The skies are already friendly
But what about the ground?
Just in time for the likely spate of holiday travel delays, the Obama administration has anno
unced that passengers cannot be kept on a delayed airplane for more than three hours before the airline must get them off the plane (or “deplane them” in awkward airline parlance). My first though when I read this was, “What a useless rule–no one sits on the tarmac for three hours.”
Apparently I was wrong. According to the Associated Press, the first six months of 2009 saw 613 flights sitting on the tarmac for over three hours with passengers on board.
No more. Now an airline must provide food and drink after two hours, and will be fined $27,500 per passenger for each flight that exceeds the new limit. The rules apply to domestic flights, although American carriers that fly international flights must voluntarily decide limits. Foreign carriers are exempt. There’s also an exception for security or safety concerns voiced by air traffic control.
What are we to make of this new regulation? Read more
Political bribery
Related to Marc and Colin’s posts on political “compromise,” Michelle Malkin outlines here and here the various ”gifts” or “bribes” that Democratic leadership has granted to certain legislators and interest groups in return for their support for healthcare reform. One example in the bill is increasing Medicaid subsidies for ”certain states recovering from a natural disaster,” which apparently, after two pages of clarification, refers only to Louisiana. It seems that the $100 million in subsidies was granted to guarantee the support of moderate Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu from Louisiana. All things being equal, such an unequal grant of federal money, assuming it’s unwarranted for special considerations, would be unjustified.
But the ends of national healthcare reform, for Democrats, are said to justify such unseemly means. At first blush, there doesn’t seems anything wrong with this, at least from the perspective of the Democratic leadership. For lots of good democratic reasons, policy is forged through the politics of Congress, and if one is not willing to play those politics, then one will never forward his agenda and he will serve no purpose as a representative. And certainly from the perspective of what’s best for the nation, the Democratic leadership could justify this to themselves reasonable and rationally.
However, what about Landrieu herself, assuming she pushed for the subsidy? Is it right for someone to take advantage of (her) party’s biggest domestic policy like this? What if everyone held out until their state was granted a special benefit? But what else is Landrieu do to, then to fight for the best deal for her constituents? From what perspective should she be pondering the bill (the nation as a whole, Louisiana’s, current citizens, future citizens, etc.)? I think the rightness or wrongness of her politics depends upon the answer to the perspective question.
The right answer might involve some Kantian fairness: She should act according to rules that she wishes all congresspeople upheld. If that formulation is right, since she would not wish every member of congress to hold out for her constituents in such an egregious manner, her actions are improper.
-Jake
Max Weber and realism
We’ve been talking a lot about the idealism vs. realism debate here at TPP – Is compromise necessary, and how much of it is admissible? How much should our political values be restrained by immediate possibilities?
Matt Yglesias takes this on here, citing Weber’s Politics as a Vocation to suggest a distinction between an ethic of of “ultimate ends” and an ethic of “responsibility.” Yglesias says that in our world, responsibility must be the guiding principle:
…a lot of what goes wrong in American foreign policy commentary, I came to see, was a refusal to adopt the ethic of responsibility. Instead, people would want to orient themselves in a way that expresses a sense of moralized outrage.
To be sure,
“Realism” pursued on behalf of purely selfish goals is immoral, but the pursuit of laudable goals in an unrealistic and destructive manner doesn’t help anyone.
And on applying “responsibility” to climate change:
The sensible goal, however, is to avert the collapse. To do the best we can today, and the best we can tomorrow and the best we can the day after that. And next week? To do the best we can. And again next month and next year and next decade.
-Colin
Naked guy revisted
Remember naked guy who challenged our understanding of personal freedom and the boundary between public and private? Looks like a judge decided this morning that the case of Erick Williamson was one of indecent exposure. Naked guy is exercising his freedom, not surprisingly, to appeal.
-Marc
Compromise
To political ideologues, “compromise” is a four letter word. It means giving in; not standing on principle; even moral weakness. Two major issues in the news this week remind us why we’ve written so frequently on the topic here: it is one of the most controversial conceptual issues in all of public philosophy – ultimately getting to the core of how we approach politics.
At the UN-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen, world leaders, it seems, are punting on a number of tough issues including the proposed 2010 deadline for a binding treaty that environmental advocates claim is necessary to combat climate change. Back home, Senate leaders are struggling to compile a health care reform bill that will garner the 60 votes necessary to move ahead to a vote. In both cases, politicians who hold strong views on the issue at hand are being forced to make major compromises in order to get something done. On health care, compromises have been made to such a degree than some Democrats are claiming they will vote against the bill because it does not go far enough.
So what should we think about compromise? How much compromise is ok? Does it depend on the issue? On the political climate? Or is compromise never acceptable?
-Marc
WWUD?
What would Uganda do? Michael Gerson writes in today’s Washington Post about proposed anti-homosexuality legislation in Uganda. His piece is a pretty good example of public philosophy. He regards the principles at stake, but also does some interesting intellectual history. Not sure I agree with his conclusions. But absolutely worth a read. Here’s an excerpt:
It took long centuries for this radical idea of religious and moral autonomy to work itself out in the political realm. But it found expression in the American founding. We refused to be a “Christian nation” precisely because the founders held a broadly Christian view of human beings, who are subject to God and their conscience, not to the state. Pluralism is not a temporary or tragic compromise; it is the proper way to treat men and women created free and autonomous in God’s image.
This principle does not require a complete libertarianism. Some individual choices are legally prohibited as inherently exploitative (statutory rape or using child pornography) or destructive to the very idea of freedom and autonomy (drug use or voluntary slavery). A single worker drunk on gin is generally a matter of indifference to the state. A large portion of the British working class drunk on gin in the 18th century — catching their arms and legs in looms — required regulations on the sale of spirits.
But it is not sufficient to argue that a practice should be illegal just because some — even many — regard it as wrong. Laws require a clear, public good. Absent that good, people can still advocate their moral views publicly and strongly. But their method should be persuasion, not coercion.
-Sam
Would health care save lives?
I wanted to quickly weigh in on the debate that seems to have largely ended this week in the blogosphere. The question at hand is whether it is appropriate or necessary to use stark language to indicate that policy debates have real-world consequences. Ezra Klein and Yglesias sparked controversy by calling attention to the near-certainty that expanding access to insurance would save lives; thus, voting against the bill is a vote that costs lives.
I think that Klein’s point is indisputably correct, but I do think Klein hopes that this revelation should really change things. Policy decisions do have costs, but they are economic in addition to human in nature. His point seems to be that the policy calculus is significantly different when the human cost is revealed, but I think that cost has always been obvious to all involved.
I think the real point, and one that Yglesias makes more explicitly, is that progressives should be using more hyperbolic language in defense of their policy objectives, which is a political judgment (and likely a correct one).
-John
Faith in the Supreme Court
Does a justice’s religion matter?
Under Slate‘s “jurisprudence” section, Dahlia Lithwick addresses a taboo subject – the religious beliefs of Supreme Court justices. Interestingly enough, we now have six Catholics on the court, two Jews, and only one Protestant. For reference, about 50% of Americans are Protestant, 24% are Catholic, and only 1% are Jewish.
Ok, so what? Does the religious identity of judges actually influence their decisions? Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, has come under fire for suggesting that it might. In Gonzales v. Carhart (which was settled when Justice Souter, an Episcopalian, was still on the court), the five Catholic justices overturned settled precedent on partial birth abortions, while the Jewish and Protestant justices dissented. Stone is uncomfortable with the implications:
By making this judgment, these justices have failed to respect the fundamental difference between religious belief and morality. To be sure, this can be an elusive distinction, but in a society that values the separation of church and state, it is fundamental. The moral status of a fetus is a profoundly difficult and rationally unresolvable question. As the Supreme Court has recognized for more than thirty years, when the fundamental right of a woman “to determine her life’s course” is at stake, it is not for the state — or for the justices of the Supreme Court — to resolve that question, and it is certainly not appropriate for the state or the justices to resolve it on the basis of one’s personal religious faith.
Lithwick shares Stone’s concerns about religious belief seeping into jurisprudence, but posits that a justice’s stance toward strict or evolving precedent is probably more central to controversial moral decisions than personal faith.
Moral luck & negligent driving
Bicycle advocates in my home state of Washington are arguing for tougher laws against reckless drivers who kill pedestrians. In many ways, these new policy proposals mirror the national trend, as the Department of Transportation held a September summit on the dangers of distracted driving, and states like Utah have dramatically increased the penalties for drivers who cause an accident while texting. Are these stricter laws justified, and how responsible should we hold an individual who makes a reckless and deadly mistake? Read more
GDP as welfare
The International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, convened by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and chaired by economist Joseph Stiglitz, wrote a lengthy report recently opposing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of social welfare. GDP is the market value of all goods and services produced by a nation in a year. In his blog, Chicago Law professor Richard Posner outlines some of the critiques, which involve philosophical debates about the definition of welfare and it’s validity as a metric for moral value. He writes:
[This] brings me to the third and broadest problem with GDP as a measure of welfare–that even if improved along the lines I have just suggested it would not really measure happiness or well being. Market value is a function mainly of cost. The value that people derive from goods and services is better measured by what they would pay for them if competition did not reduce their price to or near the cost of production; but that value (“consumer surplus”) is difficult to estimate. Or consider—coming closer to current events that have sharpened traditional concerns with GDP’s adequacy as a measure of welfare—the anxiety that people who are involuntarily unnemployed experience.
The second in command at the international commission was the economist Amartya Sen, a pioneer (along with the philosopher Martha Nussbaum) in attempting to develop measures of human “capabilities” and ranking countries according to their ability to equip their citizens with such capabilities (long life, adequate nutrition, education, etc.). The United Nation’s Human Development Index attempts such a ranking, and some might think it a candidate for replacing GDP.
Posner concludes, nevertheless, that we should not jettison GDP as an important value. First, he argues that government statistics need to be calculated in objective ways to have legitimacy and the other contenders all involve controversial, necessarily biased economics. Second, he argues that GDP is at least “rougly correlated with adjusted measures of welfare.” Third, he argues that GDP is important not as method of ranking nations, but as a means of measuring the business cycle in an individual nation. This addresses the criticism that if GDP accounted for leisure time, an important compenent of welfare, some counties–like France (which in French apparently means “nappy time”)–would be much higher ranked.
-Jake
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