The court of public opinion
The New York Times has a cool interactive feature where you can compare your views on certain issues with the Roberts court and the general public. However, comparisons can be slightly misleading since the questions are framed as policy questions not constitutional questions. While readers are asked whether they would support a ban on partial birth abortion, the justices are not supposed to be considering whether or not the law is smart policy but whether it is constitutional.
-Luke
Is eating healthy a choice?
Or can the poor simply not afford nutritious meals?
A few weeks ago I explored whether we should subsidize healthy habits and tax unhealthy ones. In the post, I quoted Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who questions if we should “trust” the government to act as our “guardian.”
To what extent should we use the power of the state to protect us from ourselves? If we go down that route, where do we stop?
Mankiw frames the issue as whether we need the government making choices for us, but in a recent blog post at The Atlantic professor Ellen Ruppell Shell questions this idea. Read more
Will the extension of unemployment benefits encourage people to remain unemployed?
Last week, Obama signed into law an extension of unemployment benefits to 99 weeks. Supporters of the extension argue that it is a sensible thing to do when the economy is in dire straits, and that the presently unemployed deserve a safety net to shelter them from circumstances not entirely of their doing. Opponents argue that the extension will delay economic recovery by discouraging people at the margins from working. Although economic in nature, these arguments speak to the basic assumptions that both sides have about human preferences.
The supporters’ argument implicitly assumes that the supply of labor is relatively inelastic; this corresponds to an argument that incentives will not strongly influence how much a person works. Work is something that most people prefer to have as a matter of self-respect or a desire to keep active. Since it is not for lack of desire to work that people are unemployed, they deserve assistance from the state.
The opponents’ argument posits that the supply of labor is relatively elastic, and that how much people work is very much influenced by incentives. In this thinking, leisure is a luxury that people want more of while labor is something grinding, burdensome and best forgotten. There is some empirical evidence pointing in this direction. The end of open-ended welfare under Clinton dramatically increased the employment rate of the urban poor.
There is surely a degree of truth to both arguments. Unfortunately, macroeconomics is still a young science and nobody has either perfect information or perfect theory.
-Charles
Photo by Flickr user John McNab used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Is WikiLeaks WikiLegal?
Transparency redux
Last week I sided with transparency over state secrets in the case of the Washington Post‘s special reporting on the U.S. intelligence buildup since 9/11. In that instance, the willingness of the intelligence community to pass on making any real objections provided no reason to think the usual cost of transparency – safety or national security – was in play.
Today it’s same song, second verse. The transparency site WikiLeaks has just released 91,000 classified documents related to the Afghanistan war, and most major papers – which received advance copies – are running various stories related to the documents.
The White House isn’t happy. According to a statement from National Security Adviser Jim Jones:
The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.
Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents – the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted.
This is the opposite case of the Post. WikiLeaks gave the government no heads-up, no chance for review, no opportunity for objection.
Now that’s not itself wrong. Read more
TPP Weekly Rewind
TPP Week-In-Review
- On Monday, Sam chastised the US Intelligence community in favor of The Washington Post, and TPP intern Charles wondered how much we can reasonably limit free speech
- On Tuesday, TPP intern Jonathan suggested that many citizens have a bad memory
- On Wednesday, TPP intern Han distinguished three conceptions of ‘just desert’ in light of a New York Times‘ op-ed lamenting a rising American aristocracy, and then suggested another justification for state laws criminalizing HIV transmission
- On Thursday, TPP intern Charles argued that we ought to allow the construction of a mosque and Muslim community center two blocks from Ground Zero; Luke examined Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s decision to support Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court, despite ideological differences; and TPP intern Ethan insisted that the argument over national standards in public education belies a debate over the nature of education itself
- On Friday, TPP intern Han considered pointed to a Newsweek story in order to connect the concepts of fairness and desert, and Jake criticized moral naturalism for failing to answer an important question
In Others’ Words
- Michael Smith asserted in an op-ed for News Herald that modern liberals are not who they think they are
- In the ‘Religion and Ethics’ section of ABC’s Australian site, Stanley Hauerwas claimed that America’s god is dying
- Robert Wolff shared another installment of his introductory series on game theory and related fields
- Herbert Gintis at Cato Unbound explained an interesting relationship between evolutionary biology and political philosophy
- Phil at A Very Public Sociologist discussed the relationship between radical politics and listening
- Youtube user CollegeBinary posted a three-minute summary of Immanuel Kant
- Some folks on Facebook suggested an interesting way to put the corpus of Ayn Rand to good use
- Neil Levy at Practical Ethics examined a recent study (which TPP has written about previously) that suggests people are often more likely to believe false information than true information
- Stephen Neale spoke about meaning and interpretation for Philosophy Bites‘ newest podcast
The limits of “moral naturalism”
Why be moral?
David Brooks’ column today discusses “moral naturalists,” who believe our moral faculties are an evolutionary and biological product born out of animals’ need to cooperate. This view is contrasted briefly with those who believe morality comes from God and those who believe we discern moral principles through reason and abstraction. Brooks writes:
One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate.
By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.
While moral naturalism has much to offer, especially in regard to understanding and analyzing our moral intuitions, at the bottom, it fails to say anything about why morality is actually important. Okay, so morality is a natural, evolutionary product? So why should I be “moral” when it doesn’t help me? Is it any different than our biological desire for sweet and fatty food, an unthinking impulse that one can choose to indulge, or not?
Moral naturalism, by itself, cannot answer these worries, I believe. A reply about the importance of cooperation and human interests and fulfillment will appeal not to a biological tale, but rather to the religion or abstract reasoning from which moral naturalism is supposedly immune.
-Jake
Money for nothing
A story over at Newsweek profiles three people who want to bring the estate tax back. The main arguments for this tax concerned the deficit:
To Julian Robertson, the founder of hedge fund giant Tiger Management and a major philanthropist, the economic and moral case for an estate tax increase was simple. “You get out of a credit crisis by getting your house in order, and in America’s case bringing your deficit down. This implies tax increases.” The fairest way to do it, he said, is to tax “the least deserving recipients of wealth, which are the inheritors.
I’ve written earlier this week about the concept of desert, but it is interesting to consider where the concept of fairness combines with desert in this and similar arguments.
-Han
Photo by Flickr user propertytaxonline used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
National vs. state standards for education and why it matters
A look at the debate over the new common core standards
The N.Y. Times reports that many states have quickly adopted national education standards. While this is surely due in part to the money awarded to those states that adopt the standards by August 2nd as part of the Race to the Top competition, the question of whether the U.S. should adopt national standards for education has been and continues to be a fundamental and divisive issue independent of any excitement caused by the new funding.
Supporters of national standards for education traditionally cite great variation in the levels of competency between different states under state-regulated standards. Pushing for national standards, they argue, will ensure that children in all states receive uniform education, instead of the wide discrepancies in knowledge base and competency symptomatic of state-regulated education. Local control of education is seen as a formula for mediocrity. One education scholar adds that “a child deemed a ‘proficient’ reader by officials in Texas is reading at the below basic level in Massachusetts.” National standards threaten to expose this kind of discrepancy.
Graham’s vote for Kagan
When should senators confirm judges whose judicial philosophy differs from their own?
On Tuesday the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. The vote split along party lines, with the exception of South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who broke rank to support Kagan’s nomination.
Graham defended his choice by saying that while he disagreed with Kagan on many issues, he felt it was his duty to support President Obama’s nomination provided she was fair and competent. The conflict raises an interesting ethical and constitutional question, should, and if so when, may Senators vote against judicial nominees on ideological grounds? Read more
Islamic mosque, Islamist mosque, or extremist mosque?
How appropriate is animus toward the new Ground Zero mosque?
A few months ago, news emerged of plans for a mosque and Muslim community center two blocks from Ground Zero. In the ensuing and continuing saga, Sarah Palin is but one of the latest to weigh in, tweeting “Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand. Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in the interest of healing.”
John Esposito at CNN framed the moral question well: “Why should Muslims who are building a center be any more suspect than Jews who build a synagogue or center or Christians who build a church or conference center?”
What underlies the Palin position is the conflation of Islam, Islamism, and radicalism.
It seems rather improbable that the new mosque in practice will become a magnet for extremists. But the opposition to the mosque is concerned as much with the fear of terror as with the symbolism of a building that represents what is perceived as an alien and hostile culture. Read more
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