Truth and Policy: Further Reflections on Character-Based Voting

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I’ve updated an October 2014 post on character-based voting in light of the recent controversy over Donald Trump’s behavior as a GOP presidential candidate. The post takes the form of a critique of Jason Brennan’s views on that topic as expressed in his 2012 book, The Ethics of Voting. The post had originally used India’s Narendra Modi as a foil for thinking about Brennan’s views, but it’s occurred to me that Donald Trump is an even better example.

Note: The post is at least 5,000 words long and (relative to my recent posts here) sort of technical. The November 27 postscript I just added is about 800 words long.

The (Further) Implosion of Donald Trump’s 9/11 Celebration Story

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MTV has finally released the notorious video that constitutes the only videographic “basis” for the 9/11 celebration rumor about Paterson, New Jersey. I’ve had “eyewitnesses” of this video swear to me over the years that they not only watched the video, but that the video itself depicted a celebration taking place in front of the public library in the 900 block of South Main Street in Paterson. It’s the video that I describe in my Jewish Standard interview as the one that I went “crazy” looking for. Incidentally, my own repeated inquiries to MTV in 2001 and 2002 went unacknowledged.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold Exhibit A in Donald Trump’s supposed case for “thousands and thousands” of Arab-Muslim celebrants of 9/11 in the streets of Jersey City, New Jersey:

I never spoke with Emily Acevedo during my research, but the story she tells is identical to the most credible story I’ve heard over the years. It’s also identical to the story that Curtis Sliwa told me in a long phone conversation I had with him back in 2001 or 2002.

Note that Acevedo points out that the disturbance was celebration-like, but that it was not clearly a celebration of 9/11. It could well have been a case of a bunch of high school kids making a disturbance simply because they’d been let out of school early.

As far as Paterson is concerned, I would essentially call this “case closed.” But I certainly have more to say, and though I have hundreds of pages of grading to do over Thanksgiving break, I’ll try to find time to offer a coda (or two) to the controversy.

HT: Glenn Kessler.

Postscript, 6:30 pm: As you may have heard, Trump is now under fire for seeming to mock Serge Kovaleski, the reporter whose September 18, 2001 Washington Post story (written with Frederick Kunkle) is the only (pathetic) basis for Trump’s claim about “thousands and thousands” of post-9/11 celebrants in Jersey City.  I’ve addressed the Kovaleski-Kunkle article–and my inadvertent role in facilitating Trump’s exploitation of a sentence in it–in the comments section of a previous post. (Here’s a CNN article where Kovaleski elaborates a bit on the story.)

As a substantive matter, a single obvious fact is worth making, or really, re-iterating for the nth time: as stated, the Kovaleski-Kunkle article doesn’t give credence to Trump’s claims as he originally stated them.  The Kovaleski-Kunkle article refers to alleged celebrations (the phrase used is “allegedly seen”), but as I’ve said in the comments I just mentioned, the alleged celebrations were never verified (reports of the celebrations were verified, not the celebrations themselves); Trump mentioned thousands of celebrants, but no such number is mentioned in the article; Trump claims to have seen the celebration on video, but no “video” is mentioned, and none has surfaced. Further: no location is mentioned for the alleged celebrations, no time is mentioned, no detainees are mentioned by name, and as far as I know, no members of the Jersey City Police Department who were involved in the detention have discussed the matter for the record.

At a minimum, if we’re going to take any claims about Jersey City celebrations seriously, we need to see documentation of who was detained, for what reason, what questions were asked of these people, and what was said in the questioning. Precisely none of that has surfaced, despite the fact that the 2001 report definitely asserts that detentions were made and questioning took place, but only asserts that celebrations were allegedly seen. So far, no publicly available evidence has emerged regarding detention, questioning, or celebrations. And though only an idiot would assume that an otherwise unconfirmed allegation of a celebration was by itself evidence of a celebration, evidently plenty of such idiots exist and insist that any allegation of a celebration is proof that one happened.

The current controversy concerns Trump’s apparently mocking Kovaleski’s physical condition (see the first link in this postscript for details). Apparently, Kovaleski has a medical condition called arthrogryposis, a congenital condition that attacks the joints. Here’s a juxtaposition of images of Kovaleski and of Trump making his speech. (Be sure to watch the video embedded in the very first link of this postscript.)

If anyone but Trump were involved, I might be inclined to accept Trump’s defense as deserving of the benefit of the doubt (the link goes to a statement Trump has released on the matter, tweeted at the site of CBS reporter David Goodman). Ordinarily, we might think that the apparent similarity between Kovaleski’s condition and Trump’s mimicking a flustered reporter was a coincidence. But given Trump’s proven history of mendacity, and his history of making fun of people’s appearance (e.g., Carly Fiorina), I think he’s forfeited the right to be believed. I’m inclined to believe that he’s dishonest enough, and malicious enough, to be lying even about something like this.

Though Trump claims not to remember Kovaleski, and therefore claims not to know what Kovaleski looks like, Kovaleski disputes that claim. Kovaleski claims, plausibly enough, to have met Trump on several occasions while covering his (Trump’s) exploits for The Daily News. Though we all know that Trump’s claims to have “the world’s greatest memory” (now demoted to “one of the all-time great memories”) was practically intended to be bullshit, it’s also an indication that Donald Trump is the sort of person who will spout any rubbish that occurs to him without regard for truth or consequences, and it’s entirely plausible to think that such a person would stoop to mocking a person with a physical disability. Hard to believe that political discourse in the United States has descended to this level, and that the person leading the charge is the Republican front-runner for the presidency.

Here’s an editorial from the New York Times calling for journalists to play a harder form of hard ball with Trump. (I actually think the Trump-Wallace comparison is somewhat unfair to George Wallace, who, to his credit dramatically changed his views late in life, and asked his victims for forgiveness.)

Paul Waldman puts things very well in a blog post at The Washington Post:

Trump represents one face of today’s racism (though not by any means the only face). It simultaneously insists that Muslims can be good Americans, and accuses them of hating America and says their places of worship ought to be kept under government surveillance. It says that some Mexican-Americans are good people, and says most of them are rapists and drug dealers. It says “I think I’ll win the African-American vote” and then tries to convince voters that black people are murdering white people everywhere. In every case, Trump proclaims that he’s no racist while tapping into longstanding racist stereotypes and narratives of the alleged threat posed by minorities to white people.

Since I can’t read minds, I don’t know whether Donald Trump is a racist deep in his heart. But he is without question making himself into the racist’s candidate for president. And that’s a subject the media needs to explore in more depth.

Critics will no doubt claim that there’s an inconsistency between the requirements of journalistic objectivity on the one hand, and the ascription to a public figure of a normatively charged term like “racism” on the other. The moral realist philosophers among us ought to be quick to see the false dichotomy there. And we shouldn’t hesitate to descend back into the Cave to say so.

Postscript, November 27, 2015: This New York Times piece adds some useful information on the Trump-Kovaleski controversy, including Kovaleski’s recollections of having met Trump in person:

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Kovaleski said that he met with Mr. Trump repeatedly when he was a reporter for The Daily News covering the developer’s business career in the late 1980s, before joining The Post. “Donald and I were on a first-name basis for years,” Mr. Kovaleski said. “I’ve interviewed him in his office,” he added. “I’ve talked to him at press conferences. All in all, I would say around a dozen times, I’ve interacted with him as a reporter while I was at The Daily News.”

In other words, Trump expects us to believe that despite his world-class memory, he doesn’t remember the appearance of a person with a distinctive physical handicap who interacted with him a dozen times over several years, including in his office–but he definitely remembers seeing thousands and thousands of celebrants of the 9/11 attacks in a video clip that no one has been able to recover in fourteen years. He also doesn’t seem to be able to remember that the article he keeps referencing asserts that people were detained and questioned for allegedly celebrating the attack while not offering a particle of confirmation that anyone was in fact detained or questioned, much less found to be celebrating.

In some of his remarks, Trump seems to be implying that he saw the celebrations with his own eyes, not on video. So far, no one has been able to ask him where he was, what he saw, and where exactly the event he saw was taking place. He claims on 9/11 to have been in an apartment with a view of the World Trade Center, which allowed him to see people jumping from the towers. Does the same apartment provide a view of Jersey City that allows the viewer with the naked eye to discriminate a celebration there? If he’s serious, he should show us.

If he was in Trump Towers, we’re being asked to believe that he saw people jumping out of the WTC towers from four miles’ distance and saw a celebration in Jersey City from an apartment on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. If that’s not so, either he was elsewhere (where?), or his whole story turns on the phantom video tape. Since he insists so heavily on the Kovaleski-Kunkle article, he should be able to request the police reports of the detention and questioning, find the exact location of the alleged celebration, as well as the names of the people detained and questioned, and take it from there. I realize it’s an exercise in futility to expect people indifferent to truth to go through the motions of making a serious inquiry to discover it, but that’s what a serious inquiry would require.

It’s not clear to me that Trump “intended” to mock Kovaleski in the sense of self-consciously hatching a plan to do so and then enacting it. He might have done that (I wouldn’t close the door on the possibility), but I think it’s more likely that since mockery is second-nature to him, he reflexively mocked Kovaleski in the speech without thinking about it, then defaulted (without thinking about that) to the cheapest and easiest form of mockery, mockery of someone’s appearance. So it’s immaterial whether he “intended” to mock Kovaleski or not. More likely than not, what we saw was the ultimate Freudian slip–habituated mockery aimed at what Trump regards as another’s weakness. A bizarre irony: having defamed the people of Jersey City with his reckless disregard for truth, Trump is now insisting that his critics adhere to the truth when it comes to claims adverse to his reputation.

Sad but true: The Republicans are now desperately trying to dislodge Trump, but as Josh Marshall correctly points out at Talking Points Memo, the Trump phenomenon has been a long time in the making, and will be a long time in the undoing. Meanwhile, the spectacle involved manages simultaneously to be addictive and unbearable to watch.

Yes, Trump is Lying

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A reporter just asked for my comment on Donald Trump’s recent claim about “thousands and thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11. Here’s what I said.

The quotation from my co-authored piece with Gary Fine is my bottom line on the subject (quoted near the bottom). I did the interviews for the book chapter linked in the WaPo piece, and have interviewed Patersonians in the years since. No evidence has surfaced of any celebrations over and above the formulation of ours quoted in the WaPo from our book chapter. A small handful of people I’ve interviewed over the years claim to have seen something celebration-like in the mid morning of 9/11 around the 900 block of South Main Street (and claim to have been there in real time). I regard some of them as credible, and some of them as not credible. By all accounts, the “celebration” in question consisted of maybe a dozen or half dozen teenagers jumping around and yelling. It dispersed relatively quickly (i.e., within a few minutes). The police were patrolling the area and claim to have seen nothing. Reporters from the Herald News and Star Ledger were in the area; I interviewed as many reporters as I could find, and not one said that they had seen anything celebration-like. The only journalist who has ever defended the idea of a celebration has been Curtis Sliwa, who conducted a series of interviews in the area just after 9/11. I’ve spoken with Sliwa as well. To the best of my knowledge, his view coheres with mine–he regards it as likely that there was a mini-celebration consisting of 6-12 teenagers or young men, and that it dispersed relatively quickly.

To state the obvious: I don’t regard equivocal testimonial evidence of a bunch of teenagers jumping around and yelling as consistent with or supportive of Trump’s claims.

Also to state the obvious: Trump is the one who’s making the current claims. He bears the burden of proof for the claims he’s making. It seems to me he should be the one asked to bear it.

Irfan Khawaja

PS. Just to be clear: in case you saw my Jewish Standard interview from 2002, I do still stand by what I said there, as long as you take the interview as a whole with the July 2004 postscript. The 2004 postscript corrects a minor factual error in the original interview.

Bottom line: no matter how you slice it, Trump is lying.

Thanks to Michael Young, Joseph DeFilippo, and Susan Bernarducci for alerting to me to the story.

Postscript, 1:16 pm: Just to head off any misunderstandings, in the Jewish Standard interview, I make reference to a celebration “said to have” taken place at the Islamic Cultural Center in Paterson, New Jersey at 5 pm. I end my speculation about that anecdote by pointing out that I found the story implausible, intended to look into it, but never did look into it. What I recorded at the time was my hunch that the story sounded implausible. But precisely because I never actually looked into it, I don’t regard the story or my hunches as evidence of any substantive claim.

Postscript, November 24, 2015: I was gratified to see this piece by Benjamin Wittes in Lawfare. I’ve long admired Wittes’s work (have taught some of it, in fact), and this piece is no exception to the general rule. Here’s a small excerpt, but read the whole thing:

Let’s be blunt about this: They are either lying or they are delusional. And assuming they are not suffering both from the same hallucination, they are lying in a fashion calculated to instill anger and hatred against a minority population at a time when nerves are raw, fears are high, and tempers are short. There are a lot of names for this. None of them is nice.

The “they” is a reference to Ben Carson, who (briefly) joined Trump in what Wittes aptly (though qualifiedly) calls a “blood libel.” (Carson’s now backed off of the claim.)

Postscript, November 25, 2015: Here are some useful links on Trump and the celebration rumors: I’ve linked to Glenn Kessler’s Washington Post column above, but be sure to keep checking back, as he’s updated it several times. This item from the Bergen Record is practically a re-run of the sorts of items that regularly ran in the north Jersey papers in the fall of 2001.  The Record story mentions John Chadwick, who played an important role in the early reporting on this issue; here’s a link to some of Chadwick’s reporting from 2001. (Also important is the reporting of Hilary Burke, then of the Herald News. Unfortunately, Burke’s reporting isn’t easily available online, but I’ll try to remedy that if I can.) This piece from Talking Points Memo offers a useful summary of the issues, and a useful reminder of the other celebration rumor that circulated in the wake of 9/11–the “Dancing Israelis” rumor. Here’s a classic Snopes take-down of the celebration rumors.

Today’s New York Times has three interesting items on Trump’s mendacity and related matters. A front page item details yet another Trump fib, followed by a fairly cavalier expression of indifference to it from Newt Gingrich, who doubles in his post-political life as a historian. This piece provides a nice summary of Trump’s recent deceptions. And this column lays out John J. Farmer Jr.’s case against Trump. Farmer was attorney general of New Jersey in September 2001, and was stationed in Jersey City on 9/11. He’s currently the Dean of the Law School at Rutgers-Newark. According to Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, Farmer’s claims have been disputed by Walter Zalisko, a former Jersey City police officer.

But Walter Zalisko, a former police officer in Jersey City, contacted The Fact Checker to say Farmer was wrong. He says he heard on the radio dispatch at the time that officers had found Middle Easterners “clapping and laughing” on a number of rooftops, even in one case knocking down a cardboard version of the Twin Towers. But he does not think a police report was filed. “It was at most a hundred people doing this,” he said, saying Trump’s description of “thousands and thousands” was an exaggeration. As for Farmer’s account, Zalisko said “John was holed up in his office and he didn’t know what was going on.”

Lots of things are said over the police radio, not all of them true. How does Mr. Zalisko know that these claims were true? How was the ethnicity of the people involved determined? Where and when did the event take place? He mentions “officers.” Who are they? And where are they? If he himself didn’t see the events in question, how is he better off than Mr. Farmer? If he did see the events in question, that would be worth knowing, but the passage seems to suggest that he didn’t see them. How does he know that the people in question were clapping and laughing at the attacks? The night that the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry to Earth (February 1, 2003), I went for a walk in my neighborhood in Princeton, New Jersey and saw lots of people in bars and on the streets, clapping and laughing. Were the people of Princeton celebrating the crash?

Here’s a piece by The Weekly Standard, with a link back to this post, recording one of Chris Christie’s better moments. The author dutifully lines up the Kovaleski-Kunkle piece from The Washington Post and my claims about Paterson to put the best face on the idea that celebrations might have taken place. But he ignores something more obvious: surely the more obvious fact to consider is how many people lied and spread rumors about celebrations that clearly hadn’t taken place. Why mention the unverifiable possibilities but not the fully verified fact? (See my response to Derrick Abdul-Hakim on this issue in the combox below, responding to Powerline’s misuse of my research.)

In a repeat of the events of 2001-2002, my phone has started to ring once again with “eyewitness reports” of the Paterson celebrations. “Hi, my name is ___, I live in Paterson, and I was there on 9/11. Are you still doing research on the Paterson celebrations?” Somehow, I have a feeling I’ll always be doing research on the Paterson celebrations. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Or do I mean taking. Anyway, I guess I’m back in business again.

Here’s an interview I just did with Kelly Heyboer of the Newark Star Ledger.

Blasphemy in Pakistan: If You Listen to Fools…

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Breaking news of a series of arson attacks on Ahmadi Muslims in the city of Jhelum, Pakistan on grounds of “blasphemy.” From Pakistan’s Dawn:

JHELUM: An enraged mob set a Ahmadi place of worship on fire in Punjab’s Jhelum district on Saturday, following Friday night’s arson attack on a factory.

The place of worship was located in the Kala Gujran area of Jhelum, which was under guard of local police forces.

The mob managed to break through the police cordon which was established to safeguard the Ahmadi places of worship, following Friday night’s unrest.


Police had to resort to baton charging and tear gassing the protesters in order to bring the situation under control, but were unable to do so. The mob resorted to pelting stones at the police personnel.

The incidents were a result of rumours circulated earlier in Jhelum district which levelled blasphemy allegations on the owner and workers of the factory.

According to Pakistan’s Express News (in Urdu), Jhelum is now under control, but it sure took awhile. If you want to see what anarchic mob violence looks like up close–a micro-level picture of the descent from Locke’s State of Nature to the State of War–have a look at this video.

No cops anywhere. No firefighters en route. Just an unbridled mob drunk on theological liquor, screaming their minds out in coarse Punjabi. I understand the language but most of what they’re saying is unintelligible, and even when I can make out the words, I have no idea what they’re talking about until 1:00, when they sound the “takbir,” the equivalent of a hallelujah. Almost two minutes into the video, and they’re still doggedly at it, committing arson in a leisurely fashion, with no fear whatsoever that anyone will stop them. They were right not to feel fear: no one did stop them. As the Dawn story makes clear, when the police came, they arrested the victims.

Last time I was in Pakistan, on my last night there, a bunch of us Khawajas had dinner at the home of a cousin of mine who’s a well known politician in Pakistan, and a qualified defender of Pakistan’s blasphemy law. It was a wonderful send-off for me, but we ended up having a riotous argument about the blasphemy law over biryani and shami kebabs, most of us arguing against the in-principle legitimacy of such a law, but a minority at the table defending it.  My politician cousin (and gracious host) agreed that the law had been tragically abused, but insisted that some such law had to be retained in Pakistan, albeit enforced in a narrower and more impartial way. The rest of us argued that the reformist gambit was a lost and pointless cause. I wonder if this event will induce Pakistanis (including Pakistani politicians, and particularly including the ones related to me) to rethink their naive, dogmatic attachment to that cause. Maybe it’s time for some push-back from Pakistan’s American sponsors as well. (While we’re on this subject, how about a little pressure on Pakistan to lift its legalized anathematization of Ahmadis?)

That said, the issue here isn’t just a matter of the blasphemy law but of the rule of law. As far as I’m concerned, the video above is a perfectly accurate depiction of a state of anarchy. I know that anarchists will object to that characterization, but though I’m familiar with the objections, I don’t accept them. The Jhelum attacks are a paradigmatic instance of life under a state that is too weak to uphold the rule of law. The remedy seems obvious: retain the state, but strengthen its commitment to the rule of law. The remedy is not to ratchet back the state and aim (or hope or pray) for some “market-based” solution, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Part of the problem is that it’s not clear what it means, much less how it’s supposed to work.

To complete the thought in the title…

Postscript. Just to give PoT readers a taste of the mentality involved, here’s an exchange in Urdu on YouTube between commentators discussing the YouTube video I inserted above.

kamz khan 1 day ago
bilkul theak kiya ha is kafir ko b isi aag main jalana chaheye tha
Hasan Ahmad23 hours ago
Kabhi Quran parha hai ? Pata hai usme Kia likha hai
The first writer, Kamz Khan, writes: “What was done here is absolutely right; they should have burned the infidel owner in the very same flames.”
The second writer, Hasan Ahmad, responds: “Have you ever read the Qur’an? Do you have any idea what’s in it?”
Postscript, November 22, 2015: This is a useful backgrounder on the Pakistan Supreme Court’s position on the blasphemy law, taking roughly the sort of position I ascribed to my cousin in the original post (call it “theocratic reformism” or “theocratic constitutionalism”). The article was written a few weeks before the Jhelum incident. The Qur’anic verses cited in the article are 2.83, 2.94 (Surah Nisa’a), and 49.6 (Surah Hujuraat). Note the frightening ambiguity of this passage:
Thirdly, “any call for reform of the law regarding the offence of blasphemy ought not to be understood as a call for doing away with that law and it ought to be understood as a call for introducing adequate safeguards against malicious application or misuse of that law”, is the Supreme Court’s clear answer to the flawed argument that criticising the manmade blasphemy law is blasphemy.
Contrary to the author’s apparent re-assurances, the claim he makes here at least leaves open the possibility that root and branch rejection of the blasphemy law is itself blasphemy. I find it unfortunate that a Visiting Fellow in Political Science at LSE could write such stuff. Shouldn’t it be legally actionable “blasphemy” to defend such a position in a secular-liberal country like Great Britain? Mercifully, it isn’t–not yet, anyway. (Here’s the Wikipedia entry on “Blasphemy Law in Pakistan.”)
It’s worth noting, incidentally, that Pakistani newspapers are (legally) obliged to refer to Ahmadi mosques as “places of worship” rather than as mosques or masjids. Since Ahmadis have been declared “non-Muslim” by Pakistani law, it’s against the law to refer to their “places of worship” in a manner that implies that those “places of worship” are Muslim places of worship. (Read the text in the preceding hyperlink to get a sense of the surreal, totalitarian character of the law, Ordinance XX.) I was gratified to see The New York Times refer to the place in question straightforwardly as a mosque.
Postscript, December 17, 2015: More useful background, care of The Friday Times blog (Lahore).

Atlas Shrugged: The Rematch

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This is old news, but apparently, Al Ruddy, the producer of “The Godfather,” is planning to make a Netflix-type miniseries of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This is what he has in mind:

Mr. Ruddy, who is working up an outline for a writer or writers yet to be named, sees his rendition as a love story, built squarely around its commanding female protagonist, Dagny Taggart. (Angelina Jolie was in line for an earlier, never-made version.)

The main thing, Mr. Ruddy said, is to honor Ms. Rand’s insistence on making a film for the future. That means redrawing its capitalists and creators, who go on strike against creeping collectivism, as figures more familiar than the railroad heiress and industrial titans who figured in a book that was first published in 1957.

“When you look at guys like Jeff Bezos, he’s not only doing Amazon, he wants to colonize Mars,” Mr. Ruddy said. He spoke by telephone last week of his plan for a mini-series in which an Internet blackout led by Bezos-like figures might shut down cellphones, banks and almost everything else.

As for concerns about faithful Rand fans objecting to any liberties he might take with the book, Mr. Ruddy said he had none.

“If you can reimagine the Old Testament and the New Testament,” he said, “why can’t I reimagine Ayn Rand?”

Yeah, that sounds really great–Jeff Bezos meets Angelina Jolie on Mars after the Internet goes down. Can’t wait.

I’ve already given my two cents on this topic: if you want to do Rand, aim for low but solid ground; forget Atlas Shrugged for now and make an updated film version of We the Living. Not that I expect any of these media moguls to take my advice.

Meanwhile, I think Inspector Wang captures my essential reaction to the “re-imagining” of Atlas Shrugged that Al Ruddy has in mind.

Apologies for the “cultural appropriation.”

Supererogatory Bluffing

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You know you’re in trouble when you encounter a sentence like this in a paper for an ethics class:

After reading both Powell’s and Zwolinski’s articles, there are definitely pros and cons of sweatshops.

The hyper-conscientiousness of having read “both articles” is laudable. Trouble is, Powell and Zwolinski are the co-authors of a single article.

P.S. Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” is the last reading of the course.

Help Unwanted

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The Republicans want an absolute guarantee that not a single Syrian refugee entering the United States is a terrorist-in-the-making. Meanwhile, psychiatrists are complaining that they’re being held legally liable for failing to identify criminals-in-the-making; that’s unfair, they argue, because such predictions are impossible. While we’re on the subject: advocates of gun control think that mental illness is a proxy for predictions about gun violence, but critics of gun control think that no such predictions are possible.

It almost makes you wish that there was a discipline that helped us think about–integrate, make coherent sense of–such complex, far-flung claims.

I suppose we could ask the economists, but if we did, I think we’d still be left wondering why a Hayekian like Paul Ryan insists that centralized government planning works when it comes to vetting an influx of refugees, but not when it comes to anything else.

By the way, Marco Rubio thinks it’s important for the next generation of Americans to know how to connect one piece of metal to another, but not how to connect one piece of information to another.

I’d expatiate at further length on this topic, but I have to go teach Critical Thinking to a classroom full of students who persistently ask, out loud, why they have to take a course in a topic as obviously irrelevant to life as philosophy.

Postscript, November 20, 2015: It’s not philosophy, but this take on the Syrian refugee issue strikes me as just right. For a discussion of the refugee issue at PoT that precedes the Paris attacks, read the comments on this post. For my skepticism on the anarchist-literalist version of “Open Borders,” read this post and the comments on this one.

Just Answer the Question, Dammit

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If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been lately, aside from teaching and grading I’ve been immersed in a series of mandatory Title IX online training courses at my University. Each module–there are four* of them–consists of a couple of dozen questions plus explanatory gloss. You’re obliged to give an answer to each question in order to proceed to the next question; you’re obliged to reach the end of the training module in order to be remain employed at the University; and having done so, you’re explicitly obliged to indicate your assent to the contents of each module as well.

Here’s one of the questions, under the heading “Constant Consent.” It’s a yes/no question. This is the sum total of the question-prompt.

Allie was kissing her date at the end of their evening together. If Allie chose to make out with him, did his having sex with her count as rape?

Now, there’s a paradigm of a well-constructed test question.
The answer turns out to be: YES, i.e., he raped her. Here is the official explanation.
Consent can be revoked at any time, and when Allie told him to stop she was explicitly ending her consent. Having sex with someone when you do not have their consent is rape, and her rapist could be expelled from his school and convicted in a court of law.

She told him to stop? I didn’t catch that. Evidently, much of the drama here seems to be happening off-stage.

So let’s take this step by step: Allie was kissing her date. From kissing, they consensually went to “making out” (ex hypothesi, there’s a subtle distinction). Then, without further elaboration, we’re told that they ended up having sex. Nothing is said in the initial prompt about whether or not the sex was consensual. The omission is then construed in the answer (which is not visible until after you’ve answered the question) to mean that Allie explicitly told the date to stop, and that he didn’t stop. Evidently, “constant consent” not only means that Allie has to indicate consent at each step of the sexual encounter, but that questions about sexual encounters can be written in such a way that if consent isn’t mentioned one way or another, we’re to infer that consent was explicitly denied and flouted.

The question is whether I can revoke my consent to take this online training.

The answer is: NO. Here is the explanation.

Consent cannot be revoked at any time. Once you’re employed, you’ve consented to everything that your employer wants to impose on you, no matter how ridiculous. Failure to take the compulsory training module will result in termination of employment.

In other words, revocation of consent would be a kiss of death for my further employment prospects. Pretty sexy.

*Correction, November 15, 2015: I had originally written “three,” but there are four. [Correction, March 24, 2016: Felician admin recently scolded me for missing the fifth.]

Postscript, November 16, 2015: As promised, an item from the harassment module of my training:

Watch your language: Tolerance does not mean you need to compromise your ethics. You may disagree with choices others make, but express your opinion respectfully. Don’t post critical comments on social media sites, spread rumors or call people names.

As we all know, critical comments are the equivalent of rumors or insults. For this reason, and with all due respect, no more critical comments will be allowed at Policy of Truth, especially if they are critical of me, Irfan “the Oppressed” Khawaja. Anyone who criticizes me will be asked to apologize, grovel, abase themselves, resign from any position they hold anywhere, and be reminded of the PTSD I suffer from my past-life Jungian experiences as a result of the Partition of India and Pakistan (in 1947, two decades before I was born). And then they’ll be asked to send me a check to cover my therapy co-pays for the rest of my life (ht: Jason Brennan at BHL).

That goes double for white, male cis-gendered (etc.) readers of this blog (yes, including contributors). I’ve had it with your privilege! Had it! Be quiet! Who the fuck hired you? This blog is my home! It’s not about creating an intellectual space. Do you understand that? Is this what Policy of Truth is? You’re disgusting! 

Just kidding! Ha ha.

If the preceding doesn’t meet your subversion-of-the-norms-of-discourse quota, try this post.

Postscript, March 24, 2016: I have mixed feelings about the AAUP–and particularly mixed feelings about the accuracy of their reporting–but unless there are any major boo-boos in it, this seems like a worthwhile use of their resources (PDF).

Adventures in Campus Diversity

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We’re covering issues at the intersection of race and criminal justice in my Phil 250 class (“Making Moral Decisions”) via Michelle Alexander’s 2013 TED talk, “The Future of Race in America,” and Heather Mac Donald’s 2008 City Journal article, “Is the Criminal Justice System Racist?”

Two representative vignettes from class:

Section A: A black student tells the story of how he was accosted by the police this summer on Felician’s Rutherford campus. Why? He was walking down the street while looking intently at his phone; the officer who stopped him worried out loud that he was taking pictures of buildings on campus–a worry made salient (the officer said) by the possibility that he might be affiliated with ISIS. The officer then asked to see the student’s ID, and demanded his name, address, and phone number on the grounds that it would be beneficial for the Rutherford Police to have this information in case the student ever lost his wallet in town.

Section B: On watching the Alexander video–which asserts that the American criminal justice system has come to replicate a twenty-first century form of Jim Crow–a white student asks, in exasperated bewilderment: “What the fuck is ‘Jim Crow'”?

I swear to God I’m not making any of this up.

Economic Rationality versus Full Rationality

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An economist—and perhaps most people—would treat the punishment a criminal justly suffers as the result of his wrongdoing as a bad thing for the criminal. But Plato argues (for example, in the Gorgias) that punishment is good for the criminal because it corrects his unjust ways and makes him a better person. And, assuming for the sake of argument that Plato is right about the effect of punishment, he has a point. But of course, so does the economist. Now, if both are right, it seems to follow that we have two different ways of calculating our good, the one invoked by the economist and the one invoked by Plato. Are there really two distinct ways of calculating our good, or is this a mirage? If there really are two, what distinguishes them and how is each justified?

The two ways might be reconciled if the criminal is merely short sighted and doesn’t realize that he can after all maximize his gains by undergoing punishment. Undergoing punishment would then be like taking medicine to become healthy. Taking medicine is locally a negative event, true enough, but it results in higher global rewards. In another metaphor, punishment is a local minimum that must be traversed to reach a global maximum—a trough one must pass through to reach a higher hill.

But this won’t do. The economist’s view of punishment as negative is not so easily set aside. The economist can easily explain the good of taking medicine: the individual compares the negative degree of the treatment (together with the probability of its effectiveness) with the negative degree of the ailment (together with its probable future course without treatment) and chooses the less negative of the two expected futures. Assuming the medicine would work and is not worse than the ailment, then, taking the medicine is good. But this only works because the ailment is evaluated negatively. And the trouble is that it is hardly clear that the criminal regards his own “ailment”—dishonesty, injustice—as a negative. Or anyway, as sufficiently negative to counterbalance the profits of crime.

Injustice might be a global negative if it results in lost economic opportunities, if it is bad business. In that case, punishment would turn out to be good in economic terms if it shocks the criminal out of his unjust habits or proclivities and converts him to justice. Then punishment would be the trough the criminal passes through to reach the higher hill of justice and its greater profitability. In many cases, this might be correct. But surely not in all. It is naïve to think that justice is always the most profitable course of action, even in the long run. (And by the way, there is not always a long run.) There will always be opportunities to commit injustice with very little risk of detection or punishment, so that the most profitable course of action is to mimic a just person while taking advantage of these opportunities as they arise. An interesting result of game theory is that such opportunities will tend to proliferate as the number of just persons in a society increases. For, the greater the number of just agents, the less is the need for an apparatus of vigilance, wariness, contracts, lawyers, detectives, prosecution, and enforcement. So, since these things are not free, they will atrophy, thus enlarging the opportunities for injustice. Therefore, the more that just behavior prevails in a society, the more injustice is encouraged by utilitarian considerations; i.e., by economic rationality.

The paradigmatic illustration of the economic problem of justice is, of course, the prisoner’s dilemma. In a prisoner’s dilemma, it is good to cooperate if you are with another cooperator—but it is even better to defect. Notice that the paradox of “rational” decision making yielding suboptimal outcomes in the prisoner’s dilemma cannot be resolved by the agents taking a longer or more comprehensive view of their interests. These are specified in the decision table, and as long as the situation is a true prisoner’s dilemma, economic rationality dictates the suboptimal outcome. The only way to reach the mutually optimal outcome is for the agents both to ignore the values specified in the decision table and in effect to value cooperation for its own sake. This fact is sometimes expressed by statements like, “it is rational to be irrational in a prisoner’s dilemma.” This is just to say that the agents could achieve a higher value outcome by not caring about value (and caring about cooperation instead). But such statements are not strictly true. On the one hand, if the agents really care less about the values in the table than about cooperation, then they are not being irrational when they cooperate; they are satisfying their preferences. And such an agent should still remain satisfied even if he is defected on. On the other hand, if the agents’ “irrational” behavior is really rational only because of the higher value outcomes they achieve, then that implies that the values in the table are the most important thing after all. And in that case, cooperating really is irrational. For, if the second agent cooperates, the first agent does better by defecting. And if the second agent defects, the first still does better by defecting. So regardless of what the second agent does, the first gets a higher value outcome by defecting. There is simply no way around this conclusion as long as the decision table values are the ruling consideration.

Both the conventional economic agent who defects in the prisoner’s dilemma and the devoted cooperator could therefore be said to be rationally pursuing their preferences but merely to have different preferences. And we could say that the decision table in the prisoner’s dilemma does not accurately depict the devoted cooperator’s values. Perhaps the devoted cooperator is constitutionally unable to place much value on a good acquired through defection. For such a person, a prisoner’s dilemma decision table could not be constructed. He would be immune to the prisoner’s dilemma! Of course, he might also become the victim of defections. But in accordance with his scale of values, he would still be satisfied with his own course of action. Thus, the conventional economic agent and the devoted cooperator could be made equivalent as regards rationality. Each rationally pursues his values. It’s just that their values are not the same.

I want to resist this line of thought. I think there is a more comprehensive sense of “rational,” in which we can say that the devoted cooperator is more rational than the conventional economic agent in the prisoner’s dilemma, and in which we can agree with Plato that punishment is good for the criminal, at the same time as there is a more limited, economic sense of the term, in which defection is rational in the prisoner’s dilemma and punishment is bad for the criminal.

If the devoted cooperator is “really” rational, more so than the conventional economic agent, how is this so? It can only be because the devoted cooperator pursues his real interests and the economic agent does not. How can we say what these are? In Aristotelian fashion, we must appeal to the total, integrated good functioning of the organism, the human being. This should mean success in getting external rewards, as well as an absence of internal conflict, disruption, and discord. One should be comfortable and pain free in one’s own skin as well as efficacious in external functioning and successful in promoting one’s own existence in one’s environment. One should be well-adjusted both internally and externally.

Are our true interests in this sense better achieved by the devoted cooperator than by the economic agent? Not necessarily, if we restrict our attention to external rewards. True, the devoted cooperator will always outcompete the economic agent in a world where there are other devoted cooperators around and where these can be reliably identified. As long as cooperators can identify each other and exclude conventional economic agents (who will defect whenever possible), cooperators will achieve the higher gains. The trouble is that the conventional economic agents will learn to mimic cooperators and thereby exploit them. And, as argued above, the more cooperators predominate in society, the easier exploitation by the conventional economic agent becomes. Therefore, as far as economic rewards go, it will always be possible for at least some conventional economic agents to hold their own with devoted cooperators. Thus, although economist Robert Frank, in his brilliant Passions within Reason (W. W. Norton, 1988), argued that a disposition to devoted cooperation could evolve in a society by devoted cooperators’ ability to outcompete conventional economic agents, he did not argue that devoted cooperators could succeed to such an extent as to drive conventional economic agents entirely from the field. The predicted outcome is a draw: there will always be some equilibrium consisting of a certain percentage of devoted cooperators and a certain percentage of conventional economic agents.

On the other hand, when it comes to internal success—the personal, psychological, social, “organismic” or holistic well-being of the agent—the devoted cooperator would seem to have a clear advantage. It may be that the conventional economic agent can outcompete the devoted cooperator in the sphere of economic rewards through mimicry, but the internal cost of this strategy is likely to be high if it entails living as a “Talented Mr. Ripley” who constantly deceives others and is conscious of the pain he brings them, whose life is a frenetic balancing act between lies and the truth, who must be constantly vigilant against the intelligence and perceptiveness of others, who lives in constant fear of getting caught, who is socially isolated and never able to really reveal his true self to anyone, and so forth. These are genuine aspects of well-being, but they do not show up—not directly—in the accounting of material rewards.

Yet the accounting of material rewards is important on its own. It is the basis of economic science and as such has a considerable measure of predictive success. Nearly all business activity—of banks, shops, factories, you name it—is measured in its terms, which seems right. People engage in economic activity to make money, and firms compete in an economic environment in which their growth and indeed their survival is determined by material outcomes. Again, analyses like Frank’s focus exclusively on material rewards, and they are very valuable. It is important to be able to see the sense in which defection is the rational action in the prisoner’s dilemma and the sense in which punishment is bad for the punished. But these cannot be seen from the standpoint of full rationality, which takes account of internal as well as external rewards. From the standpoint of full rationality, defection in the prisoner’s dilemma is pathological and corrective punishment is beneficial.

The standpoint of exclusively material rewards is important because very often, rightly or wrongly, it is how we actually reason and function. This is why it is predictively so successful. And in many contexts this standpoint is not unreasonable. Consider that ultimately our shaping is by the evolutionary process of natural selection, and natural selection is driven entirely by material outcomes.

Some economists may say that their focus is not on material rewards exclusively, but on “utilities,” which include all forms of preference satisfaction, internal (psychological, etc.) as well as external (material). They may say this, but it isn’t true. Nearly all economic analyses are conducted in terms of money, for example. The fact is that it is material goods that are almost always the exclusive focus of economic analysis. This is just why some of the analyses of Gary Becker, for example, which invoke the utility we place on the welfare of spouses and children, are so extraordinary—because they are so rare. In addition, the internal rewards I am talking about are not a matter of utility or preference satisfaction, but of objective well-being or good functioning, regardless of whether it is recognized or valued by the agent.

It seems, then, that there are grounds for two conceptions of rationality, an economic conception that focuses exclusively on material outcomes, and a full conception that focuses on holistic well-being, including internal as well as external flourishing. Economic rationality may be the more natural of the two. It is certainly more common. It is thought to be hard-headed and no-nonsense. It is the conception according to which defection is rational in the prisoner’s dilemma and punishment is bad for the criminal. Full rationality is the comprehensive conception. It encompasses the material rewards of economic rationality and also the rewards of proper internal functioning. These latter are less easily specifiable or measurable, but they are real and important nevertheless. It is full rationality that enables us to see why it is rational to be a devoted cooperator and why corrective punishment is good for the criminal. Full rationality takes as its standard our complete good, not just material well-being.

Now, a reason this matters for social theory: Libertarianism can be described as the political philosophy that assumes that economic rationality is all there is to rationality. But the above analysis indicates that it isn’t. Economic rationality falls short of full rationality. So the challenge for a post-libertarian political philosophy can be put this way: How to integrate the insights of economic rationality and the importance of individual liberty into a broader conception of the human good.