Do laws matter if they’re not enforced?
The Telegraph has an article today on a 19th century Paris law banning women from wearing pants. It’s notable because it is both unenforced and vigorously defended by Paris officials. At least twice in the last fifty years attempts have been made to have it overturned. In both cases, Paris officials refused. An attempt in 2003 was met with the following response from the minister in charge of gender equality: “Disuse is sometimes more efficient than (state) intervention in adapting the law to changing mores.”
Given the number of crazy laws in the United States, the response raises an interesting question: are unjust laws problematic if they are not enforced?
-Marc
Should KSM have a trial even if he may be acquitted?
Andrew Sullivan comes out in favor of a trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the grounds that doing so would restore confidence in western notions of justice. Interestingly, he sees the trial as desirable even given an apparently high likelihood that KSM would be found not-guilty given that the bulk of his testimony was given during or after he was tortured.
That last part gives pause: would western legal structures and traditions really gain a victory if they lead to an incredibly unpopular judicial decision? Sullivan is willing to risk an acquittal here since that acquittal would be predicated on a public airing of Bush’s torture policies. It’s not clear to me, however, that this would be by any means a public vote of confidence. The most recent historical parallel might be the spate of vigilante movies that captured public opinion after the Miranda decision led to some number of unpopular acquittals.
-John
No visa for oil
Balancing values and interests
The New York Times has an article today on Teodoro Nguema Obiang, the forest and agriculture minister of Equatorial Guinea, who, despite being a corrupt foreign official, is regularly granted visas for travel to the United States. Internal government documents assert that “most if not all” of Obiang’s wealth comes from corruption. So why does the State Department fail to enforce the federal law prohibiting corrupt foreign officials from receiving American visas? The answer, claim a number of former U.S. officials: oil. Equatorial Guinea produces nearly 400,000 barrels of oil a day, mostly by American oil companies.
We’ve written on this blog about conflict among values (e.g. freedom and equality). Just as common is conflict between values and interests. In personal life, we face such conflicts all the time: when a grocery store clerk gives you too much change do you pocket the money or give it back? When you walk by a homeless person carrying a doggie bag of leftovers do you give it to them or save it for tomorrow’s lunch? Values and interests exert a constant tension on foreign policy – do we pursue our material interests in the world or promote the values we hold dear? Sometimes these two align (ex. foreign aid may help “drain the swamp” of violent extremism), but more often they come into conflict – call out human rights abuses in Russia or gain an ally in efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program? Promote democracy in Pakistan or further counter-terrorism efforts?
In Obiang’s case, the conflict is between punishing corruption and ensuring U.S. access to Equatorial Guinean oil and wealth for American business. So how do you balance the two? Do values always trump interests? Read more
Healthcare is nice, but (morally) expensive
Robert Samuelson at the Washington Post does some moral cost/benefit analysis on healthcare reform.
Pro-reform:
…almost everyone thinks that people in need of essential medical care should get it; ideally, everyone would have health insurance.
Con:
First, the country has other goals — including preventing financial crises and minimizing the crushing effects of high deficits or taxes on the economy and younger Americans — that “health-care reform” would jeopardize. And second, the benefits of “reform” are exaggerated. Sure, many Americans would feel less fearful about losing insurance; but there are cheaper ways to limit insecurity. Meanwhile, improvements in health for today’s uninsured would be modest. They already receive substantial medical care. Insurance would help some individuals enormously, but studies find that, on average, gains are moderate. Despite using more health services, people don’t automatically become healthier.
The first point reveals the problem of prioritization I discussed in an earlier post and the second shows, once more, how the factual and empirical invade the moral.
-Jake
Secularizing the calendar!?
The latest controversy to emerge at the intersection of public schools and Christianity concerns our dating system. A movement in my old school district is protesting the use of BCE / CE (instead of BC / AD) to teach kids about dates in history. “Before the Common Era” and “Common Era” are less offensive to non-Christians than “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini,” which is Latin for “in the year of the Lord.”
But there’s just no getting around the fact that BCE / CE are simply secularized labels referring to Christ’s suggested birth date. We shouldn’t feel too guilty about that, however, because most calendars are built around some otherwise arbitrary date of particular cultural importance.
We’re probably stuck with the date, but should we be stuck with the religious trappings? Like so many of these controversies, from school prayer, “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, “In God We Trust” on our currency, creationism in biology class, and the annual “War on Christmas,” the arguments are couched in language of cultural heritage – this has always been a Christian nation, so it goes, and efforts to “secularize” its institutions are either paternalistic or morally destabilizing.
Those in favor of church-state separation usually counter that in a society of many faiths and traditions, public representations of a particular faith must either be removed, like religious displays in courthouses, or secularized when useful for publicly justifiable reasons – like Christmas or having Sundays off. Regardless of our historical legacy (which is decidedly more complicated than most allow), liberals must weigh matters of cultural importance against the heavy counterweights of free conscience, association, and equal treatment.
-Colin
You were fired the day you were conceived
Genetic testing and employment
The ethical boundaries of the 21st century have increasingly focused on the rapid pace of scientific and technological advancement. The more we seem to know about how our world works, the fuzzier that world grows ethically.
In a week, one of those boundaries will be tested when the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act comes into effect. The Act prevents employers from either engaging in genetic testing or taking genetic information into account when deciding whether to hire, fire or promite someone. It will also bar health insurance companies from considering genetic information in decisions to provide coverage or set premiums.
This approach broadly reflects the sensibilities of modern liberalism, with one twist. Read more
An American Rand
There’s a dialogue going on over at the Corner about the recent “Ayn Rand Revival” we’ve been documenting here. Found this tidbit interesting:
Peter, Like Andrew, I think Rand is a symbol rather than a movement philosopher. Very few of those who mention Adam Smith favorably have read his moral philosophy or considered its implications and Rand is clearly in a similar position.
Who are the movement philosophers? I propose: Rousseau, Montesqieu, Marx . . . who else?
-Sam
Human dignity and incarceration
What’s the difference between torture and thirty years behind bars?
The vagueness of the term “human dignity” is matched only by its importance. It serves, in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and many national constitutions, as the source or justification of individual rights. Dignity, at its core, relates to the notion that humans are incredibly special creatures, such that they must be treated with a certain (high) amount of respect and concern. From carbon, dust, etc. emerge these conscious, wondrous beings. Jeremy Waldron, political philosopher at NYU Law, has argued that dignity entails granting each person a very high social status or standing, along the lines of that accorded to European nobility in earlier centuries.
The content and details of this respect and concern will depend upon how a community fills in the details of the concept of dignity. That is, what the community believes it owes its members will depend upon why they believe people are special and worthy. So, in a liberal society, we think that one especially value-laden facet of people is their autonomy, their ability to make moral choices, their ability to make life-plans and carry them out, etc. To respect someone’s dignity, then, means enabling their autonomy or possibly not infringing it to some unspecified degree.
For dignity to gain analytical traction it has to mean something more than autonomy-and I think that is the case. Many people think, for instance, that one should not be able to freely choose slavery, since slavery compromises one’s dignity. In that case, free choice (autonomy) is at odds with dignity. There is also a famous French and European case where a judge ruled that dwarf tossing (exactly what it sounds like) was illegal because it infringed upon the dignity of the dwarf, even though the dwarf consented to (and was paid for) the experience. The slavery example is better.
Is health care pro-family?
Continuing the string of progressive policies with pro-family implications, the New York Times Health blog has an article on a study released in the journal Cancer documenting the divorce rate among straight couples when one spouse is diagnosed with a serious illness. According to the study, when the woman is the one diagnosed with serious illness, the marriage is seven times as likely to end in divorce as when it is the male who becomes ill.
In addition to reflecting poorly on the male gender, the study suggests that serious illness puts an often overwhelming strain on marriage. During the five year period of the study, some twenty-one percent of the couples in which the woman became ill were separated or divorced (compared with approximately twelve percent of the American population). Among these couples, divorce occurred on average six months after diagnosis, suggesting a connection between the illness and divorce. All of which leads me to wonder, whether improved health care (whether you believe this would come from health care reform or not) would benefit the family?
-Marc
The drone dilemma
When does efficiency cost too much?
The U.S. military and intelligence services have been using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drones”) since the Gulf War for surveillance, transportation, and combat. Drones are usually launched and landed by specialists on the ground, but they are often controlled by civilian contractors on American bases, thousands of miles away from conflict. Originally used only for gathering intelligence, drones are now used widely for what some call “targeted killing” – secretive attacks on enemies often carried out by the CIA, which runs its own drone program.
As Jane Mayer suggests in The New Yorker (I highly recommend this article), the use of unmanned technology to execute combat operations is quite controversial. There seem to be two large problems with drones: (1) We’re waging war with “machines” instead of soldiers; and (2) we’re using these machines in what many are calling assassinations, which are in violation of U.S. and international law.
What’s wrong with having drones do the fighting for us? It largely eliminates the human cost of war, and by extension, it makes the engagement seem costless and painless. Without the sense that our sons and daughters are sacrificing their lives in our defense, a declaration of war is checked only by its financial cost and strategic value.
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