Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

Ten (or So) Lessons of 9/11

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I posted this a year ago as “Ten Lessons of 9/11.” I’m reposting it, essentially verbatim, with a new mini-lesson tacked onto (2).

We’re just a few days away from the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from the last decade and a half of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list (mostly) minus examples to illustrate what I’m saying. But I have a feeling that the lessons will ring true enough for many people, and that most readers can supply appropriate examples of their own.

(1) The inevitable gap between normative theorizing and political practice
A war can be justified in principle as a proportionate response to unprovoked aggression, have a rational object, have clear and publicly stated conditions for victory, and still not be worth fighting because there is no guarantee that the war will be fought on the grounds that were publicly given for fighting it. Even if a war seems perfectly justified on every conceivable matter of principle, remember that wars are fought in the real world, not ex hypothesi in thought-experiments, and that every theoretical simplification you make in thinking about a war will be more than matched by some unforeseeable complication that arises in the fog of war. Those complications may well be significant enough to nullify everything else you managed to think of, and destroy the best theoretical case for “going.”

(2) The perpetual opacity of post bellum considerations
It’s always easier to grasp the immediate and supposedly urgent reasons for going to war than to conceive, in detail, of the post bellum conditions that the war is supposed to bring about–much less to predict those conditions. But in confronting any suggestion that “we need to go to war,” try to imagine and predict how things will go in the end game, starting with the best-case scenarios and moving to the worst. I predict that you’ll find it hard even to imagine how to bring about the best-case scenarios (at least in any fine-grained way). The harder you find this, the better the case for not going.

(2a) One notable but easily-overlooked post bellum consideration: refugees. If you decide to fight a war, expect a refugee crisis, and figure out what you intend to do about it ahead of time.

(3) The crudeness of just war theory
The conceptual apparatus that philosophers bring to bear on the conduct of war consists of a set of extremely crude tools for dealing with the actual conduct of warfare. This being so, we face the following dilemma: either we should go to war in the knowledge that our best tools for dealing with it are so pathetically crude, or we should, if possible, avoid going to war in the knowledge that our best tools for dealing with it are that crude. I think it’s obvious that the latter fork provides the better way out of the dilemma.

Some examples of the conceptual crudity of some commonly-invoked ‘principles’:

  • The so-called non-initiation of force principle merely tells us that for any x, if x is an instance of force, x ought not to be initiated. It doesn’t give us any indication of the permissible range of values for x, and doesn’t tell us what to do if we face an instance of initiated force.
  • The so-called ‘last resort’ principle is, on its own, merely a directive to appeal to war (or ‘force’) as a last resort; it gives no criterion of ‘lastness’ in resorts, and gives no criterion to determine what counts as a ‘use of force’ (often conflating ‘force’ with ‘warfare’ in confusing ways).
  • The so-called principle of proportionality appeals to a quasi-mathematical metaphor that is in practice very hard to make literal or apply in any determinate way.
  • The so-called principle of discrimination tells us to target combatants but not non-combatants; it doesn’t define ‘combatant’ or ‘non-combatant,” much less apply that distinction to hard cases, or tell us what to do when non-combatants are innocent shields of combatants. Nor does it deal with the obvious but little discussed fact that ex post facto reports of ‘civilian’ fatalities in battlefield conditions are extremely imprecise, and more easily fabricated than reported with accuracy.

(4) The inevitable unreliability of allies, both moral and strategic
Either you go to war alone or you go with a coalition. If you go alone, you fight the war isolated from the rest of the world, so that your adversary can count on active or passive allies throughout the world. If you go with a coalition, the problem becomes that you can’t control what your coalition partners do, no matter how insane or immoral they turn out to be. To this day, it’s unclear whether we should have allied as closely as we did with the Soviet Union during World War II; it’s also unclear whether we should have allied so closely with right-wing dictatorships during the Cold War to fight the Soviet Union, Communist China, and their proxies. The same unclarity extends to the alliances we’ve more recently formed to fight Islamist terrorism.

(5) The inadvisability of ‘reconstructing’ another country, whether for your good, theirs, or both
A country that still suffers race riots over its own legacy of slavery and racial discrimination probably can’t be relied on to reconstruct other countries that suffer from their problematic historical legacies—especially when those engaged in reconstruction are hated as imperialist interlopers, don’t know the history of the countries they’re reconstructing, lack the resources to engage in reconstruction, are confined for security reasons to well-fortified barracks, don’t speak the native language, and are politically hostage to a public back home that is totally uninterested in what they’re doing. It tends not to help that the problematic legacies of countries that are candidates for ‘reconstruction’ arise in large part from ill-conceived prior attempts at reconstruction produced by centuries of imperialism.

(6) Truth as the first casualty of war
Truth really is the first casualty of war, in large ways as well as small. Once war begins, wait for the lies and half-truths to proliferate—from all sides, about all things. And don’t assume that you’ll have the luxury of sifting truth from falsehood during wartime, either. The informational imperatives of wartime are simplicity, digestibility, and coherence with one’s own war effort. If reality doesn’t fit that template, reality will be sacrificed to wartime imperatives, and it will be decades (if that) before anything like a more rational or objective equilibrium is restored. (If you’re interested in ‘getting involved’ in the efforts behind a genuinely justified war, ditch the idea of a military draft or compulsory national service and try an anti-rumor campaign: induce people to stop believing rumors, to stop spreading them, and to criticize any rumors that come their way. You’d be amazed how much harm is done by rumors, and how hard it is to counteract them.)

Incidentally, one casualty of war on the side of those who don’t want war is truth about the nature of foreign aggression. Dogmatic pacifists have a problematic tendency to pretend that foreign aggressors either don’t exist, or are not really aggressing because they’re responding to legitimate grievances. That attitude is too obviously false to be usefully employed in any successful anti-war effort. So don’t.

(7) Domestic liberty as the next casualty of war
The next casualty of war is domestic liberty, along with the ever-present temptation to declare ongoing states of ‘emergency’ demanding ‘emergency measures’—in part by expanding the scope of the concept of ‘emergency’ to cover anything and everything, at whim. Try coming up with a serviceable definition of “emergency,” and try to stick with it.

(8) Civil defense as an alternative to war
If you really want to avoid being attacked by foreign aggressors, seriously consider the possibility of coming up with a civil defense policy that (a) blunts the force of any aggression, (b) costs fewer lives than a war would, (c) gets the whole population involved in the “war” effort, but (d) doesn’t sacrifice domestic liberty in the process. A tall but not necessarily impossible order–no more impossible than the proverbial war that leads smoothly to victory. Your civil defense policy will inevitably have to apply at the borders of your country and be integrated with your border/immigration policy. If you confront dogmatists who insist on ‘open borders,’ ask them whether open borders as they conceive of them require a nation to allow foreign aggressors into the country without challenge. Then ask them how respect for rights would be served by such a policy.

(9) Speak up, speak out
If you oppose the idea of going to war on a given occasion, say so–a lot, to everyone, including your political representatives. People may well regard you as a monomaniac, but in this case, that’s a good thing. Better a monomaniac than a cipher.

A proviso: if you’re going to speak out against war, try not to trespass, vandalize, assault people, or blow things up in the process. It makes you look stupid and hypocritical, and it won’t stop the war.

(10) Patriotism
If you regrettably find yourself in a war, don’t bother to show your patriotic spirit by flying a flag or putting some bellicose bumper sticker on your car. Find a support organization for injured or debilitated veterans, and support it—financially or otherwise. Nothing clarifies the nature of warfare more powerfully than time spent with combat veterans. And nothing makes it clearer that even the ‘best’ wars are an enormous waste of lives, limbs, blood, effort, time, materiel, and money. If saying that doesn’t count as ‘patriotism’ where you live, say it anyway. Or find somewhere else to live.

A bonus meta-lesson: It’s perfectly OK to come up with outright excuses for not going to war, as long as the excuses don’t obscure the need to go to war in the rare case when war is justified.

New Blogger: Hendrik Van den Berg

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I’m pleased to announce that Hendrik Van den Berg has agreed to blog for Policy of Truth. Hendrik is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He’s currently a Lecturer in Economics in the Department of Economics at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He also happens to be on the Editorial Board of Reason Papers.

PoT is a little philosophy-heavy, so I thought it’d be nice to bring someone on board from another discipline, but Hendrik’s approach to economics is normative enough in focus to make a nice fit with PoT’s focus on political philosophy. Here’s the biographical blurb from the Mt. Holyoke site:

Professor Van den Berg teaches economic growth and development as well as international economics. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees in economics from the State University of New York at Albany and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to obtaining his doctorate degree, Van den berg served as a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Managua, Nicaragua in the position of Commercial Officer, and at the U.S. Trade Center in São Paulo, Brazil, as Market Research and Promotion Officer. Hendrik has published many articles and is currently examining the biases of neoclassical economics and the influence of the neoclassical paradigm on the fields of international economics and economic development.

Here’s his CV.

He also backs Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a $15 minimum wage by the year 2020.

What’s up with this blog, anyway? First we’re worried about fish. Then we’re worried about adjuncts. Derrick’s carrying on about empathy and refugees and what not. We already had a Marxist, and our resident classicist turns out to be a vegetarian opponent of strip clubs. Just when you thought we were going respectable–with Potts–we manage to haul a left-wing economist into our midst. Are things ever normal here? I mean, seriously, what next?

And Another One Gone: Another Adjunct Bites the Dust

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Here’s a contribution to the adjunct debate from the Chronicle of Higher Education by an adjunct who has more or less been forced out of the field for financial and logistical reasons. Read it if you feel so inclined, but there’s a quiz afterwards.

And here’s your quiz–multiple choice, with the option of a short answer in the combox. Which of the following is, morally speaking, the fitting and appropriate response to this essay?

(A) Gratification that one more deluded, incompetent, and unqualified adjunct is leaving the field. (Jason Brennan: “This person took my advice. She got another job that pays better, rather than trying to pursue a job for which she lacks the minimal qualifications. Good for her.”)

(B) Mortification at how badly adjuncts are treated by the field, and head-shaking regret at how bad things are out there for deserving people.

The case for (A) focuses on in the fact that the author holds an M.Ed degree (rather than an MA or a PhD), wants to teach at the college level, but can’t find a full-time job. The argument suggests that all college-level teaching requires that the would-be instructor possess a terminal degree, presumably a Ph.D. or at least an Ed.D. Since the author lacks both, her complaints should summarily be dismissed as whining. She should be happy to have left the field, and we should be glad that she’s gone.

The case for (B) presupposes that the article accurately recounts the author’s experiences as an adjunct, and assumes ex hypothesi that she is a good teacher. The presumption is justified by the fact that people in the author’s predicament do exist; even if the author herself turns out to be misrepresenting her experiences, what she says can stand in for those whose experiences are correctly described by her essay.

Assuming all that, the case for (B) focuses on the fact that she’s ill-paid and ill-treated. It’s not clear that anyone in particular is to blame for her being ill-paid, but it’s lamentable that she is, and (B) laments that. It is clear that particular individuals are to blame for her being ill-treated, which is what motivates the “mortification” to which (B) alludes.

As you’ve probably guessed, I regard (B) as the correct answer. Like this author, I’ve taught at community colleges (Mercer, Middlesex, and Western Monmouth Community Colleges, all in central Jersey). I’ve also worked closely, for more than a decade, with writing instructors who have credentials comparable to hers. I don’t see any legitimate pedagogical or academic reasons against hiring an exceptional (or just plain motivated and competent) person with an M.Ed on a full-time basis to teach intro-level literature courses, or to teach English composition on a full-time basis (if that’s done within the English Department). Granted, the author says she doesn’t like teaching English composition, but I’m a full-timer and there are classes in our curriculum that I don’t like teaching, either (Intro Philosophy, Philosophy of Education). You can’t always get the schedule you want. If English composition is all there was, English composition would have to do.

Faculty positions aside, I also don’t see any good reason against hiring an M.Ed to teach on a full-time basis as a tutor (or some equivalent) in a college or university Writing Center. Once hired, of course, I assume she’d get a full-time salary and benefits package. People tend to forget what a thankless job it is to teach writing at that level–and how crucially necessary. Thankless: It’s like teaching ESL, but to native English speakers. Necessary: it’s like teaching ESL, but to native English speakers. It’s also a job that most faculty regard as beneath them, even as they freak out about their students’ illiteracy and wonder why the idiots can’t write. “Go to the Writing Center!” mutters the harried Associate Professor at the hapless illiterate in his office, longing to get back to that paper he’s writing for Phil Review. Yeah, I get it, superstar. Just pray that someone is there. And while you’re at it, pray that someone put a line in the budget to pay whoever’s there.

The truth is, the average faculty member neither knows where the Writing Center is, nor knows who staffs it–nor cares. The Writing Center is, to paraphrase Mike Rowe, a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. Somehow it seems to come as a surprise to the “real faculty” that those someones ought also to get paid. Granted, maybe the money isn’t there to hire such people where the author lives or has sought work. In that case, our author is back at square 1: she’s got to find other employment. Option (B) acknowledges that possibility–without treating it as something to celebrate.

If you think the right answer is (A), I’d love to hear why.  But if your academic career consists of going from one R1 school to another, and you’ve never taught at a community college, and you’ve never taught students at a lower-tier institution, and you’ve never done sustained work with M.Ed’s in a Writing Center, then I’m not sure why anyone who’s spent the last decade doing that (as I have) should take your advice at face value. But I’m always open to persuasion.

Are ya happy? Are ya satisfied? How long can ya stand the heat? 

A Little Bit of Racism and a Whole Lotta Trump

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Will Thomas of the Atlas Society complains that Donald Trump is a 21st century “Know Nothing”:

Donald Trump has jumped into the race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination with a splash. His current front-runner status reveals the ugliest side of the Republican coalition: the die-hard faction of nativists and collectivists. He’s a “know-nothing” for the 21st century. …

When Trump declares that he will expel all illegal immigrants, the racists and nativists cheer. Trump will save America for real Americans! Never mind that no administration has had the budget needed to do this task. And to do it would require creating an intrusive police state that would destroy the last vestiges of independent living in America. And for what? To elevate native-born Americans against immigrants, no matter their worth.

It’s a plausible set of claims, but it’s diluted by the author’s admission, in a different article published on the same site, that he is himself “a bit of a racist.”

I’m a bit of a racist. I’ll bet you are one, too.

Okay, no one wants to admit it. But I find I’m like most people: I take race seriously in making practical decisions. I think American blacks are likely to be less efficient and less capable at most jobs than are American whites. I think whites are likely to be sloppier and ruder than East Asians. I think Southeast Asians are likely to be cheerier than everyone. I’m worried that poorly-educated Latino immigrants might create a culture of Catholic poverty and Latin populism here in the U.S.

The passage suggests that Thomas is a bit of a nativist, too.

Here’s a hypothesis: Donald Trump is what happens when lots of people are “a bit” racist, nativist, and know-nothing in their political attitudes. Add up the hasty generalizations, the stereotypes, the selective moral laxity (and ad hoc moral severity), and then add a bit of free-floating ressentiment to the mix. Wait long enough, and iterate often enough, and the result will be Donald Trump.

For reasons that I regard as too obvious to belabor, you can’t function effectively as a critic of Trump if you’ve been part of the iteration process. Unfortunately, that’s something that can be said of large swatches of the political right, and is one reason among many for sensible people to stop cutting the Republican Party any slack and abandon them.

Put Biden on the ticket and I’ll vote for him. I’ve had enough.

Carrie-Ann Biondi on Kurt Keefner’s “Killing Cool”

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Carrie-Ann Biondi has a nice review up of Kurt Keefner’s recent book, Killing Cool: Fantasy Versus Reality in American Life. I haven’t read the book myself, but have leafed through a copy (Carrie-Ann’s copy, actually) and found it interesting. Not sure yet what I think about it all, but take a look.

Carrie-Ann and Kurt had an interesting exchange here last year on the concept of “surrender” in Ayn Rand’s fiction. That makes both of them PoT-heads, though I suspect they’d be cool to that description.

Sadik Al Azm Wins Goethe Medal

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I’m happy to report that my friend and mentor Sadik al Azm has won Germany’s Goethe Medal for intercultural understanding.

The awards ceremony took place in Weimar on Friday (28.08.2015), on the 216th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. This year’s motto was “The Spirit of History.”

The recipients of Germany’s official decoration, Sadik Al-Azm, Neil MacGregor and Eva Sopher, are international figures who have close ties to the country and contribute to intercultural understanding, in the spirit of the Goethe-Institut.

The Syrian philosopher Sadik Al-Azm, one of the most recognized intellectuals in the Arab world, is a strong advocate of freedom of speech and democracy. He aims to strengthen understanding between the Arab-Islamic world and Europe. Due to the conflict in Syria, he obtained political asylum in Germany three years ago.

Another item:

“For decades, the Syrian philosopher Sadik Al-Azm has actively advocated the right to freedom of speech and for the rule of law and democracy while also championing understanding between the Arab-Islamic world and Western Europe”, the Goethe Institute’s website reads. Most recently, his contribution “The Shari’a from a Secular Perspective” appeared in the volume “Rechtskulturen im Übergang/Legal Cultures in Transition” (ed. by Werner Gephart, Raja Sakrani and Jenny Hellmann) of the Center’s publication series.

Al Azm is the author of a series of newly-released and newly-translated classics of contemporary Arabic philosophy, including Critique of Religious Thought and Self-Criticism After the Defeat. I’ve commissioned a review of the latter for Reason Papers.

Al Azm is essentially the grandfather of the Arab Spring. (Here’s a more recent piece by Al Azm on Syria in the Boston Review. This piece is worth reading as well, on Arab reactions to 9/11. And here’s a translation we did of one of his Arabic-language essays back in 2011 for Reason Papers.) At any rate, he’s certainly been a major source of inspiration for my own intercultural approach to philosophical understanding. Mabrouk!

Alcohol, Strippers, and Fried Chicken: Thoughts on Exploitation (Part 1 of 3)

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Strippers and Fried Chicken

The fall semester at Felician started up again this past Wednesday, and as usual, I’m teaching a lot of ethics and critical thinking. Once again, my Phil 250 ethics class (now called “Making Moral Decisions”) starts out with a unit on sex, and moves from there to units on drugs, money, criminal justice, and a final hard-to-characterize unit on virtue ethics (centered on the virtue of honesty). Since we start the semester with (a unit on) sex, I once again have sex on the mind. (I don’t mean to imply that I only think about sex at the start of every semester, though it increasingly seems that way.)

I’m sitting here in my office on a hot, hazy Sunday afternoon. I’d forgotten to bring something to eat, so around lunchtime, I decided to amble off campus to get something. I hate driving, but everything on campus is closed, so I was gratified to discover that someone had bought the run-down deli a few blocks from campus and turned it into a fried chicken joint. Fried chicken makes for an enormously unhealthy meal, but hey, it’s convenient, and if “justice is the first virtue of social institutions” (as Rawls says), surely buying locally is one of the first requirements of justice (says the zeitgeist). Who can resist a tasty, $5, fifteen-minute combination of convenience and do-gooding–with a brisk walk both ways to walk off the calories?

I can’t, even on the basis of reasoning as weak as that, so I headed straightaway to the chicken place, placed my order, gave the guy my Visa, and was waiting for the receipt, when I decided to strike up one of those inadvertently philosophical conversations that don’t quite go the way you expect them to.

Irfan: So how’s business?

Chicken Guy: Oh, pretty good, pretty good.

Irfan: So are you getting business from the College at all?

A bit of background is in order here. Felician College’s main campus sits on South Main Street in Lodi, New Jersey. It’s the very opposite of a college neighborhood, or, truth to be told, any kind of neighborhood. Basically, it looks like this:

And this:

And this:

Not exactly Hyde Park, Ann Arbor, or Providence.

It’s not just that it’s ugly as hell (though it’s that), but that it’s a mini food desert. Setting aside the chicken place I just mentioned, in order to find a place to eat, you either have to eat in the College’s cafeteria, or when it’s closed (which it often is), you have to drive north or south of campus for the purpose. There’s nothing that’s quite walking distance.

Part of the motivation behind my second question was my expectation of a “yes” answer from Chicken Guy, which I then intended to parlay into optimistic thoughts about the transformation of the neighborhood. In other words, I thought he’d say, “Yes, business is booming, and it’s all because of the College, just as my market research foretold!” That would imply that the chicken place was an oasis in the food desert, and might also suggest the prospect of more neighborhood-revitalizing businesses to come. But that wasn’t what I got.

Chicken Guy: Yeah, we sent some flyers out to the College, and we got some business, but the real business comes from the strip club.

Irfan: Mmm-hmm (Socratic irony at work).

Chicken Guy: Yeah, they pay in cash, in singles [laughs]–but it’s all good.

Irfan (weak smile, followed by weaker chuckle): Yeah…. (deep Socratic irony at work).

Chicken Guy: I’d say most of our business comes from the strip club. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

Irfan (weak smile now starting to crumple a bit): Wow, yeah.

Chicken Guy: They sure eat a lot of chicken over there!

Not sure whether “they” referred to the strippers or their clientele (or both), and didn’t ask. Socrates would have asked.

The “strip club” is Twins Go-Go bar down the street, just past the College. They actually advertise as being “Right Next to Felician College,” though in fairness they also advertise as being next to the DMV. Feel free to visit the site, but be informed that its iconography is not exactly safe for work, though I suppose that depends on the kind of work you do. You might also want to turn down your speakers, as the site opens to what sounds to me like a high decibel cross between Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio” and a Middle Eastern cut from “The Rough Guide to World Music.” (I actually kind of like it.)

Some useful information:

Club Type: Bikini Bar
Dancer Ethnicity: Mixed
Dance Prices: 20
Drink Prices:
Daytime Cover: 0
Nighttime Cover: 0

Hours:
Mon -Thurs: 12:00pm – 2:00am
Fri-Sun: 12:00pm – 3:00am

Who could argue with those hours, those prices, or that commitment to racial integration?

More:

Features: Beer and Wine, Full Bar, Lunch / Sandwiches, Dinner / Full Menu, Non-Smoking, DJ, Bikini Dancers Only, Bikini Lap Dances, Private Lap Dance Rooms

I like the “non-smoking” touch. Question: does the menu includes non-GMO options?

Here’s a comment on Twins from a patron who’s been a member of The Ultimate Strip Club List discussion board since 2003. He’s reviewed 37 clubs and written 67 reviews, so I’m guessing we can rely on his testimony*:

April 14, 2015 • I’ve been an on-again/off-again customer here since before the restoration. Girls this last trip out were better looking, but still a bit stand-offish. Was there for half an hour, no one stopped by to chat other than the usual dollar parade.

I think we can all empathize with the writer’s disappointment, but the hard fact is that one can hardly expect a bunch of working girls to interrupt work to chat with clients for free: there is, after all, no pro bono publico requirement in the sex industry. Incidentally, I’m guessing that “the restoration” has nothing to do with Oliver Cromwell or the Stuart kings. I’m also guessing that the name “Twins” has nothing to do with the Minnesota baseball team of that name.

My favorite passage from the website comes from the “Employment” page, which says forthrightly:

Photos Required for All Positions Except Bouncers.

I get the rationale, but it still seems ad hoc.

Anyway, I now feel very ambivalent about the chicken place–not quite ambivalent enough to stop buying there altogether, but ambivalent enough to wonder how I myself would feel if I opened a fast food joint and discovered that it was being kept in business by servicing a strip club. And ambivalent enough to have a certain presumptive aversion to going back, without quite having a principled reason not to.

I don’t know about you–and I’m interested in others’ impressions here–but if I learned that my business was surviving because it was servicing a place like Twins, I think I’d want to pack it in right there and close the shop. I don’t mean I necessarily would pack it in, all things considered, but I’d be strongly tempted to. As a general proposition, what’s depressing is the thought that the survival of one’s business might, through the vagaries of supply and demand, depend in an essential way on exploitation–and, though I know this is controversial, Twins seems to me a near-paradigm example of exploitation.

The fundamental issue, of course, is the ethical status of exploitation (and its facilitation). A secondary issue is whether sex work counts, or characteristically counts, as exploitative. Anyway, that’s the set of thoughts I’d like to explore in the next few posts. Is my reaction to Chicken Guy merely an idiosyncrasy of my prudish and mildly feminist temperament, or is there some universalizable ethical issue here rooted in the wrongness of exploitation? I’m sure Chicken Guy would have said “the former.” And I have a feeling that many PoT readers will, too. But I say the latter. More soon.

—————————

*The Default Rule for Testimony, from the SEP entry on “Epistemological Problems of Testimony“:

If the speaker S asserts that p to the hearer H, then, under normal conditions, it is correct for H to accept (believe) S‘s assertion, unless H has special reason to object.

It seems to me a non-trivial question in applied epistemology to figure out how this rule applies in the present context.

The Adjunct Summit: An Update and Postponement

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With the start (or imminent start) of the academic year, adjuncting is back in the news. Here’s a piece from Hyperallergic. From Toward Freedom. From The New Yorker (going back to May). A CFP and other materials from SEIU Faculty Forward. From Counterpunch. From Bleeding Heart Libertarians.*

Readers may remember the discussion about adjuncting that took place here this past spring, and my floating the idea of an “adjunct summit” at Felician under the auspices of the College’s Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough funding to hold a full-fledged adjunct summit this fall. The $3,000 we get has to cover two other events, namely, our fall symposium–which is on an unrelated topic–and our spring conference. That amount covers expenses for two events, but not three, and those two events were planned before I came up with the idea of the adjunct summit.

But there’s wiggle room here (there has to be, with our budget): what I’m thinking of doing is to have a special session at our spring conference dedicated to the ethics, economics, and politics of adjuncting. The spring conference is to take place at Felician’s Rutherford campus, on Saturday, April 23, 2016. I’ll announce details as I work through them. If that session goes well, perhaps we can hold a full-fledged “adjunct summit” as a follow-up in the fall of 2016. (Here, by the way, is the program for the 2015 FIEPA conference.)

Anyway, stay tuned.

——————————————

*I can’t resist responding to one of the comments at the BHL discussion. Recall that as per Matt Zwolinski’s request in the April 2015 adjunct debate, I’m not supposed to comment there.

A commenter, apparently agreeing with Jason Brennan’s take on the issue, sarcastically comments: “First world problems.” Actually, the adjunct issue is not just a first world problem. Having spent the summer teaching in the West Bank, and having visited universities in Pakistan, I can say from first-hand experience that universities in the “Third World” face some of the same problems we face, including the problem of compensation for contingent faculty. In one form or another, it’s a worldwide problem.

It’s worth adding that even a first world problem is a fortiori a problem, and a problem is a state of affairs that demands a resolution. It’s not clear to me what meaningful claim is made when a manifestly first world person derides a problem as merely “first world,” except to suggest that real problems only exist in the Third World. Newsflash: they don’t.

Ad Blocking and Tacit Consent: An Exercise in Lockean Theory

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Locke on property and consent, partly inspired by my recent travels, and partly by preparations I’m making for a workshop I’m doing this weekend in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania with Fred Seddon on his book, Ayn Rand, Objectivists, and the History of Philosophy.

Given that, this item in yesterday’s New York Times caught my eye, apropos of Locke (and/vs. Hume) on consent. The ostensible topic is Internet ads and ad blockers, but the underlying assumption is one about tacit or implicit consent.

Some background on Internet ads:

Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web, not least this very newspaper and its handsome, charming technology columnist; as I’ve argued before, many of the world’s most useful technologies may never have come about without online advertising. But at the same time, ads and the vast, hidden, data-sucking machinery that they depend on to track and profile you are routinely the most terrible thing about the Internet.

Here’s the connection to tacit consent:

Now, more and more web users are escaping the daily bombardment of online advertising by installing an ad blocker. This simple, free software lets you roam the web without encountering any ads that shunt themselves between you and the content you want to read or watch. With an ad blocker, your web browser will generally run faster, you’ll waste less bandwidth downloading ads, and you’ll suffer fewer annoyances when navigating the Internet. You’ll wonder why everyone else in the world doesn’t turn to the dark side.

Well, everyone may be catching on. Ad blocking has been around for years, but adoption is now rising steeply, at a pace that some in the ad industry say could prove catastrophic for the economic structure underlying the web. That has spurred a debate about the ethic of ad blocking. Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads.

The link that goes to the “debate about the ethic of ad blocking” goes to a blog post by a programmer named Marco Arment who is arguing against the idea that there is any such implicit contract or tacit consent. He suggests, almost in passing, that there are two different issues involved here: By surfing the Web, do we tacitly consent to: (A) tolerate Internet ads (so that it would violate our tacit agreement to block them via ad blocking technology)? and (B) be tracked via the data associated with our computers, where the tracking is typically activated by clicking a hyperlink? In that case, there would be no “invasion” of privacy when that information was used for whatever purposes the trackers had in mind.

My inclination is to answer “no” to both (A) and (B), but in saying that, I can’t help thinking that my argument is potentially ambiguous as between three interpretations:

(1) There is a clear distinction between tacit consent and non-consent. These cases clearly fall on the latter side of the divide.

(2) Tacit consent is so defective a form of consent that it only counts as consent in a very special kind of case–a case in which you don’t actually have express or explicit consent, but you obviously don’t have coercion either; where it’s extremely plausible to think that if you asked, you could get explicit consent, but for some reason, it’s either impossible or impractical (or impracticable) to ask. The cases under discussion don’t qualify as the relevant kind.

(3) There is no clear distinction between tacit consent and non-consent. “Tacit consent” is a vague (or confused) idea, and the distinction between tacit consent and non-consent is itself unclear. Given the ambiguities of the idea and the fuzziness of the distinction, the default assumption should be that where you don’t have explicit or express consent, you don’t have consent. Since ex hypothesi we don’t have explicit or express consent here, we don’t have consent.

Claims (1) and (2) are distinct, but not exclusive; both are incompatible with (3). For now, I’ll just say that I reject (3) and am inclined toward some version of (2), with the proviso that the version of (2) I espouse might well reduce to (1). In other words, I’m inclined to think that there are contexts in which tacit consent makes good sense, don’t think (A) or (B) qualify, but think that some things might, and that we might ultimately be able to get clear enough on the issues for (1) to be the case. Anyway, let me deal with issue (A) here, leaving (B) for another time.

There’s a common tendency to conflate the reasonable (or prima facie reasonable) with the consented-to.  It seems eminently reasonable to think that if the Internet costs money to operate, and is paid for by ads, then anyone who uses the Internet ought to tolerate the ads that pay the “service” he’s using. The phrase “Internet costs money to operate” is of course ambiguous. In one sense, it refers to the World Wide Web as such: it costs money for the WWW to have been brought into existence, and to be maintained in existence. In another, it refers to individual websites: the content on any website involves labor that has to be paid for. Ads pay for the Internet in the latter rather than the former sense. But they do pay for it, and many if not most of us enjoy the content we enjoy because of it. It seems like free riding and also like an indulgence in self-defeating behavior to undermine the revenue source that pays for all of that (otherwise) free content. Of course, the “indulgence in self-defeating behavior” is only self-defeating in an extended, and possibly metaphorical sense: no single act of ad blocking by itself is liable to be self-defeating, but once ad blockers reach a certain critical mass, and become a “bloc,” so to speak, they’ll tip the revenue scales in such a way that the cumulative effect of all of their behavior will become self-defeating.

Even if we grant all that, however, I don’t think it establishes a tacit contract or implicit consent to ads. At least, I don’t think it establishes a contract or quasi-contract that is breached by the use of an ad blocker. Arment offers a reductio for thinking that there can’t be implicit consent in this case: if there were implicit consent, he says, we would be obliged to read every (word of every) ad that pops up or impedes our web surfing, but that’s obviously too demanding, so there can’t be implicit consent. I agree with the conclusion but not the argument. It seems to me that you could have a tacit obligation to tolerate web ads without having an obligation to read them every word of every one of them. You could likewise have an obligation to skim web ads (or “consider” them in some weak sense) without having an obligation to read them all the way through. In either case, you’d have an obligation incompatible with ad blocking.

My argument against tacit consent likewise takes the form of a reductio, but its logic is simpler and more transparent than Arment’s. It’s this: it cannot come as a total surprise to you that you’ve tacitly consented to something. In other words, in order to test whether you’ve tacitly consented to something, ask whether, in retrospect, you recognize having consented to it. If you make a sincere and conscientious effort, and come up with no recognition whatseover of having consented to the activity, you cannot have consented to it.

I realize that in other contexts, this would be a problematically permissive argument form. If p entails q, you can’t deny the entailment by asking yourself whether you recognize the entailment, and then deny the entailment in the case in which you don’t recognize it. But consent is in that very respect different from entailment. Consent is something that by definition you knowingly engage in and can remember having engaged in. I don’t mean that a momentary lapse of memory gets you off the hook from an act of consent. I mean that if you can’t in principle remember having consented, you can’t have consented. And if you don’t at all recognize the act of consent as an act of consent, there couldn’t have been one. That’s what makes consent such a weird concept–its extreme relativity to the agent’s states of mind while operating within a realist moral philosophy that in many contexts regards such relativity as irrelevant.

I’m sympathetic enough to the idea of tacit consent to acknowledge that you may not, in the moment of consent, recognize that the action A in which you’re engaged constitutes consent to something X, which consists of elements (i), (ii), and (iii)–at least not under that description. But once the moment of having performed A is past, you have to be able to recognize, in the first person, that the performance of A amounted to consent to X and/or consent to some (=1) of the element(s) constituting X. If you really, honestly, sincerely can’t do this, you can’t have consented to X, no matter how obvious it is to someone else that performance of A amounts to consent to X, and no matter how reasonable it is that performance of A ought to lead to performance of X. You may well be culpably ignorant for not grasping that performance of A ought reasonably to lead to performance of X, in the sense that any idiot grasps the connection that you’ve managed to miss. But being culpably ignorant of a connection is not the same as having tacitly consented to the existence of the connection. Even if I ought to know the connection between Internet ads, revenue, and the existence of the Internet, my not knowing it–even my culpably not knowing it–is not equivalent to my tacitly consenting to it.

That’s the long and short of my argument against tacit consent to Internet advertising. Before I read the Times’s article, I was well aware of the fact that there was a causal connection between advertising and the existence of content on the Internet, so that the one thing enabled the other. (Of course, I was also dimly aware of the bizarre exceptions to that rule, like Wikipedia, whose funding mechanisms still strike me as mysterious.) But I had no idea whatsoever that anyone had regarded recognition of the connection as one of tacit consent, so that in using the Internet I was consenting to advertising in a sense that would have made ad blocking the moral equivalent of a breach of contract (or even a quasi-breach of contract, or a breach of quasi-contract, or whatever). Maybe I’m the only idiot in the world who believes that. Maybe I’m culpable for not knowing more. But I still don’t think there is any clear sense in which I ever consented to the existence of online advertising in a sense that rules out my trying to block it.

I think something similar might be said about issue (B), but I won’t belabor that here. The basic point is that even if I was aware of the fact that when I clicked a hyperlink that allowed various entities to track me, I never took myself in that act to have consented to data-tracking. Hence I didn’t consent, even if data-tracking is a perfectly reasonable idea, and even if I should consent to it. (Of course, in case [B], there is sometimes express consent to data-tracking, e.g., when a site owner comes out and tells you that he’ll be tracking you if you click the following box. But that’s a separate issue.)

How does any of this relate to consent to government? As is well known, Locke relies pretty heavily on tacit or implied consent in his argument for the legitimacy of government in the Second Treatise. D.A. Lloyd Thomas puts the point nicely:

Locke is looking for some act the performance of which, though it would not count as the giving of express consent, would bind us to relinquishing our executive power of the law of nature just as if there had been an act of express consent. (D.A. Lloyd Thomas, Locke on Government, pp. 35-36).

Candidate acts include residence, immigration, inheritance (and/or bequeathal) of property, voting, acceptance of government benefits, and so on.

On my view, however, there is only one way to tell whether someone has tacitly consented to government. You have to ask them whether they recognize that some act X amounted to consent to government. I have no idea about the state of the social science research on this topic, but I’m inclined to think that if you ran my test on a representative sample of Americans and/or Western Europeans, you would discover that a good proportion of them had tacitly consented to government. My point is not that sheer consent to any old set of options establishes the legitimacy of the relevant governments, or that the consent that obtains in the actual case is consent to the right things in the right ways. It’s simply that the disposition to consent to government is there and can’t be waved away by appealing to the fact that we have no evidence in hand of express consent to a limited, rights-respecting government.

Given that, the usual gloss on Lockean consent is less of a problem than it seems:

The literature on Locke’s theory of consent tends to focus on how Locke does or does not successfully answer the following objection: few people have actually consented to their governments so no, or almost no, governments are actually legitimate. This conclusion is problematic since it is clearly contrary to Locke’s intention.

Few people have actually consented to their governments because, naturalized immigrants aside, few have been given the opportunity to give express consent. But if many or most people tacitly consent, there is reason to believe that if you clarified the issue of consent for them, and then properly structured the consent-options for them, they would consent. That they would consent doesn’t meant that they have consented, but it also takes some of the sting out of the claim that they haven’t. And that, it seems to me, is all that a Lockean theory of consent needs in order to be taken seriously.

I can’t resist adducing a counter-example to the common assumption I quote above–that “few people have actually consented to their governments.” The counter-example is American Indian tribes. Tribes are by all accounts sovereign governments, but to belong to a tribe, you must expressly consent to membership within it.

The rule is (implicitly!) stated in the 1981 Supreme Court case, Montana vs. United States 450 US 544. On the one hand, with respect to those non-Indians who don’t consent to tribal authority, tribal authority shrinks almost to non-existence unless licensed by consent (from the Wikipedia entry):

A tribe may regulate, through taxation, licensing, or other means, the activities of nonmembers who enter consensual relationships with the tribe or its members, through commercial dealing, contracts, leases, or other arrangements. A tribe may also retain inherent power to exercise civil authority over the conduct of non-Indians on fee lands within its reservation when that conduct threatens or has some direct effect on the political integrity, the economic security, or the health or welfare of the tribe.”[1] No consensual relationships existed between the Crow tribe and the non-member sportsman. The tribe had also not said that the outdoor use of their lands by non-members would “imperil the subsistence or welfare of the tribe.”[4] As a result of these conditions, the Crow tribe was not entitled to regulate the activities by non-members on their fee lands. The tribes “retain their inherent power to determine tribal membership, to regulate domestic relations among members, and to prescribe rules of inheritance for members.” However, this case was dealing with non-tribal members who were not endangering the tribe.[5] Due to the court’s statement that the tribal court could regulate conduct that “threatens or has some direct effect on the political integrity , the economic security, or the health or welfare of the tribe”, the tribe did not have the authority to impose fees and taxes on the non-Indian hunting and fishing use of tribal lands.[10]

On the other hand, tribes can regulate the conduct of Indians (most obviously, members of the tribe itself), but tribal membership is essentially a matter of consent:

It is not always necessary for an individual to be formally enrolled in a recognized tribe to be regarded as a member for jurisdictional purposes….Nevertheless, [voluntary and consensual] enrollment provides by far the best evidence of Indian status. Whether enrollment is viewed as a most important factor, as in [United States v.] Bruce, or as a dispositive one, as in United States v. Stymiest…enrolled members are almost always found to be Indians. (William C. Canby Jr., American Indian Law, 6th ed., p. 11).

So essentially, American Indian tribes rule by the consent of the governed.

Postscript, August 24, 2015: A letter in today’s New York Times suggests that Social Security involves tacit consent:

To the Editor:

Re “Republicans Against Retirement” (column, Aug. 17):

We agree with Paul Krugman’s analysis, but we wish he would bolster the understanding of Social Security by liberally using the term “earned benefits.” After all, the system is not a giveaway. It is a “social contract” wherein workers agree to contribute a portion of their earnings through payroll taxes for the common good of present retirees in return for their future retirement funding by future workers.

This isn’t a government gift. It’s an earned benefit that the government facilitates. Unless we consistently reiterate the true nature and mechanics of this transaction, Republicans will continue to misrepresent it as an “entitlement.”

BARBARA GALLER

BILL GALLER

Redmond, Wash.

Whatever the merits or demerits of Social Security, I don’t see that it passes any plausible test of tacit consent. It certainly doesn’t in my case (not that I’m militantly against it, either: my point is simply that I haven’t consented to it). If anything, it’s likely to seem to pass a tacit consent “test,” ex post facto, in the eyes of its imminent beneficiaries: once the benefits are on the horizon, it may well seem, as a matter of confabulation, that you “tacitly consented” to their arrival. But  the test I was defending rules out consent-by-retrospective-confabulation. To tacitly consent to something, you have to have consented to it (past perfect); you can’t project your current approval backwards onto an “act of consent” that never took place.

It’s worth noting that the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) “Understanding the Benefits” pamphlet makes no reference whatsoever to the Gallers’ so-called “social contract.” It merely says that when you work, you pay into the Social Security trust fund. It says nothing about your agreeing, whether tacitly or expressly, to pay. And since it describes workers as paying a tax, it’s easy to understand why they’d do things that way: if SSA admitted that Social Security taxes were contingent on some voluntary act, the government might have to concede that taxes as such were contingent, and indeed, that some literal, non-hagiographical content had to be given to the Declaration of Independence’s claim that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That’s more contingency than most governments have ever consented to.

Anyway, if the Social Security Administration really believed that the legitimacy of its program rested on your consent, you’d think it would tell you at precisely this point–when it was explaining the nature of the program to its putative beneficiaries. That it doesn’t bring up consent suggests that consent is not involved. It’s an interesting question whether you can unilaterally consent to something that’s being forced on you. I don’t think you can.

It’s also worth considering this: Imagine that you’re employed (hence paying Social Security taxes) but belong to a demographic cohort whose unemployment rate is 80%, whose disability rate is high, and where life expectancy is well below 65. Would it be rational for you to consent to pay Social Security taxes? I don’t think so. Yes, by paying in, you get access to Supplemental Security Income (SSI, or “disability”) if you needed it (and you might). But if there’s a low probability you’ll make it to retirement age (and there is), is it fair to ask you to pay into a trust fund that supplements the retirements of people who not only will make it, but will far surpass it, and be living on Easy Street as they do? Again, I don’t think so.

In a case like this, a person confronted with the alternatives of paying an unfair tax versus being a free rider on the benefits conferred by an unfair system could, in my view, justifiably opt for the latter. In other words, if you belong to that cohort through no fault of your own, and can’t escape your circumstances through no fault of your own (or at too high a price to constitute a reasonable expectation), I think it’s perfectly justifiable to evade Social Security taxes, as long as you have a safe way of doing so. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I think it’s legitimate to evade Social Security taxes and benefit from SSI in a case like that (there’s the free riding I was talking about).

Lesson 1: we should avoid conflating tacit consent with pious liberal mythology.

Lesson 2: free riding isn’t always wrong.

(I deleted the video I originally inserted after the post.)