Man at the top
The problem with inequality
Writing for The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof criticizes the rising inequality in America, comparing our economic situation to the famous “banana republics.” According to Kristof:
In the past, many of us acquiesced in discomfiting levels of inequality because we perceived a tradeoff between equity and economic growth. But there’s evidence that the levels of inequality we’ve now reached may actually suppress growth. A drop of inequality lubricates economic growth, but too much may gum it up.
First, we can wonder why inequality makes us uncomfortable in the first place. One possibility is that there may be something intrinsically valuable about equality. However, it’s hard to imagine this being the case – even if there was some truth to this, the value of equality would be easily outweighed by many other mitigating factors. Consider this famous thought experiment by Harry Frankfurt:
Suppose that ten people have a deadly disease, and they need two shots of a certain medicine in order to be cured. Anything less would mean certain death. However, there are only ten shots of the medicine available. If we gave the medicine out equally, everyone would get one shot, and all ten would die. Obviously, equality is not the best policy here.
But, some might argue, the economy is different than the medicine example. Read more
Blinded by the light
Feeding the national dialogue
“The dialogue is impoverished.” This lament is heard across the political spectrum, echoing between the margins of opinion pages and muttered by graying professors in an air of resignation. It’s the reason this website was created. It’s a statement we all seem to agree on, and one thing we are all trying to fix. This makes it all the more regrettable when an attempt at the solution only adds to the problem.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Professor Peter Berkowitz begins well enough: liberal commentators have been dismissive in their views of the Tea Party movement, and this is wrong. I agree completely with this statement – there are many powerful (and perhaps ultimately correct) reasons to believe in the principles of personal liberty and limited government. These reasons constitute philosophical arguments, and they’re arguments that opponents of the Tea Party should engage with in good faith, clear logic, and intellectual honesty.
Berkowitz, unfortunately, believes the debate should lie elsewhere. Read more
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
Police and thieves
The rise of China and America’s military responsibility
A piece in The Atlantic reports on a joint US/Japan rehearsal to defend Japan from a possible Chinese invasion. According to the article, while there is no immediate threat of any Chinese invasion, there is no doubt that China is a rising power that one day will challenge American supremacy.
The question isn’t will China rise, it’s what happens when it does. If we simply let current trends continue, it’s entirely foreseeable that China could cajole, persuade, or bully the rest of East Asia under its influence. The U.S. can handle Chinese competition, but a unified East Asia could undermine the U.S. in any number of ways. […] Another risk of inaction could be regional war. As China expresses more dominance over its neighbors, if regional diplomatic institutions remain too weak to ensure peaceful conflict resolution, it’s possible that China could come to blows with states such as Thailand or, yes, Japan.
This is an argument for a more aggressive foreign policy in an era when many are calling for cuts to the defense budget and dismantling of the American “empire.”
Moral arguments for scaling back American power overseas tend to rely a “live and let live” type of analogy. It is arrogant and often disastrous for Americans to impose our will upon disparate nations and peoples, some might contend – let each family live according to their own rules without the fear of the American fist.
There is certainly some truth to this argument, but I think it is overly simplistic. Even if America withholds its own power, nations may still fear the power of other militaries, or perhaps equally important, individual persons may fear the power of their own governments. 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
Polls: they told me to do it
When should we hear what the public thinks?
Parties and politicians often oppose the other side’s position, whether on gay marriage, Afghanistan, or anything else, by arguing that it’s at odds with the people’s wishes, as revealed by opinion polls. When is such an appeal to polls appropriate? It’s more complicated then it appears.
On all the but the crudest definitions of a good elected representative, Congressmen do not exist merely to tally their constituents’ views on a given policy question and then vote accordingly.
Surely, fighting for their bosses’ opinions forms a big part of their obligation as a democratic representative, but they have a distinct duty to deliberate and debate publicly, so that they can join and lead the national conversation by which they and the people fashion their views. More than aggregating the people’s opinions, they have an obligation to ensure that such opinions are right.
With this in mind, we can discern where an appeal to polls should have the greatest (or least) amount of impact in the course of political debate.
First off, when an issue is fresh and unexamined, the power of polls ought to be at its lowest ebb. For an official to say at such a point that the debate is over because the public feels one way shirks his duty to lead the deliberative process. Neither he nor the people have considered this issue for long, and their first instinct, like that of any individual when first presented with a problem, may be wrong.
Career of evil?
A continent’s past crimes and present guilt
A piece in The National Review commends an essay by Parisian intellectual Pascal Bruckner that diagnoses a type of European “self-hatred.” Europe apparently views its own history as a series of crimes for which it must repent. Bruckner thinks this guilt is responsible for the continent’s “decline.”
Do Europeans have reason to be remorseful? While denying that guilt can be transmitted from generation to generation — “As there is no hereditary transmission of victim status, so there is no transmission of oppressor status” — Bruckner acknowledges that European history is pockmarked with crimes: slavery, feudal oppression, colonialism, fascism, and Communism.
On one hand, I agree that there is no hereditary transmission of moral guilt – the son is not responsible for the sins of the father. However, there is a certain sense in which a feeling of guilt for a society’s past crimes can be both important and helpful. Read more
Who deserves sympathy?
On both the 11th and the 23rd of this month there have been stories on BBC citing the inadequacy of the international aid response to the Pakistani floods. At the moment, there are seven mentions of the Pakistani floods on the front pages of the BBC site.
U.S. news outlets have less to say. CNN, Fox, CBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have one or two mentions each on their front pages. ABC News and the Wall Street Journal have none at all. Elsewhere in the world, Der Spiegel, Xinhua and Pravda are about the same.
The British understandably feel a peculiar connection with their former colonial possession. But in most of the world, you would not think that there is an ongoing calamity displacing millions of people, exposing them to hunger and disease.
One BBC article offers tentative answers for this indifference. Some suggest that Pakistan is merely unlucky. The floods come while donors are fatigued from the Haitian earthquake; the disaster unfolded over a span of weeks and makes a weak headliner; the floods are a part of the seasonal monsoon rains.
Other explanations, however, point to Pakistan’s perceived faults. Namely, Pakistan’s links to terrorism and corruption within its government make sympathy a tough sell. Comments on the story’s page suggest, sometimes harshly, that a country capable of amassing nuclear weapons, maintaining a large army and funneling money to terrorists surely has the means to rescue its own people.
This is close to approval of collective punishment. Victims of the flood cannot be held personally responsible for the dubious actions of Pakistan’s ISI (its clandestine intelligence service), its decades under military government, or greed and corruption of its officials. Moral and legal codes everywhere assign agency to individuals and judge them accordingly. Can individuals be blamed for the actions of others in a group over whom they have little control? What are the bounds of collective responsibility?
-Charles
Image by Flickr user DFID-UK Department for International Development used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Lawful mutiny
The BBC reports that several federal police officers in Ciudad Juarez have arrested their own commander on grounds of corruption and racketeering. On the heels of the Wikileaks case and in the midst of two ongoing wars, it is worth considering the moral role of the individual in security-related institutions like the military and police.
Millennia of human experience demonstrate that discipline and professionalism distinguish effective security forces. Such forces can do tremendous good. But institutions are fallible. The uncertainties of both violent conflict and day-to-day human life also provide endless opportunities for rigid adherence to orders to cause grievous harm. When is it appropriate for those who are vested with the protection of a society to disobey orders and even turn on their superiors? Read more
The ethics of the House ethics committee
Who do they represent?
The most interesting ethical questions surrounding Charlie Rangel don’t concern him, his villas, or his rent controlled apartments. They are about the operation and purpose of the House ethics committee and what ethical perspective members of the House should bring to bear on the controversy.
Rangel, dethroned former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been charged by the ethics committee with 13 violations, including, among other sins, using his office to solicit donations to school to be named in his honor and failing to pay taxes on and report rental income from a house in the Dominican Republic. Settlement talks have stalled and Democrats are wringing their hands over the prospect of a public ethics trial for a fellow party member. It will not help their chances in the November elections.
A number of ethical perspectives in tension here, and for everyone involved. Here are a few.
First, there is the special obligation one has to himself, his life’s work, and his family. This means wanting to keep one’s job as a Congressman (or to regain one’s job as a chairman), and leads to asking the question: What process and outcome will be best for my election chances?
Second, there is obligation to one’s party, both as a matter of duties to an organization one has freely joined and also as a matter of personal integrity, in the sense of fealty to one’s political and philosophical ideology. This leads to question: What process and outcome will be best for my party’s election chances?
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