Defining “emergency” (Part 1)

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’m in the middle of editing, and writing a contribution for, Reason Papers’s forthcoming symposium on the epistemology, ethics, and politics of emergencies. (Though I’ll be contributing an essay to it, credit for the idea of the symposium goes to Carrie-Ann.) The topic turns out to be an amazingly interesting and fertile one, with ramifications in a number of directions, including the epistemology and semantics of definition; the application, scope, and stringency of moral principles; the scope and content of rights; the proper role of government; the rule of law; and so on.

The topic has been made particularly timely by a number of recent events–the recent Ebola outbreak; the state of emergency declared this past summer in Ferguson, Missouri after the riots; the states of emergency declared during Hurricane Sandy in 2012; the states of emergency that have been thought to obtain after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, etc. But those phenomena hardly exhaust the applications of ‘emergency’: once you start looking for emergencies, you find them everywhere, often in the most unlikely places. And then there are emergency-cognates, like disasters, catastrophes, crises, epidemics, and pandemics, as well as pseudo-emergencies of every kind.

At the most basic level, emergencies are events that are ontologically and normatively discontinuous from “normal” events. It’s part of the very concept of an emergency that it’s an exceptional sort of event, that it involves danger, and that it demands urgent attention and action. Given those facts, emergencies drastically affect the content and application of normative principles–epistemic, ethical, and political: principles that apply to ‘ordinary’ life don’t apply, or at least don’t apply in the same way, to emergencies. Ordinarily, we expect people to form their beliefs on the basis of the evidence for them–but in emergencies, guesses and hunches become acceptable. Ordinarily, we expect people not to kill, torture, kidnap, steal from, trespass on, cheat, deceive, or manipulate others–but in the right kind of emergency (some would say) just about anything goes. Ordinarily, we’re governed by the rule of law, including constitutional law, but in emergencies, we either bend the rules, or are governed by open-ended edict or fiat. And so on.

Given this, emergencies give rise to a difficult dilemma in need of solution. On the one hand—call it the rigorist hand–there’s the danger that the invocation of “emergency exceptions” to moral principles serves as a rationalization or excuse for ad hoc exception-making. The concept of an “emergency” seems ill-defined and elastic, and “emergency exception” seems like a magic wand by which moral principles are undercut and effectively ignored. If we define “emergency” too broadly, every form of duress becomes an “emergency,” so that the concept loses its meaning, and emergency exceptions serve to subvert the stringency of the moral principles that are supposed to govern normal life. At a certain point, a moralist has to put his foot down and insist that duress requires the exertion of moral strength and endurance in the name of normality rather than exception-making in the name of abnormality. But the appeal to “emergencies” is one of the most seductive ways of evading this responsibility. From the rigorist perspective, then, emergencies are philosophically important primarily because we have to put them in their place. Emergencies, the rigorist insists, are marginal exceptions in life. We should cordon them off as essentially irrelevant to normal life, and focus our attention on the non-exceptional rules that govern normal life.

On the other hand—call it the pragmatist hand—there’s the danger that if we ignore emergencies, or minimize their significance or frequency, we ignore a real phenomenon that affects the proper application of moral principles. All principles, even the most stringent, apply within a specific and in-principle specifiable context. If we ignore the difference between emergencies and non-emergencies, we apply principles designed for one context to a context where they lack application. In doing so, we run the risk of sacrificing things of greater value to things of lesser value on the basis of a robotic commitment to empty verbal formulations masquerading as moral principles. In doing that, we risk the dangers of imposing pointless burdens on those suffering great duress, invoking “morality” as a pseudo-justification for our dogmatism. From this pragmatic perspective, we ought to take emergencies seriously because emergencies are an extreme instance of duress, and duress is a ubiquitous but easily-ignored part of our moral life. Goodness is fragile, and emergencies underscore that fact in an acute way.

The rigorist and pragmatic views are, of course, one-sided caricatures of possible positions. Each view gets something right, but each view ignores the merits of the other view, and thereby gets something wrong. A good dialectician would have to work through the two views, integrating their best insights, discarding what each view gets wrong, and fashioning an alternative to them that avoids the pitfalls of either view. The task would be to strike the mean between rigorist and pragmatist extremes.

I’ve argued elsewhere—very briefly and tentatively, in a footnote (p. 219 n.29)—that Ayn Rand appears to have been the first writer to have ‘thematized’ the topic of emergencies in twentieth-century English-speaking philosophy. (If I’m wrong about that, as I very well could be, I’d be interested to hear about it in the comments.) Her discussion appears in “The Ethics of Emergencies,” a 1963 essay published in her 1968 essay collection, The Virtue of Selfishness, and anthologized every now and then in philosophy textbooks. I have mixed feelings about the essay, as I do about much that Rand wrote.

On the “pro” side, I think she gets four or five things basically right.

(1) Most fundamentally, she gets the basic framing issue right:

It is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality: the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise definitions. (Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 54).

In other words, some principles straddle emergencies and non-emergencies, retaining their identity across both contexts, but taking different forms in the one context as opposed to the other. Good theorizing keeps both facts in mind. It’s not enough for a theorist to insist on the sameness of the principles that apply to emergencies and non-emergencies; she has to explain how a principle can prescribe opposite courses of action in emergencies as opposed to emergencies and yet be the same principle. Nor is it sufficient for a theorist to insist on the need for exception-clauses in emergencies, based on the dissimilarity of emergencies to non-emergencies. She has to explain why the exception clauses exemplify the general and universally applicable principles that apply to both contexts. In other words, if it’s wrong to lie in ordinary life, but right to lie in an emergency, what needs explanation is what single principle is exemplified in both contexts, and how that single principle demands truth-telling in the one case and lying in the other. The constraint seems to me a plausible one, even if Rand herself doesn’t explain exactly how it works, and even though most theorists (in my experience) seem to violate or ignore it.

Having said that, it’s worth adding that some philosophers have emphasized the constraint. For better or worse, Mill does so in the last few paragraphs of Utilitarianism. A more recent example is Alasdair MacIntyre’s trio of papers on moral dilemmas and truth-telling in Part II of Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006). Another interesting discussion is Thomas Hill’s “Making Exceptions Without Abandoning the Principle: or How a Kantian Might Think about Terrorism,” in Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (1992). There are, of course, many others.

I think Rand gets some other things right.

(2) She’s right, I think, that the philosophical literature misuses emergencies and moral dilemmas to the point of systematically indulging in fallacious appeals to the emotions in order to induce readers to accept otherwise under-argued moral claims. (Peter Singer’s drowning child example is a paradigm of this approach–an approach my graduate school roommate Patrick Kain once aptly dubbed “The Argument by Surely Operator,” as in, “Surely, we would all save the child…” Interestingly and counter-intuitively, both Singer and Rand regard it as utterly uncontroversial that one has an obligation to save the drowning child, but neither of them has an argument for it. I have never, in twenty years of reading on the subject, seen or heard a bona fide argument for saving the child beyond table-pounding appeals to intuition, consensus, or plain old emotion.)

(3) Unlike much of the literature, Rand insists on defining “emergency.” It’s amazing how much of the literature discusses emergencies without ever defining the term.

(4) Again, unlike most of the contemporary analytic literature, Rand’s definition of “emergency” takes the form of a definition by genus and specific difference (“An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event that…”) rather than biconditional equivalence (“An emergency takes place if and only if…”). This is a large topic, but I tend to think that the traditional Aristotelian format for definitions has advantages over the newer analytic one. I’m also inclined to think that Rand’s definition of “emergencies” is basically right, while admitting that she says nothing in defense of it, and admitting that any any adequate defense of it would probably require revisions to it.

Unfortunately, I also find Rand’s essay seriously defective. I see at least seven or eight basic problems.

(1) For one thing, though the essay is titled “The Ethics of Emergencies,” it’s not primarily about the ethics of emergencies at all. In my edition, the essay is about eight pages long, and is about a variety of topics, none of them particularly well developed. Rand opens the essay with a page-and-a-half-long well-poisoning polemic against the misuse of emergency scenarios in ethics. Another four pages go to a paradoxically illuminating but ill-argued explication of the egoistic basis of human relationships. A mere page and a half discusses emergencies. Another half page concludes the polemic against the misuse of emergency scenarios in ethics, focusing on the role that such scenarios play in defending altruism. Despite the title of the essay, then, the discussion of emergencies ends up being a mere afterthought to, and application of, the claims about the egoistic basis of human relationships. The cumulative result is that the essay is torn between at least two different topics–relationships and emergencies–and fails to do justice to either topic. For that reason, though I think the essay has some worthwhile things to say, it is, on the whole, a failure.

There are other serious failures of argumentation in it, failures that have essentially gone undiscussed in the “literature” on the subject, almost all of it written by writers sympathetic to Rand. (For a notable exception, read pp. 100-104 of Carrie-Ann’s 2008 Reason Papers review of Tara Smith’s Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics.)

(2) In discussing egoistic relationships, Rand repeatedly stresses that a rational egoist forms a hierarchy of values, incorporates other people’s well-being into that hierarchy, and then treats others well-being as part of his own. What she doesn’t explain is how or why anyone would do that. Yes, if you incorporate others’ well-being into your own, you come to treat their well-being as part of your own, and thereby promote their good while promoting your own. But why would an egoist do that? What benefit does an egoist get by making the initial choice? She doesn’t explain. Her failure to explain would, by itself, merely be an omission rather than a defect in her view (or in the essay), but having omitted a discussion of that crucial topic, she then goes on to make very strong claims about the structure that a rational hierarchy of values would have to take, as well as the actions that would have to follow from its adoption. But unless she specifies the benefit that an egoist gets from doing as she prescribes, she’s not entitled to such claims. What we need but don’t get in the essay is a derivation of other-regard from egoistic self-interest, not a rhetorical deflection of the accusation that egoists are mean people.

(3) Rand divides her discussion of other-regard into two parts: how an egoist deals with his intimates, and how he deals with strangers. As for intimates, she says, we incorporate their welfare into ours based on their past track record of virtue. Roughly speaking, the more virtuous they are, the more deeply integrated into our own welfare; the less virtuous, the less so. Though there’s deep truth in this claim, it’s also a gigantic oversimplification. But never mind that for now; let’s accept it ex hypothesi. One problem is that it explains how egoistic relationships continue, not how they come to be. I can continue to incorporate your welfare in my hierarchy of values based on your past track record insofar as you have a past track record (with me). But there has to be some initial point at which you lacked a track record (with me). How then do relationships begin?

The same problem applies even more problematically to strangers. A stranger by definition has no track record with another stranger. So we can’t incorporate the welfare of strangers into our own on the basis of their past track record of virtue. What then do we do? Rand acknowledges the problem here, and claims to deal with it, but what she says is very compressed and obscure (p. 53). We grant a stranger a “generalized respect and good will,” she says, on the basis of “the potential value he represents” (my italics). Later she describes the rationale for this respect and good will as “a consequence, an extension, a secondary projection” of one’s own self-esteem (p. 53, my italics).

There’s an intriguing idea lurking here, but taken at face value Rand’s claims are pretty puzzling. Why does a stranger “represent” any value to me at all, especially if I’ll never see him again? And why does he “represent” value rather than straightforwardly being valuable to me (or not being so)? Elsewhere, in the context of the debate about abortion, Rand derides the idea that potentialities are morally significant (“Of Living Death,” reprinted in The Voice of Reason). There, she says, the embryo and fetus are merely potential human beings, hence not rights-holders. Here, however, the argument asserts that a stranger is potentially valuable, hence valuable. The latter inference seems ad hoc, and the two claims together seem inconsistent. Rand doesn’t seem to have had a consistent position on the normative significance of potentialities, a problem, I suspect, that lies at the heart of the common accusation that she has no adequate ethical account of children, the family, and moral patients.

Finally, the language of “projection” is equivocal and potentially problematic. What does it mean? Here are some possibilities:

We project the value of the stranger in the Goodman-Quine sense of treating his being-valuable-to-us as a “projectible” predicate.
We project the value of the stranger in the Humean or Freudian sense of ascribing to him traits that belong to us.
We project the value of the stranger simply in the sense of expressing our self-value in relation to him, treating him as its proper object and beneficiary.
Some combination of the preceding.
None of the preceding.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t say a word to decide between the options.

(4) Rand rather arbitrarily asserts that we ought to give assistance to strangers only in emergencies, but she never explains either the restriction or the ought:

Why help only in emergencies (as opposed to elsewhere)?
Why help in emergencies at all (as opposed to not helping even there)?

Again, she says little or nothing to clarify.

(5) Rand equivocates as to whether helping strangers in an emergency is a moral obligation (an “ought”) or merely a permission (a “may”). Sometimes she suggests that we ought to help strangers in an emergency (as long as the risks to us are “minimal”), implying that anyone who doesn’t help is morally defective, or lacking in virtue (specifically, lacking in integrity). Sometimes she suggests that we may help others in an emergency if we wish, but only if we do so from a sense of good will, and only if we want to, implying that we are not defective if we don’t help. Both claims can’t be right, and the latter claim contradicts Rand’s insistence, elsewhere, that her Objectivist Ethics is an ethic of conditional “necessities,” according to which every morally right act is a conditional imperative necessitated by “the conditionality of life” (“Causality Versus Duty,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It). Prima facie, a necessitated permission is a contradiction in terms.

(6) Having told us that we ought only to assist strangers in an emergency, Rand abruptly contradicts this claim, and tells us that it’s permissible to assist strangers in cases of illness or poverty that aren’t emergencies (p. 55). What she’s saying here may be a concession to commonsense, but in the context of the essay, it really seems like nonsense. Either we help others only in emergencies, or we help others in emergencies and elsewhere. We can’t have our “only” and eat it. An additional problem here is that her definition of “emergency” leaves no clear way of conceptualizing medical emergencies. But medical emergencies are a paradigm case of emergencies.

(7) Though I’m inclined to agree with her definition of “emergency,” she shows no awareness of how controversial it is, or of the most obvious objections that a reader might have to it (namely, that it seems too narrow). Even if I ended up agreeing with her definition, however, I’d have to disagree with her applications of it to cases.

(8) Rand conspicuously fails to meet her own adequacy-condition for a discussion of the subject, as described above.

For present purposes, as well as for purposes of my RP symposium contribution, I want to continue the task that Rand started–defining “emergency” by genus and specific difference. As I see it, the two basic definitional questions about emergencies are these:

(a) What are emergencies?

(b) Of what kinds of thing are emergencies properly predicated?

The two questions are verbally distinct but conceptually interconnected. Any answer to (a) probably constitutes an answer to (b), though I don’t think that the reverse is bound to be the case.

Rand defines an emergency as “an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible” (“Ethics of Emergencies,” p. 54). She adds, in elaboration of the definition, that “[i]n an emergency situation, men’s [sic] primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger, and restore normal conditions” (p. 54). Presumably by “men” she means “rational agents acting rationally”: men aren’t the only people who respond to emergencies, and some men fail to respond to them at all.

In any case, Rand takes “emergency” to contrast with “events that take place in normal conditions,” so that either (i) “emergency” and “normal-condition event” are correlatives, or (ii) “emergency” is defined in terms of (and as a basic deviation from) some conceptually prior notion of a “normal-condition event.” I’m inclined to think that (ii) is the case. If so, a great deal of the definition of “emergency” depends on spelling out that prior conception of metaphysical “normality.”

“Normality” is a notoriously difficult concept to define in a non-circular, non-statistical way. The concept is one to which Rand often helps herself, and which bears some unclarified relation to what she elsewhere calls “the benevolent universe premise.” But it also finds its way fairly often into the non-Randian literature, whether in discussion of emergencies or other topics. Here’s one example from the scholarly literature on Aristotle’s ethics: The virtuous agent, Terence Irwin writes, “will correctly regard as dominant those rational and rigid states of character that secure complete happiness in moderately favourable external circumstances” (“Permanent Happiness: Aristotle and Solon,” in Aristotle’s Ethics: Critical Essays, p. 15, my italics). I take Irwin’s reference to “moderately favorable external circumstances” to pick out a concept similar to Rand’s notion of “normal-condition events.” “Favorable circumstances” seems to do analogous work for Aristotle as for Rand.

There’s a lot going on behind Rand’s definition–a lot of questions to be asked of it, and a lot of refinements to be made to it even on the most charitable reading. Here are a few questions that seem to me worth asking, and which I hope to address in my RP essay.

Suppose that “emergency” is parasitic on some prior notion of metaphysical normality. What is metaphysical “normality,” and how is it to be conceptualized prior to and independently of “emergency”? On the other hand, if “metaphysical normality” and “emergency” are correlatives, is there some other concept that allows us to break free of the conceptual circle they form?
Rand says that emergencies are unchosen, but why, or in what sense, can’t you bring an emergency on yourself? Does Rand mean that you can’t self-consciously bring about an emergency under that description (“I’m going to bring about an emergency right now”), or does she mean that you can’t chose to bring about an emergency, full stop? If I plan to commit suicide, and then start to enact the plan, is the enactment not an emergency even if it’s genuinely life-threatening? There’s something right about her claim, but it has to be made more precise and explicit than she makes it.
Rand says that emergencies are “unexpected.” Does that mean that they’re unpredictable? If so, why, or in what sense, can’t they be predicted? Mutatis mutandis, the same follow-up questions apply here as in #3. If, for instance, I correctly predict a hurricane, and correctly predict that it will lead to fires in a certain city, is Rand’s point that the subsequent fires aren’t emergencies? Or is her point that while “fires” are predictable of the hurricane as event types, the corresponding event-tokens are unpredictable emergencies? In other words, what is expected (but not an emergency) is “fires resulting from the hurricane”; what is unexpected and is an emergency is, say, the particular fire that breaks out on Broad Street at 10:43 pm during the hurricane. If so, Rand’s view seems to imply that while the hurricane itself is not an emergency, unexpected micro-events caused by it could be.
That, however, raises another set of questions. How predictable does an event have to be to qualify as “predictable”? I may not be able to predict that I’ll have a serious traffic accident today, but if I’m on the road and see a bus hurtling toward me–and have nowhere to go as it does–I may be able to predict, a few seconds before the event, that a serious traffic accident (construed as an emergency) is about to happen. Does that sort of predictability count or not? Here again, Rand’s definition needs some “chisholming.”
What justifies the stricture that emergencies are “limited in time”? The claim seems plausible, but needs an argument. Among the considerations that make it plausible: human pre-history lasted a long time but involved an enormous degree of pain, suffering, and duress; we might be inclined to regard the latter phenomena as emergencies if we suffered them, but there is something problematic about describing hundreds of thousands of years of human history as one long “emergency.” Supposing that emergencies are limited in time, how are the limits set? After all, some wars (or totalitarian dictatorships) last decades or centuries, and create life-threatening conditions. Does Rand want to deny that wars or dictatorship are emergencies? (It’s worth remembering that her novel We the Living features a protagonist who lies and cheats her way through life in order to survive as best as she can under Soviet socialism.) Perhaps, as in the hurricane case, only unexpected micro-events within wars or dictatorships are emergencies, but the macro-events themselves are not. If so, recurring causal chains of emergencies under long-lasting emergency-prone conditions are not (qua chains) emergencies, even if they require massive adjustments to the adoption and practice of “normal” moral principles (as they obviously do). Similar issues arise about life in, say, prisons, concentration camps, totalitarian states, and epidemics–generally, of phenomena unfavorable to life but durably long. (For an interesting novelistic portrayal of life in an epidemic, I’d recommend reading or watching Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. [Afterthought, October 23: Obviously, another one is Camus’ The Plague!]).
Rand says that emergencies “create conditions that make human survival impossible.” Prima facie, this seems too strong. Most dictionaries tell us that emergencies threaten life, health, and/or property, or raise the probability of threats to survival. Why insist on the strong modal claim–that emergencies create survival-impossible conditions? Further, does survival have to be threatened at all in an emergency? Imagine a case where someone gets her hand terribly stuck in a glass pickle jar, and calls 911. Is that an emergency? (That’s a real example described to me by a paramedic.) What about bathroom emergencies, e.g., desperately needing to use the bathroom but not being able to find one?
Suppose that we accept Rand’s definition as stated. Does the definition entail that “emergency” and “non-emergency” is a proper distinction, i.e., mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive? Or is it compatible with the existence of borderline events between emergencies and non-emergencies, or events that fall into neither category?
Suppose that emergency/non-emergency is a proper distinction. Is it a sufficiently fine-grained distinction, or are there non-emergencies that are sufficiently like emergencies to justify our thinking of them as quasi-emergencies, and to justify our creating a precise, fine-grained vocabulary to describe them (e.g., ‘crises’)?

I’m curious what readers think about any or all of this. In later posts, I’ll offer some answers of my own.

P.S.: Here’s a directly relevant article from out of today’s New York Times science section: “Ethicist Calls CPR Too Risky in Ebola.” I have no specialized knowledge of the issue, but Fins’s advice strikes me as nearly self-evident. I also agree with Fins that the issue needs to be discussed more widely than it has.

I was, incidentally, somewhat surprised to discover that medical ethicists don’t just regard “self-sacrifice” as virtuous, but as a special virtue of its own. Does anyone know of a good argument for that?

I’m curious to know whether Arthur Caplan has an argument for the claim that it would be morally wrong for health care workers to invoke Fins’s advice in cases of patients who are asymptomatic for Ebola but have (or even may have) come into contact with an Ebola patient. It simply isn’t obvious to me that health care workers have a duty to resuscitate in cases where there is–symptoms or not–a reasonable basis for believing that someone might have Ebola. Medical ethicists seem to me in the bad habit of offering prescriptions about the risks that health care providers are obliged to bear without really being able to explain why they should or must bear them. Relatedly, it’s worth pointing out that you can’t prove that p by asserting that you “can’t help thinking that p must be true.”

Goodbye, Columbus*

Posted on October 12, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Monday October 13th is Columbus Day–a state and federal holiday, observed in New Jersey by the cessation of most business across the state (government offices, schools, colleges, universities, banks, and most other businesses or agencies are closed–except, of course, where frantic Columbus Day sales are taking place). The implication would seem to be that Christopher Columbus is a person morally on par with Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the veterans of our foreign wars, the servicemen and -women of our armed forces, and last but not least, Jesus Christ.

What did he do? As far as popular historiography is concerned, the answer is simple: he discovered America. In 1492, he sailed the ocean blue in the Pinta, the Nina, and the Santa Maria. And, lo, America came into existence, or at least came into the domain of human knowledge. Unfortunately, popular historiography has been saying the same damn thing now for decades, in defiance of a more sophisticated and accurate historiography that’s been trying to get a hearing for at least two decades, and realistically, for a lot longer. Most of the rest of North America has gotten the message. But not us. (To be fair, Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, and South Dakota have opted out of Columbus Day. Pathetically, Spain and Italy–with even less to brag about–are even more enthusiastic than we are.)

I haven’t yet gotten around to reading Kirkpatrick Sale’s classic text, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbia Legacy (1990), but I have read, and would highly recommend reading, Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (1984). Don’t be turned off–if you’re apt to be turned off–by the post-Modern-sounding subtitle. The dedication page is pretty straightforward:

The captain Alonso Lopez de Avila, brother-in-law of the adelantado Montejo, captured, during the war in Bacalan, a young Indian woman of lovely and gracious appearance. She had promised her husband, fearful lest they should kill him in war, not to have relations with any other man but him, and so no persuasion was sufficient to prevent her from taking her own life to avoid being defiled by another man; and because of this they had her thrown to the dogs. –Diego de Landa, Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan, 32

I dedicate this book to the memory of a Mayan woman devoured by dogs.

That passage isn’t about Columbus per se, but what Columbus did hardly differs from it in any essential way.

Columbus’s motive, in his own words (as quoted by Todorov):

At the moment when I undertook to discover the Indies, it was with the intention of beseeching the King and Queen, our Sovereigns, that they might determine to spend the revenues possibly accruing from the Indies for the conquest of Jerusalem; and it is indeed this thing which I have asked of them. (p. 11).

My desire was to pass by no single island without taking possession of it. (p. 45)

His first action, upon encountering the natives:

He called upon them to bear faith and to witness that he, before all men, was taking possession of the said island–as in fact he then took possession of it–in the name of the King and of the Queen, his Sovereigns. (p. 28)

Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to Columbus that they didn’t understand his language, and he didn’t understand theirs. What happens next is kind of predictable:

These are, indeed, very wild people, and my men are very importunate; finally I took possesion of lands belonging to this quibian [village chief]. As soon as he saw the houses we had built and a lively trade going on, he determined to burn everything and to kill us all. (p. 46).

So there’s a war. Guess who wins? And what the victors do?

They would make good and industrious servants…They are fit to be ruled…(p. 46)

From here one might send, in the name of the Holy Trinity, as many slaves as could be sold as well as a quantity of [timber]. If the information I have is correct, it appears that we could sell four thousand slaves, who might be worth twenty millions and more. (p. 47)

I can’t summarize the whole thing, of course; I encourage you to get a copy of the book and read it for yourself. But perhaps the best one-line summary is Todorov’s apt claim that Columbus, “discovered America but not the Americans” (p. 49).

At any rate, if we’re going to “celebrate” Columbus Day, we may as well be clear about what we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating the words and deeds of a theocratic conqueror and slave-merchant whose fundamental ambition was to use the wealth of the “Indies” to re-conquer the Holy Land–in other words, someone who wanted to enslave the people of one continent to put the people of another continent to the sword. It’s not really clear what part of that is worth celebrating, and no one interested in celebrating this holiday seems to want to talk about it in any straightforward fashion. For all of the brave talk about “diversity” and “multiculturalism” we’ve heard over the past few decades, and the fears that sensitivity to other cultures has all “gone too far,” that cheap set of evasions is where things still stand. We’re the last country on the continent to be able to look the truth about Christopher Columbus in the face and deal with it in a rational way.

Allan Bloom opened his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind with this famous passage:

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending…The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. (p. 25)

There’s some (non-relativistic) truth to that. Tellingly though, Bloom continues with the polemical claim that it’s a mistake to the combine intensive study of “the traditional American grounds for a free society” with the intensive study of “non-Western” cultures for fear of contaminating the former by the latter:

One of the techniques of opening young people up is to require a college course in a non-Western culture. Although many of the persons teaching such courses are real scholars and lovers of the areas they study, in every case I have seen this requirement–when there are so many other things that can and should be learned but are not required, when philosophy and religion are no longer required–has a demagogic intention. The point is to force students to recognize that there are other ways of thinking and that Western ways are not better. It is again not the content that counts but the lesson to be drawn. (pp. 35-36)

Obvious questions spring to mind. How many cases had Bloom actually seen? Why would the cases he’d seen determine the very nature of the requirement? If the content is to be ignored, where does the lesson come from? And what, at any rate, is the basis for the claim that “philosophy and religion are no longer required”?

But never mind the details. The thing to focus on is the deliberate, studied parochialism implicit in Bloom’s conception of education: students are to try to grasp the meaning of “natural rights,” but to conceive of it only as the traditional American grounds for a free society; they’re to apply it only to us, and study no one and nothing else that might challenge how they conceive of rights, or might challenge how they apply the principle to cases. Somehow, despite this, Bloom expects to conquer relativism.

The approach was bound to fail, and in Columbus Day, we have the clearest case of its failure. Columbus Day is a holiday for people who can manage to spout the rhetoric of “natural rights” on the Fourth of July; play lip service to racial equality on MLK Day or Lincoln’s birthday; spend Memorial Day valorizing those who died to overturn slavery in the Civil War as well as those who fought genocide in the Second World War; go to Midnight Mass every Christmas Eve to honor Jesus’s Crucifixion at the hands of the Roman imperium–and then, on the second Monday of every October, unapologetically intone pieties about a (literally) racist imperialist slavedriver who inaugurated a veritable genocide on this continent. It’s a holiday, in other words, for people who have memorized the mantras of “the American creed” but have not grappled in any serious way with the moral realities or complexities of cross-cultural interaction, whether as a historical matter or in the present day. And given the staying power of this holiday, that seems to amount to a lot of people.

I’d like, at some point, to be able to educate (part of) a generation out of such claptrap. It won’t be done Bloom’s way, and it won’t be done quietly. But I’d like to get it done, even if it means having to go in to work and teach class on (what used to be) Columbus Day. I like having the day off as much as anyone, but Columbus Day is the the epitome of a vacation day with a guilty conscience. Rename it and re-conceive of it, as other countries have done, and I’m glad to take the day off. But until then, Columbus Day should remain a day that deserves ridicule, censure, and rejection. At some point, a showdown will have to be had with its supporters. And that day, I predict, will be a real day of discovery.

*I changed the original (anemic) title of this post a few minutes after hitting “Publish.”

Jason Brennan on character-based voting: the cases of Narendra Modi and Donald Trump (with several updates)

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India, recently on a speaking tour in the US and elsewhere, and promoting his nationalist agenda for India wherever he goes. He’s very much the talk of the town, which is a great irony, considering that less than a decade ago, he was in effect barred from entering town: he was denied a visa to enter the United States for his failure to stop the Gujarat riots/massacre of 2002, and boycotted in Europe for much the same reason. Back then, he was a relatively obscure figure, at least by international standards. Now, he’s the Prime Minister of a major world power. Evidently, the principle involved here is that if you play a presumptively culpable role in a massacre, you’re to be treated with contempt until you assume the trappings of power. Once you do, the passage of time and victory in a democratic election jointly wipe the slate clean, and you’re to be treated with respect and admiration, bygones being bygones–even if some of the bygones include a few thousand corpses for which you were plausibly thought to bear responsibility. Wait and win, and you’re out of the moral doghouse. It’s an interesting lesson–about India, about democratic politics, about historical memory, and about justice. Worth remembering for other contexts.

I bring the issue up not (merely) to moralize about Modi (whom I admittedly despise) but as a counter-example to the discussion of character-based voting in Jason Brennan’s much-praised and much-discussed book, The Ethics of Voting. I generally agree with the thesis of Brennan’s book, at least as I understand it, which is that epistemically incompetent voters ought not to vote. But having edited a symposium on the book in Reason Papers last year, and having read some of the discussion of it there and elsewhere, I’ve been surprised at how much of what is contestable about Brennan’s argument has gone entirely undiscussed and uncontested by his peers, peer-reviewed and otherwise. Brennan’s discussion of character-based voting is one such example (EV, pp. 84-85), and the case of Narendra Modi conveniently serves to focus the issues.

The discussion of character-based voting comes up in chapter 3 of the book, which is devoted to explication of the concept of “wrongful voting.” “Unexcused harmful voting occurs when a person votes, without epistemic justification, for harmful policies or for candidates likely to enact harmful policies” (EV, p. 68). Brennan’s point is that we ought to refrain from engaging in unexcused harmful voting. It follows that citizens should vote only if their beliefs about the prospective harm or welfare-conductivity of policies are epistemically justified–probably a small minority of actual voters. The two crucial concepts here are epistemic justification and harmful policies. Brennan doesn’t explicate either, but assumes that on some version of both, his thesis turns out to be correct.

One objection to Brennan’s view is that we might vote for or against someone on the basis of character, not knowledge about the welfare-conducivity of the policies they intend to enact. Take some political candidate, X. My beliefs about X’s policies may be unjustified, epistemically speaking; they may be vague, vacuous, or based on very little evidence. But my beliefs about his character may be perfectly on target. Suppose I correctly regard X as (very) immoral, correctly regard Y as morally decent, and vote for Y because I regard X as so immoral that a vote for Y is preferable to one for X even if I’m generally (though not completely) ignorant of the relative policy implications of voting for X versus Y. Assume that Y’s policies will predictably be worse than X’s (though not egregiously so), but X’s past is egregiously unjust whereas Y’s is perfectly decent.

According to Brennan, unless I treat my judgments of X’s past immorality as proxies for predictions about X’s future policies, my vote is a case of unexcused wrongful voting no matter what X might have done in the past. It’s not clear why, however, and he doesn’t make it clear. What if, as a voter, I weight character over policy as a criterion for voting, at least in cases as egregious as those like X’s? Why is that unexcused wrongful voting? Or is it excused wrongful voting?

Let X be Narendra Modi, and ex hypothesi assume the worst about Modi’s role in Gujarat. Further (also ex hypothesi), assume the worst about Gujarat. If I were an Indian citizen voting in the last election, I would have voted against Modi simply because his role in the Gujarat affair put him beyond the pale for holding the position of Prime Minister of India. The issue is not so much that I expect Modi to repeat his past behavior; in fact, it’s unlikely that he will. Given the scrutiny he’s gotten over the years–and the visa denials and boycotts, etc.–Modi is likely to be more careful about how he expresses his nationalist sentiments, and is likely to overcompensate for his past sins, at least in policy contexts. Nor is it that I think that Modi’s policies are likely to be inferior to those of his political rivals. They may actually end up being a bit better, at least from a free market perspective. The relevant point is simply that Modi ought not to be rewarded for his past behavior, and voting him into office is a reward (a huge one), one that evades the moral significance of that past behavior. Justice demands that we not grant the unearned, and Modi’s past behavior disqualifies him from earning title to the office he now holds.

For purposes of this post, I don’t want to go into the factual details of Modi’s actual (past) behavior. Doing so is unnecessary, since my aim here is to contest Brennan’s discussion of character-based voting, and to that end, Modi simply draws attention to a relevant possibility–viz., the evil political candidate who is likely to enact better policies than the merely decent one. So if you’re not familiar with Modi’s past, or you disagree with my interpretation of it, we can simply imagine a Modi-like figure and use that as a point of departure for thinking about Brennan’s argument.

So here are my stipulations: Imagine a Modi-like candidate for office who has behaved disgracefully in an affair like the Gujarat massacres of 2002 (or worse). Imagine that he showed callous disregard for the lives of his fellow citizens when he had the responsibility to protect them. Imagine that thousands of innocents died as a result. Imagine that there is good evidence that his own nationalist political agenda explains the animus for those massacred, motivated those who killed them, and rationalized the killings (using “rationalized” in the colloquial, not Davidsonian sense).

Now fast forward about a decade. Imagine our Modi-like candidate going up for the highest office in the land. Imagine that he claims to have cleaned up his act, having done an about-face from his bad old days a decade ago. Imagine that there is no serious question that his forthcoming policies will revert to the ways of his bad old days. Assume that his policies will actually be an improvement on what the country currently has, and what the other candidate has to offer. Now imagine a rival anti-Modi candidate who is morally decent (and in particular, critical of Modi’s behavior in Gujarat). Let his policies be relatively indeterminate–not great, but not of the sort that might lead to any policy disaster. (Take the party you dislike most and imagine them enacting a safe and pragmatic version of politics as usual.) Let them just end up being worse at the margins than those of the Modi-like immoral candidate. Brennan’s thesis implies that we ought to vote for the immoral candidate, not the decent one. But why?

Here’s what he says:

To a significant degree, voting for character is voting for wrong reasons. When we elect someone, we give him power. That power can be used for good or bad. The office of the presidency is not an honorific meant to show [that] we respect that person’s character. Giving someone the presidency is not bestowing a medal or a certification of commendation but giving him (some) control of the state, an institution that makes rules, and forces innocent people to comply with these rules using violence and threats of violence. We need to be sure he will do a good job controlling it.

The first sentence refers the reader in a footnote to Russell Hardin’s How Do You Know? The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge and Bernard Manin’s The Principles of Representative Government. I haven’t read either book, so if my objection is answered there, I’d concede my case. But for present purposes my point is that my objection is not answered by Brennan in The Ethics of Voting: the passage above does nothing to answer what I regard as the most obvious objection, posed by Modi-like cases. It begs the question and offers an ignoratio elenchi.

Brennan starts by telling us that voting for character is “to a significant degree” voting for the wrong reasons. But I’d respond that it’s a principle of justice that we ought not to reward wrongdoing. Modi-like people have, to put mildly, engaged in serious wrongdoing. So justice entails that we ought not to reward them. The issue then turns on whether a vote for high office like Prime Minister of India is a reward. I think it obviously is: you reward someone when you give them what they want, and that in turn gives them power, prestige, income, a place in history, an opportunity to enact their values on a wide scale, and other perks they couldn’t otherwise have gotten.

Brennan’s discussion bypasses this last fact. The office of the presidency, he tells us, is not an honorific. Why not? He gives no argument for its not being an honorific, and doesn’t consider the possibility that it might constitute a reward without being primarily an honorific. To the extent that he thinks he has an argument, he simply adduces a different fact about the presidency that supposedly rebuts the claim that the presidency is in part an honorific–that the presidency involves the exercise of power. But this fact, though true, doesn’t really help his case. Political offices could both confer rewards on office-holders and give people control of the state. The one function is perfectly compatible with the other, especially when control is a reward.

Yes, we need to make sure that those who hold power control their use of it. But we can do this as long as we have very vague ideas about a person’s policies. As long as I know that Modi’s rivals aren’t going to enact crazy policies that will take India to perdition, and I believe that they’re decent people lacking an outright lust for power, I know they will manage to control power somehow. (Brennan basically concedes this point in his paper “The Right to a Competent Electorate,” when he says: “We should not overestimate the damage bad voting can do…Even in the US or the UK disastrous candidates rarely have a chance of winning….” p. 707). The wrongs they do via bad policies may be bad, but I may find them more tolerable than the wrong done by rewarding someone responsible for mass murder with the perks of high office. I may be ignorant about the details of the relative merits of Modi’s versus his rival’s policies. But as long as I know that Modi is immoral or evil, and that his rival is tolerable, I may know all I need to know to vote against him.

In other words: If I am more committed to the backward-looking principle of not rewarding past evil than I am (within limits) to forward-looking considerations about good or bad policies, it seems to me I can justifiably vote for the policy-suboptimal candidate so as to avoid voting for the evil candidate even when the evil candidate is more likely to enact better policies. When I do so, I’ll have some vague thoughts about policy considerations, but I’ll have epistemically justified thoughts about character, and the thoughts I have need not be proxies for future policies but might instead be motivated by considerations about not rewarding past immorality (assuming that that immorality crosses a certain threshold, e.g., culpable involvement in mass death rather than, say, adultery or smoking pot). I don’t see that Brennan even considers this possibility, much less rebuts it.

A digression: Brennan writes of “the presidency,” but I assume that he means any electoral office, including everything from municipal judge to American presidency to prime ministership, etc., including offices whose perks are enormously large. It’s an odd feature of Brennan’s book that while its topic is “the ethics of voting” as such, his focus is almost exclusively American, as though American voting were the paradigm of the phenomenon of voting as such, and as though empirical work on American voting generalized to voting everywhere. I raised this issue in an editorial context with one of the contributors to the Reason Papers symposium (not Brennan), who told me that as a social scientist it was his view that the default position is that empirical work on American politics ought to generalize to politics everywhere unless it can specifically be proven that it didn’t generalize to some particular context elsewhere. In other words, if Jones cites a study on American voting patterns, Jones can, absent contrary evidence, assume that the American voting patterns generalize to Pakistanis, Indians, Italians, or Palestinians. Generalization from the American case is the default rule. That strikes me as a pretty bizarre methodological assumption, but I’ll let the bona fide social scientists fight over it.

Brennan devotes one more paragraph to the topic, but as far as I can see, it merely elaborates on the conclusion Brennan thinks he’s established in the preceding passage.

So character-based voting is acceptable only insofar as it is a proxy to the quality of the governance a candidate is likely to produce. To what degree good character and good policies are correlated is largely an empirical question. If someone is morally corrupt, there is a pretty good chance he will use the power of the state for personal benefit rather than to promote the common good. Yet a virtuous politician with a powerful sense of justice might still be deeply misguided and committed to all sorts of counterproductive, harmful policies. Having the right values is not sufficient for making good policy, because it requires social-scientific knowledge to know whether any given set of policies is likely to achieve those values…If there is good evidence that a politician is likely to enact harmful policies, one should not vote for her (without sufficient reason) even if she is a good person. Voting on the moral virtue of a candidate counts as good voting only to the extent that the candidate’s moral virtue is evidence that she will enact good policies.

(1) My first and most basic comment on this passage is that it doesn’t address the objection I’ve raised, and doesn’t address what seems to me the most obvious objection that could be raised.

(2) My second comment is that it doesn’t cohere very well with the preceding passage. The first passage told us that voting for character was “to a significant degree” voting for the wrong reasons. The second passage tells us that voting for character can be voting for the right reasons under certain circumstances, and it’s an open empirical question to what degree good character and good policies correlate.

So which is it? If it’s an open question whether good character and good policies correlate, they might well correlate, and there are (as Brennan himself seems to admit) commonsense reasons for thinking that they do correlate. If so, why is voting for character “to a significant degree” wrong? Why is it wrong at all? And how can we know to what degree it’s wrong if it might turn out to be right?

Perhaps Brennan means to say that we don’t know whether it’s right, and if we don’t, it can’t typically be epistemically justified to use character as a basis for voting since no one has the social scientific evidence in hand to demonstrate the relevant correlations. But since he himself admits that there is plausibility in the idea that character and policy are correlated, it’s not clear that the claim about epistemic justification follows. Is p only epistemically justified in political contexts if we have a peer reviewed study (or set of them) showing us that p is the case? If I infer that a habitual liar and promise-breaker will be an unreliable implementer of good policies, is that inference epistemically unjustified? Why isn’t banking on a “pretty good chance” good enough?

I don’t mean that there’s an outright contradiction or inconsistency here; I mean that there’s a failure of exposition that leads to an obvious and unresolved puzzle in the reader’s mind about what Brennan is saying. The failure of exposition arises from the legalistic character of Brennan’s writing: we’re told that something is wrong “to a significant degree,” but not told what that phrase means; later we’re told that the issue is empirically undetermined, but we’re told one contestable claim is highly plausible. From one perspective this looks like very careful, rigorous writing, but from another it looks like a confusing way of covering all the bases so as to avoid being held to any particular claim; it also seems to put the author in the position of dialectical victory no matter what objection is made, simply because the claims in the text are so elliptical that they can be made to say anything that the author wants them to say–without saying anything a reader can pin down.

(3) Third comment: there is such a thing as epistemic virtue. Why not consider the possibility that we ought to vote not on the basis of predictable policies per se, nor on the basis of character minus epistemic virtue, but on candidates’ moral plus epistemic character? I’d be curious to know the state of the social science literature on this subject. What evidence is more easily and effectively available to voters–information about a candidate’s epistemic virtue, or information about the predicted outcomes of the policies he can be predicted to enact during x years of a term when the issues he faces are themselves partly unpredictable? Having the right values may be sufficient (or as close to sufficient as matters) for making good policy (or at least for predicting good policy) if the values in question are both moral and epistemic.

(4) If there is good evidence that a politician is likely to enact harmful policies, perhaps one should vote for her as long as she is a good person, the other candidate is an evil person, and the harmful policies are not that harmful. The preceding claim seems incompatible with Brennan’s thesis, which entails that we ought not to vote for politicians who will enact harmful policies simply because the other candidate has a bad character. Brennan adds the parenthentical “without sufficient reason” in the penultimate sentence of the passage as though to include the Modi-like case I have in mind–in which case my Modi-like case wouldn’t be a counterexample to his thesis, but something he’d already thought of, and carefully baked into the thesis ab initio.

But Brennan’s parenthetical seems inconsistent and ad hoc. Either Brennan’s point is that character is relevant to voting (only)** when it is a proxy for future policy, or not. If the first disjunct is the case, Modi-like cases are a counterexample to Brennan’s view. On the other hand, if we go by the second disjunct, i.e., if there can be sufficient reason to vote for character when character is not a proxy for future policy, it is unclear what Brennan has been saying in this section of the book, or why he thinks what he has said is a response to the objection under discussion in the section. If “voting on the moral virtue of a candidate counts as good voting only to the extent that the candidate’s moral virtue is evidence that she will enact good policies,” the “only” implies that there cannot be a reason for voting on the moral virtue of a candidate when there is no evidence of a connection between character and expected policies. [And if there cannot be a reason, there cannot be sufficient reason. Hence the reference to “sufficient reason” is incoherent.]*

On the whole, though I generally agree with Brennan’s thesis in The Ethics of Voting, and regard it as an important contribution to the literature, I’m not crazy about the way in which he deals with objections in the book. The issue of character-based voting is merely a case in point, but in my view a clear one. Though one blurb for Brennan’s book describes it as “beautifully clear and eminently readable,” this particular section is neither. I don’t think the failure is mine as a reader but his as its author.

*I added the bracketed sentences a few hours after I originally posted this.

**Added for clarification’s sake a day after the post went up.

Postscript, October 9, 2014: A belated afterthought: doesn’t Brennan’s view entail that voter disenfranchisement of convicted felons is only justified to the extent that being-convicted-of-a-felony is a proxy for high-likelihood-of-wrongful-voting by the felon? After all, Brennan’s view is that the relevant issue as regards the right to vote is always the voter’s epistemic justifiedness or competence (on a rather narrow understanding of competence that is operationalizable and excludes, e.g., “softer” moral considerations considerations of empathy, etc.) That is the motivation for Brennan’s rejection of character-based voting. But there is nothing about being a murderer, rapist, or robber that a priori excludes competence or epistemic justifiedness in the relevant sense. So it seems to follow on his view that felons ought not to be disenfranchised qua felons. They ought to be enfranchised, regardless of their crimes, and we ought then to give them a chance to become competent voters. Since felons currently lack the right to vote, they haven’t had practice either at voting or at acquiring the necessary skills for it. But dispositionally, they might be fantastically competence under the right conditions. If they can achieve Brennan-competence (once we arrange the remedial conditions), they ought to be allowed to vote. Right? Practically speaking, that would be a bit of a headache, but such considerations don’t otherwise faze Brennan (consider the practical headaches of administering a nationalized poll test, though to be fair, we do have precedents to work from, e.g., the NAEP Civics Assessment) so why not?

Postscript, December 8, 2014: Here’s an excellent background essay, by William Dalrymple, on the Modi phenomenon, written for Britain’s New Statesman in May 2014, well before the elections that brought Modi to power. It’s journalism at its best, and has a richness that no thought-experiment could hope to have.

Postscript, December 9, 2014: This article in The New York Times, “Modi’s Campaign Stop in Kashmir Is Notable for Lack of Unrest,” provides some useful specification of the point I’m making in the post. For one thing, note that the real Modi’s behavior resembles that of the hypothetical Modi I describe: he’s not been alarmingly nationalistic or anti-Muslim, and he’s promised (perhaps credibly promised) policies that advance the economic prospects of Kashmiris, including the poor. And yet, the article ends, unsurprisingly, with this:

But as the crowd filed out afterward, a knot of well-dressed men stood nearby and watched with smoldering eyes.

“I didn’t go, because that man is a criminal,” Ahtisham Shah, a 40-year-old manager at the local office of a telecommunications company, said of Mr. Modi. “He still has to answer for the massacre in 2002.”

Asked if any of them would vote in the next round on Sunday, all five men shook their heads.

“To hell with India and to hell with Pakistan,” said Basharat Ahmad. “Kashmir is an independent country.”

The guys with the smoldering eyes aren’t voting because there’s no credible anti-Modi candidate to vote for, and, as they see it, any vote is a vote for India anyway. But ignore both things for the moment. Imagine that there was an anti-Modi candidate to vote for, and imagine that the smoldering-eye guys put aside their “to hell with India and Pakistan” attitude long enough to vote. (I’m not giving advice; I’m just imagining the possibility.) Should they, as per Brennan’s suggestion, not vote on character, even if the candidate in question “has to answer for the massacre in 2002”? Better yet: should we, as per Brennan’s suggestion, regard them as wrongful or incompetent voters if they do? Should they be required to pass a Brennanite competence test before being regarded as competent to vote for or against Modi? Isn’t there something nearly obscene about the suggestion that they should be disenfranchised for their failure to pass a Brennanite poll test?

My answers: they should vote on character; we should not regard them as wrongful or incompetent for doing so; they should not be required to pass a Brennanite competence test as a necessary condition of being considered competent; there is something obscene about Brennan’s suggestion (even if, as he likes to brag, he managed to make the suggestion in a well-known “peer reviewed” philosophy journal: I have to wonder how many of Brennan’s “peers” at Phil Quarterly were Indian or Kashmiri Muslims).

If Brennan didn’t intend any of the preceding conclusions in The Ethics of Voting, he might want to make that explicit, but nothing about the text of the book or any of the articles of his that I’ve read excludes my interpretation or even considers the possibilities I’ve raised.

Postscript, March 28, 2015: Reports are now coming out of India that suggest I may have been too charitable in my predictions about the situation of Muslims in Modi‘s India, not that that affects my argument at all.

Postscript, March 30, 2015: OK, so I guess I was being really over-charitable to Modi.

Postscript, April 27, 2015: I find it depressing that Barack Obama has chosen to write a laudatory essay on Modi for Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” issue (April 27, 2015). Frankly, I find George Wallace’s moral rehabilitation more impressive than Modi’s. The rehabilitation doesn’t stop Wikipedia for telling us (accurately) that Wallace is “remembered” for his segregationist stance (not his subsequent rehabilitation). Meanwhile, this is Obama on “Narendra”:

When he came to Washington, Narendra and I visited the memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We reflected on the teachings of King and Gandhi and how the diversity of backgrounds and faiths in our countries is a strength we have to protect. Prime Minister Modi recognizes that more than 1 billion Indians living and succeeding together can be an inspiring model for the world.

Yes, they can.

Postscript, November 27, 2015: The controversy over Donald Trump and the post 9/11 celebration rumors induces me to revisit the topic of Jason Brennan’s critique of character-based voting (see here as well). Also relevant (though perhaps less clearly so) is some of the commentary on the recent elections in the Bihar province of India, where Narendra Modi’s BJP was unseated by its rivals. In thinking about both controversies, it belatedly occurs to me that Brennan is operating with either an overly narrow or an equivocal conception of “governance.” Go back to the last passage of Brennan’s that I excerpted. It begins like this:

So character-based voting is acceptable only insofar as it is a proxy to the quality of the governance a candidate is likely to produce. To what degree good character and good policies are correlated is largely an empirical question.

The second sentence seems to presuppose that good governance is reducible to the enactment of good policies, so that if a judgment about character is indeterminate with respect to the enactment of good policies, it’s irrelevant to judgments about whether to vote for the candidate in question. I’m not sure how Brennan understands the term “policy,” but on the ordinary understanding of the term, good governance isn’t reducible to the enactment of policies. It certainly can’t be the case that “good governance” can be understood by this formula:

S engages in good governance if and only if, for every policy P that S enacts (or proposes or broadly speaking facilitates), P is a good policy.

What about the good policies that S fails to enact? Is the failure to enact or propose (etc.) a policy a failure of policy on Brennan’s view? Charitably read, I think he’d say “yes.” At any rate, his view doesn’t prevent him from saying “yes,” so I’ll give him that.

But what about actions unrelated to policy? Here, it seems to me, he faces a real problem. His view seems to be that either a politician is in the business of enacting/refusing to enact policies, or he’s not on the job at all. But this strikes me as a reductive and oversimplified conception of politics.

Arguably, some of what political leaders do is essentially discursive. They talk to us, and often this talk has little or nothing to do with policy–or at least need not have much to do with policy. In their discursive capacities, politicians play (or as I see it, ought to play) the role of public intellectuals: they comment authoritatively on matters of public concern in a responsible way. Arguably, in doing so, political leaders also serve as models of civic virtue: they don’t just comment authoritatively on matters of public concern, but deal with those matters in ways that self-consciously exemplify a concern for truth and justice in public affairs. They give speeches, they answer questions at press conferences, they visit distressed places under their jurisdiction, they interact with people in a face to face way, and they’re recorded as interacting with people in that way. This isn’t just PR or show business. It’s a form of interaction that’s essential to leadership. In other words, a successful politician isn’t just a technician or policy wonk, but a leader–a public figure who functions as a moral exemplar, at least in certain limited respects. And good governance isn’t just policy wonkery; it’s leadership.

So character is bound to be relevant to governance whether or not it’s relevant to policy. The details of a person’s sex life may or may not be relevant to being, say, President of the United States or Prime Minister of India. But a person’s attitude toward (say) race relations certainly is relevant to both offices, whether or not those attitudes are proxies for any policy that the relevant individual proposes, enacts, or doesn’t propose or enact. The next president of the United States might well conclude that no new policies of any kind regarding race need to be enacted during his term. Suppose ex hypothesi that this is the correct decision as a matter of policy. Suppose ex hypothesi that the president successfully plays the political game so that he gets his way, and no policies are passed. That is ex hypothesi the optimal policy outcome, but it’s not the end of the story: it certainly matters how he pulls it off, e.g., how he defends his decisions, and how he deals with critics.

Once we cross a certain threshold, an asshole is not a good leader, and not a practitioner of good governance, even if he enacts the greatest policies in the world. (I’ll grant that we have to tolerate some degree of assholishness in almost any political leader, but even in politics, there’s such a thing as crossing the Asshole Rubicon, and once we do, all bets are off. Bright lines may be hard to draw here, but I think it’s obvious that Modi and Trump crossed the Rubicon a long time ago.) This is a subtly different point from the one I had originally made. My original point was backward-looking: having crossed a certain threshold, we shouldn’t reward wrongdoers with the perks of political office given their past misdeeds. My present point is present- and forward-oriented: we shouldn’t regard character merely as a proxy variable for predictions regarding policy-enactment, narrowly understood. We need to employ a broader conception of governance than that.

The topic of assholes brings me to Donald Trump (and Narendra Modi). Put it this way: imagine that Donald Trump becomes president, but that (miraculously) while in office, he changes his tune and enacts perfectly reasonable policies, even with respect to Arab and Muslim Americans. But imagine that he continues to comport himself as he currently is doing. Would he make a good president? No. His current comportment would undercut his claims to good governance even if he was enacting the right policies, and declining to enact the wrong ones. My point is not that ill comportment would undermine the policies per se, but that demeanor is an autonomous desideratum in a political leader, and that judgments of character are, in an obvious way, a proxy for it. You can’t be a good leader if you systematically disrespect and insult the people you govern, even if you enact the right policies in the process.

Incidentally, in saying that good character and good policy-enactment is an empirical matter, Brennan seems to be implying (as he often does) that identification of the correlation is a matter of consulting double- or triple-blind peer review social science studies. But if that’s what he means, he needs to deal with some obvious but unacknowledged questions.

First of all, there are many, many situations in life in which we have pre-scientific beliefs but no scientific studies to consult on the matter. Is his view that in every such case, we should simply ditch our pre-scientific beliefs on grounds of unreliability? Or is it sometimes permissible to use the pre-scientific beliefs as a guide to action? The first claim is really implausible, but the second claim sits uneasily with his rejection of character-based voting. He himself admits without consulting “the social scientific literature” that “[i]f someone is morally corrupt, there is a pretty good chance he will use the power of the state for personal benefit rather than to promote the common good.” Well, yes, that’s a matter of pre-scientific common sense. But what social scientific literature proves that it’s true? What social science literature has ever taken the population of “someones” as its sample?

Second, we know that a great deal of social science is unreliable. (Much of it is trivial as well.) To what degree, then, can we assume a priori that social scientific findings are, regardless of subject matter, more reliable than pre-scientific beliefs? I don’t see any reason to think that social scientists have the inside track on the nature of moral virtue. If they don’t, I don’t see any reason to think that their findings are always more reliable than pre-scientific beliefs on questions related to virtue.

Third, Brennan exaggerates the univocality of social scientific findings. Social scientists disagree with one another in both interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary fashion. Unless Brennan can show us that one branch or sub-branch of “social science” has a monopoly on the truth about politics, the appeal to social science strikes me as a bit of dogmatism and a bit of intimidatory hand-waving.

Since Brennan admits that character is something of a proxy for judgments about good governance, but also admits that it has variable weight, and can’t exclude the possibility that it sometimes might be highly weighted, and has no principled reason for preferring global reliance on social science over pre-scientific beliefs, and has an overly narrow conception of governance, I conclude that he lacks a coherent objection to judicious character-based voting. (Proviso: Brennan has a new book that’s either forthcoming or just recently out from Princeton University Press, called Against Politics. For obvious reasons, I haven’t read it, so I don’t know whether he discusses any of what I’ve said in this post there.)

Postscript, December 10, 2015: This critique of Trump is useful because it very clearly enumerates moral defects of Trump’s that aren’t necessarily proxy variables for predictions about policy.

In the article, Hillyer argues that Trump has a long record of undermining or abusing those weaker than him who get in his way. To the extent that Trump hasn’t broken any laws, that gives us a clear inference to the conclusion that Trump is immoral in his personal/business dealings, but yields no clear predictions about any particular policy conclusion. Hillyer goes on to argue that Trump mistreated his workers, but even if we grant that, we can’t infer that Trump’s economic policies would necessarily slight workers; after all, Trump is sufficiently opportunistic to change his tune and plump for pro-worker legislation.

Suppose you’re against eminent domain. Can we infer from Trump’s reliance on eminent domain that Trump would favor the expansion of eminent domain as a matter of policy? No, not really. Given his opportunism, Trump could just as easily restrict eminent domain if he found that desirable.

Maybe all of this proves that we shouldn’t vote for Trump because his impulsiveness and opportunism would make for bad policy. Maybe, but to be consistent, a defender of Brennan’s thesis would need to adduce social scientific evidence to suggest not only that impulsiveness and opportunism make for bad policy, but that they make for worse policy than intentionally aiming at bad policies (cf. Hillary Clinton, at least as viewed from a libertarian free market perspective). Note that this social science couldn’t just leave its findings at some set of generalities; it would have to be sufficiently tailored to the Trump vs. Clinton option to allow us to decide between them. I’m skeptical that any existing social scientific literature can yield such a conclusion.

The real reason why we shouldn’t vote for someone with a Trump-like track record is that electing someone to political office confers a reward on the person, and justice forbids rewarding someone’s past malfeasance whether or not the past malfeasance is a proxy variable for the person’s enacting bad policies in the future. In short, we shouldn’t vote for a Trump-like or Modi-like candidate simply because they don’t deserve our votes.

Postscript, December 12, 2015: More on the same theme. Consider Megyn Kelly’s now-famous misogyny question of Donald Trump back in August. The latter half of her question had an indirect sort of connection to policy (roughly, “how do you answer the charge that you are part of the war on women?”), but the first part did not. After quoting some of Trump’s remarks, she asked, “Does that sound [to] you like the temperament of the man we should elect president….”? (my emphasis).

As I see it, the first half of the question would have been entirely fair and appropriate on its own, even without the tie back to policy. Arguably, an avowed, explicit, egregious misogynist does lack the temperament of “the man we should elect president” even if he promises do great things for women (as Trump did, in answer to Kelly). Other things equal, misogyny of Trump’s variety ought to be a reason for voting against him (or not voting for him), whether or not the misogyny predicts any particular policy position he might take as president.

Suppose that other things aren’t equal, however. It’s an interesting question what a voter should do if faced with an out-and-out misogynist whose policy positions are, all things considered, appreciably better than the non-misogynist. To keep things relatively simple, imagine a pro-choice misogynist running against an anti-abortion non-misogynist (and suppose ex hypothesi that abortion ought to be legal). Unless you take avowal of an anti-abortion position to be prima facie evidence of misogyny on its own, I’d be inclined to say that the pro-choice policy position trumps the misogynistic defect of character, so to speak. Of course, if you regard an anti-abortion position as evidence of misogyny, then the choice here is between two misogynists, so that the dilemma is resolved from the outset. But though I’m pro-choice on abortion, that approach seems implausible to me.

Postscript, December 26, 2015: So Modi “surprises” us again, though this move comes as a less of a surprise to me than some of stuff I’ve described in the postscripts above. Given Modi’s character, however, it’s hard to interpret: is it a sincere step forward, or just play-acting? It seems obvious to me that one can’t easily disentangle the policy-related issue involved here (discussed near the end of the article) from an issue of moral character: is Modi honest or trustworthy? If he is, his trip to Lahore seems like a step forward in Indo-Pak relations. If he isn’t, there’s no way to know where he stands on policy, because we can’t trust anything he says or does.

Brennan might claim that the preceding observation is consistent with the letter of his claim in The Ethics of Voting (as it is), but I would say that it contradicts the spirit of his claim: if judgments of intellectual character are relevant to virtually every prediction we make about a candidate’s prospective policies, it makes good sense to vote for intellectually virtuous (honest, intellectually responsible, non-demagogic, etc.) candidates, and makes good sense to figure out whether a given candidate is in fact intellectually virtuous (honest, responsible, non-demagogic, etc.).Other things being equal, we should vote for the intellectually virtuous candidate, the more the virtuous the better.

If so, it makes no sense to come out against character-based voting, pointlessly adding the proviso that character-based voting is OK as long as it’s relevant to policy. How could a candidate’s honesty, candor, probity, conscientiousness, accuracy, trustworthiness etc. be irrelevant to policy? We might (accurately but in this context a little tendentiously) call those policy-relevant traits of character, and think of them as the policy-makers’ analogue to the intellectual virtues required to do good science. If policy-relevant traits of character are always relevant to policy, then a ban on character-based voting that allows for them is either toothless or misleading or both.

Thanks to Faisal Jilani and Aftab Khawaja for the discussion on Modi that inspired this post, and to Fawad Zakariya for driving home to me the moral significance of what happened in Gujarat. The usual caveat applies.

“Just What Is a Platonic Virtue?” Greg Sadler on Plato

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

As mentioned in an earlier post, my friend Greg Sadler came by Felician’s Lodi campus yesterday and gave a nice presentation on Plato’s conception of virtue. I’m sure Greg will be posting a video of the presentation somewhere,* but I thought I’d jot down a few very brief thoughts here on what he said.

As I understand it, the issue that motivates Greg’s project is something like this:

(1) Suppose we accept the paradigmatically Platonic conception of virtue we find articulated and defended in Plato’s Republic. This account presupposes the tripartite conception of the soul that Plato defends there, and proposes an account of the virtues as regulatory capacities internal to the soul that allow mind to govern the soul’s lower (spirited, appetitive) elements. Plato proposes four virtues–wisdom, justice, moderation (sophrosune), and courage–to play this role. On this view, the virtues are psychological dispositions that inhere in particular souls.

(2) But Plato also regards virtues as Forms, and this fact sits uneasily with (1). Forms are, on the Platonic account, entities distinct from the natural world we inhabit. They are essentially impersonal and non-psychological, and can’t be conceived of as inhering in particulars. They are separate from (chorista) particulars, and particulars depend on them, while somehow “participating” in them. (I’m relying here on the account of Plato’s “middle theory” in the Introduction of Kenneth Sayre’s Plato’s Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved, but see also the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on the subject.)

The question, then, is either how to make (1) coherent with (2); or if they’re not coherent, how to defend a distinctively Platonic virtue ethics without recourse to the Forms–or failing that, without recourse to the problematic aspects of the theory of Forms.

As Greg pointed out, the first disjunct of the preceding disjunction arguably leads us, via neo-Platonism, to some form of Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism. The second disjunct leads us to a sort of Aristotelian (or possibly Freudian) naturalism. An interesting modern version of the first form (highly influenced by Freud, among others) can be found in the work of Iris Murdoch (see, e.g., her The Sovereignty of Good). An interesting modern version of the second form (also highly Freud-inflected) can be found in the work of Jonathan Lear (see, e.g., his book, Open Minded). (Those are my examples, not Greg’s.) It’s a question whether a distinctively Platonic view is still plausible or viable. We had an interesting and somewhat freewheeling discussion of that issue, but I’ll focus on a single theme here.

One worry I have is about the motivation for the project as a whole. The motivation for the project arises from the ontological oddities of Plato’s theory of Forms: Plato thinks that virtues are Forms, but Forms don’t seem particularly virtue-like, at least on any recognizable (to us) conception of virtue. That’s true enough, but Greg seemed to want to suggest that there is a distinctively ethical problem here for Platonism–a problem specific to ethical Forms–that can be raised in abstraction from entirely general questions about the adequacy of the theory of Forms as a metaphysical doctrine. Greg insisted that he wanted to set aside specifically metaphysical questions about the theory of Forms.

I don’t think that that’s possible. To me, Greg’s problem simply looks like the ethical version of the age-old problem of self-predication in Plato. The problem is that Forms are supposed to be paradigmatic exemplars of whatever they’re Forms of. But Forms qua Forms have features that are incompatible with the properties some Forms are supposed to have. No Form is supposed to have physical dimensions, for example, but Forms for physical dimensions are supposed to be paradigmatic exemplars of those dimensions. So the Form of Length is supposed to lack physical dimensions and yet be long (or have length). Likewise with the Forms of Size, Weight, Mass, Height, etc. (my examples, not Plato’s): they’re supposed to lack physical dimensions and yet exemplify size, weight, mass, height, etc. It seems to me that Greg has simply isolated and articulated the ethical version or counterpart of the problem of self-predication in Plato: Forms for moral qualities ought paradigmatically to exemplify moral qualities, but to have moral qualities, a thing must in some sense be psychological or personal, and Forms qua Forms aren’t sufficiently personal to have such qualities.

In either case, I reach the same conclusion. The problem of self-predication suggests that the classically Platonic conception of Forms is untenable, whether in the ethical cases or the non-ethical ones. There’s no way to defend such a theory; it just has to be junked. If we want a virtue ethics that is in any residual sense Platonic, it has to be naturalized and developed in an Aristotelian or Freudian or Aristotelian-Freudian way. Paradoxically, perhaps, Aristotelianism is about as Platonic as a viable Platonism can get.

I wonder whether the intuition that motivates Greg’s attraction to Platonism (and to the problem that comes along for the ride) has something to do with the possibility (or rather, impossibility) of moral perfection. At one point in his presentation, Greg seemed to be suggesting in passing that moral or aretaic perfection is impossible to mortal humans. No just act we ever perform is perfectly just, and no putatively just person is perfect in his possession or exercise of the virtue of justice. Something about our materially embodied selves gets in the way of perfection, and something external to us holds out a standard or criterion of perfection to which we’re obliged to strive, but that we can never hope to reach. In that sense, Platonic Forms seem attractive because they function asymptotically as regulative ideals in a sense that straddles what Plato had in mind in defending them, and what Kant had in mind in defending his conception of pure practical reason.

If you hold this sort of view, and find Plato’s moral psychology generally plausible, Greg’s problem will seem a live one: how do you marry a plausible form of that moral psychology to a plausible theory of Forms? I suspect, however, that if you reject the relevant intuition about moral perfection, as I do, the project ceases to have the same urgency. You can just admit that aspects of Plato’s moral psychology have a certain plausibility; that Aristotle and/or Freud (and their successors) appropriated the best aspects of this psychology; and that we don’t need anything like Platonic Forms to perform the ideal-regulative role that makes moral perfection impossible to us. But that’s just a speculation, and I’m curious whether it’s at all on target.

Anyway, my thanks to Greg for coming down to do the talk. I hope readers get as much out of reading about it here as I did attending it in person.

*Postscript, Sept. 26, 2014: This link takes you to the video for the presentation.

Postscript 2, October 5, 2014: Greg now has a blog post on the issue at his own blog, Orexis Dianoetike.

Evidentialism: Who Needs It? L’affair Klinghoffer

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve been blogging, teaching, and thinking, about evidentialism lately, so this item caught my eye:

Several hundred protesters gathered outside the Met before the performance of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” for a noisy demonstration calling for the company to cancel its production of John Adams’s 1991 opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which is to have its Met premiere next month. That opera depicts a 1985 cruise ship hijacking by members of the Palestine Liberation Front, and the killing of a disabled Jewish American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer. …

On Monday morning, Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, in the Bronx, led a small group in prayers for Mr. Klinghoffer on Monday morning in a small park across from Lincoln Center. He said that he “absolutely” hoped that the Met would cancel the production. Like many opponents, he said he had not heard “Klinghoffer”: “I’ve not seen it, but I’ve heard enough about it and I don’t want to see it, frankly.”

P.S., October 22, 2014: Another classic contribution to the literature of obscurantism and fallacious argumentation by would-be opponents of “The Death of Klinghoffer.” This one is from a letter in today’s New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Protests Greet Met’s Premiere of ‘Klinghoffer’ ” (front page, Oct. 21):

It has been widely reported that many of those who protest “The Death of Klinghoffer” have never seen the opera, as if that disqualifies them from passing judgment.

To me, whether John Adams’s opera is great art or not is irrelevant. To those who disagree, I ask: How would you feel about an opera about 9/11, sympathetically describing the motivations of the terrorists who brought down New York’s twin towers, as well as the almost 3,000 innocent victims whose lives they ended so brutally?

Certainly, the Metropolitan Opera has a right to stage the opera, but for what purpose?

And why now? Some events are too raw, too sensitive, too wrenching, too immoral to be depicted evenhandedly and without judgment.

And if this opera seeks to communicate some larger truth, some cosmic message for our times that justifies its being performed now, trumping the pain that it causes, what is it?

MARK R. ARNOLD
Gloucester, Mass., Oct. 21, 2014

So not having seen an opera doesn’t disqualify you from passing judgment on it, because whether you’ve seen it or not, nothing stops you from confabulating a tendentious and question-begging description of what it must a priori contain: a “sympathetic” description of the motivation of the terrorists. It seems pointless to point out that a depiction is not a description, that neither a depiction nor a description is an endorsement, and that there is no conceivable way of knowing whether the opera is sympathetic if you haven’t seen it, and don’t intend to. We seem to have gotten to a point in the Klinghoffer debate in which willful, culpable ignorance has become a virtue, while the desire to know the facts first-hand has become a vice.

As for Mr Arnold’s rhetorical questions:

1. I would feel very badly about an opera about 9/11 that “described” the motivations of the terrorists: operas should be sung, not narrated.

2. The most obvious reason for staging an opera is that the opera company staging it thinks that it’s a good opera, which is what the leadership of the Met Opera happens to think (not that I can judge one way or another, not having seen it).

3. As for “why now?”: to paraphrase Hillel, if not now, when?

For decades, we’ve heard sanctimonious lectures from “the West” about the moral insignificance of the “pain” caused to Muslims by artwork like The Satanic Verses and the so-called Muhammad cartoons. Grow up, Muslims were repeatedly told (for decades), and learn a lesson or two about free speech and toleration from us enlightened Western folk. (Don’t forget, incidentally, that the main character of The Satanic Verses was named “Mahound,” i.e., the name for the Prophet Muhammad given him in The Song of Roland, the epic poem of the Crusades. If the death of a single man decades after the fact “causes pain,” should a joking literary allusion to the carnage of the Crusades have elicited joy?) Now that a different ox is being gored (if it is), the double standards leap to the fore. Call it the pseudo-moral triumph of misology.

As for the claim that we ought never, ever to make excuses for force, or place responsibility for it on anyone but its perpetrators, hearken to the words of Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld:

Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, who was the rally’s master of ceremonies, said he did not expect protesters to react inappropriately. “But you can’t be responsible when the Metropolitan Opera advocates terrorism and incites violence — you can’t know what will happen,” he said. “And anything that happens, that has besmirched this Metropolitan Opera, and besmirched Lincoln Center, is to be laid at the foot of Peter Gelb.”

Evidently, you can know what an opera contains without seeing it, but you can’t “know what will happen” when you place responsibility for the disruption of an opera on those suffering the disruption…even as you exculpate the crowds engaged in the disruption. Classic.

Postscript 2, October 23, 2014: More from Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, arch critic of the advocacy of terrorism and incitement to violence:

Several hundred protesters, led by City University of New York trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, picketed outside Lincoln Center before the Met’s opening night last month.

“You will be made to destroy that set,” Wiesenfeld said at the protest. “We will demand it. It doesn’t belong in this city. We are going to be back here — everyone here and many, many more — every night of the Klinghoffer opera until the set is burned to the ground.”

Most of those protesters say they’ve never seen Klinghoffer, and don’t want to. They argue the opera is anti-Semitic because it humanizes — and therefore glorifies — the terrorists. But the opera’s defenders say that’s a fundamental misreading of the work.

Considering Wiesenfeld’s disgraceful performance, in this case as well as in the 2011 case of his attack on Tony Kushner, isn’t it time to protest him rather than “The Death of Klinghoffer”? Isn’t the real question how such a thug manages to become a trustee of the City University of New York, and achieve the unearned prominence he’s somehow managed to acquire?

Postscript 3, December 3, 2014: I just happened to notice Paul Berman’s “Klinghoffer at the Met” in The Tablet magazine, by far the most intelligent contribution to the Klinghoffer controversy I’ve so far read. I appreciate Berman’s criticism of the thuggish quality of the protesters, and assuming the accuracy of his descriptions of the opera, his commentary on it seems sensitive and apt. The criticisms made of him on the comment board at The Tablet strike me as contemptibly idiotic. But I have a criticism of my own to make.

Berman mentions, but doesn’t make very much of, the Met’s agreeing, under pressure from the ADL, not to simulcast “Klinghoffer” in the theaters, as it does for all of its other operas. Apparently, in this case, an exception to standard policy was deemed necessary. I would have thought that the implications of the Met’s acquiescence deserved a bit more comment. Americans do not generally accept the idea that Muslim (or Christian) religious sensibilities may permissibly set the terms of secular cultural activity. Why should Jewish or Zionist ones do so? A hundred years ago, readings and performances of The Merchant of Venice were regularly banned in the U.S. because the play was thought anti-Semitic. (And no, I don’t think The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic. Some of its characters are anti-Semitic, but the play is not.) In fact, contemporary critics–if one can call them that–still insist that The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic, and insist that performances of it ought to be protested “without whining.” What we’re seeing is the recrudescence of the same attitude in a different context.

I wonder whether Berman has detected the double-standard here. For the last fifteen years, we’ve been conditioned–by intellectuals like Berman himself–to believe that Islam poses the most significant threat to our shared cultural space. To suggest that political Judaism does so is to risk being called an anti-Semite. But when was the last time that Muslims managed to pull off a coup, at least in the U.S., on par with the ADL’s blackmailing the Met over “Klinghoffer”? The truth is that they haven’t. In 2010, Berman published a controversial book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, complaining about American intellectuals’ abdication of their moral responsibility in criticizing Islam, as exemplified (he said) by the widespread adulation they lavished on the media darling of the moment, Tariq Ramadan. Well, Tariq Ramadan has, as far as the American cultural scene is concerned, vanished like breath off a blade (and good riddance)–but Abraham Foxman shows no signs of doing so. Is it perhaps time for a companion volume to Berman’s book, one about a different cultural and intellectual threat?

Actually, such a book appeared in 2007, as a kind of prequel to Flight of the Intellectuals– namely, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book of far greater precision and rigor than Berman’s own (than any of Berman’s own, and I’ve read them all). What did Berman have to say about The Israel Lobby? He certainly didn’t agree with it. He certainly didn’t regard it as an account of the other half of the story he was telling about “the flight of the intellectuals.” No, Berman, who had managed to find a conspiracy in American intellectuals’ failure to condemn Tariq Ramadan, ended up likening The Israel Lobby to the ur-text of psychopathic conspiracy theorizing, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not a sophisticated document; but Walt and Mearsheimer’s book “The Israel Lobby” is (in some people’s view) a sophisticated document. And the sophisticated document makes the unsophisticated one seem like it is on to something. By reasoning in this fashion, people end up concluding that Hamas’ doctrines have a purchase on truth – something that quite a few people believe. But they choose not to say it because they don’t want to look unsophisticated or coarse.

Presumably, then, those who agreed with The Israel Lobby were apologists for Hamas and purveyors of blood libels and czarist conspiracy theories. Nothing psychopathic about that set of comparisons. But then, Berman was the guy who had written, in Flight of the Intellectuals, that verbal criticism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali was tantamount to Stalinism, anti-Semitism, and mob violence (pp. 263-64). It didn’t seem to occur to Berman, or bother him, that in writing in this drunken, gauzy, irresponsible way, he was cheapening the currency of the phrase “anti-Semitism,” and exploiting the irrationality of those who might want it cheapened.

Here is the problem: an author who indulges in indiscriminate, scattershot defamations of the preceding sort is really not in a position to criticize the know-nothing fools who show up in Lincoln Center and want to burn the Met down over “Klinghoffer.” Whether they’ve read him or not, they’re simply following his lead. And whether he admits it or not, that “lead” leads to a moral abyss via double standards of the sort that he himself has been exemplifying for awhile.

I wrote a long review essay for Reason Papers of Flight of the Intellectuals back in 2011, and invited Berman to respond to it. We had a brief, and on his end, non-committal email exchange over whether he’d do so. It’s been three years since the invitation, and at this point, I think it’s safe to say that he has no intention of responding. But let me renew the invitation: when the issues are timeless, after all, it’s never too late to address them. To paraphrase Victor Hugo, if we wrote only for the moment, we might as well consign our word processors to the flames.

While I’m at it–waiting for a response that will probably never materialize–let me offer some unsolicited advice. If you’re going to make accusations of something as serious as anti-Semitism, then for God’s sake stop making them in the form of coy, half-asserted and half-denied innuendo like the passage I’ve quoted above. Have the courage of your convictions and say what you really mean in sentences with identifiable subjects, identifiable predicates, and identifiable connections between the two. Stop taking refuge in circumlocutions like “the sophisticated document makes the unsophisticated one seem like it’s on to something,” when what you mean is “The Israel Lobby is a sophisticated version, in intention and effect, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Don’t write things like this:

The campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented–at least since the days when lonely refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press (where the dissidents were accused, by the way, of whipping up right-wing fervors, exactly as is Hirsi Ali… (Flight, p. 264).

When what you really mean is: “Those who have criticized Hirsi Ali are Stalinists in a new guise.” Don’t compare mere criticism of Hirsi Ali to “the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003.” Don’t think that having done so, you can extract the sting and the venom of the remark by reducing the supposed similarity of two wildly different phenomena to an indeterminately vacuous property they supposedly have “in common” (namely: “These are developments that, even ten years ago, would have seemed unimaginable” [Flight, p. 264]).

Writing of this kind is corruption of language–the virtual but visible “flight of an intellectual.” Indulge it long enough, and you shouldn’t be surprised when the populist version of your attitudes shows up in Lincoln Center, barring your entry into the Met, ticket in hand or no. It may sound like a cliche, but at that point, you’ve met the enemy–and believe it or not, it’s you.

Postscript 4, December 4, 2014: The New York Times reports this morning that Louis Head, the stepfather of Michael Brown, has–albeit under the pressure of a police investigation–apologized for inciting violence after a grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for having shot Brown. Head had apparently shouted, “Burn this bitch down” at a protest near the Ferguson police station, referring to the police station itself. No comparable apology seems to be forthcoming from Jeffrey Wiesenfeld for comparable remarks about burning down the Met. Granted, Head’s remarks coincided with actual violence (rioting and arson took place shortly after his saying what he said), but then, in mitigation, his remarks were a response to the actual and relatively recent death of his stepson. Wiesenfeld’s remarks led to no actual violence, but were a response to confabulated outrage about the death of a stranger decades ago, and were directed at an institution that had no responsibility either for the death or for adjudicating events connected with it. File it under “Moral Luck and Double Standards.”

Friedman and Frederick on Nozick; Sadler on Plato

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Reason Papers 36.1, which came out a few weeks ago, included a nice review essay by Danny Frederick of Mark Friedman’s recent book, Nozick’s Libertarian Project. Friedman has now responded to the review on his website, with a short rejoinder by Frederick in the comments.

For other recent work on Nozick in Reason Papers, check out Dale Murray’s October 2012 review essay of Ralf Bader’s Robert Nozick and Bader and Meadowcraft’s Cambridge Companion to Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Also relevant is Lamont Rodgers’s “Self-Ownership and Justice in Acquisition,” from the October 2012 issue. Digging back in RP‘s archives, I was astounded (and a bit dismayed) to discover that the journal ran no review of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia when the book came out in 1974, though it did, in 1980, run a Nozick-oriented paper by Richard B. McKenzie, “Entitlements and the Theft of Taxation.”

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Lodi, New Jersey this Wednesday the 24th around 1 pm, and you’re interested in Plato and/or virtue–a small, self-selected population, I realize–you might want to stop by Kirby 206 at Felician College and hear Greg Sadler’s presentation, “Just What Is a Platonic Virtue?” The talk–officially a Current Research Workshop–is sponsored by Felician’s Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. Here’s a summary:

Plato’s dialogues talk quite a bit about the virtues — including the cardinal ones: wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage — but it’s not always clear just what these virtues are in his work. Do they exist in persons? Or are they Forms? In this workshop… I’ll be presenting my current research on the subject — aimed at clarifying the metaphysical status of virtue and virtues in Plato’s thought, and thinking how we would apply such a perspective in our own contemporary lives.

If you’re not in the vicinity of Lodi, New Jersey this Wednesday–never fear, I’ll blog it here (at some point). Incidentally, if you’re interested in doing a Felician Current Research Workshop, contact me at my Felician address (click the “Current Research Workshop” link for that), and I’ll try to set something up.

Thoughts on W.K. Clifford’s Evidentialism (Part 1)

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve been discussing the ethics of belief in my Phil 304 epistemology seminar at Felician. The strictly philosophical issues on that topic strike me as interesting in themselves, and also for the implications they have for current controversies (e.g., Ferguson, ISIS, etc.) so I thought it might be worth setting out some thoughts on it via commentary on W.K. Clifford’s classic defense of evidentialism, “The Ethics of Belief.”

Clifford famously opens “The Ethics of Belief” with this passage and example:

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.

Like many readers, Clifford’s example strikes me as exactly the right sort to clarify what’s at stake in the ethics of belief. But like many readers, Clifford’s example also strikes me as problematically ambiguous—as apt to clarify as to muddy the waters. The problem arises not with the example per se, but with the details of Clifford’s description of it. The basic question is the structure of the inference involved: how does Clifford get from the facts of the example to the wrongness of the shipowner’s actions? In this post, I just want to analyze the example and inference. In a later post, I’ll make some broader observations about the ethics of belief (in Clifford, Rand, and others), and about the use of examples in philosophy generally.

It might help to begin by asking what actions are being evaluated for rightness or wrongness. I take it that the actions in question are inferences, and that Clifford is assuming that inferences can be evaluated from a perspective that is simultaneously epistemic and ethical (or possibly a perspective that is a hybrid of both). The claim, then, is that the shipowner makes inferences that involve voluntary epistemic defect and (therefore) moral culpability. In other words, the shipowner is guilty of a form of culpable ignorance and culpable lack of epistemic justification for his beliefs. The overtly physical action of sending the ship out to sea follows directly from the sum total of the shipowner’s beliefs, themselves dependent on the inferences he makes from the facts. But the culpability of the action of sending the ship out to sea is parasitic on the culpability of the inferences made about its seaworthiness, so it’s the inferences, not the sending per se, that are the basic candidates for evaluation. What’s wrong with the sending supervenes on what’s wrong with the inferences.

The problem is, Clifford treats the inferences as a single uncontroversially culpable inference, as though the shipowner were making an inference like

(1) The situation of the ship is S.

Therefore,

(2) I’ll send the ship out to sea,

–where ‘S’ denotes a state of affairs that indicates obvious lack of seaworthiness.

In that case, the ‘inference’ in question would be:

(1*) The situation of the ship is S.

(2*) S indicates obvious lack of seaworthiness.

(3*) A ship that isn’t sea-worthy should never be sent out to sea.

Therefore (nonetheless),

(4*) I’ll send this ship out to sea.

And Clifford’s point would have to be—more cautiously: might very well be—that the shipowner’s conjoint belief in (3*) and (4*) is culpable. You can’t believe (3* & 4*) without experiencing severe cognitive dissonance. But if you experience such cognitive dissonance (the implication is) you have the obligation to resolve it. If you don’t, you’re epistemically-morally culpable; the higher the stakes, the more culpable you are.

If that is Clifford’s point, I think what he’s saying is true. Not that it’s uncontroversial. Many people might dispute the idea that we’re obliged to resolve every cognitive dissonance we experience as well as every apparent inconsistency in our beliefs. But I agree with Clifford—and, I think, Ayn Rand—that we do. The problem is, to produce the preceding interpretation, we have to cherry-pick the passage, ignoring the complexities of what it actually says. And what it says seems more ambiguous to me than it evidently does to Clifford. The problem is that the shipowner isn’t making one obviously culpable inference, but a series of inferences, some obviously culpable, some possible culpable, and some not-at-all culpable. Perhaps Clifford thinks that any set of inferences is culpable if one inference in the set is culpable. But he doesn’t say that, and his meaning is not transparently obvious from what he does say.

Let’s take each step in the shipowner’s reasoning in piecemeal fashion (acknowledging that we’ll have to consider the reasoning later on as a single integrated set of inferences).

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs.

The shipowner believes that the ship is old, and not “overwell built at the first.” The latter phrase is a bit coy, and a bit unclear, and requires some hairsplitting interpretation. Does “not overwell built” mean badly built? Or satisfactorily built on the whole, with some significant flaws? Or satisfactorily but not optimally built? I don’t know, but the details would matter. We also need to know how old the ship was, and what counts as excessive age in ships. Further, if the ship was repaired, we need to know whether the repairs fixed the flaws or not, and in general, whether “often needing repairs” indicates an unsafe lemon or not. The answers are all technical matters that a shipowner ought to know, but they’re not the kind of thing the average philosophically-inclined reader would know. That seems to me to present an expository problem for Clifford: the nautically ignorant will have trouble interpreting the example, and yet he couldn’t have intended the paper primarily for nautical experts.

I suppose we could tweak the example. As it happens, my car seems to satisfy Clifford’s description of the ship in his example. It’s a 2001 model (an unlucky thirteen years old), and when I bought it (from a used car dealer), I knew it had some defects. It’s seen many New York/New Jersey Metro Area streets and highways, and has often needed repairs. The last bout of repairs, which cost me about $2,000, seems to have fixed whatever was broken. (Thus spoke the dealer.) Now the car runs great, and I drive it everywhere without worrying ” overmuch” that the brakes will suddenly fail and get me (or others) killed. Does that (according to Clifford) make me as guilty as the shipowner, or does it just make my car different from the case of Clifford’s ship? Of course, if the cases are the same, I might be as innocent as the shipowner.

To stick with Clifford’s example, I suppose we could stipulate that the shipowner knows that the ship is too old to be sent to sea, and that the repairs it’s needed indicate that it’s a lemon that ought not to be sent to sea, but I wonder if such stipulations start to trivialize both the example and the point Clifford wants to make with it. If we stipulate that the shipowner knows that the ship isn’t seaworthy, why not just come out and say that, and dispense with a drawn-out example? It’s an interesting question what the example is supposed to do for Clifford’s argument.

It’s also an interesting fact that Clifford writes as though evidence was required for entertaining a belief in the ship’s seaworthiness but not for doubts about the ship’s seaworthiness, or even beliefs about the ship’s lack of seaworthiness. Clifford doesn’t agonize at all, or have the shipowner agonize, about the evidence he has for the ship’s age, the conditions of its original construction, or its needing repairs over time. That knowledge is all taken for granted as knowledge; the shipowner obviously has sufficient evidence for it. That might seem like a pointless quibble on my part, but I think it bears on the epistemic status of the doubts that Clifford puts in the shipowner’s mind:

Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense.

Clifford writes here as though doubt is allowed to make its claims on us without having to earn a right to do so. Elsewhere in the same essay, Clifford is very severe about the impropriety of spreading ill-founded rumors, but the doubts he has in mind here sound very much like rumors. We’re told that the doubts “preyed upon his mind,” but not everything that preys upon one’s mind is worth taking seriously. There’s such a thing as paranoia, and it would be a mistake to assume that paranoia ought always to be acted on or appeased just because it’s there. We’re told that the shipowner thinks he “perhaps” ought to have the ship thoroughly overhauled and refitted, but we aren’t told why. You don’t just overhaul a ship because a fear has floated into your head that it might crash. Of course, Clifford has told us that the ship is old, wasn’t well-built at first, and has needed repairs, but that doesn’t obviously tell you—at least, it doesn’t tell me–that the ship needs to be overhauled, either.

Finally, Clifford says this in description of the shipowner’s inferences:

Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

This passage presents a rather confusing mélange of inferences, some entirely reasonable, and some obviously dishonest. Together, they make Clifford’s example hard to interpret.

Clifford says that the shipowner “succeeds” in overcoming his melancholy reflections, but there are two problems in this formulation. In describing the reflections as “melancholy,” Clifford himself is trivializing them–“melancholy” is meant ironically–but if they are trivial, why would it be wrong to overcome them? Further, in saying that the shipowner “succeeds” in overcoming them, Clifford implies that he feels no cognitive dissonance: “succeeds” means “succeeds in overcoming any residual worries that might arise by reflection on them.” That contradicts the “cognitive dissonance” interpretation I previously put in Clifford’s mouth (which seems to me to make his view more plausible than his own formulations do), and also raises the possibility that the shipowner’s inferences are good ones. After all, if he succeeds in overcoming his reflections, maybe he’s successfully rebutted his doubts (i.e., rebutted them with answers that were more plausible than the doubts themselves). In that case, where is the inferential culpability? The second sentence of the passage could well be part of a perfectly reasonable inference to the best explanation: surely a ship’s track record is part of the evidence of its seaworthiness; if its track record is good, why assume that it will crash this time, unless you have evidence to suggest that its surviving its last few voyages was a matter of dumb luck? And we aren’t given any.

The claim about Providence is of course a sufficient condition for inferential culpability—whether you believe in Providence or not. I’m inclined to think that a belief in Providence would fail evidentialist strictures from the start, but whether it does or not, the shipowner has no evidence that Providence is smiling on his ship now. The problem is, Clifford has inserted this belief in Providence into a series of inferences that aren’t nearly as problematic as the one about Providence. So there are two interpretive possibilities here. We could seize on the sentence about Providence to indict the shipowner’s inferences, or we could ignore it, and focus on the reasonability of the shipowner’s inferences bracketing the one about Providence. It’s not clear to me how to read the passage, unless we use it to generate sub-cases–ones in which Providence figures prominently in the shipowner’s reasoning, and others in which it doesn’t.

Here’s another one of Clifford’s ‘give-with-one-hand-but-take-with-the-other’ passages:

He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors.

Well, if the suspicions were really ungenerous, why is that dismissal wrong? I suspect that Clifford really intends ‘ungenerous’ ironically, but in that case, the irony gets in the way of what he’s trying to say.

And the last bit:

In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

This raises the point I made earlier about cognitive dissonance. If his belief was sincere, it’s hard (though not necessarily impossible) to pick out the culpability. ‘Comfortable’ is equivocal as between ‘complacent’ and ‘confidently self-assured’. The rest of the passage leaves unclear whether he watches the ship with a sincerely light heart and benevolent wishes based on a scrupulous consideration of all reasonable considerations for their safety, or whether Clifford is writing ironically and means that the shipowner is callously and cynically indifferent to the passengers’ fates, deceives himself about the ship’s safety, fakes a light heart and benevolent wishes, and pockets the insurance money without tears. The problem ultimately is that “such ways” is equivocal between too many ways.

Given the ambiguities here, I don’t think Clifford’s moral verdict on the shipowner follows. Here it is, again:

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.

But it isn’t clear from the example that the shipowner acquired his belief dishonestly. Unless Clifford thinks that it’s wrong to suppress any doubt regardless of its nature, it’s a bit tendentious to use this example as one of “stifling” a doubt, where “stifling” implies that the doubt is itself legitimate. And of course, it’s question-begging to assume that it is wrong to suppress any doubt. Fundamentally, what is unclear is the nature of the exact “frame of mind” that Clifford means to be condemning.

In my next post, I’ll discuss some general issues brought to light by Clifford’s example.

(Thanks to Kate Herrick for helpful discussion, as well as to students in my Phil 304 seminar–Caitlin Baard, Chelsea Barrett, Dan Postel, and Julianne Matassa.)

Ten Lessons of 9/11

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The consideration to bear in mind was once nicely articulated to me by a paramedic I met in a medical emergency (I was the emergency): “Look,” he said when I asked him not to move me, “I have to move you. If I don’t move you, things are going to suck. If I move you, I realize: things are going to suck. Basically, no matter what happens, things are going to suck. But they’ll definitely suck more if I do nothing than if I move you. So I have to move you, OK?” He was absolutely right, and after he moved me, put me in a contraption to get me down the stairs, loaded me into the ambulance, and got me to the ER, I managed to get some painkillers into my system–whereupon I agreed with him 100%.

I’m not a pacifist, so my point is not that we should never go to war. It’s that when we do, we should be able to articulate the reasons why in just the way that my paramedic did. It rarely happens. But if volunteer paramedics can do it, so can armchair generals. Something to remember for the next 9/11.

Postscript 1, September 10, 2014: As if on cue, here’s a glimpse into the level of argumentation prevailing among hawkish Republican politicians:

Mr. Cheney, who was among the chief proponents of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq based on the flawed assumption that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction and was tied to the Sept. 11 attacks, might have seemed an unlikely messenger of the moment.

But Republicans, for the most part, embraced him anew.

“We can argue over whatever about the Iraq war, but most of our guys believe Bush left in 2009 with the U.S. in position to win” the conflict, Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said after the session. Mr. Cole added that six years into the presidency of Barack Obama, “at some point, it can’t be Bush and Cheney’s fault.”

Mr. Cheney’s brief talk during a closed-door meeting of the House Republican conference was mostly about the need for Republicans to push to maintain a strong military, but he also argued that his party needed to stop the establishment of a terrorist state in the Middle East.

He did not discuss the fact that many ISIS leaders were former Iraqi military officers who were imprisoned by American troops, nor did he dwell on the sectarian divisions and bloodletting since the 2003 American invasion. The crux of his argument, in fact, centered not on Mr. Obama, but on the isolationist voices on the rise in his party ahead of the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican lawmakers said.

“We can argue over whatever about the Iraq war, but most of our guys believe Bush left in 2009 in position to win.” There’s intellectual leadership for you. A sub-headline to today’s lead story: “Beheadings are Said to Push U.S. to Act–Speech Tonight.” Two war correspondents were beheaded in a war zone–so we have to go to war. If only I were making it up. Perhaps I should revise (6) to say: “Intelligence as the first casualty of war.” And the last.

Postscript 2, September 10, 2014, 8:25 pm: Read this before you buy the President’s argument tonight that he has the authority to order air strikes on Syria–and before you let your Congressional representatives shirk their responsibility to call a vote and make a public decision over it.

Postscript 3, September 11, 2014: From “Struggling to Gauge ISIS Threat, Even as US Prepares to Act“:

Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a “farce,” with “members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified.”

“It’s hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic, with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells, that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas or that the group will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems — all on the basis of no corroborated information,” said Mr. Benjamin, who is now a scholar at Dartmouth College.

Mr. Obama has spent years urging caution about the perils of wading into the Syrian civil war, a position that has led critics to argue that his inaction has contributed to the death and chaos there. Now, he faces criticism that he has become caught up in a rush to war with no clear vision for how the fighting will end.

Ferguson continued: answers to second-order questions

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Here, as promised, are answers to some (not all) of the questions I posed about Ferguson in an earlier post. I’ve focused here on second-order questions about the shooting. The first-order questions are mostly, as I’ve already suggested, unanswerable at this stage of the case.

5. Must we always wait for a verdict before passing judgment on a criminal case?

I think there ought to be a default rule of waiting for a verdict in a criminal trial before passing judgment on matters of guilt or innocence. The principle here is that the accuser bears the burden of proof, and the accused has to be presumed innocent until the accuser meets the burden of proof. In criminal trials, the burden of proof is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, a fairly high standard as I understand it.

A great deal of the evidence in a criminal case is bound to be in the hands of the contending parties in the case, and for a variety of reasons may not (often is not) publicly disclosed to the media (despite the impression one gets that the media has the ‘inside scoop’ on a case). So declarations of guilt or innocence about criminal cases prior to a legal verdict are bound to be premature, counter-productive, and encouraging of bad epistemic habits.

There are exceptions to this general rule. In some cases, guilt (or innocence) may be transparent enough to obviate the need for a trial, at least as far public, non-legal discussion is concerned. But I think such cases are rarer than people tend to think, because even putatively transparent evidence can be highly ambiguous.

In some cases, a trial may not be possible, and yet a ‘verdict’ of some kind is necessary in order to take action to deal with an undeniable threat to one’s rights. I don’t think, for instance, that the US or Pakistan needs to put the Taliban on trial before deciding to launch drone attacks on them. Nor do I think that ‘extrajudicial murder’ is involved in killing Taliban militants. Unlike the metaphorical talk about Ferguson as a ‘war zone’, northwestern Pakistan really is a war zone (as is Gaza). But de facto war zones involve a de facto reversion to (a Lockean) State of Nature, where lower epistemic standards are both necessary to defend one’s rights against clear-cut aggression, and morally justified. One of the reasons I object to talk of Ferguson as a ‘war zone’ (or comparisons of Ferguson to, say, Gaza) is that such talk induces us to regard Ferguson as a place where lower epistemic standards are prematurely justified. It also induces us to compare like with unlike. But Ferguson is not Waziristan or Gaza. Comparisons of the two are wrongheaded and irresponsible.

It might be objected that a criminal case can drag on for decades as a defendant exhausts his appeals. Should we wait until the last appeal is in to pass judgment? I think that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. The principle I would adopt is to regard the first jury (or bench) verdict in the case as defeasibly conclusive unless there are reasons to suspect the bona fides of the case. If there are reasons for suspicion, one simply has to wait until they’re resolved, and that can require decades. (I realize that ‘defeasibly conclusive’ is an odd phrase in need of explication, but I think most Policy of Truth readers will understand it, if only because its readers are (a) an extraordinarily sophisticated bunch, and (b) number in the double digits.) It’s worth remembering that the Innocence Project has demonstrated the innocence of people who had previously gotten what seemed like conclusive verdicts of guilt—decades after the fact. The Central Park Five are a vivid example, but for a particularly heart-wrenching and weirdly counter-intuitive example, I’d suggest reading chapter 11 of Kathryn Schulz’s excellent 2010 book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. (Schulz’s chapter is a nice confirmation of Kathleen Wilkes’s insight that real-life cases are often more clarifying than thought experiments.)

[Postscript, September 4, 2014: Here is yet another in the endless litany of exonerations of previously-convicted people who had gotten what had seemed a conclusive verdict of guilt. I discuss a related sort of case from my own personal experience here.]

It might be objected that since courts err, it’s a mistake to wait for a court verdict before forming a judgment on a criminal matter. But it seems to me that the dangers of error are much higher if one doesn’t wait.

Finally, one might object that civil trials, including trials for wrongful death, involve a lower standard of proof than criminal trials, so why not follow suit? I actually have a moral objection to the use of lower standards of proof in civil trials, and find it objectionable that in the American system, one can try the same case twice in two different court systems. So I reject the premise behind the objection. On the view of punishment I favor, there would be no distinction between civil and criminal trials: there would be one trial per case focused on what I think of punitive rectification of the rights violation. (My definition of ‘punishment’ stands outside what I take to be the retributivist monopoly on definitions of that term.)

In the case of Ferguson, I think it’s obvious that the initial rule stands. Where we have a series of ongoing investigations into a criminal matter, it makes no sense to ‘take sides’ or even give the appearance of doing so, not just in advance of the trial, but in advance of the conclusion of the initial investigation. But partisans on both sides have done that re Ferguson.

Consider some of the attitudes expressed in this news item, expressing “support” for Darren Wilson.** At this stage of things, Wilson could either be entirely innocent or a cold-blooded racist killer, or something in between. ‘To take his side’ is to gamble that he is innocent when he could be guilty. To do that is to play Russian roulette with one’s moral and epistemic faculties.

On the other side, consider the attitudes expressed by Michael Eric Dyson in this news item. It’s not enough for Dyson that President Obama wants to wait for the findings of an investigation underway. Apparently, virtue requires Obama to become the blowhard identity-politics version of George W. Bush: he has to meet the violence of what is happening in the streets with rhetorical violence that ups the ante. For a reductio ad absurdum of the view he’s adopting, I’d suggest Dyson’s spending some time in the streets of Islamabad, Pakistan with the supporters of Imran Khan and Muhammad Tahir ul Qadri ,where tens of thousands of passionate but completely mindless protesters are besieging the presidential residence* in order to overthrow democracy in the name of democracy, but cannot articulate either the nature of their grievances, or what they want done in rectification of ‘them’. Whether he realizes it or not, those mindless crowds are the perfect expression of the politics Dyson has in mind. (Incidentally, the supposed contrast Dyson draws between Holder and Obama does not seem to me to be borne out by the facts).

In answer to both sets of partisans, I’d suggest reading Gary Alan Fine and Patricia Turner’s excellent book, Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America, which describes the ease with which untrammeled passion leads to rumors, and rumors in turn fuel race riots. My favorite line in the book: “Ultimately, we, the public, are the agents of justice, and we must strive not to be blind” (p. 209). Both Wilson’s supporters and people like Dyson are practically suborning blindness in the rest of us.

[Postscript, August 27, 2014: Two items in today’s New York Times serve as a useful pair of footnotes to what I said here. A letter by Norman Siegel (former director of the American Civil Liberties Union) nicely reiterates some of the themes of my argument, but an op-ed by Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean of the Law School at University of California, Irvine) suggests the need for some qualifications to what I said.

Chemerinsky argues, plausibly, that the judicial deck is stacked against anyone who wants to hold police officers and other government officials responsible for civil rights violations. I’m not qualified to offer an opinion as to the legal merits of Chemerinsky’s argument, but if he’s right, we need to distinguish between two different reasons for waiting for a legal verdict before passing moral judgment on a legal case: (1) an evidence-based reason: we won’t have full access to the evidence until the verdict has been handed down; (2) a quasi-positivist reason: the legal verdict is constitutive of the facts re guilt or innocence. I’m defending (1), not (2). I doubt that anyone would defend a literal version of (2), but it’s worth stating explicitly, so as to differentiate it sharply from (1). The point is that courts have better access to the evidence relevant to guilt or innocence than does the general public (and the press), not that court verdicts magically “make” people guilty or innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been charged. Of course, even (1) is only true as a general rule; given the exclusionary rule, courts sometimes exclude relevant evidence from consideration, thereby handicapping their own access to the truth. But the point is, they have access to the relevant evidence. In other words, the overarching point I’m making is primarily epistemic, not legal.]

6. Can it ever be justified to use a weapon against, or shoot, an unarmed person?

I think it can. One of the better arguments of gun enthusiasts is that firearms level the ‘playing field’ between large and menacing (but unarmed) assailants and the rest of us. And the argument makes good sense. If you have reason to believe that an assailant means you serious harm, and you have no other means of escape, I think you can resort to the use of a firearm. But where possible, you must limit the damage you do to your would-be assailant. What needs an explanation in the case of Ferguson is why Brown was hit with six rounds when one would have sufficed. On the face of it, I can’t imagine a legitimate reason for Wilson’s firing six shots at Brown (he might have lived if he’d been hit with one instead of six), but I’ll leave that to the forensics experts to unravel.

In general, however, I’m surprised by how many stories I’ve read over the years of suspects being shot by multiple rounds, the Amadou Diallo case being the most jaw-dropping example. It almost sounds like a joke: How many armed cops does it take to disable a man? How many rounds does it take to neutralize a human threat? Reading some of these stories, one gets the impression that the police regard criminal suspects in the way that big-game hunters regard big game. It might take six shots to take out a charging lion, but should it take that many to take out a charging human?

7-8. Should the video of Michael Brown’s robbing or stealing from a convenience store before the shooting have been released? Is it relevant to the case?

Eric Holder has described the United States as a “nation of cowards” for its unwillingness to discuss matters of race. Personally, I think there is cowardice in Holder’s suggestion that the video allegedly showing Michael Brown engaged in a convenience store robbery ought not to have been released to the public. I so far have not heard a plausible explanation for why the video ought not to have been released, aside from the claim that doing so would upset people. I find it remarkable after all of the criticism of the hyper-sensitivity of people in the Islamic world (e.g., the Muhammad cartoons, the anti-Satanic Verses protests, etc.) the Attorney General of the United States thinks that the American people have to be infantilized in the same fashion: if the disclosure of information will upset them, the information ought, in deference to their sensitivities, be concealed.

Why not say the same thing about the conversation about race that Holder envisions? Discussions about race might upset some people, too. Why isn’t their prospective ‘roiling’ a good reason for not having such discussions? If white people threatened, en masse, to take to the streets at the disclosure of some untoward fact about Wilson’s life, would that justify concealing it? Many untoward facts (some of them not quite facts) were revealed about George Zimmerman in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case, not all of them obviously relevant to the case. Should they all have been concealed? (The same was true of Conrad Murray, by the way.) Why should anyone think concealment is justified in the current case?

I think the video of Brown’s robbing the convenience store is potentially relevant to the case. Though Wilson stopped Brown for jaywalking rather than robbery, the official police timeline suggests that he was aware that the robbery had taken place, and that he suspected that Brown and his companion, Johnson, were the robbers (or thieves, depending on how you want to describe the event in the store: I’m not convinced it was robbery). There is obvious reason to fear a robber more than one fears a jaywalker. If Brown was high on pot, there is additional reason to think that his judgment was impaired. Nothing in the way of justice is gained by trying to cover up these facts, or possibilities, whichever they turn out to be.

9. Is it too easy for the Darren Wilsons of the world to get away with murder?

This question in effect goes back to question (1) in the original list. It’s possible that even if Wilson ends up being guilty of murdering Brown, there might (in the nature of the case) be insufficient evidence to convict him of a crime because the evidence falls below the threshold of being beyond a reasonable doubt (or being a civil rights violation in the civil context).

Suppose that that’s so, and that a jury hands back a verdict of ‘not guilty.’ Legally, of course, we’d have to treat Wilson as not-guilty. But outside of strictly legal contexts, are we justified in regarding him, in effect, as going through the rest of his life trailed by a cloud of suspicion? Depending on how the evidence turns out, I think we might be. That is in effect the current predicament of George Zimmerman. Even people who accept the verdict in the Zimmerman case might have their doubts about whether he is genuinely innocent in the moral sense. I do. Zimmerman may not have murdered Martin, but he had no business pursuing him after he (Zimmerman) had called the police. He should have stayed put, and his failure to do so strikes me as morally culpable, even if it isn’t legally adjudicable. Something similar would (on this scenario) end up being true of Wilson. Even if he ends up being legally innocent, he might end up being morally culpable of some non-legal infraction, and if so, that suspicion would (and should) follow him in our judgments of him thereafter. A legal finding of non-guilt doesn’t necessarily wash away all evidence of or suspicion of moral wrongdoing. The hard fact of the matter is that a legal finding of non-guilt doesn’t even necessarily wash away all suspicion of criminality, a fact with complex ramifications I can’t do justice to here.

10. Should the testimony of police officers weigh more heavily than those of criminal suspects?

This might have been a tendentious question on my part, but in any case, I regard the answer as obvious. I don’t know the specifically legal status of this rule (or if it’s even a ‘rule’), but I’ve seen it applied often enough in courts of law here in New Jersey: if a case comes down to the testimony of a police officer versus a criminal defendant, the judge will simply assume that it is the police officer who is telling the truth and the defendant who must be lying or in error. Why? Because police officers can be presumed to be truthful, but criminal defendants cannot. In effect, the defendant’s presumption of innocence can be defeated by a police officer’s sheer assertion that the defendant is guilty. The insouciance with which I’ve seen this rule applied is amazing, and I think the remedy is obvious: our courts should stop treating the testimony of police officers as pro tanto more weighty than those of criminal defendants. Everyone’s testimony should be regarded as being on a par, unless there’s positive evidence to the contrary.

One is obliged in a court of law to treat officers of the court with great deference and respect, which they are not obliged to reciprocate: legally speaking, there is such a thing as contempt of court, but no such thing as contempt of citizen by the court. But I’m inclined to think that the latter is more commonly exemplified than the former, and there is no legal remedy for it (aside from the very attenuated remedy of an appeal).

When the judicial system runs roughshod over whatever procedural rights one has, one is apt to feel contempt for or rage at those who run it. Having been on the receiving end of this treatment myself in a court case that had nothing to do with race, I was tempted, in court, to say something that would have gotten me a contempt citation. When, a few months later, I saw the same judge walking down the street on his way to a restaurant, I was tempted to confront and abuse him. I held my tongue on both occasions, but I understand the impulse to lash out, and anyhow, my case was a very, very trivial one (it was a traffic case involving three license points and a $100 fine).

I think one has to experience officialized judicial or police arrogance in one’s own case to be able to grasp the justified rage of the protesters on the streets of Ferguson. I don’t mean that rioting is justified. What I mean is that anger is justified, and that those who feel no anger (and by implication no sympathy for the protesters) ought to ask themselves whether they’ve had the sorts of experiences that merit the same anger. I doubt they have. I’m enough of a cognitivist about the emotions to say that one can’t think by means of anger. (I agree with Ayn Rand’s claim that emotions are not ‘tools of’ cognition.) But I’m enough of an Aristotelian or Freudian to think that justified anger is a potential ally of thought about justice. We need, as Roderick Long has apt put it in a different context, to think our anger—or our apathy, come to that. There’s more of that to do, so more to follow.

*I had originally written “Presidential Palace,” but I think I was momentarily confusing Pakistan with Somoza’s Nicaragua.

**This item makes the point better than the item I originally used.

Some questions about Ferguson

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

As I said in my last post, there is less to say about Ferguson than to ask about it. What follows are some of the questions that I think ought to be asked, divided into those pertaining to the shooting, and those pertaining to the protests, the riots, and the official response to them. In this post, I ask the questions without answering any of them, including the ones that I think can currently be answered. In a subsequent post, I’ll venture a few answers. The questions are, of course, far from exhaustive.

The shooting

The most obvious question to ask is what happened, and how do we know? An article in this morning’s New York Times provides an informative account, but what it describes are the findings of a highly qualified preliminary autopsy report, and an official police timeline. Here is what I regard as the relevant passage:

No matter what conclusions can be drawn from Dr. Baden’s work, Mr. Brown’s death remains marked by shifting and contradictory accounts more than a week after it occurred. The shooting is under investigation by St. Louis County and by the F.B.I., working with the Justice Department’s civil rights division and the office of Attorney General Holder.

I would be suspicious of any rhetoric that tries to do an end-run around this basic, axiomatic fact.

It’s been alleged that there were “eyewitnesses” to the shooting. How many were there, and what exactly did they see?
A meta-question about eyewitness testimony: how reliable is it, and how should we assess it in this case?
A meta-question about police-generated testimony: how reliable is it, and how should we assess it in this case?
Another set of meta-questions: must we always wait for the verdict in a criminal trial before we offer moral verdicts on a criminal case? After all, criminal trials can last for years—and if appeals are figured in, for decades. Will it only be permissible to discuss Ferguson after the last appeals are exhausted in the last case on the matter? Can’t evidence of guilt or innocence sometimes be sufficiently transparent as to justify a moral verdict prior to any official legal adjudication of the case?
Is it ever justified to use a weapon against someone who’s unarmed? Is it ever justified to shoot such a person with a firearm?
It’s been alleged that Michael Brown was robbing a convenience store before he was shot. Did Officer Wilson know this or not? Suppose he did know it. Is the fact relevant to the justifiability of shooting Brown or not? Suppose he didn’t know it. Could it still in principle be relevant?
The Ferguson police released the video of Brown’s supposedly robbing the convenience store; others, including the Justice Department, have criticized this decision on the grounds that it encouraged rioting. Should information in a criminal case be suppressed simply because it will lead to rioting or violence (and for no other reason)? (Incidentally, what exactly does the video show? Robbery? Larceny? Battery? Police testimony aside, how many of us can be certain that the central figure in the video is Michael Brown?)
Suppose that the evidence of Michael Brown’s being murdered by Officer Wilson turns out to be slim. Couldn’t it still be the case that he was murdered? How do we deal with the fact that the Officer Wilsons of the world can in principle get away with murder precisely because despite being guilty, evidence of their guilt is so inconclusive?*
In many courts of law, a police officer’s testimony is regarded as more weighty than an ordinary citizen’s—even when the police officer is accusing the citizen of a crime, and the citizen is supposed to enjoy a presumption of innocence. If we apply that “principle” here, we reach the conclusion that Officer Wilson’s testimony ought to trump that of the eyewitnesses to the shooting. What inference should we draw?

The protests, the rioting, the response

What, exactly, is the causal connection between the shooting and the rioting?
Allegations have been made about the pervasive racism of the Ferguson Police Department, and of Ferguson in general. How good is this evidence, and how relevant is it to judging the police response to the protests?
How much violence has there been, and how bad has it been in aggregate?
Can it ever be justified to loot, vandalize, or riot? Suppose, for instance, that racism is Ferguson is pervasive, and has gone unaddressed for decades. Suppose, further, that rioting will bring this racism to light. Suppose that rioting is (as a matter of historical fact) the best way of publicizing racism and eliciting a response (cf. the Kerner Commission Report). Is rioting then justified?
It’s been alleged that the police response to the protests has been excessive. What would a proportional response be or have been? As a conceptual matter, can a proportional response to a threat be insufficient to neutralize the threat?
It’s been alleged that the police response to the protests has been indiscriminate as between protesters and rioters. Is discrimination possible or feasible? Again, as a conceptual matter, suppose that discrimination is feasible, but makes it impossible to neutralize a threat. Should discrimination be trumped by the need to neutralize the threat, or should the need to neutralize be trumped by adherence to the principle of discrimination?
Do non-violent protesters have a moral or legal obligation to separate themselves from violent protesters, so as to facilitate the police’s capacity to neutralize the latter? (This question is really a special case of a more general one: do we have a moral obligation to refrain from taking actions that, though legal in themselves, facilitate illegality?)
Is a curfew a justified response to what is happening in Ferguson? Suppose that it it’s not. Is it justified to defy the curfew? Suppose that it is. If a police officer tries to stop a curfew-violator, is that curfew-violator justified in using force against the police?
A long-form question: As a historical matter, why have the police become so militarized in the United States? As a normative matter, is there any legitimate reason for militarization? (Reason Papers 36.1 isn’t live yet, but I’m tempted to link to parts of our Waco symposium for this question.)
Is there a general problem with police non-accountability in the United States, extending beyond Ferguson, and beyond issues of race?
A deep theoretical question: is there any reason to believe that what happened in Ferguson could not have happened, in substantially** the same way, under anarcho-capitalism? Would anarcho-capitalism have made things better–or worse?

*PS. In asking this question, I don’t mean to be implying that I believe that Wilson is guilty of murder. I mean: ex hypothesi, if he were guilty, evidence of his guilt might still be insufficient to convict him of murder.

** I had originally written “precisely,” but I meant “substantially.”

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