Mother always said to tell the truth
But the truth doesn’t always make an interesting story
The biopic The Social Network opened on Friday. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, and people close to him convincingly dismiss the movie as more fiction than fact. Have David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin done us a disservice?
People have always applied artistic license to stories portraying events beyond living memory. Sometimes, fiction turns history completely on its head. Banquo from Shakespeare’s Macbeth was, according to Holinshed’s Chronicles (from which Shakespeare frequently drew inspiration), not Macbeth’s noble adversary but his accomplice in regicide. Read more
I don’t sanction that
The BBC reports that the United States has imposed sanctions on key Iranian officials for human rights abuses dating from the crackdown on anti-government protesters in the summer of 2009. The sanctions consist of travel bans and asset freezes. As far as diplomatic tools go, sanctions like these –small, targeted ones- are mostly symbolic in nature and morally uncontroversial. They will at least inconvenience the miscreants in question a little, and likely will not hurt any innocents.
But the same cannot be said of sanctions in general as diplomatic tools. Without so much as a shot fired, economic sanctions can be just as destructive as wars and just as capable of harming the innocent. More than that, they rarely accomplish policy goals in their own right, although they might make some goals easier to attain in at least the short run.
When we discuss sanctions of the kind that target whole nations, we are really weighing the morality of collective punishment against the desirability of certain policy goals. Maybe the price will be worth it. Maybe not.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user ajagendorf25 used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
The loss of innocence is more than a literary trope
In response to debates over public school library blacklists, the BBC poses the question, “should parents have the power to ban school texts?” The complaints the BBC article addresses are mostly about children’s exposure to sexuality. Some of the books in question are literary classics, though most are staples of pop culture like the Twilight series.
Who is responsible for the development of children, moral and otherwise? A short list of candidates would include parents and community organizations alongside schools. Parents have a great deal of latitude over their children, and can usually choose what activities in the community they engage in. But only the relatively privileged can choose what schools to send their children to, and when questions of sex and morality are concerned there is rarely consensus in the school boards. Someone is bound to be offended.
But in some ways the debate over public school blacklists misses the point. The fact remains that public school libraries are only one of many different ways for children to access information. By hook or by crook children will whet their curiosities. Concerned parents must surely acknowledge the existence of libraries outside of school, bookstores, and the internet.
The issue of public school library blacklists is only a distraction from the more general question of how children should be raised, and whether any one set of preferences should ever prevail against the wishes of some.
-Charles
Image from Flickr user Robert Dumas used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Honesty is the best policy
Sexual taboos lead the way to hypocrisy and tragedy
CNN reports that Bishop Eddie Long, Baptist church leader and staunch opponent of gay marriage, will defend himself from allegations of sexual assault on younger men. If the allegations prove true, then Bishop Long’s case will be the latest in a succession of gay sex scandals involving publicly anti-gay crusaders.
Of course, people who bill themselves as defenders of traditional sexual mores and values do not have any exclusive claim to scandalous sexual misconduct (although it is possible they have a slight edge). But when scandals involving those who profess such beliefs do arise, what really distinguishes their cases is less the severity of the transgressions and more the depths of their hypocrisy. They rightfully attract condemnation, for sexual hypocrisy, more than other kinds, ruins lives.
The death penalty may be constitutional, but is it justified?
The United States Supreme Court has refused to overturn the execution of a Virginia woman who conspired with two accomplices to murder her husband and stepson. The legal debate that has emerged around the case concentrates mostly on whether the woman, who is borderline mentally disabled, deserves a harsher sentence than her accomplices, who each received life sentences.
But there is a broader issue at stake here. Recall the justifications for punishment – incapacitation, retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. The death penalty does incapacitate criminals – terminally – but so does a secure prison. It is certainly an expression of society’s disgust and vengeance (retribution).
But does it deter? Deterrence depends in part on the probability and severity of punishment. The death penalty is so seldom exercised in the United States that the case for its deterrence effect is a questionable one.
Perhaps the deterrence effect would be more meaningful if people were executed more often. But there is a very dark undertone to this suggestion: the justice system is by no means infallible, and entrusting matters of life or death to it does carry real risks.
And even if we sincerely believe that there are monsters among us that don’t belong among the living, we must seriously consider whether the danger of wrongfully executing the innocent is outweighed by the benefit of ensuring the guilty get their just deserts. The cost of retribution and deterrence may not be worth the benefit.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user johnmuk used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Worlds apart –why an open society may be better after all
On Monday, Han wrote about Thomas Friedman’s Op-Ed in the New York Times on the
“green economy,” contrasting the technocratic approach of China’s authoritarian rulers with the haphazard and undirected approach of the American political system. Han suggested that technocratic and authoritarian governments may have an advantage for costly but necessary endeavors.
There is certainly an allure of decisiveness and efficiency under technocratic rule. Thomas Friedman quotes the chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy as saying that “There really is no debate about climate change in China.” But climate change is not the only issue on which public debate in China is absent.
In China, internet search terms such as “freedom,” “democracy,” and “demonstration” are blocked, as are some sites on health, education, news, entertainment, religion, pornography, Taiwan, and Tibet. Sometimes the bans extend to academic sites. In January of 2009, the Chinese government even censored Obama’s inauguration.
If technocrats are to monopolize decision-making, then they cannot be questioned or challenged meaningfully. This is worrisome, not only because the technocrats won’t get it right every time. John Stuart Mill once pointed out that the absence of debate leads to orthodoxy, rigidness, and most importantly stunted intellectual growth. Inertia and resistance to necessary change can plague authoritarian societies as much or more than democratic ones. Not only do liberty and political equality suffer, but so does the very development of societies and individuals.
Technocratic societies in the past have sometimes been able to make remarkable achievements in a brief time span. The Soviet Union not only launched Sputnik and led the world in rocketry but also aggressively promoted literacy and women’s rights. But these achievements did not last. Russia today is hardly a bastion of progressivism, prosperity, and innovation. Without intellectual diversity and debate, the promise of progress cannot be realized in the long run.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user sofafort used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Do not pass GO. Do not collect heart transplant.
The complexity of allocating health care morally
ABC News reports that the morbidly obese are unlikely to receive heart transplants because their chances of recovery are so slim. Some transplant centers purportedly have a Body Mass Index cutoff of 35.
Although nobody died in the making of the ABC story, the same cannot be said of this horrific anecdote from Britain, in which a premature baby was unattended to for being born two days too early. Elsewhere in the world, a 69-year old Japanese man who was hurt in a traffic accident was turned away from 14 hospitals before he died. In slightly funnier twist, a Swedish man fed up with waiting sewed up his own leg (successfully) and was charged for the unlicensed use of medical instruments.
Healthcare horror stories seem to crop up everywhere regardless of the kind of system that prevails. The American healthcare system is a mixed-public private system, as are those of Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Sweden, the UK, and Canada are single-payer government-run systems. No examples of a pure free-market healthcare system exist anywhere.
Under a pure free-market healthcare system, care would simply be rationed on the basis of the ability to pay and perhaps the charity of doctors. Supply would meet demand, end of story (nothing like this has ever existed for reasons that are beyond the scope of this post). This strikes most people as at least a little offensive –if a child’s parents cannot afford a life-saving procedure, should that be the end of the story? A pure free-market system would definitely have its share of horror stories too. Read more
Should identity and politics ever mix?
The BBC reports that France’s Senate has overwhelmingly approved banning Islamic full-body coverings. The heart of the issue is the integration of Muslim immigrants, who have been arriving in France and other European countries in large numbers for the last three decades but have often visibly failed to assimilate. Undoubtedly, the Paris riots of 2005 and the terror attacks in Madrid and London weigh heavily on the minds of French voters and parliamentarians.
France is not the only European country to move in this direction. Belgium and Spain are considering similar laws, and Switzerland recently outlawed minarets.
It is not surprising that secular Europeans react with visceral hostility and disgust to what they see as trappings of archaic, patriarchal and oppressive religiosity. The values that Muslim immigrants bring to Europe are often at odds with those of the modern Western human rights culture. But is it appropriate for the heavy hand of the law to secularize by force?
Forcible secularization as a form of social engineering has a mixed record. In Turkey, the fervently nationalist and secular governments since the time of Ataturk have outlawed headscarves and generally repressed religious expression. Islamic radicalism was forcibly stamped out (although the ruling AKP bills itself as a moderate Islamist party). But many rights that Americans would take for granted were trampled in the process. And religious identity politics in Turkey have by no means been resolved for good.
Banning articles of clothing might give the illusion of assimilation, while violating basic rights to religious expression. If Europeans want to address the challenges posed by immigrants from radically different cultures, they should probably think of other ways to bring their immigrants into the economic and social mainstream. Assimilation and religious freedom need not butt heads.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user BBC World Service used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Hope and change in schooling are sorely needed
Elitism and egalitarianism in education
Courtland Milloy suggests at the Washington Post that D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s vision for the D.C. school system is both inspiring and quixotic.
Milloy quotes Rhee as suggesting that elitism, “reluctance by the city’s haves to share classrooms with the have-nots,” is the single largest obstacle to school reform. Overcoming elitism, Warren Buffet once suggested to Rhee, would simply require the abolition of private schools and assignment of all children to public schools by random lottery. The argument goes that well-to-do parents would force schools to improve if they were denied the choice of where to send their children.
Ironically, elitism would militate against the opposite solution as well. Suppose all public schools were abolished and poor families given vouchers and scholarships to attend private schools like their wealthier peers. Milton Friedman’s solution is the polar opposite of Buffett’s –improve education by giving rather than denying choice to all. But in this case, elites too would have to put up with the prospect of rubbing shoulders with the rabble. If elitism is indeed the major roadblock to reform, then this solution, conceptually just as radical, is practically just as unrealistic. Read more
Do ask, do tell –later, when you’re a little older
Last Thursday, a federal judge in California ruled Don’t Ask Don’t Tell unconstitutional on First and Fifth Amendment grounds for restricting the rights of gay service members to free speech, free association, and due process. The case put the Obama administration in a slightly awkward position, having to defend a standing law that it is already in the process of repealing.
It is clear that Obama, Chairman of the Join Chiefs Mullen, and Secretary of Defense Gates have little love for DADT. The public is not keen about it either. And yet, legal procedure is so important to our form of government that it sometimes means defending or accepting laws that we don’t support.
Procedure allows for consistency and predictability. It is the counterweight to the whim or discretion of leaders, the public, bureaucrats, and other parties – none of whom are everywhere and always right. For example, we have due process and the presumption of innocence to protect people from being punished hastily and wrongfully.
Whether to defend something you believe to be morally wrong because it is the law of the land is one of the most difficult moral quandaries in public philosophy.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user The U.S. Army used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
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