This GPS thing keeps sending me to the police station!
The New York Times editorializes on whether courts should require police to seek a warrant before tracking a suspect’s car through a GPS device. According to the Times:
As technology advances, government will continue to acquire new and more efficient ways of monitoring people. It is critical that the privacy rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment keep up with those advances.
My only amendment would be to say that it’s important we keep the conversation alive as technology advances, whether or not we actually expand or contract privacy rights.
-Sam
Fighting on a virtual battlefield
Should we be worried about “war games”?
In my fourth and final installment in the “Colin blogs about war” series, I want to take on the portrayal of warfare in video and computer games. While this is especially interesting to me as a gamer, it’s also more important than you might think: the latest “war game” to be released, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, boasted the biggest launch in the history of entertainment, raking in $550 million in the first few days of sales. The game’s producer reported that gamers spent over 5.2 million hours on MW2′s multiplayer platform during its first day.
Needless to say, lots of people are shooting lots of virtual people on LCD screens. This particular genre (first-person shooters, or FPS) is not without controversy, however. While games have featured often gruesome amounts of violence since their inception (along with movies, books, and most other forms of entertainment), some new developments have made the intersection of games and battle a bit more complicated.
Food for thought
Philosopher Gary Steiner has an interesting article in Sunday’s New York Times on whether it is wrong “to kill animals for human consumption.” Steiner comments on how
These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the horrors that they are
Regardless of how one feels on the issue of eating meat, Steiner’s argument illustrates the importance of public philosophy. The fact that it is easy to become desensitized to the ethical choices we face in our day-to-day lives illustrates why philosophy is often dismissed as irrelevant and overly abstract and consequently why it is still so important.
-Luke
Was Fort Hood terrorism?
The New York Times’ news blog, The Lede, has an interesting post on the Senate hearings probing the connection between terrorism and the Fort Hood shootings. Given that the definition of terrorism is traditionally limited to attacks on noncombatants but that many people want to call the Foot Hood shootings terrorism, The Lede inquires whether an attack on troops can ever be called terrorism.
Plenty of space is given to a 2004 book by and 2006 interview with political philosopher (and sometimes public philosopher) Michael Walzer, the most prominent contemporary thinker on just war theory. Walzer has defined terrorism as “the deliberate killing of innocent people, at random, in order to spread fear through a whole population” with some intended political effect. Walzer sticks pretty hard to the noncombatant part of this definition: he argues, for example, that, besides the innocent civilians taken hostage on American Flight 77, the Pentagon part of the 9/11 attacks was not terrorism, since those killed in the Pentagon were soldiers or civilians actively supporting soldiers. Walzer concludes: “attacks on soldiers are not terrorist attacks”, though he is clear that this “does not make them right; terrorism is not the only negative moral term in our vocabulary.”
So what do you think? Can attacks on soldiers be called terrorism? Does it matter if the Fort Hood attacks were technically terrorism or not? Does this definition of terrorism impede our ability to investigate and prevent attacks by violent extremists (whoever they are against)?
-Marc
Who should we bail out next?
There’s $200 billion dollars of TARP bail out money left in the coffers, roughly the equivalent of 36 billion five dollar footlong sandwiches from Subway (after DC sales tax). Now everyone is wrangling over what to do with it:
Congressional Democrats could be careening toward a head-on collision with the White House over $200 billion in leftover bailout money – money that Republicans think should simply be returned to taxpayers.
The Treasury Department is pushing for fiscal prudence and wants to use the money to pay down the deficit and keep a small rainy-day fund in case of economic catastrophe.
But Democrats are salivating over the possibility of $200 billion in unspent money.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson of Connecticut wants dough to fund job-creation legislation. Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, the powerful chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, wants to direct $2 billion of repaid Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to loans for unemployed homeowners so they can avoid foreclosure. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California admits that “there’s a good bit of interest” in spreading the money around to various economic projects.
And Senate Democrats want to put a big chunk – say, $40 billion – toward loans to small businesses.
Who should get the money? Republicans will say that the money belongs to the taxpayers, although that’s not strictly true. The money for TARP has been raised legally, through taxation and otherwise, so it’s not as if the government took out a loan directly from the taxpayers.
This may seem like a trivial or obvious (or technical) distinction, but it’s actually quite important. If I borrow $10 from you under duress and you unwillingly hand it over, there’s a good case to be made that I owe you whatever is unspent, in addition to the principal at a later date. But TARP isn’t like that. Instead, TARP, like all government allocations, is willingly and legally transferred from we, the taxpayers, to the government. In return, they do stuff for us, like preserve our banking system or purchase expensive fighter jets.
This logic would point to putting the leftover money to use doing whatever would be best for us. Maybe that would be giving it back, in the form of a tax rebate. Or it could be through a jobs bill, as some advocate.
What’s important to note, however, is that both the Republican and Democratic positions make the same assumption: the money doesn’t belong to the taxpayers in any more than the abstract sense that we “own” all of government, simply because its grant to rule derives from us.
The argument about what to do with TARP is a live one, but let’s not get confused by rhetoric.
-Sam
What is the opportunity cost of your turkey?
I’m not one to oppose attention being paid to environmental conservation. However, one must admit that the movement to “green” all facets of life often looks suspiciously less like a serious social movement to decrease consumption than a feature on “Stuff White People Like.” So it’s refreshing to read a post like this, from The Atlantic’s Daniel Akst.
The local turkey tasted quite good, but I’ve enjoyed many a Thanksgiving with the store-bought variety, and it seemed to me not just painful but profligate to spend all that additional money in this way. So this year we’re going to buy the supermarket turkey and find a soup kitchen or homeless shelter to which we can donate $50.
What is so often missing from calls to save the environment by spending more is a discussion of the opportunity cost. A serious discussion of the ethical value of any environmental decision should also consider that there’s real value in the money the well-off are able to spend on organic apples; one might well consider just how many mosquito nets a trip to Whole Foods could buy.
-John
Privatizing war
How much of the war effort should we “contract out”?
In this third entry of what is becoming a series on the ethics of war (drones last week and R.O.T.C. recruiting the week before), I want to take a look at a controversial trend in American defense strategy. That trend is the rapidly increasing extent to which we outsource responsibilities normally handled by the military to private contractors.
I noted in last week’s post that drones are often flown by civilian contractors, thousands of miles away from the conflict. That’s just the proverbial iceberg’s tip. In mid-2007, the U.S. military had about 145,000 troops on the ground in Iraq, but most of us had no idea that 126,000 private personnel had accompanied them, almost doubling the total force. These contractors are often responsible for critical mission activities, such as guarding politicians and diplomats. General David Petraeus actually admitted to being accompanied by a private security firm, not the U.S. military, as he travels in Iraq.
Gladwell and democratic discourse
In the October 19 issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell published one of his trademark essays: interesting though poorly thought out, scantily defended, and designed to do what he does best: sell baby, sell. The title and image lead us to believe that the thesis will be that professional football is as or almost as objectionable as dog fighting. Yet in classic Gladwell style, the first 98% of the article is simply vignettes about how football is bad and, interspersed, about how dog fighting is bad. We are only left with the following closing argument:
There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.
Strong, strong words there. But of course nothing is mentioned of the fundamental distinctions between the two activities: that one involves coercive violence, and another involves the chosen career decisions of full-grown, mentally sound individuals.
Sure, one could argue that the two activities are similar in that young boys are in some way “programmed” to put sport above all else, play while injured, etc and really have no choice given the society they inhabit. This is, in my view, a very poor argument, but it’s one that Gladwell isn’t making. He’s making no argument at all.
So, what is the public philosophy issue? Simply that this kind of poor work is popular not just in local newspapers or alternative magazines, but in The New Yorker and atop best seller lists. The reading public, and specifically, the educated reading public, has strangely accepted that insinuation can pass for argument as easily as assertion and the defense of a position. The importance of a public philosophy project must be to engender a public discourse that fits between two extremes: shrill and acerbic monologue (tea parties et all) as well as a discourse that seeks to take no stance at all and, one would imagine, therefore draw paying customers from both sides.
-John
State skepticism
John Judis writes about the supposed origins of Americans’ general distrust of government expansion:
Americans’ skepticism about government dates at least from the Revolution. In The Liberal Tradition in America, published in 1955, political scientist Louis Hartz described the Americans of 1776 as “Lockean liberals.” He was using the term “liberal” in its classic connotation–more like today’s free-market conservative or libertarian. Americans, he perceived, envisaged the state as strictly limited to protecting property relations among equal producers. They saw strong government–which they identified with the British crown–as a threat to economic and political freedom. Government, in Thomas Paine’s words, was a “necessary evil.”
Judis essentially argues that, but for a few moments, this anxiety over government has never left the American ethos, making perennial Democratic efforts to expand government’s role difficult:
Still, with these exceptions, Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have done well under conditions that are not as favorable for reform as they seemed in January. Obama and the Democrats understand not only the opportunity for reform, but also the long-standing ideological obstacles they face in obtaining it, and they have adopted a strategy of dividing business and framing their proposals as market reforms. If they continue to do so, and if they are not scared off by pressure from the right, they should succeed in getting a health care bill and new financial regulations. A climate-change bill will be more difficult but not impossible, as long as they can keep the voting public focused on the specifics of liberal reform rather than the atmospherics of ideological conservatism.
My question has been and continues to be: why cede the premise? Why should Democrats continue to be forced to pursue an agenda defined by an anti-government philosophy? Why not sell a new philosophy about government, one that rejects Lockean liberalism?
-Sam
Hobbes and religion … in Hebrew
A collection of scholars weigh in on an odd, but interesting event: the first full publication of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in Hebrew. While the first two parts (dealing with philosophy and politics) have long been available, the third and fourth (which deal with religion) had not yet been translated and published in the Hebrew language.
Among others, Yoram Hazony laments the suppression of the “Hebraic” side of Hobbes, and philosopher Stephen Darwall lavishes the following praise:
Thomas Hobbes is our greatest political philosopher. Why greatest? Others philosophized in the service of sounder political ideas, like democracy and human rights, but no one else has had Hobbes’s systematic mastery, rigor and originality.
Hobbes’s “state of nature” and authoritarianism have stood the test of time, but his theological thought is largely ignored today (the latter half of “Leviathan” is rarely assigned in class). It is a bit of a slow read. Perhaps we need a translation of our own, into modern English…
-Colin
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