TPP Weekly Rewind
Monday, August 30-Friday, September 3
TPP Week-In-Review
- On Monday, Sam explored a change in a race-based policy at an elementary school in Mississippi and explained its larger meaning, and Charles pointed to an interesting Project Syndicate series on free trade before discussing criticisms and benefits of a free trade approach
- On Tuesday, Luke evaluated Glenn Beck’s recent criticism of President Obama’s religious beliefs; Charles suggested, in light of some news about Mexican federal police, that criminal punishment might not be enough to end corruption; and Ethan differentiated between and discussed different environmental protection philosophies in response to a New York Times op-ed on wilderness areas
- On Wednesday, Han traced the possible moral connections between the destruction of human embryos and the use of stem cells in research, and John argued against the Governor of Arizona’s response to the State Department on the issue of immigration law
- On Thursday, Charles disparaged the suggestion, from people like the recent hostage taker at the Discovery Channel headquarters, that human civilization needs to dismantle in the name of the environment; Luke continued his investigation of CEO salaries and lauded politicians’ recent decision to require companies to release the pay ratio between CEOs and normal employees; and Jake expanded on his piece in today’s Christian Science Monitor by considering America’s moral responsibility for the Mexican drug war
In Others’ Words
- Philosophy In A Time Of Error criticized Larval Subjects for forgetting Michel Foucault in a recent discussion of Martha Nussbaum and ethical thought
- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote a piece on a couple of the most recent US presidents and the American Character for Time
- Larry Arhart at Darwinian Conservatism wrote of Aristotle as a biologist, and connected the philosopher to Charles Darwin
- Some folks at xkcd are having an interesting conversation about free will
- Gene Kinsey at Living The Grand Life wrote in opposition to perceived Islamophobia
- According to BBC News, one course at Oxford University dominates all of Britain
- Practical Ethics, arguably Oxford’s version of TPP, posted about equality and rules in sports about illegal enhancements
- Philosophy, et cetera wrote about the morals behind bad voting and abstaining from voting
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We buy their drugs and sell them our guns
US responsibility for Mexican drug lords cont.
In today’s Christian Science Monitor, I expand upon an argument I began in an earlier post about the United States’ moral responsibility for the vicious Mexican drug lords. In the Monitor I wrote:
Mexican drug lords exist to feed the US drug market. And they get their guns through the US weapons market. We give the bad guys their money by buying their drugs; we sell them the guns that enable their continued existence; and they threaten a fragile young democracy of more than 100 million people at our border.
I’d like to discuss the notion of moral responsibility for democratic nations a bit more. It seems that it can take one of at least two paths.
The first depends upon a conscious choice by an elected leader acting in his official capacity. When a President wages war, it’s useful to say that “We (America) went to war with country X today,” and that “we” are responsible for any good or bad that may result. The nation as a whole may not support the decision, but they support the process that empowers the President to have and use his war powers.
The second, more gestalt sense of national responsibility occurs when some sufficiently large subset of the population, operating within our collectively maintained political and cultural system, achieves some notoriety, such that we can say, “We (America) created Rock-N-Roll” or “We (America) give $39 billion a year to drug lords.”
Our responsibility south of the border is more of the latter case, since no leader supports the illegal drug purchases and weapon sales. But it quickly shades over to the first type when we see that our government does little to combat the problem. As I wrote earlier, a national government can be responsible for inaction, too.
-Jake
Executive compensation
A while ago, I investigated how much CEO’s deserve to make. My conclusion, we needed better tools for quantifying the worth of executives to a company.
This presents a further challenge, that of determining the value of the executive to the company. Supporters of current executive salaries would argue that these people are the most important figures in gigantic corporations, and that their salaries reflect their contribution. Given that the ratio of a CEO salary to the average worker in the company is increasing so sharply, this would mean that the relative value of company executives has been rising exponentially.
Debates over executive compensation have ignored these trends, and commentators have failed to seriously investigate metrics that could actually measure the value of a CEO to a company. Unfortunately, that’s the only way to settle this contentious debate.
Primitivism is insane
And maybe wrong
The hostage taker at the Discovery Channel headquarters posted a diatribe condemning modern civilization. The hostage taker saw humans as “filthy” and “parasitic” and considered the environment the only important value. In a warped re-reading of Daniel Quinn’s My Ishmael, his manifesto urges human civilization to dismantle itself before it takes the environment down with it.
Not long ago, there was another madman who embraced the collapse of civilization. He was a brilliant Harvard mathematician who convinced himself that, in order to truly be free, humans must satisfy a “power process” of challenge-and-reward cycles by eschewing industrial technology and struggling to survive. He also thought mailing bombs to people was a good idea.
Jared Diamond’s book Collapse provides a saner discussion of the demise of human civilization. Diamond argues that the depletion of resources has historically doomed isolated civilizations and may doom the entire human race in the near future. The solutions he suggests challenge things we take for granted, such as rising living standards and reproductive freedom.
State Department throws Arizona under the bus
Why the State Department’s criticism of Arizona’s law is a strike for states’ rights
The AP reports that the US State Department listed its objection to Arizona’s immigration law as a step the State Department is taking to protect human rights. Understandably, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer disagrees, writing:
“The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a state of the United States to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional.”
Let’s take these claims one at a time.
If the role of the High Commissioner on Human Rights is indeed to protect human rights, a state’s ability to criticize its own past decisions seems to be critical. Given the UN’s lack of hard power and unwillingness to intercede in state-level politics except when absolutely necessary (and often not even then), for there to be any kind of international human rights regime states must police themselves. The State Department’s actions seem to be internationalism of the best kind.
Further, the State Department’s decision is in fact a strike in defense of state sovereignty. By criticizing Arizona’s law, the State Department concedes Arizona’s ability to make laws that displease federal bodies. While the State Department is working through legal channels to overturn the law, in the meanwhile the immigration law remains on the books and seems to be a legitimate and likely target for human rights discussions.
It’s certainly not clear why Brewer thinks the state department’s decision is unconstitutional, other than the fact that things one disagrees with tend to be unconstitutional. In fact, the federal judge who ruled against Arizona’s law seems to believe that it’s the law itself that’s in the wrong.
-John
Image credit: Wiki Commons
Natural science?
Stem cell research and moral culpability.
A piece in The National Review commends a US district judge for halting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Before this ruling the Obama administration drew a distinction between the destruction of human embryos to create stem cell lines and the subsequent use of these stem cells in research. The destruction cannot be federally funded, but the research can. In light of the judge’s opinion that such a distinction was indefensible, the piece asks an interesting question.
On the one hand, it is true that all research on embryonic stem cells was preceded by and is made possible by the destruction of an embryo; the two acts are morally entangled. […] But on the other hand, imagine a young scientist just beginning his career, experimenting on stem cells derived from embryos destroyed years earlier, on the other side of the country, when he was still in junior high. Is he morally culpable for the act of embryo destruction?
Let us first assume that destroying and using human embryos is a morally impermissible act, even weighed against the possible good that stem cell research might produce. While this is an obviously controversial assumption on which philosophy has much to say, I will sidestep it for the sake of argument.
Does the causal link between destroying the embryos and using the stem cells in research produce the relevant “moral entanglement”? Read more
Should we protect the wilderness?
A recent op-ed in The New York Times about wilderness areas raises important questions about the ethics of public access and environmental preservation in the national park system. Its author sharply criticizes what he feels is overzealous enforcement of the 1964 Wilderness Act.
Citing cases of deaths caused by lack of signage and vast expanses of wilderness, the article suggests that the laws once intended to preserve areas of natural beauty and promote easy access to them have instead needlessly endangered lives. Further preservation efforts, enacted as recently as 2009, only exacerbate the problem:
“… agencies have made these supposedly open recreational areas inaccessible and even dangerous, putting themselves in opposition to healthy and environmentally sound human-powered activities, the very thing Congress intended the Wilderness Act to promote.”
There is significant ideological tension between encouraging access to wilderness and the efforts to preserve it. Activists talk about the vital importance of the wilderness experience, but realistically, the only way to preserve that experience is through limiting access to it. But how much space do we really need?
A conflict inevitably arises. On one side, there is a kind of wilderness elitism. Its goal is to maintain the purity of large swaths of the natural environment for the privilege of a select few. It is, on a basic level, impossible to sustain for everyone. Its counterpart is wilderness populism, which maintains that these natural areas should be easily accessible for everyone. This idea of mass access, while egalitarian, threatens to destroy the qualities that make the wilderness so precious to enthusiasts.
So far, the government has struck a good balance, and accomplished great things with wilderness preservation. Refusing to put up signs, however, needlessly endangers people. More than that, it isn’t helping anyone to more fully experience the solitude of the woods.
-Ethan
Image used under a Creative Commons Attribution License from Flickr user Jagger
When punishment isn’t enough
In the latest episode of the War on Drugs, about 10% of the Mexican federal police have been fired for corruption or failure to perform their duties. Many face additional criminal charges. Perhaps some federales will now think harder before dealing with the cartels.
As Jake has described, punishment serves four purposes: retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation. In the case of the federales, deterrence was probably the prime motivator.
But how effective is deterrence? For a criminal, the severity of punishment is one of three things to consider. The other two are the likelihood of being caught and the reward for carrying out the crime.
In the course of policing, a government can affect two of these factors: likelihood and severity of punishment. But affecting only these two factors may not be enough. Until recently, the Chinese government was routinely executing officials found guilty of malfeasance, yet corruption remains stubbornly entrenched.
This is because the potential rewards for abusing power might be so great as to trump dangers to life and limb. A simple cost-benefit analysis tells us that if the potential reward for a crime is great enough, then many risks may be justified.
In Mexico, the continued existence of a lucrative underground market provides irresistible opportunities to some people; in China, a lack of transparency in the political system does the same thing.
Punishment surely has its place among the means a society uses to control miscreants. But lasting solutions to corruption might require that we think more about eliminating the rewards that make corruption attractive.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user Foto Martien used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Glenn Beck attacks Obama’s religious beliefs
Are these sort of criticisms appropriate?
Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally has come and gone, but the conservative television host is continuing to make headlines this week. On Sunday, he strongly critiqued President Obama’s religious beliefs.
Beck claimed that Obama “is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim.”
“People aren’t recognizing his version of Christianity,” Beck added.
Is Beck’s criticism of Obama a valid critique of the President’s philosophy or an inappropriate attack on a matter of personal faith? Read more
Trading values
Project Syndicate has an ongoing series by Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati on “The Open Economy and its Enemies.” There is more or less a consensus among economists that free trade promotes economic growth; the law of comparative advantage still holds nearly two centuries after it was formulated. But the opinions of both the public and other social scientists are more ambivalent.
Competition is the means by which actors in an open economy are disciplined. But competition generates losers and winners, too –at least in the short run. Non-economic concerns with free trade include growing inequality, the constant displacement of people under conditions of ruthless competition, environmental degradation, the globe-spanning hazards of mutual dependency, and national security.
Critics of free trade may accuse economists of linear thinking for ignoring the messiness of reality. But economists might equally accuse critics of free trade for ignoring the bottom line –that increased wealth will expand the possibilities of what a society can accomplish.
The free trade debate, like many others, asks how willing we are to trade increased levels of wealth for other values, and under what conditions. Not surprisingly, this debate tends to come to the fore in times of economic uncertainty.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user free range jace used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
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