Azerbaijan and Cuba have already appealed to the international community not to elect their nations to the Human Rights Council. States committed to human rights and the integrity of the council cannot remain indifferent. Countries must express solidarity with the victims of human rights abuses and reclaim the council by simply refusing to vote for human rights abusers in this shamefully uncontested election.
–Sam
Obama’s pragmatism
Today’s Washington Post explores the Obama administration’s veritable obsession with “pragmatism” as a governing philosophy. Christopher Hayes and Robert Reich both wonder whether pragmatism is a normative philosophy, one that includes coherent notions about what’s right or wrong, or what we ought to be doing:
On the left, the Nation’s Chris Hayes argued that Obama supporters were embracing pragmatism after incorrectly concluding that Bush had struggled not because he had the wrong ideology, but because he had an ideology, period. “Obama may [say] he’s interested in ‘what works,’ ” Hayes wrote, “but what constitutes ‘working’ . . . is impossible to detach from some worldview and set of principles.”
Pragmatism has distinguished roots. William James and John Dewey promoted it as a philosophy that elevated knowledge gained through action over theory and concepts. Obama has been pragmatic in this sense when it comes to, say, the financial crisis, embracing trial and error and resisting the more systemic solution of nationalizing banks. But pragmatism fails as a political definition, says Robert Reich, who served as President Clinton’s labor secretary, because it describes how a politician moves toward a goal, not the goal itself.
“It’s possible to be ruthlessly pragmatic in terms of how you get to an objective,” Reich said, “but the phrase is nonsensical in terms of picking an objective.”
–Sam
Chait on representation
Jonathan Chait ponders the complexities of representative democracy while thoroughly skewering conservative commentator Fred Barnes:
Even funnier, if it wasn’t so morally deranged, is the way Barnes cites a poll showing little concern for global warming and immediately concludes that nothing should be done. Uh, Fred, aren’t you skipping the step where you say that Americans are correct to think global warming is not a danger? I mean, that view’s totally at odds with the scientific consensus, but saying so at least gives the the veneer of caring about something other than the short-term political interests of the GOP.
Barnes is pretty clearly out of line here. However, Chait dismisses the argument out of hand which would argue that political parties should indeed reflect the will of the majority of the electorate and, further, that the short-term political interests of a party are simply to reflect that will and are thus entirely appropriate.
Clearly global warming is a real problem and one whose costs are not perceived in the day-to-day of the American electorate, but Chait needs to do more work here to demonstrate his conclusion that politicians should disregard the will of the public when the politicians themselves hold a different view on a given issue.
-John
Nordic self-respect
Is my hypothesis disproved?
Earlier, I theorized that a deterministic conception of the person–one wherein our lives are largely the product of circumstance–threatens our self-respect. As I mentioned, this is often a justification for massive wealth distribution in contemporary egalitarian theories. I wondered if Scandinavian people experienced less self-respect in their rather egalitarian societies.
This OECD study proves otherwise, reporting that countries with large welfare systems, like Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands, have the highest levels of happiness. The questions were very similar to those one would ask to determine self-respect.
The relevance of this study for my hypothesis depends on the public justification for those social welfare systems, and whether or not they say anything about the free will vs. luck debate. If they indeed are based upon–explicitly or implicitly–a deterministic conception of the person, then my hyopthesis is simply wrong, either because its actually really wrong, or because people don’t internalize the conception of the person forwarded by their society.
If these countries don’t say anything about free will v. luck, then the hypothesis is still untested. But at least it would show that, practically and ideologically speaking, there are justifications for egalitarianism that can skirt deeper metaphysical issues about luck and choice. In the academic world, G.A. Cohen famously criticized John Rawls’ argument that philosophical arguments for social justice, whatever it may be, can cabin those issues.
-Jake
The American Dream and self-resect
Do they conflict?
Sam and John posted on the shifting nature of the American Dream.
The American Dream poses interesting questions for self-respect. I earlier argued that self-respect should be a primary concern of politics and political theory.
The American Dream promises that anybody, from any beginning, can succeed. There is a belief that in the American meritocracy and free market, people are limited only by their talents and work ethic, not by any ancient class or caste system. This is only one interpretation of the American Dream and Sam’s piece highlights the various interpretations it lends itself to, but I believe this is the standard or at least traditional understanding.
If one were to internalize this interpretation, it both helps and hurts people’s self-respect:
1. How it aids self-respect:
A. It lends itself to a capacious conception of the person, one wherein each person contains great potential energy. We respect ourselves more because we respect the possibility of humanity more. We become more interesting and powerful creatures.
B. If we are experiencing a period of failure, which is defined subjectively, as I wrote earlier, the American Dream can prevent a certain loss of self-respect because it sustains hope, hope that all is not lost and that through hard-work and maybe a touch of luck everything will turn around. We should not deem ourselves failures because that is often a transitory phenomenon in America.
C. If a person has succeeded (again subjectively) the American Dream aids self-respect by instilling in him the notion that it was him, his will, that created the success, and not a lucky birth or the structure of society. He will respect himself more than if he thought his successes were largely the product of circumstance.
2. How it threatens self-respect:
A. When somebody experiences failure, as he conceives it, the American Dream makes them him believe that it was his fault, and not the result of bad luck or circumstance. This makes him feel that much worse about their position and themselves.
The American Dream is descriptive
Sam’s post reflects on the shifting nature of the American dream, particularly a shift (of -8%) away from a conception of the American Dream defined as financial security.
Interest in the meaning of the American dream seems to be fairly constant; I want to make the argument that this new data suggests the conclusion that the “American Dream” may be defined not in terms of a political idea,l but rather as something that is obtainable by a large share of people. In this sense, the American Dream is what people have or perceive they have rather than a normative ideal or a long-project for future generations. This hypothesis, if nothing else, explains the drop in defining the American Dream in terms of financial security. It would be fascinating if this data set went back longer and could be plotted against the business cycle.
Perhaps more intriguing is the durability of language of equality of opportunity in Americans’ definition. Of course, from all we know about the nature of inequality, it is true that vast swaths of the population are extremely unlikely to “start from nothing” or “to become what I want to be.” However, I would argue that there is still a wide public perception that this ideal exists. This perception is, of course, good for a majority of the people since the successful have their achievements validated and the less successful are given some degree of hope in the future.
More than anything else, the durability of an independent American Dream is a fascinating demonstration of Americans’ continued belief in our exceptionalism.
-John
Changing American Dream
What do Americans want?
A CBS/New York Times poll last month found some interesting results regarding the status of the American Dream. In today’s Times Katharine Seelye reports on the decreasing faith in American economic mobility.
The poll also found Americans had begun defining the “American Dream” less as access to material wealth and more as an abstract value (or set of values): Read more
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