The zen master and the failure of “morality as outcome”
Can you judge the morality of an outcome when consequences are endless?
Since the Academy Awards just wrapped up, it seems appropriate to begin with a movie.
This weekend I finally got around to watching Charlie Wilson’s War, an excellent biographical film by Aaron Sorkin about the congressman who from 1979 to 1989 organized covert CIA support for the Afghan mujahadeen in their fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
In one of the final scenes of the movie, at a party celebrating the Soviet withdraw from Afghanistan, Charlie Wilson pulls his closest ally at the CIA, Gust Avrakotos, aside to congratulate him. But Gust is in no mood. He tells Charlie the following story:
“There’s a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse and everybody in the village says, “how wonderful, the boy got a horse” And the Zen master says, “we’ll see.” Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, “How terrible.” And the Zen master says, “We’ll see.” Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight except the boy can’t cause his legs all messed up. and everybody in the village says, “How wonderful.’”
At which point Charlie interjects: “And the Zen master says, “We’ll see.” Read more
Must we call genocide “genocide”?
The Armenian genocide? Or The Armenian mass killings? And does it matter?
In a debate that seems to recur every few years, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs voted today to condemn as “genocide”, the mass killing of Armenians during and after World War I. Like in 2007, the last time an Armenian Genocide resolution came up, the Administration (then Bush, today Obama), sought to halt the vote - both times to no avail.
Unlike with the situation in Darfur, the hesitancy to use the word “genocide” stems not from worries about the responsibilities to which the use of the word would commit the United States, but from simple geopolitics. Turkey, while acknowledging that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks, has always denied that the deaths were part of a planned orchestrated campaign - a prerequisite for calling them “genocide.” And fearing the genocide label would tar their national reputation, Turkey has long fought the official declaration by other governments of the events as such. Because of this lobbying, only twenty countries, to date, have recognized the Armenian genocide. Read more
Managing risk
The earthquake in Chile this weekend was 500 times more powerful than the one that hit Haiti in January. Yet the death toll in Haiti was 300 times greater than in Chile (though numbers there will probably rise further). Why? In Haiti, most of the deaths were the result of building collapses. In Chile, a country with frequent tremblers, the enactment and enforcement of building codes seems to have successfully prevented most structures from collapsing (though they may be heavily damaged and in need of rebuilding).
While we will never prevent all threats and hazards from occurring, we can take steps to minimize risk. But this, of course, costs money. So we are left with a normative question that must be answered. How much risk should we buy down? Should we spend money to earthquake proof buildings in New York City, where a 6.0-magnitude quake will happen there every 670 years or so, recognizing the scale of destruction should an event could cause? Or is that a risk worth accepting? Should we issue tsunami warnings every time there is a possibility of such an event (as was done this weekend). Or are the economic costs of evacuating large parts of island nations so great that we should only issue warnings when we are confident that a tsunami will occur? The philosophical literature on risk management is quite slim, though a former TA of mine is trying to change that. These are hard questions. Any thoughts?
-Marc
If video games lead to violence, should government regulate them?
The Washington Post’s health blog, The Check Up, writes about a study published this month in Psychological Bulletin demonstrating a link between playing violent video games and violent thinking, attitudes and behavior. There has long been a debate about the regulation of sex and violence on TV and in video games. Does this study support the case for banning or regulating video games? Can any amount of empirical evidence justify government intrusion in personal choices?
-Marc
When should politicians resign?
As the New York Times breaks news of more questionable behavior by New York Governor David Paterson, the question on everyone’s minds is will he resign. As of now he maintains that he will not. But the more relevant question for the public philosopher is not will he resign, but should he resign. What do you think? Under what conditions should politicians resign? When they break the law? When they lose the confidence of the voters? When they lose the ability to govern effectively? When they lie?
-Marc
Democracy, what is it good for?
American politicians and their love-hate relationship with democracy
Americans love democracy, right? In many ways it is our democracy that defines us as a nation, born as we were out of a revolution over “taxation without representation”. I mean, we export this stuff to other countries for heaven’s sake.
And yet with his domestic agenda stalled and his super-majority in the Senate eliminated by the voters of Massachusetts, President Obama has turned to arguably less democratic tools to push his policy proposals. And liberals as a whole, The Weekly Standard claims, “have assigned responsibility for the mess they’re in…to larger, structural faults in American politics and society. Beginning with you.”
The turn against democracy should come as no surprise. Every President faces falling approval ratings. Every Congress sees its electoral stars fading. And almost every time, the instinctive response is to scorn public opinion and “stand on principle.” In some peculiar way, we even encourage our politicians to ignore us. A January Allstate/National Journal poll found that 83% of Americans would trust politicians more if they made a “stronger effort to stand up for principle.”
The morality of assassination
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out these videos of the sequence of events in the assassination of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. The Wall Street Journal offers up some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder. Whether it was an inside job, the work of hired guns, or a classic case of state-sponsored assassination, the obvious question remains: is assassination moral? Does it depend on who the victim is? Does it depend on who the assassins are? Does it matter if previous attempts have been made to capture the individual? Does it matter if the person was engaged in activity that was a direct threat to the assassination party (in this case, reportedly, buying weapons for Hamas)? Will certainly be worth a longer post later. In the meantime, ponder away.
-Marc
Should government protect consumer safety?
As a long-time Toyota owner myself, it’s been difficult to see the rash of recalls facing the Japanese automaker. But it’s raised an interesting question about the role of the government in a free market. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, for example, has received a good deal of criticism for not following up on evidence of braking problems in Toyota cars as early as 2007. But the question remains: should government intervene in the free market to protect consumer safety? And if so, to what degree? Must government test everything that comes to market? Every product line? Or every single product? Or should government not intervene at all? Is the free flow of information (especially in the internet age) enough to get companies themselves to ensure the safety of their own products?
Discuss…
-Marc
Obama the dictator?
The use and abuse of executive power
On Friday The New York Times reported that the Obama Administration, faced with an uncooperative Congress, is looking into “a list of presidential executive orders and directives” to push its governing agenda forward. The article was, unsurprisingly, met with a barrage of criticism from the right. RedState writers suggested Obama was “dusting off his best Hugo Chavez imitation” and that his Administration had become a “DICTATORSHIP BY FIAT” (emphasis in original).
As The New York Times article notes, presidents can legally make policy without Congressional legislation “through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat.” But just because a president can doesn’t mean a president should. So should Obama use his executive powers, like executive orders and directives?
What if equality and growth were compatible?
How one economist could change egalitarian distributive justice forever
An interesting article in the Santa Fe Reporter last week on an economist whose work has major implications for theories of economic distributive justice. Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute, a research institution dedicated to the study of complexity, is one of the leading economists in a movement challenging the assumptions of the Milton Friedman/Chicago School of free-market economics.
According to the Chicago School, distributive inequality is an inevitable consequence of economic growth. Bowles challenges this notion, claiming that while the theories of the Chicago School may work in ideal models, in the real world the story is much different. The Chicago School assumes an economy that is efficiently organized. But in reality, economies are actually quite inefficient, those with greater inequality, Bowles contends, particularly so. Instead of the distribution of wealth being dependent on economic growth, economic growth is dependent on the distribution of wealth.
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