TPP Weekly Rewind
Monday, October 4 – Friday, October 8
TPP Week-In-Review
- On Monday, Han pointed us to a piece at The National Review, in which Jonah Goldberg criticized liberals who legislate without considering the constitutionality of their legislation, and Charles examined distortion and libel in light of the recent film about Facebook’s origins, The Social Network
- On Tuesday, Charles mentioned a recent Rutgers suicide case before discussing questions concerning murder and unintentional death, bullying, and privacy
- On Wednesday, Han defended McDonald’s Happy Meals against a proposed ban in San Francisco, and guest poster Joanna Langille reflected on the decision of Ontario’s Superior Court to strike down federal laws criminalizing prostitution by tracing human dignity in Western intellectual history and explaining what it means for the prostitution debate
- On Thursday, Sam examined a recent attempt to limit what food stamp users can purchase to get at a deeper question concerning government authority and individual autonomy, and Charles criticized ‘silly laws’ like the one prohibiting firefighters from saving the house of a Tennessee who didn’t pay their annual $75 fee
In Others’ Words
- Matt Lewis explained at Politics Daily why ‘red herring’ candidates may end up helping diehard conservatives
- Ian Boyne claimed for The Gleaner that there is a conspiracy against tolerance
- Robert Wilson defined ‘conservative’, and claimed a number of people are incorrect in calling themselves by that name
- Rob Long, for The National Review, playfully decided that conservatives should defend complicated toilets from zealous environmentalists
- David Murdter discussed for The Cornell Daily Sun, in his ‘Column to Restore Rationality’, the two rallies to be put on by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
- Greatly influential moral philosopher Philippa Foot died on Sunday
- Judy Lin reported for the AP that Carly Fiorina, Senate candidate from California, developed her conservative philosophy rather early
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ShareWhen silly laws benefit no one
ABC News reports that firefighters in the Tennessee city of South Fulton refused to put out a fire because of the family’s failure to pay a $75 annual fee for rural fire protection services (the family lived outside of city limits, so the fee was in place of normal city taxes). The firefighters were obligated by law not to put out the fire absent the payment of the fee. Was this justified?
The argument in favor of user fees is that they eliminate problems of free-riding by attaching costs to services. As Jacqueline Byers of the National Association of Counties put it, “If the city starts fighting fires in the homes of people outside the city who don’t pay, why would anyone pay?”
But because of the way the policy in South Fulton was constructed, a family lost decades’ worth of possessions while the city and fire department were embarrassed nationally. It would have been a simple matter to have surcharged the family after the fact. Many emergency services, such as ambulances, operate on a basis of billing after the fact. In fact, the family offered to pay $500 to fire fighters who arrived to protect a neighbor’s house.
It is not unreasonable to charge people for services; there are, after all, no free lunches. But for firefighters to let a house burn down over a small sum of money makes little sense.
-Charles
Photo by Flickr user latitudes used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Fat stamps?
Can we tell food stamp recipients what to eat?
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City – noted for his interest in public health – has issued a request to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow the city to bar the use of food stamps to purchase sugared drinks as a way to combat the city’s soaring obesity rates. The food stamp program (known officially as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) is a cash transfer that reaches about 40 million low-income Americans every month.
Some have already raised eyebrows at the ethical implications that come with determining what food stamp recipients can and can’t eat:
“The world would be better, I think, if people limited their purchases of sugared beverages,” Mr. Hacker said. “However, there are a great many ethical reasons to consider why one would not want to stigmatize people on food stamps.”
[...]
In 2004, the Agriculture Department denied a request by Minnesota to prevent food-stamp recipients from buying junk food. The department said that the plan, which focused on candy and soda, among other foods, was based on questionable merits and would “perpetuate the myth” that food-stamp users made poor shopping decisions.
What’s so odd about these complaints is that they seem to miss the deeper ethical question about the reach of government power. The real question we should be asking is whether governments have a right to tell some segment of the population what they can and can’t eat, and whether we want a government that substitutes its nutritional judgment for our own. Read more
Guest Post: The dignity of the prostitute
“Human dignity” demands that we must (never) legalize prostitution
Last week, a judge in Canada’s largest province struck down the country’s federal laws criminalizing prostitution. Judge Susan Himel of the Ontario Superior Court ruled that prohibitions on prostitution infringed Canadians’ constitutional rights to freedom of expression and to security of the person. If the decision is upheld at the federal level, Canada will join countries such as Germany and the Netherlands and states such as Nevada where prostitution is, to varying degrees, legal.
The legalization of prostitution is not currently a live issue in the United States, but a major policy change from our neighbour and largest trading partner could prompt a re-examination of the issue. Such a debate would likely pit progressive against progressive and conservative against conservative. In the prostitution debate, the camps are separated less by the traditional right versus left dividing lines, and more by a disagreement regarding the meaning of “human dignity.”
Although prevalent in Enlightenment thinking, the idea that states must respect human dignity entered the political and philosophical vernacular following the adaptation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Since then, liberal and constitutional theorists have struggled to define what, exactly, respect for human dignity by the state entails.
Liberal theory encompasses two different conceptions of what constitutes respect for human dignity, which point to two radically different conclusions in the debate over prostitution.
Ballad of an obese man
Liberalism, free choice, and Happy Meals
It has been reported that the city of San Francisco is considering an ordinance that would ban toys in kids meals unless the meals contain fruit and vegetable portions and limits calories. While the proposed ban applies to all restaurants, it is targeted specifically at McDonald’s and their infamous Happy Meals.
There is little doubt that childhood obesity is a serious problem in the United States, and that the government has an interest in fighting it. Furthermore, drawing on contemporary liberal theory, I think it is pretty easy to justify at least some laws aimed at regulating public health. However, it is far less clear how a law as harsh and direct as banning Happy Meals can be justified. Read more
Bullied and pranked to death
BBC News reflects on the shock and outrage following the death of a Rutgers student who died after an apparent incident of cyberbullying. The perpetrators face up to five years in prison for invading privacy. They might also face additional hate-crime charges. Depending on one’s perspective, these penalties may be just adequate or nowhere near enough.
What makes the difference between cases of murder from unintentional death and injury via bullying? The law differentiates betweens murder, which is carefully planned and premeditated or done with reasonable probability of deadly consequences, and manslaughter where there is no prior intent to kill. It is easy to make the connection between deaths from bullying and other causes of accidental or semi-accidental death. Indeed, the public outrage over the incident hints very strongly that many people would like to see charges of involuntary manslaughter applied in this case.
But there are good reasons that manslaughter has yet to be applied to cases of bullying (particularly cyberbullying). As John Schwartz writes at the New York Times, the issue of bullying is complicated, especially in an age where certain kinds of privacy are easily compromised by the rapid flow of information. It is often not possible to predict when and how petty malice will have enormously tragic results because of how the victim reacts. Bullying, pranks, and humiliation are common, even by adults. Some instances are benign, others not, but they only rarely result in death or serious harm.
Whether or not you think that suicide resulting from bullying should be treated as manslaughter, it’s hard not to share Governor Christie’s wonderment at how the two perpetrators can sleep at night.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user cx1uk used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
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
Don’t worry (about the Constitution)
Over at The National Review, Jonah Goldberg criticizes the “creepy logic of many liberals today,” who believe legislators should not worry about the constitutionality of their laws during legislation, instead deferring such judgments to the courts. This is an interesting question, but let us not exaggerate its importance. Writes Goldberg:
Does anyone, anywhere, think legislators should vote for legislation they think is unconstitutional? Anyone? Anyone? How about presidents? Should they sign such legislation into law? Yet, according to this creepy logic, there’s no reason for congressmen to pass, obey, or even consider the supreme law of the land. Reimpose slavery? Sure! Let’s see if we can catch the Supreme Court asleep at the switch. Nationalize the TV stations? Establish a king? Kill every first-born child? Why not? It ain’t unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says so!
This is a horribly hyperbolic straw man against which Golberg is arguing. The Constitution is not the only reason legislators should vote against monarchy and racism – obvious moral or political reasons are sufficient. Deferring judgments of constitutionality to the courts would not open the floodgates to insane legislation.
That being said, the article is still a good read overall and examines some interesting questions worth thinking about.
-Han
Photo by Flickr user Photophiend used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
TPP Weekly Rewind
Monday, September 27 – Friday, October 1
TPP Week-In-Review
- On Monday, Jake defended the role of the free market in managing public services in response to a New York Times report on the privatization of some public libraries, and Charles pointed to several cases of sexual hypocrisy and tragedy, blaming them on theological conservatism’s creation of strict taboos
- On Tuesday, Han argued in favor of American military might and intervention abroad, especially in light of China’s rise to power, and Charles argued that the debate over public school library blacklists distracts from a larger and more important discussion on how children should be raised
- On Wednesday, John suggested that religion and religious conflict has rarely been about actual theological content, and pointed to a recent Pew poll illustrating Americans’ ignorance of their own religion as evidence (take the poll yourself), and Luke argued for a parental prerogative to raise children according to certain values and ideas in response to Han’s post on Tuesday
- On Thursday, Charles claimed that while targeted sanctions on some Iranian officials are morally unproblematic, larger economic sanctions against the whole of Iran could be as harmful as a war
In Others’ Words
- Jeff Sharlet wrote for Mother Jones on how the C Street Family has gone global
- Larry Arnhart at Darwinian Conservatism reviewed a book by John Hare on Aristotle’s Platonic Religion, and discussed whether morality can survive without religious belief
- A writer-member at The Seminal claimed that the Left-Right paradigm is over
- Patrick Deneen at Front Porch Republic discussed the difference between classical liberalism and conservatism in order to show that America is, actually, liberal
- Miles Unterreiner reviewed Craig Biddles’ talk on Objectivism for The Stanford Daily
- Andy Stern claimed at The Huffington Post that there is actually a progressive candidate in the Florida Senate race, and that you should vote for her
- Alexandre Erler, for Oxford’s Practical Ethics, asks if we should get rid of carnivores if we could
- The new National Research Council’s rankings of graduate programs have been a total disaster
- Dale Jamieson and Robert Elliot have come up with a new kind of consequentialism, called ‘progressive consequentialism’
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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
