I was sitting in my cubicle mid-day when an email with an odd subject line tumbled into my inbox: “JBMDL Afghan.” It was from a bona fide sender, so I opened it and took a look. It turned out to be an email from the director of financial services at a major hospital system, making reference to a new medical services “payor,” as we spell it in the trade. It was, in other words, the Joint Base McGuire Fort Dix Lakehurst Afghan payor, i.e., the payor of medical services for Afghan refugees housed at McGuire Air Force Base/Fort Dix Army facility in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Otherwise known as the US military.
Continue readingDESERT ALL AROUND: DOPEY BEHAVIOR, ASSAULTS, CLEVELAND, AND THE FIERCE LIONESS
When someone (or something) deserves something, what sort of normative fact (property, condition) is this? Is this sort of normative fact determined by other sorts of normative facts (and, if so, which ones)? Is this sort of normative fact something that determines other sorts of normative facts (and, if so, which ones)? Here is something of a live issue in political philosophy to provide motivation (beyond mere curiosity) for asking and answering these questions: if I deserve more money or prestige than you do, this might be considered the basis for it being fair or just that I get more (or for my having normative claim or right to have more). Alternatively: it might be that standards of fairness or justice (or for relevant normative claims or rights) come first, the facts about who deserves what in society being merely a result of this. (This is the issue of whether desert of the relevant sort is “pre-justicial,” not whether it is “pre-institutional.” The former feature seems more important to me.) However we answer my questions in the distributive justice case, the answers might be different in other cases: perhaps in some cases desert-facts “come first” and in others they “come last” (or maybe things are more complicated and they “come in the middle” in some or all cases).
I want to try to make some progress on these issues (at the general level) by examining a particular sort of case of desert: the case of a person deserving not to be wronged. Though we might or might not be able to generalize from this sort of desert to other cases, my inkling is that aspects of the order or structure of the different normative features here is pretty clear with this particular sort of desert, making it a good (or at least easier) case to start with.
Continue readingDesert and Diligence
Chapter 4 of Sher’s Desert, “Desert and Diligence,” explores the thesis that diligence, or conscientious effort, is a fundamental basis of desert claims:
Whatever else we think, most of us agree that persons deserve things for sheer hard work. We believe that conscientious students deserve to get good grades, that athletes who practice regularly deserve to do well, and that businessmen who work long hours deserve to make money (Sher, Desert, p. 53).
That seems plausible enough, at least at first glance, but on reflection it raises two difficult questions:
(1) What determines what specific hard workers in fact deserve? and
(2) What does it mean say that they ought to have those things?
Question (1) seems difficult to answer precisely because effort is common to such a variety of activities with such a variety of aims. Why does the effortful student deserve grades rather than money, or the industrious businessperson deserve money rather than grades? A default answer might be that “what any hard worker deserves is just the outcome he has striven to produce” (Sher, p. 54). The (prototypical) student is striving after a grade, the (prototypical) businessperson, after money. So our provisional answer to (1) is that the deserving person deserves what she aims at in virtue of the diligent or conscientious effort she puts forth to that end.
That leads us to question (2), at least in a somewhat weak sense of “ought.” As noted in an earlier post, Sher’s inquiry into desert acknowledges that there is a gap between some claims of desert claims and the obligations assumed by any particular person. Smith can deserve something, X, without its being the case that any individual person is obligated to give Smith X. But there has to be some normative connection between what we deserve and what is desirable. Claims to desert can’t plausibly be entirely inert, normatively speaking. They have to be embody some (at least weak) claim to value.
Continue readingHe’s Immune to Parody, Too
Jason’s Brennan’s self-parodic idea of a parody, titled “I Am Immune to Criticism” (my italics):
Continue readingI’ve decided to copy-cat a style of argumentation which is prominent among democrats and socialists in the philosophy literature. This move will now render me and my work immune from criticism.
By epistocracy, I henceforth mean not only a system that gives greater weight to the wise during voting, but which actually makes substantively wise decisions! Thus, any time a seemingly epistocratic decision-system makes a bad choice–such as a choice that runs afoul of the demographic objection–it wasn’t *true* or *real* epistocracy! Epistocracy by definition always makes the wisest choices. Therefore, to oppose epistocracy is to oppose good choices and favor bad ones.
Albert Pelham, RIP
I’m deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Albert Pelham, President of the Montclair, New Jersey chapter of the NAACP, and Executive Director of the Montclair Neighborhood Development Corporation. This article just below nicely summarizes his many achievements as a civil rights activist and “social justice warrior.”
Cancel Culture: A Recantation
In previous posts here, I’ve argued that “cancel culture” is fake news–an ideological confabulation devised by the Right to discredit the Left, which is usually “credited” with having created it. I now realize that I’ve been deeply wrong, and wish to recant. Cancel culture certainly does exist, just not in the way its usual ideological adversaries would have you believe.
Think of any event that requires scheduling, e.g., an appointment, a work schedule, business hours, a conference, a travel itinerary, a date. Think of how ubiquitous such events are, and how complex and expensive the infrastructure required to keep them going–to keep the slots filled, to keep the workflow efficient, to make sure everything runs on time. Consider how much reliance the various parties place on the others in the scheduling process. If A schedules with B, A relies on B to be there, and B relies on A to show up. If A doesn’t show up, the failure (whether culpable or not) adversely affects both B and any third parties who would have used A’s slot but couldn’t, given A’s (let’s say) sudden absence. If B doesn’t show up, the absence affects A as well as a set of third parties.
Continue readingWho Deserves Afghanistan?
The expected consequence conception of desert says that, pro tanto, we deserve the expected consequences of our actions. A recent line of argument inspired by the Taliban seizure of Afghanistan both employs this conception, and unwittingly illustrates the problems with it.
Continue readingon desert and value
I’ve been playing around with this analysis or account of a certain central sort of desert, one form of which is covered in Sher’s Desert, chapter 4 (concerning one deserving success due to diligent effort, hard work, etc.; other sorts of desert in the same family would include deserving credit — admiration or honors perhaps — for achievement):
Desert (Earning) M deserves (in the earning sense) X for having feature F = it is appropriate for anyone to have (the relevant sort of) positive-attitude response to M getting benefit X as reward for M having feature F, where M (or anyone similarly situated) having F is desirable in a particular sort of way (mutatis mutandis for X being harmful to A, this constituting sanction for M, and M failing to have desirable feature F).
One question that came up in our discussion last night was whether, on this sort of approach — still of course too schematic and unspecific in important ways — this kind of desert-property comes to (or is in some way closely-associated with) a kind of value property. Sher seems to have a view like this (though his precise view, even at this sort of schematic level, is hard to pin down).
Continue readingAfghanistan: So Worth It
Frederick Kagan in The New York Times, on the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban:
Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely, even at very low numbers. I and others have argued that the investment, including the risk to American personnel, is worth it to prevent militant groups from once again overrunning the country.
Maybe, after Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, it’s time to ask what it means when people say “it’s worth it” to fight wars. What’s worth what, to whom, how and why? Anyone who wants to go and fight for Kabul or Kandahar is free to go and give it another 20 years of their life, on the model of the Lincoln Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. But that doesn’t mean it’s worth another 20 years of ours.
Continue readingLethal Prescience
I think it may be time to take down the paywall on this article from Foreign Affairs:
Policy of Truth 