Jul 28, 2019 in Ethics
Paul Manafort just narrowly avoided spending time in Rikers, which has left some people disappointed. There’s a certain glee that’s common to cases where the defendant is hated, as people begin to speculate just how grim their life will be in prison.
To some, the indignities and violence of life in jail and prison are just part of the punishment; an added way of getting justice for what criminals have done.
I think this perspective is wrong-headed. I think the commonly held intuition that prison life (as opposed to simple confinement in prison) is a punishment rests upon a very shaky moral foundation, one that falls apart under any inspection. There already exist many...
What happens if you don’t pay your taxes?
I’ve never actually tried this, but I’m pretty sure the sequence of events goes like this:
Here jail is the terminal punishment. Demands 1-4 above are backed up by threat of jail1. But there is no threat that gets you to go to jail; if you refuse, armed men and women will drag you there by force (and a...
Apr 27, 2019 in Literature, Philosophy, Politics
Many, including me, have relied on Max Weber’s definition of a state as “the rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is allegedly legitimate violence”. I thought that violence was synonymous with power and that the best we could hope for was a legitimate exercise of violence, one that was proportionate and used only as a last resort.
I have a blog post about state monopolies on violence because of Hannah Arendt. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was my re-introduction to moral philosophy. It, more than any other book, has informed this blog. To Arendt, thinking and judging are paramount. It is not so much, to her, that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is instead that the unexamined life exists in a state of mortal peril, separated only by circumstances from becoming one...
Jan 26, 2019 in Ethics, Model, Philosophy
Should lawyers be able to turn in their clients? When is society strengthened, rather than weakened, by having several different (and hardly compatible) moral systems in the mix?
May 22, 2018 in Ethics, Philosophy, Quick Fix
In some parts of the Brazilian Amazon, indigenous groups still practice infanticide. Children are killed for being disabled, for being twins, or for being born to single mothers. This is undoubtedly a piece of cultural technology that existed to optimize resource distribution under harsh conditions.
Infanticide can be legally practiced because these tribes aren’t bound by Brazilian law. Under legislation, indigenous tribes are bound by the laws in proportion to how much they interact with the state. Remote Amazonian groups have a waiver from all Brazilian laws.
Reformers, led mostly by disabled indigenous people who’ve escaped infanticide and evangelicals, are trying to change this. They are pushing for a law that will outlaw infanticide, register pregnancies and birth outcomes, and punish people who don’t report infanticide.
Now I know that I have in the past written about using the outside view in cases like these. Historically, outsiders deciding...
Feb 26, 2018 in Biology, Ethics, Literature, Philosophy
The Righteous Mind follows an argument structure I learned in high school debate club. It tells you what it’s going to tell you, it tells you it, then it reminds you what it told you. This made it a really easy read and a welcome break from The Origins of Totalitarianism, the other book I’ve been reading. Practically the very first part of The Righteous Mind proper (after the foreword) is an introduction to its first metaphor.
Imagine an elephant and a rider. They have travelled together since their birth and move as one. The elephant doesn’t say much (it’s an elephant), but the rider is very vocal – for example, she’s quick to apologize and explain away any damage the elephant might do. A casual observer might think the rider is in charge, because she is so much cleverer and more talkative, but that casual...
Jan 14, 2018 in History, Literature, Politics
Hannah Arendt’s massive study of totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is (at the time of writing), the fourth most popular political theory book on Amazon (after two editions of The Prince, Plato’s Republic, and a Rebecca Solnit book). It’s also a densely written tome, not unsuitable for defending oneself from wild animals. Many of its paragraphs could productively be turned into whole books of their own.
I’m not done it yet. But a review and summary of the whole thing would be far too large for a single blog post. Therefore, I’m going to review its three main sections as I finish them. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem set my mind afire and spurred my very first essay on political theory, so I’m very excited to be reviewing the section on antisemitism today.
(Reminder: unless I’m specifically...
Dec 1, 2017 in Model, Philosophy
In utilitarianism, “remoter effects” are the result of our actions influencing other people (and are hotly debated). I think that remoter effects are often overstated, especially (as Sir Williams said in Utilitarianism for and against) when they give the conventionally ethical answer. For example, a utilitarian might claim that the correct answer to the hostage dilemma1 is to kill no one, because killing weakens the sanctity of human life and may lead to more deaths in the future.
When debating remoter effects, I think it’s worthwhile to split them into two categories: positive and negative. Positive remoter effects are when your actions cause others to refrain from some negative action they might otherwise take. Negative remoter effects are when your actions make it more likely that others will engage in a negative action2.
Of late, I’ve been especially interested...
Aug 21, 2017 in Ethics, Philosophy
The nagging question that both halves of Utilitarianism for and against left me with is: “can utilitarianism exist without veering off into total assessment?”
Total assessment is the direct comparison of all the consequences of different actions. It is not so much a prediction that an individual can make as it is the providence of an omniscient god. If you cannot perfectly predict all of the future, you cannot perform a total assessment. It’s conceptually useful – whenever a utilitarian is backed into a corner, they can fall on total assessment as their decision-making tool – but it’s practically useless.
Absent total assessment, utilitarians kind of have to make their best guess and go with it. Even my beloved precedent utilitarianism isn’t much help here; precedent utilitarianism focuses on a class of consequences that traditional utilitarianism can miss. It does...
Jul 16, 2017 in Ethics, Literature, Philosophy
Three weeks ago, I reviewed the first half of Utilitarianism for and against. This week I’ll be reviewing the second half, the against side. I should note that I’m a utilitarian and therefore likely to be biased against the arguments presented here. If my criticism is rather thicker than last week, it is not because the author of the second essay is any worse than the first.
The author is one Sir Bernard Williams. According to his Wikipedia, he was a particularly humanistic philosopher in the old Greek mode. He was skeptical of attempts to build an analytical foundation for moral philosophy and of his own prowess in arguments. It seems that he had something pithy or cutting to say about everything, which made him notably cautious of pithy or clever answers. He’s also described as a proto-feminist, although you wouldn’t...
Jun 25, 2017 in Ethics, Literature, Philosophy
Utilitarianism for and against is an interesting little book. It’s comprised of back-to-back ~70 page essays, one in favour of utilitarianism and one opposed. As an overview, it’s hard to beat something like this. You don’t have to rely on one scholar to give you her (ostensibly fair and balanced) opinion; you get two articulate philosophers arguing their side as best they can. Fair and balanced is by necessity left as an exercise to the reader (honestly, it always is; here at least it’s explicit).
I’m going to cover the “for” side first. The “against” side will be in later blog post. Both reviews are going to assume that you have some understanding of utilitarianism. If you don’t, go read my primer. Or be prepared to Google. I should also mention that I have no aspirations of being balanced myself. I’m a utilitarian; I had much more to disagree...
Jan 8, 2017 in Ethics, Philosophy, Politics
Remember Horseshoe Theory? It’s the observation that in many ways, the extremist wings of political movements resemble each other more than centrists or their more moderate brethren. We see this in anti-Semitism, for example. In any given week this year, you’re about as likely to see anti-Semitism come from Stormfront… or the British Labour Party.
I’ve been thinking about horseshoe theory in light of another issue: the police. Let me explain.
Like most denizens of the internet, I’ve been exposed to libertarians of various persuasions. One common complaint I’ve seen among these libertarians is a belief that the state has an illegitimate monopoly on violence. This is most frequently bundled with calls to abolish the police in specific and government in general. Now I see calls to abolish the police coming from the left.
I disagree strongly with calls to abolish the police. It’s not that...
Oct 17, 2016 in Ethics, Philosophy
When I first heard about deontology, I was intrigued. Here was an ethical system that could break you, if you weren’t careful. I was young and hadn’t really systematized my morality yet, but I dearly wanted to. I’d just learned about the stages of moral development and I felt a keen need to be at Kohlberg VI.
Time passed and I forgot that systematizing was a goal of mine. While I aimed for consistency across my moral principles, I did this largely blindly, lacking a single meta-principle to guide me.
Last year, I read Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil, the (in)famous book by Hannah Arendt. The only ethics mentioned in the book is Kantian and Arendt herself is hard to pigeonhole into any one system. But reading the book set my mind afire. By the time I finished it, I...
Sep 30, 2016 in Ethics, Philosophy
To answer that question, you have to think about another, namely: “what makes an action right?”
Is it the outcome? The intent? What is a good intent or a good outcome?
Kantian deontologists have pithy slogans like: “ I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law” or “an action is morally right if done for duty and in accordance to duty.
Virtue ethicists have a rich philosophical tradition that dates back (in Western philosophy) to Plato and Aristotle.
And utilitarians have math.
Utilitarianism is a subset of consequentialism. Consequentialism is the belief that only the effects of an action matter. This belief lends itself equally well to selfish and universal ethical systems.
When choosing between two actions, selfish consequentialist (philosophers and ethicists would call such a person an egoist) would say...