From Assurance Contracts to “Compulsory” Voting

Posted on March 21, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Jason Brennan has a series of posts up at BHL on compulsory voting. One of his arguments against compulsory voting is what he calls the Assurance Argument:

The Assurance Argument

Low turnout occurs because citizens lack assurance other similar citizens will vote.
Compulsory voting solves this assurance problem.
If 1 and 2, then compulsory voting is justified.
Therefore, compulsory voting is justified.

I’ve sketched a version of the Assurance Argument here at PoT that’s immune to Brennan’s criticisms. It doesn’t exactly correspond to Brennan’s version of the Assurance Argument above, but I think it’s close enough in form to be worth discussing in the same breath.

I have yet to set it out formally, but my version of the Assurance Argument turns on the idea of an assurance contract to vote. The basic idea is this: Take a context in which low voter turnout is a bad thing you justifiably want to remedy. Find a population apt to vote in a single direction as a unified voting bloc. Make sure that what they’re voting for not only promotes their interests, but in doing so, promotes the common good. Then come up with a mechanism for generating and enforcing an assurance contract that gets that population to vote the relevant way. If you work with the right population, pursue the right aims, and fashion the right contract, my view is that you can generate a binding obligation to vote in the population, and in doing so, solve the assurance problem that Brennan treats as essentially insuperable.

Given the preceding context, premise (1) of Brennan’s version is fine as is, but the rest has to be modified as follows: In premise (2), substitute “an assurance contract” for “compulsory voting.” In (3) and (4), substitute “enforced contract remedies” for “compulsory voting” (and change the grammar). With that in place, you have a version of the Assurance Argument that comes as close as possible to an argument for “compulsory voting” without quite crossing the line into literal compulsion.

The general idea is that in any political context in which you can induce people to form an assurance contract to vote, you can “compel” them to vote, or else exact a penalty for failure to vote. That sounds implausible if you’re talking about American elections, but there are other contexts in which it’s feasible.

During the intifadas, Palestinian politics involved mass action where compliance was universally expected, and non-compliance was severely penalized (sometimes by death). The point is that in cases like this, we’re talking about a political culture that involves a strongly solidaristic ethic, where structures are in place for mass collective action.

Imagine that West Bank Palestinians somehow acquired the right to vote in Israeli elections (or East Jerusalemite Palestinians just decided to exercise their pre-existing right to vote), and that the mass action in question turned from coercive uprising-related activity to electoral politics. My claim is: If you can induce near-compliance with the dictates of an uprising (as you can), you can induce explicit consensual compliance with an assurance contract involving a promise to vote in an election. If you can do that, you can compel compliance with the contract.

More specifically: Imagine an electronic caucus–like a MOOC–in which everyone in a given population is expected, due to social pressure, to log on and decide on a course of electoral action. Everyone who logs on then becomes part of a (potential) assurance contract. The numbers are tallied, and if they’re sufficient to tip the election, the contract is considered valid, and people are expected to vote accordingly. If not, the caucus dissolves. (In other words, what I’m calling a caucus really has the function of a caucus plus a census plus an assurance contract.)

Suppose that the numbers are there to tip the election. Then everyone is expected to vote as specified in the contract. Suppose that the contract calls for x votes for a certain candidate/slate/policy. If x votes show up in the election results, fine. But if fewer do, it follows that there were free riders who reneged on the contract. In that case, it becomes a matter of finding out who they are, so as to exact a penalty for non-compliance. Now suppose that the balloting is open, not secret. If so, then if (say) Khawaja failed to vote for the agreed-to candidate, and there’s no secret ballot, someone will squeal on him when the Free Rider Commission makes its inquiry. Under such conditions, I suspect that there will be very few free riders.

If you can pull all that off, you can “compel” votes that tip the scales of the election. The obstacles to pulling it off are psychological rather than conceptual. If the right psychological dispositions were in place–if Palestinians regarded elections the way they regard uprisings, and the Israelis allowed them to organize politically, and allowed them to vote, etc.–you could generate an electoral assurance contract mechanism involving (a) numbers large enough to affect an election but (b) small enough to organize and hold compliant to the terms of the contract. This only seems implausible to Americans because we live in a huge, highly impersonal, individualistic, diverse, and cosmopolitan society where such a contract seems like a mere thought experiment. If you live in a smaller scale society with a different political ethos, however, it’s within the realm of nomological possibility.

The point I’m making isn’t so much about Israelis and Palestinians as about assurance contracts and elections. Even if the preceding doesn’t literally apply to the Palestinian case, my point is, if you can find a case that satisfies the description I’ve just given, you can run some version of an assurance argument on it. It’s an empirical question whether you can generate or discover such a case. I’m not a political scientist, and don’t know the literature very well, but as an armchair consideration, I don’t find my empirical assumptions implausible, and they merely have to be possible to get the argument off the ground. Maybe Brennan discusses the relevant empirical issues somewhere (he’s written a great deal that I haven’t read), but he doesn’t do so in The Ethics of Voting or in “The Right to a Competent Electorate,” which I have read.

There are lots of details to work out here, but once you grasp the principle involved, the sketchiness of the proposal is not an objection to the basic idea. At any rate, my argument is immune to what Brennan calls the Burden of Proof and the Worse Government arguments.

Here’s the Burden of Proof Argument:

The Burden of Proof Argument

Because compulsory voting is compulsory, it is presumed unjust in the absence of a compelling justification.
A large number of purported arguments for compulsory voting fail.
There are no remaining plausible arguments that we know of.
If 1-3, then, probably, compulsory voting is unjust.
Therefore, probably, compulsory voting is unjust.

As a response to my argument, the BP argument fails at premise (1): premise (1) doesn’t apply to my argument because unlike compulsory voting in the literal sense, there’s no initiatory compulsion involved in my assurance contract idea, and no special burden of proof is required to hold someone to a contract to which they’re explicitly a party.

Here’s the Worse Government Argument:

The Worse Government Argument

The typical and median citizen who abstains (under voluntary voting) is moreignorant, misinformed, and irrational about politics than the typical and median citizen who votes.
If so, then if we force everyone to vote, the electorate as a whole will then become more ignorant, misinformed, and irrational about politics. Both the median and modal voter will be more ignorant, misinformed, and irrational about politics.
If so, in light of the influence voters have on policy, then compulsory voting will lead [to] at least slightly more incompetent and lower quality government,
It is (at least presumptively) unjust to impose more incompetent and lower quality government.
Therefore, compulsory voting is (at least presumptively) unjust.

This argument fails at premise (1) as well. As far as I can tell, premise (1) implicitly makes a claim about the median American voter. But I’m not talking about American voters; I’m talking about non-American ones. Unless the claims of (1) generalize to the voters I have in mind, the WG argument involves an ignoratio elenchi against my proposal.

If anyone can cite studies that show that, say, Israeli Arab voters are misinformed, ignorant, or irrational when they vote for the United Arab List, I’d like to see it. If anyone can cite studies that show that East Jerusalemite Palestinians would be misinformed, ignorant, or irrational to vote for (candidates that favor) more housing permits, I’d like to see that, too. But I’m skeptical.

*I changed the title of the post after posting.

Rights for Peace

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

This Op-Ed by Youssef Munayyer in today’s New York Times sounds just the right note on the Netanyahu victory, and convinces me, at last, of the need for some version of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel–or more precisely, what I like to call “D without BS,” divestment from companies that promote the Israeli occupation and settlement enterprise, minus boycotts and sanctions.

Here’s Munayyer’s statement of the problem:

Israelis have grown very comfortable with the status quo. In a country that oversees a military occupation that affects millions of people, the biggest scandals aren’t about settlements, civilian deaths or hate crimes but rather mundane things like the price of cottage cheese and whether the prime minister’s wife embezzled bottle refunds.

For Israelis, there’s currently little cost to maintaining the occupation and re-electing leaders like Mr. Netanyahu. Raising the price of occupation is therefore the only hope of changing Israeli decision making. Economic sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s increased its international isolation and put pressure on the apartheid regime to negotiate. Once Israelis are forced to decide between perpetual occupation and being accepted in the international community, they may choose a more moderate leader who dismantles settlements and pursues peace, or they may choose to annex rather than relinquish land — provoking a confrontation with America and Europe. Either way, change will have to come from the outside.

Here’s his solution:

The old land-for-peace model must now be replaced with a rights-for-peace model. Palestinians must demand the right to live on their land, but also free movement, equal treatment under the law, due process, voting rights and freedom from discrimination.

Mr. Netanyahu’s re-election has convincingly proved that trusting Israeli voters with the fate of Palestinian rights is disastrous and immoral. His government will oppose any constructive change, placing Israel on a collision course with the rest of the world. And this collision has never been more necessary.

The election results will further galvanize the movement seeking to isolate Israel internationally. B.D.S. campaigns will grow, and more countries will move toward imposing sanctions to change Israeli behavior. In the past few years, a major Dutch pension fund divested large sums from Israeli banks active in the West Bank, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been divested from companies, like G4S and SodaStream, that operate in occupied territory.

There won’t be real change on the ground or at the polls without further pressure on Israel. And now, that pressure will increase. For this, we have Mr. Netanyahu to thank.

It’s taken me fifteen years of dithering skepticism about divestment to get to the point of agreeing with an analysis like Munayyer’s–and I think there are legitimate questions to be asked about the criteria to be used to decide questions of divestment–but the election results demonstrate that the time really has come to divest from the occupation. The failure to consider the adoption or promotion of divestment for fear of being accused of anti-Semitism has simply become a way of rewarding the Israelis for their intransigence in the West Bank. I’m sorry, but I can no longer believe in the fairy tale of civility, good will, desire for peace, or respect for rights that we’re all obliged to attribute to the Israelis. It’s not there. This election tells us that the writing is on the wall. We’ve written them blank checks for decades; they’ve rewarded us with contempt. It has to end.

Though I don’t know where he stands on divestment, I recommend Hussein Ibish’s recent essays on similar topics in The National and in Now.

Postscript, March 22, 2015: I missed this piece by William Saletan in Slate a few days ago, but it collects a lot of useful evidence, and seems to me exactly on target. (ht: Qasim Rashid’s FB page)

Postscript, March 24, 2015: Matt Faherty sends along this interesting piece from Harvard Business Review on what the author takes to be the relative inefficacy of divestment as a strategy for change or protest. Without disputing the author’s narrow claim (about investments), I’d say two things: (1) the author himself concedes that divestment played an important role in the devolution of South African apartheid, and (2) part of the case for divestment is “symbolic” rather than “instrumental”; one divests from an immoral enterprise from “clean hands” considerations, to avoid complicity in the immorality involved. But the topic could use further discussion.

The two best studies of the South African case that I know are Ronald Segal’s Sanctions Against South Africa, and Robert Kinloch Massie’s Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years. Massie’s book (which covers divestment) is of particularly direct relevance. Segal’s book, though valuable, is more about sanctions than divestment per se.

I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t really kept pace with the BDS literature on Israel/Palestine, but it’s expanding at a pretty rapid rate. The standard pro-BDS text is Omar Barghouti’s (et al) The Case for Sanctions against Israel. A standard anti-BDS text is Cary Nelson’s (et al) The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. I haven’t read either book, so I’m not recommending or endorsing, just mentioning them.

Postscript, April 3, 2015: There’s recently been a controversy at Princeton University about divestment from Israel. This letter from John Waterbury (emeritus professor of Politics) is a nice statement of the case for divestment “from all companies that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and continued siege of Gaza.”

I agree with the first conjunct but not the second. I think Princeton ought to divest from all companies that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation/settlement enterprise in the West Bank, but not from companies that contribute to/profit from the Gaza siege. Waterbury doesn’t mention that if Princeton divests from companies that contribute to and profit from the Israeli siege of Gaza, it ought to do the same for companies that contribute to and profit from the Egyptian blockade of Gaza. It expresses a double standard–and plays into the hands of divestment’s critics–to fail to mention Egypt in the same breath as Israel in this context, when both countries are doing the same thing. (In fairness to Waterbury, the original statement from Princeton Divests does explicitly mention Egypt.)

I’d also explicitly want to stipulate that divestment cannot be construed to involve objections to ventures like this one, as many advocates of divestment would like to assert. The company in question is not profiting from the occupation but profiting despite it. Unfortunately, the distinction between profiting from and profiting despite the occupation seems to be lost on many left-wing advocates of divestment, who seem willing to pounce on any profitable Israeli-Palestinian venture, simply because it is profitable and puts Israelis and Palestinians in cooperation with one another on capitalist or quasi-capitalist lines. I don’t accept that, and don’t want to be associated with it. Here’s an example of the sort of attitude I have in mind (from Electronic Intifada). The review of “Under the Sun” contained in the preceding link is both wrongheaded and egregiously dishonest, and is just one of many reasons why skepticism about the divestment movement is justified even if divestment turns out to be the right thing to do.

Postscript, April 10, 2015: So let me get this straight: A bank can be held liable in federal court for facilitating terrorist attacks when it funds the terrorist organizations behind the attack, even if the bank follows established compliance standards designed to avoid liability. Meanwhile, it’s anti-Semitic to suggest that we divest from companies that play an active role in the state-sponsored Israeli expropriation of Palestinians, even when that enterprise involves torture and homicide. In other words, facilitation of terrorist attacks (by Muslims) deserves legal sanctions, but divesting from state-sponsored rights violations (under the auspices of a Jewish state) deserves defamation. The “principle” involved here, if you can call it that: Jewish lives matter; Palestinian lives don’t. Palestinian terrorism matters; Israeli rights violations don’t. As a bonus: reckless, well-poisoning ascriptions of “anti-Semitism” are fair game in defense of Israel. Call it what you want, but it isn’t justice.

CFP: Lockean Libertarianism

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Roderick Long has a CFP up at his website for a workshop on Lockean Libertarianism at MANCEPT, to be held this September at the University of Manchester in the UK. I’ve heard great things about MANCEPT, and encourage interested others to submit abstracts to it. Details at Austro-Athenian Empire, via the preceding link.

Here’s the abstract for a paper I have in mind. The title alludes to the story of Jeptha and the Ammonites from the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible, which Locke mentions at the end of the third chapter of the Second Treatise. Comments welcome, including bibliographical suggestions, especially comments about work that’s relevant to the project but that I seem to have missed.

Israel and Ammon: Toward a Neo-Lockean Historiography of the Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1929

Locke’s theory of property rights finds its way into four distinct literatures:

(1) Philosophers and political theorists have assessed Locke’s arguments for validity, soundness, and cogency.

(2) Historians have situated Locke’s arguments within the broader, mostly Euro-American contexts in which it fits (e.g., Western political thought, Anglo-American political history, etc.)

(3) Libertarian theorists have tried to integrate neo-Lockean insights into contemporary libertarian theory, and/or tried to apply these insights to relatively contemporary policy issues, typically within a First World context.

(4) A relatively small minority of writers has discussed the bearing of Lockean theories of property on issues of rectificatory justice—some to defend Lockean theory, others to criticize it.

Call (1)-(4) as the Locke literature. Almost none of this literature discusses the topic of contemporary (i.e., twentieth and twenty-first century) land disputes in Israel-Palestine.

The historiography of Zionist-Palestinian land disputes may usefully be divided into three categories:

(5) Zionist partisans hope to produce a historiography of Zionist-Palestinian land disputes that vindicates the Zionist project in historic Palestine.

(6) Anti-Zionist partisans hope to produce a historiography of the same land disputes that de-legitimizes the Zionist project in historic Palestine.

(7) Historiographical neutralists aim to offer what they take to be an ideologically neutral account of the relevant history.

Call (5)-(7) the historiographical literature. For a variety of reasons worth exploring, both Zionist and anti-Zionist partisans regard Lockean theories of property as subversive of their ideological aims. Meanwhile, neutralists regard the adoption of any abstract theory, whether Lockean or otherwise, as subversive of the objectivity required for the historiographical enterprise.

In “Israel and Ammon,” I suggest that a neo-Lockean approach to the history of land disputes in Palestine offers a useful corrective to the problematic assumptions of both the Locke and the historiographical literatures. For purposes of the paper, I rely on the account of Zionist-Palestinian land disputes in Kenneth Stein’s landmark book, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, narrowing my focus to the years 1917 and 1929. Though Stein—in my terminology, a historiographical neutralist–doesn’t mention Locke, Locke’s theory is obviously relevant to the material he very lucidly presents.

Reading Stein via Locke (and vice versa) is therefore a useful dialectical exercise. By doing so, we come to see the extent to which the historiographical literature—including its putatively neutralist practitioners–relies on controversial normative assumptions about property; we’re also forced to confront the ahistoricity and ethnocentricity of the Locke literature as currently written, as well as its relative inapplicability to real-life situations. Both sets of problems, I suggest, need correction.

More generally, I conclude that Lockean ideas are of crucial relevance to historiography, but only in a modified form that facilitates their application to such issues. The abstract, ahistorical, and culturally bound features of the Locke literature need to be revised in the direction of general applicability; the normative (or anti-normative) assumptions of the historiographical literature need to be challenged outright. So conceived, a neo-Lockean historiography affords us a more integrated account of the relation between theory and practice, and yields valuable insights for Locke scholarship, political philosophy, and historiography.

Postscript: Here’s a related conversation taking place at Notes on Liberty, via Matthew Strebe.

Psychology, Psychiatry, and Moral Philosophy: An Open Thread

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve been working on and thinking about issues at the intersection of psychology, psychiatry, and moral philosophy lately, so this (partly but not entirely edifying) discussion-thread at BHL caught my eye. I thought I’d reproduce it here, comment on it, and then just leave the comments open indefinitely for thoughts on the matter.

The discussion arises in the context of a post by Jason Brennan on whether one should go to grad school. I don’t particularly like the self-congratulatory tone of the post, but don’t disagree with the advice he gives. Early on in the post, he addresses a frequently-asked question and offers up an answer:

I like reading and discussing economics or political philosophy. It‘s my hobby. Should I go to grad school? You can do all these things without getting a Ph.D. You won’t be as good at it, but you can read and discuss economics while holding down a job as an insurance agent, a lawyer, or a consultant. You might be able to maintain your hobby while making a lot more money.

It’s not very adeptly or tactfully put, but on the whole, I agree with Brennan. His point is not that a non-PhD. cannot in principle be as good as PhDs at philosophy. His point is that the generalization holds as a rule: generally speaking, and given current economic and institutional realities, you need a PhD to excel at philosophy. There are some notable exceptions to that rule, of course. Some of the most brilliant and successful academic philosophers got into the profession back in the day when a PhD was considered unnecessary (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre, Colin McGinn, Saul Kripke), but no one holds not having a PhD against them. Coming the other way around, I know non-academics out there (without PhDs) who can hold their own–and then some–with many PhD philosophers. But I think such people are the exception, not the rule. Ultimately, one has to commit the fallacy of accident to deny the truth of what Brennan is saying. We can recognize that exceptional cases exist while acknowledging the truth of the rule he’s identified.

Perhaps Brennan should have qualified what he said to accommodate the exceptional cases, but I also think it’s clear he had a very different sort of case in mind–e.g., the middle manager who wants to do philosophy on the side. I think Brennan is correct to think that such a person will tend not to be as good at philosophy as the PhD philosopher from a top-20 school (Arizona, Princeton, Rutgers, Oxford, Pittsburgh, etc.) who is herself working at an R1 school and (therefore) doing philosophy all day. (And most would come out and admit it.) The more invested you are in your day job, the heavier its demands. But the heavier its demands, the fewer resources you have to devote to philosophy. Given the (very) heavy demands of doing good philosophy, having fewer resources means, all things equal, you won’t do it as well as someone with more resources at her disposal. As someone who spent nine years temping and adjuncting before finding a full-time academic position, that doesn’t seem controversial to me.

It’s not much different than the situation of the guy who spends eight hours a day working assiduously on his guitar chops versus the guy who noodles a bit on his prized Gibson SG after a long day at work. The first guy might make it in the music business, if he’s lucky and other things come together; the second guy may do a gig of AC/DC covers at the local bar (if they let him in), but can’t expect to headline Met Life Stadium (capacity: 88,000), or for that matter, headline the local equivalent of the Wellmont Theater (capacity: 1,200). (Again, I should know.)

The conversation took a different (and actually, more interesting) direction after an intervention by someone named Val, a psychiatrist, who jumped in with this comment just below. Responding to the Brennan passage quoted above, he or she had this to say (sorry for the pronoun ambiguity, but “Val” could be either male or female):

Rubbish and simple minded navel-gazing. Except for the unique subspecialty of a Ph.D tenured research professor (“I’m the foremost expert on La Rochefoucauld’s writing of the year 1678!”), anyone who puts in the time and is clever can speak on intellectual issues with equal footing. You can certainly be “as good at it” in whatever interests you.

I’m a psychiatrist attached to a large research university and spend most of my day as a clinician. The philosophy professors who have careers focusing on ethics, political philosophy, or Scholasticism are barely on equal footing with the well-read clinicians who have been reading the epistemology of science for the last 25 years.

I think Val’s comment talks somewhat past Brennan’s. Yes, “anyone who puts in time” can speak with equal footing, but Brennan’s point is that if you have a day job, the better the job, the less time you’ll have to put in. The worse the job, the less sense it makes to do philosophy rather than get yourself a better job (and then do philosophy, in which case, it’s back to the first option). There are exceptions to this rule, too, but as a rule, it holds. Val’s situation is unique, and escapes Brennan’s point, but doesn’t generalize to the cases Brennan is discussing–the majority of cases.

Unfortunately, Brennan, given an opportunity to re-direct the conversation, only had this to say:

Val, I bet you just think you’re smart because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Clinical psych is easy as pie. It’s what people with bad GRE or MCAT scores do.

It’s a somewhat cryptic–and actually pretty stupid–response. The first sentence is just a particularly abusive instance of poisoning the well. The second sentence suggests that Brennan is under the impression that Val is a clinical psych(ologist). In other words, his implicit reasoning is:

You must be one of those dumb people who’ve opted to work in clinical psychology. Your GRE scores were probably too low to work in a difficult field, like philosophy, economics, or cognitive psychology. Your MCAT scores were probably too low to get you into a good medical school, or to get you in at all. So you opted for the easy way out–clinical psychology. And given that, you must think you’re particularly smart because you’re operating under the Dunning-Kruger effect. Being a victim of that effect, you’ve taken umbrage at my suggestions, but that’s because the effect has deluded you.

One problem here is that Val is a psychiatrist with an MD. So the GRE is irrelevant to his/her situation, and he/she obviously did well enough on the MCATs to get into med school, get an MD, go into practice, and get attached to a research university.

A second problem is that even if there was a documented correlation between low GRE/MCAT scores and the choice of clinical psychology as a profession, it wouldn’t follow that clinical psychology was “easy.” The more obvious inference would be that neither the GRE nor the MCAT was designed to test skill or aptitude in clinical psychology. A little Howard Gardner might have gone a long way here.

Personal experience might help, too. Brennan often likes to talk about his, so here’s a bit of mine. I spent part of grad school writing GRE questions for the Educational Testing Service (ETS), so I have a fairly good sense of what’s involved in designing them, including what they test and what they don’t test. There’s a lot that they don’t test, and a lot in them, methodologically and substantively, that is highly debatable, regardless of what ETS’s in-house psychometricians will tell you. Keith Stanovich’s work is relevant here.

It’s a great irony, by the way, that a large number of the item writers for the GRE (and personnel at ETS generally) are people who, by Brennan’s standards, are academic failures–i.e., grad students, often at Rutgers, Princeton, Temple, or Penn, who’ll never get a tenure track R1 job, or grad students (Rutgers, Princeton, Temple, Penn) who never finished their programs. So lots of Brennanite “failures” end up being the gate-keepers for the Brennanite “winners.” Something similar is true of the PRAXIS exam: I wrote items for PRAXIS at a time when, as a doctoral student without a teaching certificate, I was writing exam questions for a profession I wasn’t permitted to enter–and the questions I wrote were for an exam involving the very credential I lacked for purposes of entry!

A bit of advice, then: Brennan tells people who might want to go to grad school, but shouldn’t, to get a job at GEICO. I would say, instead: get a job at ETS. I worked there as a part-timer for almost six years before I got a full time academic position. It was a good place to work. Not my first preference, but still.

Incidentally, if I were Jerry Springer, at this point I would say that one important lesson we learn here is not to accuse someone of being a victim of the Dunning Kruger effect, accuse him/her of bombing the GRE, and misread what he/she wrote all in the same comment.

Anyway, back to Val’s comment. I sort of agreed, sort of disagreed. So here’s what I said:

I’m a PhD philosopher working on a master’s degree in counseling psych. I spend a fair bit of time discussing philosophy vs clinical psychology and/or psychiatry with people in those fields. I see where you’re coming from, but don’t agree with you (not that I agree with Brennan’s comment below*).

An enormous amount of the literature in both clinical psychology and psychiatry strikes me as methodologically weak and substantively trivial. (Much of it also makes huge, unwitting assumptions about difficult issues in the philosophy of mind.) The clinical work that (good) psychiatrists do gives them practical experience that philosophers don’t typically have (fair enough), but it’s very narrow and doesn’t equip them with the resources to think about bread-and-butter philosophical issues. In any case, for many psychiatrists, “clinical work” nowadays means “medication management,” not therapy. I don’t see how expertise at managing a dosing schedule gives a person insight into the foundations of ethics. I’m willing to hear the argument, but off hand, I don’t see it.

That’s not to say that there aren’t brilliant philosopher-psychiatrists out there (e.g., Jonathan Lear, Richard Chessick…Sigmund Freud), i.e., people with excellent philosophical skills who have capitalized on their clinical work. I’d also be willing to say that they have insight and understanding that most philosophers in the field lack. But that’s a far cry from the claims you’re making.

One look at Brennan’s derisive comment below* should tell you that if you were looking for intelligent engagement with your arguments, you’ve come to the wrong place. If you’re interested in discussing the issues, feel free to come by my blog or contact me privately (contact info at the blog). I sometimes blog on issues at the intersection of philosophy and psychology in the broad sense (that includes psychiatry), and wouldn’t mind batting this one around. We’re mostly philosophers, but there are some psychologists and psychiatrists lurking in the “audience.” You might find it fruitful to have a conversation with us. And rest assured, we won’t ask you about your MCAT score or reduce your arguments to a diagnosis.

Val saw what I wrote and had this to say:

Irfan – I agree with a good deal of what you have said. An enormous amount of psychology and psychiatry research is indeed methodologically weak. As the saying goes, nearly of all of psychology research is trivial if true, and if attempting to show something non-trivial, is impossible to convincingly demonstrate. My experience as well has been that most psychologists and psychiatrists are grossly ignorant of the surrounding philosophical issues. However, there are plenty of psychiatrists that I work with who are keenly aware of the epistemic problems of the assumptions inherent in modern psychiatry and are well read in the psychiatrist-philosophers, (Jung, Jaspers, Freud…Popper is also popular. Human Action was recently under discussion in the geriatrics department). …

I agree with that, of course. I also think it goes the other way. Most philosophers are grossly ignorant of psychology and psychiatry, but it’s unclear to me (one year into a psychology program) how much of a debility that turns out to be. If so much psychology research is trivial, what leverage does one get out of relying on it to do moral or political philosophy? Some, I think, but it’s difficult to articulate what it is.

Same issue from a different direction: as a journal editor and conference organizer, I read dozens of manuscripts in ethics and political philosophy from authors who are trying (sometimes trying too hard) to showcase their familiarity with cutting edge work and cutting edge ways of doing philosophy. A large proportion of this work showcases the latest work in psychology. Decades ago, Robert Nozick told us that either we work within Rawls’s system, or explain why not. Now the same is implicitly being said of Jonathan Haidt. It is, one might say, a haidtful state of affairs.

Much of this psycho-philosophical experiment-mongering strikes me, frankly, as trivial, and if you dig hard enough, you find in many cases that philosophers tend, subtly (or not so subtly) to overstate, distort, and cherry pick research findings from psychology to make them less trivial than they are.

The truth is, by comparison with the intuition-mongering philosophy literature, the psychological literature tends to be very, very equivocal. Here’s a random example that I just happened to read yesterday, Daniel Wegner and Sophia Zanakos, “Chronic Thought Suppression” Journal of Personality, 62:4 (December 1994). The abstract says:

We conducted several tests of the idea that an inclination toward thought suppression is associated with obsessive thinking and emotional reactivity….[Our measure of thought suppression] was found to correlate with measures of obsessional thinking and depressive and anxious affect, to predict signs of clinical obsession among individuals prone toward obsessional thinking, to predict failure of electrodermal responses to habituate among people having emotional thoughts.

Then you read the article and the qualifications start coming: “Throughout this article, we have tried to caution that our intepretations of these results are not the only possible interpretations at this time” (p. 636).

It’s one of dozens of examples I could have used, from cognitive to clinical to political psychology. I’m not faulting the authors. My point is: psychology findings do not easily lend themselves for use as “inductive backing” for some controversial claim in ethics or political philosophy. They just aren’t written that way, or with that purpose in mind. But that’s the way philosophers often use them, at least in my experience. The psychology research of the philosophers is a lot like the God of the philosophers: not the original article. Philosophers seem wedded to the psychology of journal abstracts, not journal text–to unqualified thesis statements, not to the thesis-death-by-a-thousand-qualifications-followed-by-recommendations-for-more-grant-funding-and-research that one typically finds in the text. The jury is still out for me, but I often find myself wondering how useful all this psychology-mongering really is for philosophy.

Of course, then I read hand-waving, flat-footed philosophy that resolutely ignores the empirical literature, and I swing the other way. It also helps to read classic texts–Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Freud–and see how much they got wrong, empirically speaking. (Just think of what passes for biology or cultural anthropology in any one of these writers.) I just got finished reading Calvin Hall’s Primer of Freudian Psychology, published in 1954. One doesn’t think of 1954 as being that long ago–the Eisenhower Administration wasn’t ancient history–but the author has the nerve (so to speak) to assert that asthma, arthritis, and ulcers are psycho-somatic effects of ego defense mechanisms (pp. 85-87). Primal repressions, we’re told, arise in Lamarckian fashion via the “racial history of mankind” (p. 85). I guess sometimes pseudo-science is just pseudo-science. So I’d be the last to trash appeals to hard fact as a constraint on normative theorizing.

Val again:

I’ve often thought that psychiatry rewards the philosophically minded more than any other specialty. General medicine, for instance, largely reduces to this model: is the blood sugar >6%? If yes, implement algorithm given to you by the Joint Commission. Pattern recognition and memorization required, but not a lot of analysis.

In psychiatry, if a patient complains of depression, you have to say, what does depression mean to this patient? Is depression even real? How can I judge this patient as having depression when there are no absolute standards? How will I know if his depression is responding to treatment? Why is the treatment even working? What caused the depression? Why do some develop depression in similar circumstances but not others? Good clinicians conceptualize patients in such a manner, and this is how they are discussed at conferences. Poor psychiatrists uncritically push pills.

MIT press released a very good collection last year, Classifying Psychopathology, for sale on the shelves in the medical school book shop. I doubt very much a well read psychiatrist wouldn’t be “as good” (to use Brennan’s silly words) at discussing the contents as a Ph.D philosopher who specialized in ethics.

I agree with most (or a lot) of that, but notice that the context of Val’s comment is psychopathology. Yes, within that context, psychiatrists have a lot of challenging, important philosophical work to do. But the context is itself very narrow. You can master all that there is to know about psychopathology, whether psychiatrically or philosophically (or both), and still be light-years away from dealing with issues that are central to ethics.

Anyway, there’s a lot to think about and respond to there. To keep this post within reasonable length, I’ll post any further thoughts I have in the combox. But I figure that some of PoT’s lurking readers may have things to say–there are some psychologists and at least one psychiatrist out there, along with a few non-psychiatrist MDs–so I’ll just leave this open for comment.

*Brennan’s comment was below mine when I first wrote. As of March 9, 2015, Brennan’s response to Val no longer bears his name, and is attributed instead to an anonymous “Guest.” The same is true of a few other comments of his in that discussion.

Updates

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve updated the posts on free speech in Egypt, Iraq, and Austria, on Netanyahu’s speech, and on addiction and craving.

Nidaa Badwan: 100 Days of Solitude in Gaza

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I was intrigued and gratified by this stereotype-subverting piece in Saturday’s New York Times about Nidaa Badwan, an artist in Gaza, who’s spent most of the last year in her room, creating art.

Alienated by Gaza’s restrictive religiosity and constant conflict with Israel, Ms. Badwan, 27, has hardly left the room for more than a year. Within its walls she has created her own world, and a striking set of self-portraits that are at once classical and cutting-edge.

“I wait for the light,” said Ms. Badwan, who sometimes takes a week or even a month to construct photographs that look like paintings. “Everything is beautiful, but only in my room, not in Gaza. I’m ready to die in this room unless I find a better place.”

For once: a story about a Palestinian who’s not merely a victim of Israel, is not in a blind rage against Israel, and is neither in the process of blowing something up, nor being blown up. Also: a story about a Palestinian woman that focuses on her work and doesn’t say a word about her religious convictions or love life. Further: a story about Palestinian art whose subject-matter doesn’t devolve into nationalist or Islamist propaganda or cliche-mongering.

Even better: a Palestinian woman from the heart of Gaza confident enough to look directly into a camera, and be photographed for the world without feeling the need to wear a hint of hijab–in jeans, a sweater, a vest, striped socks, and an enigmatic, almost Mona Lisa-like smile. Even better than that: an article that, by indirection, prompts the reader to wonder whether life might be better for Palestinians–or at least for creative Palestinians–under Israel than it is under Hamas. Relatedly: an article that challenges the stereotype that everyone in Gaza (or in Palestine, or in Islamic countries generally) is an Islamist robot. And in a sense, very best of all: an article whose subject goes out of her way to insist on the de-pathologization of the human need for solitude.

Due to technical difficulties, I wasn’t able to paste a photo of Badwan’s work into this post, but you can view them either from the Times piece, or from her website. The Times piece also links to her Facebook page. Here’s a video I found of her on You Tube. The comment at around 2:04 is telling–and sad.

Egypt’s Disgrace (with postscripts on ISIS and Austria)

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

The Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah has been convicted, by a court in Cairo, of blogging without permission of the state.

An Egyptian court has sentenced a prominent pro-democracy activist to five years in prison for violating a law banning unauthorised protests in what rights groups describe as an ongoing clampdown on dissent.

Alaa Abd El Fattah – a software engineer, blogger and activist – was one of the public faces of the 2011 revolution that removed Hosni Mubarak from power.

The verdict came in a retrial of 25 defendants who had previously been sentenced to 15 years over a demonstration against military trials of civilians in 2013. The remaining defendants in the case received three-year sentences on Monday, while 15-year sentences were upheld for others tried in absentia.

Before the hearing, Abd El Fattah and other prisoners were brought into the courtroom but confined to a metal and glass cage, unable to speak to their families, other activists, and journalists.

As the judge read out the sentences, the courtroom at Tora prison in Cairo erupted in outrage. The activists’ supporters scrambled on to the wooden benches, raising their fists and chanting: “Down with military rule!”

More here.

In case you’re wondering…

Question: What is the breakdown of U.S. aid to Egypt? What money has been paid out and what is left?

Answer: The Egypt bilateral foreign assistance budget for FY2014 is approximately $1.5 billion and includes $1.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) – $200 million in Economic Support Funds; and over $7 million for other security assistance programs, including International Military Education and Training, International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement, and Nonproliferation, Antiterrorism, Demining and Related Programs. The $650 million from FY2014 FMF will be the first of this funding to move forward, pending Congressional notification and approval.

More on the “green light from Congress” that kept the aid flowing.

Here’s the text of Milton’s Areopagitica—in case you need to wash the bad taste of it all out of your mouth and mind.

If you lack the time to slog through Milton right now, perhaps the words of President John Tyler will suffice:

The body may be oppressed and manacled and yet survive; but if the mind of man be fettered, its energies and faculties perish, and what remains is of the earth, earthly. Mind should be free as the light or as the air.

Postscript, February 25, 2015: There’s an apocryphal story to the effect that the Caliph Umar, upon entering Egypt, burned down the Library of Alexandria on the premise that its contents either contradicted Islam or were consistent with it; in the first case they were heretical and in the latter, they were pointless–flammable in either case. Head a few hundred miles to the northeast, and it turns out that the apocryphal tale has now effectively been realized: ISIS has burned 8,000 rare books from the library of Mosul (Iraq). It reminds me a bit of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in the film, “Agora.” People have complained about the film’s lack of historicity, but at this point, I wouldn’t worry about it: substitute twenty-first century Muslims for fourth century Christians, and “Allahu Akbar” for “Hallelujah,” and the rest is close enough. (ht: Walter Donway)

Postscript 2, February 26, 2015: Though it doesn’t rise to Egyptian or ISIS-levels of repression, I’m perennially startled by the degree of European authoritarianism with respect to free speech. Here’s an example from Austria:

Parliament on Wednesday passed a law that seeks to regulate how Islam is administered, singling out Austria’s Muslim minority for treatment not applied to any other religious group. The law bans foreign funding for Islamic organizations and requires any group claiming to represent Austrian Muslims to use a standardized German translation of the Quran.

Any nation that has an official religious establishment faces the problem of “standardizing” the religion to satisfy the demands of the establishment. Note that the law doesn’t outright ban competing translations of the Qur’an, but gives the official imprimatur of the Austrian government to an approved translation. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Austrians to distinguish the rights-protecting and religious-establishment-establishing functions of the state, and to dump the latter over the side. But I suspect it hasn’t occurred to the Austrian Parliament because it hasn’t quite occurred to Austrian Muslims, either. There are perks to be had if you accept government sponsorship of your religion: once you’re enticed by them, it becomes hard not to do a deal with the Devil to keep them in place. I don’t know about the standardized German translation, but my translation of the Qur’an suggests that seduction is the Devil’s AOS.

Conference Announcements

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Just a reminder: the due date for submissions for the Ninth Annual Felician Institute Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs is this coming Sunday, March 1. We’ve got some great submissions already, but there’s still room for more. For more information, here’s a link to the Institute’s website. The conference itself is to take place Saturday, April 25, 2015 at Felician’s Rutherford campus. The plenary speaker is James Stacey Taylor of The College of New Jersey, defending the idea of markets in political votes.

My friend Graham Parsons is organizing what promises to be a great conference on the Ethics of War at West Point Military Academy (WPMA), to take place at WPMA on Friday, March 27, and Saturday, March 28, 2015. Nigel Biggar, Richard Miller, Fiona Robinson, and Jeremy Waldron will each address plenary sessions; Michael Walzer will provide the keynote address. I’ll be there for Walzer’s address as well as the Saturday sessions, so if there are any PoT readers at the conference, let’s meet up.

An afterthought: I’ll be giving a paper (really, a mini-paper) at the 21st annual meeting of the Association for Core Texts and Courses at the Radisson Hotel in Plymouth, Massachusetts (April 9-12, 2015), so if there are any PoT readers at that conference, let’s make sure to meet up there. My paper is called “From Nicomachean Ethics to the Grant Study: Virtue Ethics Meets Behavioral Science” (slightly modified from what I submitted). Here’s my four-sentence abstract:

George Vaillant’s Adaptation to Life (1977) is a classic of contemporary behavioral science; meanwhile, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is one of the founding texts of ancient Greek moral philosophy. Both texts implicitly address the same topic, but each does so in ways that fundamentally contradict the claims of the other. Given this, it’s a useful (and entirely Aristotelian) exercise to read the two books in tandem, using the one to challenge and correct the claims of its rival. The resulting inquiry leaves us with a better sense of the strengths and weaknesses of both behavioral science and moral philosophy, and leaves us with some difficult questions as well.

I’ll post parts of the paper here, as well as the exact date/time I’m giving it, in a few weeks. A recent article on the Grant Study (ht: Kate Herrick).

Zionism, Anti-Semitism, Cynicism: A case study (with five postscripts)

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Last week, I wrote a post about the murder of my Felician College student, Tyeshia Obie. It’s an unutterably sad event, and I hesitate to use it to make a philosophical point. But I can’t think of a better way of making the point I want to make.

Imagine that, on learning of the event, I went to the Obies’ home to offer my condolences. Having done so, imagine that I offered this reflection for the benefit of family and friends:

Black women like Tyeshia have been murdered over and over again here in the New York Metro Area. Of course, they deserve protection here as anywhere else, but I think the best option for our black sisters would be: go back to Africa. You’ll be safer there. Africa is your home.

I suspect that this suggestion would not go over well among the Obies, their friends, their family, or anyone else within hearing. At best, I think I’d be shown the door, and asked never to return. And I’d deserve it. The event is sad enough. One doesn’t use such an event, exploiting the victims’ pain, to make a polemical point about nationalist identity. One exacerbates the offense if the point you’re making is itself offensively nonsensical.

With this in mind, consider the recent remarks of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the occasion of the recent shootings in Copenhagen, which reiterate what he said after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Sunday that his government was encouraging a “mass immigration” of Jews from Europe, reopening a contentious debate about Israel’s role at a challenging time for European Jews and a month before Israel’s national elections.

Speaking the morning after a Jewish guard was fatally shot outside a synagogue in Copenhagen in one of two attacks there, the remarks echoed a similar call by the prime minister inviting France’s Jews to move to Israel after last month’s attacks in Paris. Critics said then that the expression of such sentiments so soon after the Paris shootings was insensitive and divisive. Such sentiments also go to the heart of the complexity of Israel’s identity and its relationship with the Jewish communities of the diaspora, whose support has been vital.

“Jews have been murdered again on European soil only because they were Jews,” Mr. Netanyahu said Sunday in Jerusalem. “Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country, but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home,” he added.

There are some differences between my hypothetical statement and Netanyahu’s, but I think the similarities outweigh the differences.

Differences: (1) The Jewish victims of the terrorist attacks in Europe were murdered because they were Jewish; Tyeshia Obie was probably not murdered because she was black, though it’s possible that she was murdered because she was a woman. (2) Israel is a country; Africa is continent. (3) There is a tradition of European Jewish immigration to Israel; there is much less of one of African American women from New Jersey to Africa.

Similarities: (1) European Jews are being urged to flee their homes in the face of victimization; so, in my example, are black women. (2) It’s assumed that because European Jews are Jews, they would necessarily feel at home in Israel, and ought to regard it as their home, even if (a) they don’t speak the language, (b) have never been there, (c) have never previously wanted to go, (d) would be totally alienated by the place if they got there, and (e) are being given no incentive to immigrate but naked fear. The same thing is true, mutatis mutandis, of my thought-experiment. (3) Despite appealing to the fear of European Jews, Netanyahu makes no attempt to offer even a semi-rational account of the comparative levels of risk for Jews in Europe versus those in Israel. The implicit suggestion is that Israel is safer for European Jews than Western Europe. The same thing is true (mutatis mutandis) of my thought-experiment.

Let’s reflect a bit on similarity (3). Netanyahu is suggesting that European Jews immigrate en masse from Western Europe to Israel because Israel is safer for Jews than Western Europe. Why? Well, as we’ve seen, armed Muslim anti-Semites have taken to murdering Jews in Europe by means of random, unpredictable attacks of the sort we’ve seen in Paris and Copenhagen. Presumably, if such Jews were to move to Israel, they would move to relative safety.

The suggestion only makes sense, of course, if Israel were discernibly safer for Jews than, say, Paris or Copenhagen. But of course, it isn’t discernibly safer, and Netanyahu’s entire career has been predicated on fixating on the insecurity of life in Israel, and exploiting Jewish fears of it.

I happen to subscribe to the State Department’s Travel Advisory Warning System for Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. This past Wednesday, I got an update from them. Here are some highlights:

The security environment remains complex in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and U.S. citizens need to be aware of the continuing risks of travel to these areas, particularly to areas described in this Travel Warning where there are heightened tensions and security risks.The security situation can change day to day, depending on the political situation, recent events, and geographic area. A rise in political tensions and violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank has resulted in injuries to and deaths of U.S. citizens. In view of the ongoing security situation, the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority make considerable efforts to police major tourist attractions and ensure security in areas where foreigners frequently travel. …

Travelers should be aware of the risks presented by the potential for military conflict between Hamas and Israel. During the conflict in Gaza in July and August 2014, long-range rockets launched from Gaza reached many locations in Israel and the West Bank – including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other cities in the north and south. The Government of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system successfully intercepted many rockets. However, missile impacts also caused deaths, injuries, and property damage. There have been additional small arms fire and mortar and rocket launches from Gaza into southern Israel on several occasions between September and December 2014 that resulted in limited property damage.

Visitors to and residents of Israel and the West Bank should familiarize themselves with the location of the nearest bomb shelter or other hardened site.Consult municipality websites, such as those for Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, for locations of public bomb shelters and other emergency preparedness information. Visitors should seek information on shelters from hotel staff or building managers. We advise all U.S. citizens to take note of guidance on proper procedures in the event of rocket attacks or other crisis events by visiting the website of the government of Israel’s Home Front Command.

Jerusalem

U.S. citizens visiting and living in Jerusalem should be aware of the numerous political, cultural, and religious tensions that permeate the city. These sensitivities have the potential to fuel protests, civil unrest, acts of terrorism, and retaliatory attacks against groups and individuals. There have been frequent clashes between protesters and Israeli authorities, particularly in East Jerusalem neighborhoods. Travelers should be aware that protest activities and violence have occurred across Jerusalem, including in West Jerusalem, within the Old City, and in East Jerusalem neighborhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah, Shufat, Beit Hanina, Mt. of Olives, As Suwaneh, Abu Deis, Silwan, Shuafat Refugee Camp, Issawiyeh, and Tsur Baher. The intensity and number of these violent events, which have caused the deaths of bystanders, remained at high levels during October and November. Such events often increase following Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif access restrictions, in retaliation for random attacks, or during Israel National Police (INP) operations in predominantly Palestinian neighborhoods. The INP often deploys a heavy presence in many of the neighborhoods that have seen clashes and may restrict vehicular traffic to some of these neighborhoods without notice. U.S. citizens are advised not to enter any neighborhoods while restricted by the INP and to avoid any locations with active clashes.

To date, the clashes and violence have not been anti-American in nature. However, politically motivated violence in Jerusalem claimed the lives of U.S. citizens in October and November 2014, including a terror attack inside a synagogue. Other U.S. citizens have also been injured in such attacks. Travelers are reminded to exercise caution at Muslim religious sites on Fridays and on holy days, particularly during the holy month of Ramadan. The INP often imposes restrictions on visitors to the Old City’s Temple Mount/ Haram al-Sharif. Travelers should be aware that the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif is often closed without warning by the INP. U.S. government employees are prohibited from entering the Old City on Fridays during Ramadan due to congestion and security-related access restrictions.

U.S. citizens are advised to avoid public parks in Jerusalem after dark, due to numerous reports of criminal activity associated with these parks.

I’ll spare you the rest. It goes on for thousands of words.

So European Jews are supposed to leave the Islamist-infested corners of Western Europe on the premise that there are no resentful anti-Zionist Arabs in Israel, and none in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, or Iraq. Even if such things exist, the assumption seems to be that once a European Jew clears customs in Tel Aviv, he gets a special vaccination that immunizes him for the rest of his lifetime from Islamist violence. Other Israelis might be hit by Hamas rockets, killed in Hezbullah raids, or blown up in pizzerias, malls, buses, or discotheques, but if your papers indicate that you made aliyah to Israel from France or Denmark, you’ll be safe. If you believe that, I’ll sell you the Dome of the Rock.

It gets worse, though. The big controversy about Netanyahu in the U.S. is his planned visit here in March to make the case for sanctions against the Iranians. Why is it so important to defy diplomatic protocol–bypassing the White House–to make this speech? Well, because the Iranian nuclear program–along with ISIS–confronts Israel as a nearby nearly-imminent existential threat to its very existence–tantamount to being a nuclearized Arab-Islamic version of the Third Reich. That isn’t my comparison. It’s Netanyahu’s. In fact, he’s said, Iran’s nuclear program looms over Israel like a repetition of the Holocaust.

“A nuclear Iran is an existential threat on the State of Israel and also on the rest of the world,” Netanyahu said. “We have an obligation to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. It’s the world’s obligation, but above all it is our obligation.

“Remembering the Holocaust is not merely a matter of ceremony or historic memory. Remembering the Holocaust is imperative for learning the lessons of the past in order to ensure the foundations of the future. We shall never bury our heads in the sand. …

“The Iranian regime is openly calling for our destruction and working frantically for the development of nuclear weapons as a means to that end.

“I know that some people don’t appreciate me speaking such uncomfortable truths. They would rather we not talk about Iran as a nuclear threat, they claim that, though it may be true, this statement serves to sow panic and fear.”

Here is the latest in the same vein from Netanyahu, from the Jerusalem Post, on Iran’s nuclear program.

In other words, European Jews should escape the terrors of sporadic shootings at the hands of random anti-Semites in Europe for the safety of Israel, where, in addition to a resentful Arab population of second-class citizens within the state, they’ll find an even more resentful population of Arabs under siege (Gaza) or under military occupation (the West Bank), along with hostile Arabs on Israel’s northern borders–and, to crown it all, the Holocaust-level threat of the Iranian nuclear program, under frantic development by the twenty-first century equivalent of the Third Reich. Welcome home!

So I leave you with the following thoughts.

1. Could a politician be any more cynical about human life than Benjamin Netanyahu? This is a man whom defenders of Israel expect us to respect, and whom they hold up as a paragon of civilized virtue–a man who supposedly towers over Mahmoud Abbas & Co for his credentials as an exemplar of “Western civilization.” But if you consider the caliber of his public comments, the question that arises is: is he so stupid that he can’t grasp an obvious contradiction in his claims, or so full of shit that he doesn’t care?

2. One often reads that anti-Zionism is equivalent to anti-Semitism. We’re permitted to criticize “Israeli policy,” but not permitted, on pain of an accusation of anti-Semitism, to trace those policies back to the ideology that motivates it.

But what policy could be more paradigmatically Zionist than the dogmatic assertion that Jews are a priori safer in Israel than they are in, say, France or the United States or Canada–simply because they are in a Jewish State, which is their “home” (regardless of their actual ties to it) and is where they belong (regardless of whom they displace in the process of establishing themselves there)? That is the defining, essential, animating thought of Zionism. Subtract it from “Zionism,” and there is nothing left of the concept. As far as I’m concerned, the incoherence of Netanyahu’s views is evidence for the reasonability of an anti-Zionist stance: if Netanyahu is the personification of Zionism–and he is–then anti-Zionism makes perfect sense. If that thought is “anti-Semitic,” the accusation needs a lot more argument than it usually gets.

3. I wonder if we could get some clarity on a factual question: where, exactly, does Netanyahu think that these in-migrating French Jews are to live? Given the shortage of cheap housing in Israel, an obvious place might be the Arab-free “municipality” of Ma’ale Adumim or some similar location.

After you consider the circumstances under which these places were built, however, you might begin to wonder: is a Jew really safe there? I’ve been to Ma’ale Adumim myself. Yes, there is good security. Yes, there are checkpoints. Yes, it looks like an ordinary suburban town. But from one end of it, you can see the camp of the bedouins that were displaced to make it, and from the other end, you can see the Arab neighborhoods whose residents are permanently excluded from it. How safe would you feel if you paused to consider that your new life was based on expropriation, and that the victims of that expropriation were your neighbors?

I should emphasize that the relation of Palestinians to settlements is different from that of, say, inner-city African Americans to American suburbs, or even that of French Algerians from the banlieues of Paris to metropolitan Parisians–however problematic all that may be. No one today would tell an African American that he can’t upgrade from a slum in East Orange, New Jersey to the suburbs of West Orange, New Jersey even if he has the money to do so, simply because has the wrong ethnicity. But a Jewish settlement is a Jewish settlement: no Palestinians need ever apply for residence, no matter how much money they have. Palestinians can build a Jewish settlement, but they cannot live in one: the whole point of Israel’s being a Jewish state is that what is in Jewish hands must remain in Jewish hands, and what is not is, in one way or another, up for grabs by the state. The point of the settlements is to establish “facts on the ground,” and the essential desired outcome is that Israel monopolize as much land and water as possible for the benefit of Jews and to the exclusion of Arabs.*

The real debate we ought to be having is not whether Benjamin Netanyahu has insulted President Obama by addressing Congress behind his back. The real debate we ought to be having is why Benjamin Netanyahu thinks that he can assert outright nonsense, whether to Congress or in the press, and be taken seriously as a semi-rational, semi-decent human being. As far as I’m concerned, he’s neither. If I were a member of Congress, I’d boycott his speech this March, not out of righteous indignation at his insult to the Presidency, but out of righteous indignation at his insult to the human mind. I’d love to see Congress follow suit, but I somehow doubt it will.

*Last sentence added after posting.

Postscript. Michaelangelo Landgrave has a slightly different take on these issues over at Notes on Liberty. As usual, Bernard Avishai has interesting things to say–here and here. An informative piece by James Fallows at The Atlantic.

PS 2, February 21, 2015: Hussein Ibish has a useful piece on the controversy in The National, but I would take issue with two things he says. He says:

Those outside the United States who believe that Israel somehow controls American politics or policies, or that Israel is the dominant partner in the relationship, are clearly wrong. It’s a silly conspiracy theory that only reflects a profound ignorance about the actual mechanics of American policymaking.

Israel may not “control” American politics or policy, but it wields so disproportionate an influence on American politics that I think it’s a mistake to deride those who assert Israeli “control” as being in the grips of silly conspiracy theorizing or of “profound ignorance.”

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have made a systematic and so-far unrebutted case for the claim that “strategic and moral considerations neither explain nor justify the current level of U.S. support for Israel” (The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, p. 335). Strategic-moral considerations do not explain, for example, why the United States offers de facto support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the settlement enterprise there when doing so flouts our values and interests. The explanation for (the degree and kind of) our support for Israel turns on the ideological power of the Israel lobby to shape American discourse. It may be a misinference, but it is not “silly” or “profoundly” ignorant, to conclude that the lobby “controls” American policy or discourse. There is a fine line between “disproportionate influence” and “outright control,” and it’s an exaggeration to claim that the distinction between them can only be blurred by the “silly” or the “profoundly ignorant.” That’s to underestimate just how bizarre our policies appear to outsiders. It’s to underestimate how bizarre they are.

I can’t accept this way of putting things, either:

There is no need to indulge in clichéd hyperbole such as citing George Washington’s warnings about “excessive partiality” to foreign powers to recognise that this embarrassing dynamic is completely inappropriate for the United States.

I find the derision expressed here totally inappropriate. Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 is, along with the Mayflower Compact and the Federalist Papers, one of the founding documents of the American nation. Far from being cliched, the sad fact is how under-read it is. Instead of deriding it, I’d suggest that Ibish re-read it to see how precisely appropriate to the circumstances its message happens to be. I don’t agree with all of it, but it is, in essence, a defense of the distinctively American conception of “Union” and a criticism of “faction”: “To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a Government for the whole is indispensable.” Try to reconcile that idea with sectarian support for a sectarian state. For that matter, try to reconcile it with American politics today.

As for “excessive partiality,” the relevant passage goes as follows:

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence…the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

Is that “cliched hyperbole,” or a lesson we have yet to learn? (Ibish tells me in a private email that I’ve misunderstood his argument. I’m left puzzled, but since we agree on the main issue, I’ll leave the matter there.)

PS 3, February 22, 2015: Here’s an interesting, indirectly relevant piece in The New York Times on the work of Mehnaz Afridi, director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College. I’ve blogged it in even-handed pedagogical mode for my International Relations students at the website for my class. No need to be even-handed here, however.

It’s an important article, and I respect what Afridi is doing, but I have to take issue with claims like this:

Dr. Afridi has made these seeming irreconcilables into companions in her life’s work. An assistant professor of religion at Manhattan College, she teaches courses about both Islam and the Holocaust, and she is director of the college’s Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center. Her book “Shoah Through Muslim Eyes,” referring to an alternative term for the Holocaust, will be published in July, and she is a member of the ethics and religion committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museumin Washington.

Such roles have made Dr. Afridi both a valued intermediary and a visible target in the troubled relations between Muslims and Jews. As her research unflinchingly shows, a strain of Holocaust denial runs deep in the Arab-Muslim world. Holocaust recognition among Arabs and Muslims, less noticed but equally divisive, has also served as a means of delegitimizing Israel and Zionism. By this line of reasoning, which ignores the historical ties of Jews to Israel, the Holocaust was a crime inflicted by Europeans for which Palestinians paid the price. (my emphasis)

Minor point: the article makes no reference to any prior work done on the subject by Arabs or Muslims, including Gilbert Achcar’s path-breaking 2009 book, The Arabs and the Holocaust. The implication seems to be that Afridi’s work is sui generis. It isn’t.

I’ve italicized the sentences that I regard as an offensive instance of question-begging argumentation and emotional blackmail. The author of the article asserts that Holocaust denial and Holocaust recognition are “equally divisive.” What does this mean?

(a) If his point is to assert a moral equivalence between the two things, the claim is outrageously absurd.

(b) The same might be said if his point is to insinuate moral equivalence while using an ambiguous word that gives him a way of getting off the hook when called out for asserting moral equivalence.

(c) If his point is to suggest that both Holocaust denial and Holocaust recognition create the same amount of conflict in the world, I’d like to see some empirical evidence for the claim.

(d) If his point is to suggest that Holocaust denial and Holocaust recognition involve claims that are equally controversial, I’d ask: like what?

“By this line of reasoning, which ignores the historical ties of Jews to Israel, the Holocaust was a crime inflicted by Europeans for which Palestinians paid the price.” The “line of reasoning” in question can recognize that Jews had historical ties to Israel and yet still insist that the Holocaust was a crime inflicted by Europeans for which Palestinians paid the price. There’s no inconsistency there. The same line of reasoning can point out that the phrase “historical ties of Jews to Israel” is an equivocation that illicitly subsumes actual claims to the land and notional ones. In the latter sense, I have a “historical tie” to East Punjab in India–my father’s family was forced out of Amritsar at gunpoint in 1947, and dispossessed of its home and business–but that doesn’t mean that I can displace the current residents of Amritsar and establish a sectarian state in East Punjab, no matter what sentimental attachment I may have to the place.

(e) Finally, the controverted line of reasoning insists on a fact that the author ignores throughout the discussion: Jews immigrated to Mandate Palestine during and after the Holocaust over the objections of the indigenous Palestinians, but they didn’t get to immigrate to the United States over the more politically efficacious objections of “indigenous Americans.” There were immigration restrictions against Jews in both places, but stronger ones in the US. Frankly, Americans unable to deal honestly and straightforwardly with the latter fact lack the moral standing to discuss Zionism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and their relation to the contemporary Arab-Israeli conflict–not that that’s stopped them.

Postscript 4, February 26, 2015: I’ve had my disagreements with David Bernstein about Israel in the past, but I completely agree with his take on this story, about an Israeli journalist’s ten-hour jaunt through Paris, and the frankly disgusting, anti-Semitic reception that he (the journalist, Zvika Klein) encounters in the Muslim neighborhoods he walks through. I agree as well with Bernstein’s criticisms of the newscaster in the interview with Klein on Britain’s Channel 4 news–an “interview” which strikes me (for the reasons Bernstein gives) as a paradigm case of cowardice and evasion.

I’d like to think that nothing comparable could or would happen in the United States, but I’m not entirely sure: just think about the footage from the Arab neighborhoods of Paterson, New Jersey in Marc Levin’s 2005 film, “Protocols of Zion.” Granted, that was a decade ago, and things have changed (things have changed…right?). I’m tempted to put on a Jewish skullcap and fringes and walk down Main Street for a few hours to see what happens. Frankly, I’m less worried about my safety than I am about my dashed expectations. A decade after the notorious Protocols incident there, I’d like to think that things have changed, and that an orthodox Jew could walk through South Paterson without being, say, spat on. But I’m not entirely sure what would happen. I sometimes feel as though if nothing has changed in the last few decades, nothing ever will. But that’s just a counsel of despair–not what you want to hear at “Policy of Truth.”

Postscript 5, March 2, 2015: Sometimes I can’t help shaking my head at the character of American discourse on Israel. This morning’s New York Times tells us that Netanyahu’s visit is bringing uninvited problems for Jewish Democrats in Congress. Here’s an offhand sentence describing the US-Israel political relationship:

Through foreign policy trials as difficult as the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, Israeli settlement policies, Arab terrorism, and the repeated failures of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Jews in Congress — and to a large extent, Jews in the United States — have spoken in a near-monolithic voice, always in support of the government of Israel. (my emphasis)

In other words, until now, Israel’s supporters have–whatever lip service they give to the problematic nature of the settlements–all essentially agreed that Israel is to be supported in its efforts to expropriate, confine, exclude, and harass Palestinians in perpetuity. If the wrong person says that, it becomes an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. If it appears in The New York Times, it becomes uncontroversial common knowledge–“news fit to print.” I’ve repeatedly heard the BDS movement described as anti-Semitic. Isn’t it time to start asking whether those who reflexively oppose BDS do so because they’d like to have the moral luxury of “opposing” settlements in words without having to do anything about them? The uncharitable way of putting this would be to say that they’re covert apologists for a form of Jim Crow or apartheid, whose recourse to accusations of anti-Semitism serves to cover that very fact.

Remember the distinction between criticizing Israeli policy and criticizing Israel? That distinction supposedly distinguishes the anti-Semites from the responsible critics. Who is uncomfortable with it now? Israel’s supporters:

To Mr. Israel, the New York Democrat, that [diversity in opinions about aid to Israel] is not a positive development. Jewish philanthropic organizations can channel donations from American Jews to nongovernmental organizations in Israel, but United States aid will always be predominantly government to government. Mr. Israel said the last thing Israel — or the Democratic Party — needed was political tension over American aid to Israel.

“When you separate Israel from the policies of its government, it complicates the matter for Congress,” Mr. Israel said.

So Israel just is the policies of its government. Since Israel cannot do wrong, its policies can never be wrong. Since Israel’s policies are by definition always right, Israel is always right–and always deserving of our aid, no matter what it does. Once we abolish the usual relation between properties and causal powers, the rest is a piece of cake.

Day by day, my sympathy for BDS increases (at least for the D without the BS). I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there.

Postscript 6, March 23, 2015: A well-written piece by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi on Netanyahu’s uses of the Book of Esther in his speech.

Addictions, Cravings, and Compulsions: Challenging the Frankfurtian Model (with two postscripts)

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Readers of this blog know, or may remember, that yours truly was, briefly, a drug addict. It was actually a rather interesting experience to undergo, philosophically speaking, and one of the things I did while going through it was to read up on the philosophical and psychological literature on addiction, and to compare what I read there with my own six-month experience of addiction. I have a folder full of journal entries on the subject–at least a hundred pages or so–and some day I’d like to get some of that material out there into “the literature.”

A basic problem with the literature, as I see it, is that very few of the people writing in it either are, or have ever been addicts, and their lack of first-hand experience distorts much of what they write on the subject.* Their definitions of “addiction” are far too narrow to cover the varieties of addiction (even to cover the varieties of specifically pharmacological addiction, setting aside the supposed behavioral varieties, e.g. sex addiction, shopping addiction, etc.). And by my lights, they’re far too timid about considering the possibility that addicts are responsible for having becoming addicts, and are capable of choice as addicts.

But one particularly problematic assumption, ubiquitous in both the philosophical and psychological literature, is the claim that addiction necessarily involves a craving for the addictive substance. The paradigm example of this assumption is the celebrated discussion of addiction in Harry Frankfurt’s famous paper, “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person” (originally published in the Journal of Philosophy, 68:1 [Jan. 1971], reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About [1988]). It’s in many ways a very insightful paper, and like a lot of people, I’ve been heavily influenced by it. Reading Frankfurt while I was an addict, however, I couldn’t help thinking that he’d generated a conception of “addiction” designed specifically to clarify the thought-experiments in the essay, regardless of whether any of it bore any relation to the real-world phenomenon of addiction.

Whether it’s explicitly cited or not, the Frankfurtian conception of addiction plays an outsize role in the literature on addiction. And it’s not hard to see why. Suppose that you’ve never been an addict, but are interested in the topic. Suppose that you don’t know any addicts, either. How do you know what it’s like to be one? As it happens, you can’t really get a visualizable “picture” of addiction by reading social scientific or psychiatric studies of addiction in peer reviewed journals, by reading the “substance abuse” chapter of a textbook of abnormal psychology, by consulting the newest version of DSM, or by reading either the philosophical or psychological literature on “addiction science.” Nor will it help to attend lectures of this sort. The preceding sources will give you important facts about addiction, and teach you how to logic-chop some important distinctions. They’ll give you some important vocabulary, as well, and introduce you to the various “models” of addiction. But they won’t tell you what it’s like to be an addict, and like it or not (so to speak), the first-person perspective is crucial for understanding what it is to be one.

Enter Frankfurt: Frankfurt gives his readers a vivid “picture” of what it’s like to be an addict. Though it’s a third-personal account, it’s vivid and detailed enough to enable a non-addict to imagine what it would be like to be a (Frankfurtian) addict from the first-person perspective. And clearly, it would suck: a Frankfurtian addict is someone with an irresistible first-order craving for a pharmacologically-addictive substance. Either he resists this first-order craving at the second-order level, or not, and different implications follow in each case. Frankfurt never mentions by name what addictive substance he has in mind, but I get the impression that he’s discussing a stereotypical case of either heroin or cocaine addiction (or perhaps alcoholism).

As I say, it’s an interesting discussion, but I find the picture it paints of the addict very misleading. In particular, I don’t think there’s good reason to think that cravings are either necessary or sufficient for addiction.

To see this, consider a somewhat stylized, thought-experimental version of my own case of addiction. Imagine a very strict Kantian who goes to the doctor with some medical complaint. Our Kantian takes his doctor to be a reliable authority on medical matters, and regards following his doctor’s orders as a matter of duty to self. Further, our Kantian discharges his duties to self from the motive of duty. In other words, if the doctor tells him to do something, he does it because it’s his duty (to self), whether or not he wants to.

So our Kantian goes to the doctor with some medical complaint, and the doctor gives him strict orders to take a certain medication, X. As it happens, X is an addictive, psychotropic medication. Suppose that our patient has a temperamental hostility to the idea of taking any drug for any reason. So he really doesn’t want to take X. But he feels duty-bound to do so, under the doctor’s orders. So he grudgingly fills out the prescription and grudgingly takes X. Within a few weeks, he becomes addicted to it, but doesn’t know that he is. He might in principle continue like this for years, never grasping that every dose he takes pushes him further and further into addiction.

So here is the situation:

Our Kantian is ex hypothesi addicted to X;
He keeps taking X, thereby reinforcing his addiction to X;
He would suffer intense withdrawal if he stopped taking X;
Despite not wanting to take X, he continues to take X, but only from the motive of duty.

I take it to be obvious that you cannot have a craving for a substance that you do not want to take, and you cannot have a craving for a substance that you only take from the motive of duty. And yet you can clearly be addicted to such a substance, at least in the pharmacological sense of being physically dependent on it. If that’s right, craving for X is not a necessary condition of addiction to X. You can be addicted to X and not know it, hence not crave it. You can be addicted to X and not want to take it, but take it from the motive of duty–hence not crave it.

Reflecting a bit on my own experience, I’m willing to admit that there’s a slight complication here. (The phenomenology of addiction defies neat philosophical claims.) Even in the case of the Kantian addict, I think it’s possible that though our Kantian doesn’t want to take X, and takes it from the motive of duty, the pharmacological/physiological effects of addiction can alter one’s personality so that he’s in some sense psychologically compelled to take X without craving it.

This is an odd thought (and phenomenon), and I would have dismissed the possibility out of hand had I not experienced it myself. Think of it like this. Suppose that our Kantian takes X from the motive of duty and only for that reason. He doesn’t like taking X, wishes he didn’t have to, doesn’t want to. But dutiful Kantian that he is, he takes it. Suppose he takes it every night at precisely 10 pm. As 10 pm approaches, he might find himself in the grips of some very odd internal states. He might, for instance, develop an anxious compulsion to take X, or an uneasily anxious feeling about the idea of not taking X. He would thus find himself in the odd state of taking X from the motive of duty, not wanting to take it, but anxiously feeling compelled to take it, and averse to the idea of not taking it–all at the same time. I actually felt like that fairly often.

Related is the possibility that if our addict fails to take X promptly at 10 (and is sufficiently addicted to it), he either senses or subconsciously anticipates the onset of withdrawal symptoms, and develops a vague (but powerful) psychological compulsion to hurry up and take it. (“Hurry up, please, it’s time….”) Remember, ex hypothesi that our Kantian neither knows that he’s addicted nor knows that withdrawal is an issue. My point is that the physiology of withdrawal can to make its presence felt in his appetitive states despite his ignorance.

Some might be tempted to call this physiologically-induced appetitive presence a “craving,” but it doesn’t feel, phenomenologically, like anything I would call a craving. In retrospect, I think of it as a classic case of chronic, pharmacologically-induced anxiety. I’m inclined to think that in a Kantian, this anxiety would manifest itself as a specifically deontic compulsion: the compulsion to take the drug would not be experienced, phenomenologically, as a “craving” for it, but as a very urgent, anxious imperative to the effect that X must be taken. (“Hurry up, please, it’s time….”) But an imperative or an anxiety is not a craving in the ordinary understanding of that term, even if it produces a compulsion to do something. (I’m not a Kantian, but the picture of the Kantian agent I’ve painted here approximates my own experience of addiction. One feature of addiction is that it alters your personality so that you find yourself doing things that would otherwise be “out of character,” and yet weren’t produced ex nihilo, either.)

I suppose you could reintroduce the idea of craving here by claiming that our Kantian has a craving for the substance under the guise of a “craving” for doing his duty from the motive of duty, but even if that is a coherent thought (I’m not sure it is), it’s so distant either from Frankfurt or from what the literature describes as a “craving” that we’d have to revise our understanding of “craving” to be able to use it this way.

So while I want to insist that cravings are not a necessary condition for addiction, I’m willing to accommodate some version of the phenomenon that the Frankfurtian picture ascribes to addiction: addictions involve compulsive or anxious behavior, but compulsions are not accurately described as “cravings.” (It’s essential to my account that in large part, the compulsion or anxiety has a pharmacological etiology. Of course the pharmacological etiology could itself have a psychological one.)

I think it’s obvious that cravings are not sufficient for addictions. We crave many things, but it’s an abuse of language to say that we’re addicted to them. I crave knowledge, but I can’t be said to be addicted to it in the way that I was addicted to Ambien. I once had a three-year-long craving to listen to a single album (AC/DC’s Black Ice): I listened to it several times a week for three solid years. But that wasn’t an addiction in the relevant sense, either. I’m very skeptical of the extension of the concept of “addiction” to behavioral contexts without a pharmacological component, e.g., sex addiction, porn addiction, shopping addiction, etc. In my view, “addiction” is a specifically pharmacological concept involving the ingestion of a physical substance and a neurobiological mechanism that produces physical dependence on the substance.

A final observation: I get the sense that the addiction literature has not fully taken on board the possibility that prescription drugs are, like “illicit” drugs, highly addictive, psychotropic substances.** The literature, then, seems fixated on addictions to alcohol, heroin, cocaine, cigarettes, and the like, and has much less to say about FDA-approved drugs–neuroleptics, anti-depressants, stimulants (including caffeine), benzodiazepines, SSRIs, and so on. That seems to me a massive omission. If anything, it’s the latter category that needs more sustained philosophical attention than the former. I hope to give it some more attention in future posts here.

*A notable exception to this rule is Owen Flanagan of Duke University. See Flanagan’s “What Is It Like to be an Addict?” in Jeffrey Poland and George Graham, Addiction and Responsibility.

**Flanagan is, once again, an exception to the general rule. See the preceding note.

Postscript, March 2, 2015: A simpler and more obvious counter-example to the “craving conception” of addiction just hit me. Suppose that X is addicted to a psychotropic medication, and simply forgets to take it at the appointed time. Surely forgetting to take X is incompatible with craving X. QED.

Anyone who doubts the supposition (that psychotropic medications are addictive) can either check the Physicians’ Desk Reference or Peter Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal for clinical information, or Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic for narrative/anecdotal accounts.

Obviously, an even simpler counter-example to the craving conception of addiction is the (to me, obvious) phenomenological fact that people can be addicted to psychotropic drugs, experience no craving for the drug whatsoever, and willfully “go off their meds” when they decide for whatever reason to do so. The example in the post is, after all, just an elaborate way of saying that.

According to Jon Elster, “All addictive behaviors seem to go together with some form of craving. The idea of craving–the most important explanatory concept in the study of addiction–is complex” (Jon Elster, Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior, p. 62). I agree that the concept of craving is complex, but the rest of Elster’s claim–an axiom of the literature on addiction–seems hopelessly wrong to me. It either ignores the possibility (and reality) of iatrogenically-induced addiction to psychotropic medication, or else consigns it to a different, and ultimately marginal conception of addiction that plays almost no role in the sexiest, most prestigious books and journals. The literature doesn’t yet seem to have taken seriously the possibility that doctors can impose addictions on unwilling and unwitting patients. The very definition of “addiction” manages to get doctors off the hook, so to speak, and manages to blame the victims.

For another couple of examples of the craving assumption, check out Merle Spriggs’s “Autonomy and Addiction,” (PDF) especially pp. 6-7, along with the reference to Morse (n.42).

Postscript, September 28, 2015: I’ve been in the market for a therapist lately. To find the right one, I made an initial list of seven who seemed suitable, drawn mostly from the overlap between the Psychology Today “Find a Therapist” listing and the one for my insurance carrier. One turned out not to be available, one never responded (not the first time), and the conduct and demeanor of a third struck me as off-putting and unprofessional.

So I made appointments with the remaining four, three of whom turned out to be excellent, but one of whom, a PsyD (for whatever that’s worth), struck me, frankly, as a hack. Within short order, Dr. Hack had driven the intake session down (what seemed to me) an irrelevant byroad, and had decided to conduct an aggressive interrogation designed to uncover my flaws as a person. The “flaws” tumbled out, one after another, all based on inferences that no human being could legitimately have made about a stranger within twenty or thirty minutes of meeting him.

It didn’t take Dr. Hack long to conclude that I was clinically depressed and needed to go on an anti-depressant. My affect, Dr. Hack informed me, was “flat,” and that flatness was an infallible indication of depression. It hadn’t occurred to Dr. Hack that perhaps the “flatness” of my affect was a response to the flatness of his personality. When I protested that I didn’t think I was depressed (at all)–didn’t feel depressed, didn’t meet the clinical criteria of depression–I was abruptly told that that was precisely how depression manifested itself in men (as opposed to women): men denied their depression in bouts of irritation and rage; women “stayed in bed all day.” The latter had become the societal stereotype of depression, Dr. Hack informed me, but since atypical depression is still depression, I’d have to accept a diagnosis of depression, whether I liked it or not. And that meant going on an anti-depressant as a condition of working with Dr. Hack, too. Dr. Hack magnanimously allowed that he wasn’t qualified to tell me precisely which anti-depressant at which dose; that was a job for a psychiatrist. But the bottom line was: no anti-depressant, no therapy.

That made things easy, since I had no intention either of going on an anti-depressant or of working with Dr. Hack. Bottom line: I unloaded my co-pay and got the hell out of there.

I tell the story because I think it tells us something about the therapy profession today as well as about its relationship to psychotropic medications.

For one thing, I think therapists suffer from a real problem of professionalism. Even when they get PsyD’s, a supposedly practical doctorate, some of them don’t seem to learn the basics of professional etiquette. Going back to one of the therapists I called before I met Dr. Hack: it’s not kosher to ignore a legitimate query regarding professional services you’ve advertised. You may not want a certain client, even based on the message they leave on your voice mail, but it’s not legitimate to ignore them as though they’d never called you at all.

Therapists like to think of themselves as “health care practitioners,” but don’t seem to have grasped that behavior like that is flatly unacceptable in a health care profession. Incidentally, for a profession so eager to regulate the rest of the world, it’s amazing how proprietary they can be about their supposed right to refuse service (or refuse to contact potential clients) on the basis of whims and hunches about X’s “sounding like” the proverbial “problem client.” In conversation outside of clinical contexts, I’ve heard therapists tell me, sotto voce, “Oh, I stay the hell away from clients like those.” Fine: you have the right to stay away from a certain kind of client. You don’t have the moral right to delete a legitimate query from an unwanted client without further ado.

A second aspect of the same problem: the rush to clinical judgment. As a rule, no therapist can (legitimately) give a DSM-5 diagnosis within thirty minutes of the first intake session. Maybe there are clinical geniuses out there–and/or sufficiently simple cases–that are exceptions to that rule, but otherwise, it seems to me a pretty clear rule.

A corollary of the rule is that you shouldn’t be reaching for the prescription pad half-way before the first session is done. Yes, there are some obvious exceptions to that rule, but the exceptions don’t find their way that often to the average therapy office.

Further implication: prescription is a medical judgment. That means that if you’re going to prescribe a psychotropic medication, you’d better have done a history and physical on your client/patient in the medical sense. If you don’t know how to do a history/physical–and most therapists don’t–then you have no business talking about prescriptions. By “talking about prescriptions,” I mean: saying anything that asserts or implies that the client needs a prescription for some psychotropic medication. At best, a non-MD has the professional right to refer the client out to an MD, but that’s it. Otherwise, my view is that they should keep their mouths shut on the subject.

One more implication: Given the way graduate programs in psychology are currently structured, no PsyD (qua PsyD) ever has any business talking about prescriptions. Maybe some day, PsyD’s and Ph.D’s will be educated so as to know what they’re doing when it comes to psycho-pharmacology–my friend Ray Raad has made some interesting arguments for that–but that day hasn’t arrived yet, and won’t arrive anytime soon. Until then, I’d prescribe silence.

The mental health professions have expanded the concepts of “mental illness” and “addiction” far beyond what those terms mean in ordinary discourse. Maybe we ought to consider medicalizing the overprescription of psychotropic medications by mental health care practitioners. I’d be interested to see the profession’s reaction to the proposal that overprescription is itself a mental illness or an addiction. At that point, it seems to me, the old adage “physician heal thyself” would come to have new and revolutionary meaning. A thought for DSM 6.

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