The Debate Will Be Terrible

 Who will win the debate?  No one.  No one will win, because it will be terrible.  Political debates are always the worst.  And I say this as someone who loves debate.  I always want debates to be like the debate episode of the West Wing.  (It was a simpler time.)  But that’s not how they are.  What is going wrong?

If ever there was ever a debate that might have been like the West Wing, it was Clinton vs. Trump.  Clinton was highly qualified, incredibly prepared, and extremely competent.  Trump was…not.  And yet, debates didn’t move the dial for Clinton. 

There’s a longstanding debate among debate people about whether sometimes the judges are just wrong.  I’m on the side that it’s fine to blame the judges – but then maybe that’s because I lost my share?  (Or at least, the judges voted against me, which is note the same as losing.)  Anyway, I do think sexism is part of the story, but I think the story is more complicated than just sexism against Clinton. 

In the last few days lots of people have been posting debate advice.  I want to get in on this before it’s too late.  Here are seven guidelines.

1. It’s hard to gain ground; it’s easier to lose ground.

For the most part nobody cares about debate.  So as long as you don’t do anything dramatic, you can play for a draw.  If you do shake things up, that’s taking a risk.  Once as a speechwriter in high school I lost a race for Boy’s State Governor, when victory was otherwise a good bet, by going for something interesting.  (Yes, I called myself a speechwriter in high school.)

 2. Be charitable.  It’s a mistake to try to make your opponent’s position look as bad as possible.

A very successful competitive debater once told me that the biggest mistake novices make is trying to argue that everything their opponent says is wrong.  For some reason it’s very tempting to think the right play is to make the opposing side look as weak as possible.  But this intuition is exactly backwards.  You should try to make your opponent’s position look as strong as possible.  This makes you look better.  If the opposing argument is so bad, why does it look like a draw from the outside (see rule 1)?  When you make your opponent’s points look good, it makes you seem like you’ve considered all the angles.

3. Facts are boring.

Lots of people on the internet are saying this so I won’t make heavy weather of it, but the studies are in.  You can’t get someone to believe the facts by telling them the facts.  That is not a winner. Once as a speechwriter in high school I lost an election for student body president by thinking it was a good idea to make it about “the issues.”  To my knowledge, I may be only political consultant in the actual world who has literally never won anything.  Good thing I got a philosophy job!

4. Stories have to be interesting.

Politicians tell the worst stories.  Just the worst.  “Lemme tell you about my friend, First Name.  First Name is a decent, hard-working American. But because of policies like the one Opponent favors, First Name is having a rough time…”  This is insulting to everyone.  More importantly, it’s a terrible story.  Anyone could have predicted everything what happens in advance.  For a story to be compelling, something unexpected must happen. 

I know it doesn’t sound like I’m giving debate advice, but I am.  If you make the story didactic, it becomes a way of trying push someone around with the facts.  People hate that.  This isn’t just folk wisdom.  Pushing people with facts does nothing, or maybe even provokes a backlash.  Most of us hate the experience of someone trying to persuade us, because it literally feels like a threat our autonomy.  On the other hand, when we hear a story we can relate to, we don’t feel threatened.  Here is the crucial point: we are more likely to be persuaded when nobody is trying to push our beliefs around. 

You know who told good stories?  Jesus.  The reason they were compelling is that it was genuinely hard to figure out what he wanted people to get out of them.  As theologians like John Dominic Crossan and Amy-Jill Levine have pointed out, Jesus was more provoking people to consider something than trying to get them to believe anything in particular.  Imagine if Jesus had said, “I have a friend who was a good, hard-working guy, but then the Romans came round with these policies…”  Nobody cares. 

5. You have to think about what your opponent will say back to what you say.

This is so obvious I don’t know why I’m writing it. But for some reason people are tempted to think about their opponent’s position, not what their opponent will say back when they’ve finished talking.  That’s a mistake.

6. It is very difficult to land pre-planned, contrived jokes.

Antithesis: it is remarkably easy to land a joke that could not have been written in advance.

7. Only attack someone if the audience will think they have it coming.

It doesn’t matter how many unjust deaths your opponent is responsible for; the audience will only take your side in a fight if they have just witnessed bad conduct for themselves.  We all love to see someone who really deserves it get the receiving end of a verbal attack.  But it’s hard to get someone to reveal that they deserve it. 

If you have never seen it, Jon Stewart’s premeditated dismantling of Tucker Carlson on his own show is a masterclass in baiting someone to throw the first punch, then going all in.  In less than three minutes Carlson finds himself on his heels in an argumentative terrain he hadn’t planned for or thought about.  Jon Stewart gets him to reveal exactly the disposition for which Stewart wants to criticize him, and then doesn’t let up for the duration.  It’s incredible to behold.  As the leading youtube comment notes, you can witness Tucker’s “villain origin story.”

So much for rules.  Now, advice.  I like backseat quarterbacking as much as anybody.

The advice: It’s weird that a Republican President who used the executive branch to make a propaganda video for North Korea should be a difficult mark in a debate.  But, here we are.  Probably the smart money bet debating Trump is to recite boring Democratic talking points so your base can pretend like you “won,” and call it a night. 

Say, though, that you wanted to try.  In that case, consider trying to get Trump to say something vaguely disrespectful of the military or another conservative institution.  This is apparently not that difficult in private.  Start with praise.  “It’s great that the President is against bombing people for no reason – so good job throwing out Bolton, etc.”  Then suggest consensus.  “But in our system it’s important that the president be willing to listen to people who know more.”  It’s very unlikely to work, but might Trump be tempted to say he was right in one of his famous un-doings of military decisions?  One could also try pushing to see if Trump will say more on opposing democratic outcomes of elections in America.

Of course, it’s all a long shot.  The likely outcome is boring.  May I recommend instead counterprograming with election episode of Gilmore Girls?  It’s not that realistic, but at this point, who’s counting?

More on Angry Mobs

 You might have some imperfect obligation to speak out against some issue. (It can't be a perfect obligation, can it? Does anyone think you are literally obligated to speak out for or against some issue at all times you're awake?)

Even if so, it doesn't follow that other people have permission to make you speak out on demand. For instance, even if you should speak out against the genocide of the Uighurs or against closed borders (two things that are far more important, morally speaking, than Black Lives Matter), it doesn't follow that I, Jason Brennan, may approach you at any time and insist that you speak out on the spot. If I further harassed, harangued, and threatened you, you would be justified in defying me.

At any rate, I am please to report that last night in DC, I found that exactly zero protesters were wearing "Free the Uighurs/Fuck the CCP" or "Open Borders" T-shirts. I beat up 300 people with a baseball bat, thus protecting the world from their horrifically violent silence. 

Routledge's WHY IT'S OK series

 Here is a new video about Routledge's Why It's OK series. 

Chris Freiman explains why it's OK--indeed, laudable and obligatory for most people, to ignore politics.  I explain why it's OK--indeed, in many cases laudable--for most people to want to be rich, to make money to get rich, and to keep much of their money rather than giving it all away. Jess Flanigan will later argue that it's OK to have bad grammar and spelling.

Here's the series blurb:

Philosophers often build cogent arguments for unpopular positions. Recent examples include cases against marriage and pregnancy, for treating animals as our equals, and dismissing some widely popular art as aesthetically inferior. What philosophers have done less often is to offer compelling arguments for widespread and established human behavior, like getting married, having children, eating animals, and going to the movies. But if one role for philosophy is to help us reflect on our lives and build sound justifications for our beliefs and actions, it seems odd that philosophers would neglect the development of arguments for the lifestyles most people—including many philosophers—actually lead. Unfortunately, philosophers’ inattention to normalcy has meant that the ways of life that define our modern societies have gone largely without defense, even as whole literatures have emerged to condemn them.　　

Why It’s OK: The Ethics and Aesthetics of How We Live seeks to remedy that. It’s a series of books that provides accessible, sound, and often new and creative arguments for widespread ethical and aesthetic values.  Made up of short volumes that assume no previous knowledge of philosophy from the reader, the series recognizes that philosophy is just as important for understanding what we already believe as it is for criticizing the status quo. The series isn’t meant to make us complacent about what we value; rather, it helps and challenges us to think more deeply about the values that give our daily lives meaning.　

Forthcoming:

Why It’s OK to Get Married
Christie J. Hartley

Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies
Matthew Strohl

Why It’s OK to Eat Meat
Dan C. Shahar

Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business
Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke 

Why It’s OK to Be Fat
Rekha Nath

Why It’s OK to Be a Moral Failure
Robert Talisse

Why It’s OK to Have Bad Grammar and Spelling
Jessica Flanigan

Why It’s OK to Speak Your Mind
Hrishikesh Joshi

In Defense of Lori Loughlin

 If you read this blog, you’ve probably noticed its writers largely agree that the political state does more than its share of unjust things.  But that point is pretty mundane.  I’d venture that a majority of academic folks we associate with across the political spectrum broadly agree about the most egregious examples of political injustice. 

Sometimes, however, there is a case where something seems obviously unjust to me, but for some reason a lot of academics I know see it differently.  This post is about Lori Loughlin, who yesterday was sentenced over her well-publicized ploy to get her children into USC under the guise of a rowing scholarship.  I confess this strikes me as crazy.

Here’s a case to warm you up to my view.  Imagine you want to get into Fancyperson Richclub, an exclusive fraternity for the well-heeled and well-mannered.  One of the rules of admission is that your parents and grandparents must have also met certain criteria of membership among the social elite.  As it happens, your family’s past is checkered with markers of low and middle class heritage.  Your application is turned down.  Indignant, you fabricate a new family history, purging old family pictures of birthdays at Cheesecake Factory and photoshopping in nights at the symphony, etc. etc.  Unused to your plucky ambition, Fancyperson Richclub is duped.  They admit you.

Is your action wrong?  Well, there is some deception, which is often wrong.  But in some cases, deception as a way of parrying unjust background conditions – or what philosophers sometimes call defensive deception – is ok.  I’ll admit mileage may vary on this question.

Is your action unjust?  Here I say no, it’s not unjust.  If they smell you out as a low class striver, they’re free to excommunicate you.  That’s freedom of association.  But nothing more.

Second case.  Over the years, Fancyperson Richclub starts losing members and money.  Sure, they still have their pride, but that doesn’t pay for the ice sculptures.  They decide to take a few members with less distinguished pedigrees, provided they can make a “donation” up front.  You just have to take your "donation" to the Appropriate Office.  As long as you do, you’re in.  But if by chance you take your “donation” to the Inappropriate Office, the attendant there calls the police on you.  As it happens, you bring your briefcase of cash to the Inappropriate Office and get made.  The police arrest you.

Here is what puzzles me.  I don’t know why the state should intervene at all.  And if the state intervenes, why take the side of Fancyperson Richclub?  Doing that looks plain suspicious.  It’s almost as if the state had some interest in defending the old class structure. 

I’m going to introduce a technical term.  I will call something a “scam” whenever some agent or group represents themselves as something they’re not in order to get a positional advantage.  Elite colleges like to represent themselves as not trading admissions for money.  That way they can maintain certain reputational gains that give them a positional edge.  At the same time, elite colleges trade admissions for money.  So elite colleges are engaged in a scam.

Astonishingly, Lori Loughlin got the better of them.  How did a middle class divorcee turned B-list celebrity do it?  The answer to that question is the stuff of what I regret will probably not be first Hallmark true-crime thriller. 

How should an egalitarian minded political society regard people who scam the scammers?  Polite indifference?  Public commendation?  A medal of some kind?  Those are my pre-theoretical intuitions. 

Not so.  Lori Loughlin was sentenced to two months in jail.  I think this is unjust. 

I’ve had this argument with a few people.  Sometimes I’m told that it wasn’t fair for Lori Loughlin’s kids to get admitted to USC because they took some else’s spot.  Three responses.  First, I want to note that most academics tend to think “you took my spot!” reasoning betrays a kind of category mistake.  Second, for spot-taking to be unfair, it must be the case that the person who’s spot was taken was in fact more deserving.  But third, let’s say for the sake of the argument they were more deserving.  Now some star high school rower is slumming it on the crew team at UC Santa Barbara instead of USC.  And we’re going to put Lori Loughlin in a cage used by some humans to physically contain other humans as a form of punishment?  Insanity.  At the worst, we should make her send a note of apology or something. 

But really, why should the state intervene at all?  To me it looks suspicious.  It’s almost as if they had some interest in defending the existing class structure.  Maybe you disagree.  I realize I’m in the minority.  But if you’re on the other side, I am curious who you think the bad guys are in any heist movie you’ve ever watched. 

 

When Might Virtue Signaling Be Virtuous?

Virtue signaling is the conspicuous display of moral character. When we use the word in a pejorative way, we mean something like the conspicuous display of moral character for the purpose of self-promotion. Often virtue signalers are engaging in a grandstanding. As Warmke says, "Grandstanders are moral show boaters who use public discourse as a vanity project. They aren't really concerned about helping people or contributing to a conversation."

We have strong reasons to think that most but not all virtue signaling is self-interested and not virtuous. But when, if ever, is virtue signaling virtuous?

Let's use something like Rosalind Hursthouse's basic formula here: A virtuous person does the right thing for the right reason and feels the right way about it. A virtuous action is a right action done for the right reasons and accompanied by the right kinds of feelings. 

Thus, a virtue signal might possibly be right or good but not virtuous. If I do the right thing for the wrong reason, I am not acting virtuously. For instance, if Bob saves the drowning child's life only because Bob wants fame and status, Bob does the right thing, but his actions aren't virtuous. Similarly, if the primary reason I engage in virtue signaling is that I want to promote my own status, my actions aren't virtuous, even if it turns out that such virtue signaling is the right thing to do in this situation or even if it promotes good outcomes. Virtuous action must be sufficiently, if not solely, motivated by moral reasons. So, below, assume that in the cases discussed, the virtue signaler is sufficiently motivated by moral reasons and has the right kinds of affective attitudes. 

1. Lots of people--especially those who engage in frequent virtue signaling--like to claim virtue signaling is virtuous when it pressures and induces others to develop more virtue and act more virtuously. Suppose one prays in public in order to induce others to be more pious. (Assume they're worshipping the correct god.) One engages in conspicuous donations to charity in order to induce others to give more to charity. (Assume they're giving to an effective charity.) One protests conspicuously in order to bring more people to the cause. (Assume it's a good cause.)

It seems likely that conspicuous virtue displays sometimes do induce others to follow suit. They also often induce them to rebel against the displays. They often engender cynicism. I don't know if there are good empirics on this showing when virtue signals induce others to behave better or when they have bad effects. 

Anecdotally, it seems like costly signals are more likely to induce good responses, while cheap signals are more likely to induce cynicism. When the Yetter-Chappells and Neil Sinhababu talk about how they've donated a large portion of their income to effective charities, this makes me want to give more. When certain other philosophers write blog posts loudly proclaiming their virtue but which cost them nothing, this makes me more cynical. But that's all anecdotal. 

2. Another reason a virtuous person might virtue signal is to get what they deserve.

Consider: People deserve to have a reputation (at least among those who know them) that matches their degree of virtue. It's unfair and wrong to think your spouse is a cheater if he isn't. 

A virtuous person might recognize that people think wrongly of a third party, and then work to correct their misperception. Here, the virtuous person might be motivated to ensure that the third party gets what she deserves. For instance, if Terry thinks Dave is an asshole, but Dave is a good guy, I might try to correct Terry's mistake because Dave deserves that Terry think highly of him. 

If a virtuous person might want to ensure others get what they deserve, they might also want to ensure that they themselves get what they deserve. If Bob could virtuously work to ensure Dave gets the reputation Dave deserves, why can't Bob also virtuously work to ensure Bob gets the reputation he himself deserves? Of course, people often will lie to themselves and tell themselves this is all they're doing, but here we're asking whether a genuinely virtuous person might do this kind of thing. 

So, it seems plausible that a genuinely virtuous person might self-promote and engage in virtue signaling if doing so is useful to ensure that people give that person what she deserves. 

Are You Virtue Signaling?

It's hard to judge others' motives, and hard to judge our own. Our own minds are not transparent to us.

However, here's a decent test to determine whether you might be solely or predominantly virtue-signaling. When you express or do something which might signal to others that you are good or virtuous, ask, "Would a purely selfish person have sufficient reason to make that same expression or do that same thing?" If the answer is yes, there's a good chance your motives aren't good.

For instance, if I say, "I advocate that high income be taxed more because I care about the poor," it makes other people who agree with me like me a bit more, but I don't actually lose any money. A sociopath who wanted to increase their own status in order to generate selfish benefits might say this.

In contrast, if I were to anonymously donate 40% of my income to the poor and tell no one, then I get no social benefits. So it's more likely to be a genuine act of beneficence rather than faking beneficence for self-interested reasons.

Of course, this is not a perfect test. 

At any rate, in contrast, I prefer to vice signal. Vice signaling is a form of counter-signaling where you are so secure in your own virtue that you actively signal that you are worse than you in fact are. It's like when very rich people dress down in meetings. 

Justice Is Not a Team Sport

If you go back in history in most societies, you find that their ancestors believed that morality is a team sport.

Consider the current NE Patriots. By the time the next season begins, perhaps none of the current players will have been on the team when they won their last Super Bowl or any of their last championships. But they will still have a sense that--and we will act as if--they are in some way connected to those past winning teams. Similarly, it could be that the team loses the first few games, replaces literally all of its players by halfway through the season, and then starts winning. But they will still feel burdened by those first few loses. We attach reputations, records, and so on, to the team. Given the nature of the game, we have reason to do so.

Similarly, part of what it is to be a fan of the Boston Red Sox is to dislike the New York Yankees. But there's something odd about that. After all, three seasons from now, the teams will both have entirely new players. Bostonians will dislike the players on the 2024 Yankees simply for joining the Yankees, even though those players have no history of thwarting Boston's goals. Imagine that halfway through the 2024 season, Boston and New York traded their entire teams--they literally switch their entire rosters. Bostonians will now root for the all the players who were, as of a day ago, all Yankees, and they will oppose the people who were, as of a day ago, all Red Sox.

Early societies treat entire groups of people, including families, clans, tribes, nations, and races as being like members of the team. If someone on your tribe killed someone on my tribe, we might decide to exact revenge not by killing you in particular, but by killing someone on your tribe. If your grandfather killed my grandfather, then I regard you as inheriting his sins. I might distrust you or even want to kill you, too, or think you owe me compensation. If people from Fire Nation attacked the people in the Earth Kingdom 100 years ago, people in the Earth Kingdom today might want to kill people in the Fire Nation today. And so on.

I regard all such attitudes as "barbarian pseudo-ethics" I say "barbarian" because it is a pejorative term indicating uncivilized, brutish attitudes and behaviors. I say "pseudo-ethics" because these principles function like a moral code but at the same time are fundamentally a rejection of ethics.

A basic principle of ethics is that a person cannot be held morally responsible for something that person did not do or had no control over. (We rationally hold people responsible for others' actions only when that person exerts power over them, for instance, a supervisor who can control employees in her division. We don't hold the supervisor at Starbucks responsible for what happens at Tim Hortons in another town.) What you ancestors did has no bearing on your moral character or responsibility. Further, what people who sort of look like you but aren't really related to you did in the past has no bearing on your character or responsibility.

None of this is to deny collective wrong-doing. The people who, say, voted for Trump are responsible for him being elected. But they are responsible because they actively participated in electing him, even though  any of them could have abstained with no effect. They aren't responsible because they are members of arbitrary groupings of people, and some other members of that group did something. 

Unfortunately, barbarian pseudo-ethics is alive and well, despite the Enlightenment's attempt to banish it. Rather people seeing each other as individual people, they tend to put each other into groups based upon their birth, and then hold them responsible for things others in those arbitrary groupings did. 

It's perhaps not surprising that the critical theory crowd, which rejects the Enlightenment's objectivist epistemology in favor of barbaric subjectivism and authoritarian epistemologies, also rejects the Enlightenment's individualistic ethics in favor of barbarian pseudo-ethics. They believe bad things for bad reasons, and act badly as a result. 

The Harm Principle and Toleration: An Interview with JS Mill

As many of you know, I am a trained necromancer. (I learned this skill after I wrote Why Not Capitalism? I so thoroughly destroyed G. A. Cohen's book that Satan was forced to relinquish Cohen's soul to me from hell. I now keep it in a shoebox under my desk and use it as a footstool.) One of my skills is talking to the dead. Today, I'm interviewing John Stuart Mill on his book On Liberty.

Brennan: "You say that neither government nor society should regulate or control actions unless they cause harm to others."

Mill: "Correct."

Brennan: "So, what you mean by that is so long as someone claims an action--such as writing an op-ed criticizing their philosophy of gender identity--harms them, then the action should be regulated heavily by society or government."

Mill: "Uh, no, that doesn't follow."

Brennan: "Wait, why not?"

Mill: "Well, for one, anyone can claim they are harmed by anything. We can't just let individual people decide by fiat that they were harmed. A principle like that would surely be abused. I mean, if all it takes for you to be able to assert control over others is that you were harmed by them, people will claim to be harmed all the time. Human beings are pretty crappy and will generally take advantage of structures of power for their own benefit. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that this is how people behave. A church may be created for the purpose of saving souls, but give it 10 years and its new purpose becomes amassing wealth and real estate. You can't trust people--whether in social mobs, bureaucracies, or in governments--with much power. That's one of the big reasons I oppose paternalism, you may recall, if you read the second half of that book."

Brennan: "But suppose they could be trusted, would that be enough? And suppose it did cause real harm by some objective standard."

Mill: "Well, no. The other problem is that you are confusing a necessary condition with a sufficient condition. I'm saying that we should tolerate anything people do that doesn't harm others. But I'm not saying that if something does harm others, it should therefore automatically be subject to any, let alone significant, social or political regulation."

Brennan: "Why not?"

Mill: "I mean, to simplify the argument I make in that book, it comes down to this: When we decide what level of freedom people should have, and how much we should tolerate, we should draw the line where doing so produces the most overall social progress and overall best living conditions for people. High tolerant, risk-taking societies produce great social, political, scientific, artistic, and cultural progress, while heavily moralizing, indignant, puritanical, risk-averse, and mobbish societies do not. Tolerant societies make people flourish, intolerant societies do not. I realize that's an empirical argument and requires empirical proof, but I think history and economic analysis rather clearly demonstrates I'm right."

Brennan: "Can you give me an example of a harm that we should tolerate?"

Mill: "Take one from economics. If a competitor comes along who builds a better mousetrap, she might put your mousetrap company out of business. It's plausible to say that you've been harmed--probably far more than a person would be harmed by, say, allowing a conservative speaker to come to campus, a speaker the person is free to ignore. So, imagine we said that in order to prevent harm, we never allow people to outcompete each other in the market. What do we get? Stagnation, poverty, rent seeking, and a political system run by insiders who control the anti-competitive regulations for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else. See the medieval guild systems, for example. We all are better off in a system where such competition is allowed, even though each of us would prefer that we, and we alone, be immunized and protected against such competition. Similarly, overall, we each benefit greatly from living in liberal, open, tolerant cultures, even though we each selfishly might wish to crush and destroy those who have ideas and beliefs we despise."

Brennan: "People are much less racist, ethnocentric, sexist, and so on today then back when you were writing, say, The Subjection of Women. Do you think we're a more tolerant society?"

Mill: "Yes, for sure. But at the same time, we should be careful not to credit people with being tolerant when they really aren't. Most people today are not very tolerant overall, even if they are more tolerant than most people were through most of history. Toleration means putting up with things you dislike and disapprove of. For instance, Jay, do you disapprove of homosexuality?"

Brennan: "No, not at all. I think there is no moral difference between heterosexual or homosexual sex, or really any consensual sex among adults."

Mill: "Then you can't really be said to tolerate these actions, because you don't disapprove of them. It's a bit like saying you are tolerant of people using red toothbrushes. Toleration means putting up stuff you dislike and disapprove of. In contrast, if an evangelical Christian thinks homosexuality is sinful but puts up with it, doesn't harass gay people, and generally leaves them alone, that's tolerance. So, what are some things you disapprove of?"

Brennan: "Illiberalism, for one. Liberalism is the correct theory of justice. I also, frankly, tend to think that non-liberals are almost universally motivated by a will to power and that their putative reasons for illiberalism are a cover for their self-interested actions."

Mill: "Ok, so as a liberal, you have to tolerate illiberal people. Here, read this FAQ to understand what that means. Toleration is an extremely demanding principle, and most people don't live up to it."

FAQ's

1.  Q: Should people say bad things, (e.g. demeaning, inegalitarian, or mean comments)?

A: No.

 

2.  Q: If people shouldn’t say bad things, then should saying bad things be illegal?

A: No. Most things that are bad shouldn’t be illegal.

 

3. Q: But maybe if someone says a bad thing outside of work, they should still get fired from their jobs?

A: Not usually. Often the same reasons against making something illegal are also reasons against imposing other sanctions on people.

 

4. Q: Ok but what if a boss fires someone for saying a bad thing? If that’s wrong, then shouldn’t what the boss did be illegal?

A: No (see question #2).

 

5.  Q: What if instead of people getting fired or facing legal penalties, everyone just yells at the person who said the bad thing?

A: It depends. Sometimes this is a good idea. Sometimes, yelling at people in this way amounts to saying a bad thing (see question #1).

 

6.  Q. So basically, you’re saying that people can’t say bad things but they have to put up with other people saying bad things and not facing legal penalties or getting fired. And it’s only sometimes ok to yell at people who said bad things? It sounds like you’re saying that people have to put up with a lot of stuff they disapprove of in order to avoid inappropriately sanctioning or punishing someone. What kind of view is that?!

A: Liberalism.

 

Violent Protest and Harmful Intent

The demonstrations against racial injustice have generated varied reactions, some showing support, others showing anxiety and distress. Here I assume that the protests are substantively justified. In the parlance of just war theory, protesters have a just cause: to end racial injustice. (I do not define racial injustice; I just assume that ending it is a worthwhile goal.) But many protesters destroyed the property of innocent parties. Can protesters justify this harm by pleading a just cause?

Some have answered yes. To them, sometimes innocent persons must bear the cost of rectifying injustice, especially if they suffer harm to their property and not to their life or limb. As the saying goes, to make an omelet you must break some eggs.

I think this view is questionable. To see why, consider an analytical framework used to evaluate collateral destruction in war: the doctrine of double effect (DDE). A major problem with an otherwise justified war is that the just warrior is bound to harm innocent persons. This may be enough to condemn war altogether and be a pacifist, as some have done. But those who believe that some wars are justified have tried to distinguish between direct and oblique harm in pursuit of the just cause. Direct harm to innocents is almost never justified, while oblique harm to innocents may sometimes be justified. The DDE is complex and there are many versions in the literature, but reduced to its bare bones it claims the following:

An act with two effects, one good, one evil, may be performed (1) if the evil effect is not directly intended but merely foreseen, and (2) if the good achieved by the good effect is significant enough to permit the evil of the evil effect to come to pass.

The DDE, then, poses an intent condition and a proportionality condition. These are each necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the permissibility of acts that harm innocent persons in the pursuit of a just cause.

Now let’s apply the DDE to violent protests against racial injustice. To justify harm to innocents, the protesters must not directly intend that harm, even as a means to end racial injustice elsewhere.  The harm to bystanders can only be justified as a collateral effect of the protesting actions. This difference can be illustrated in two scenarios.

In the first scenario, protesters confront the police. The protesters, let’s assume, are justified in using proportionate violence against the police, perhaps by throwing stones at them. In the course of this confrontation, the property of neighbors is damaged, as they are caught in the middle of the riot. This harm complies with the DDE. The protesters did not intend to harm the neighbors (intent condition), and the cause pursued, ending racial injustice, is important enough to justify such collateral damage (proportionality condition). While the protesters could foresee that harm, they didn’t centrally want it, it was nothing to their intent.

In the second scenario, protesters, after having confronted the police, marched through the neighborhood burning the residents’ property. This harm violates the DDE because it does not meet the intent condition. Protesters directly intended to burn those buildings as a way to demonstrate against racial injustice. The harm is not collateral harm but direct harm. This is true even if the action meets the proportionality condition. It may be that the end of racial injustice is important enough to allow the destruction of some property. But it must be done right, with the right intent.  Protesters willed the burning of property; that harm was central to their intent.

Someone may retort: “Racial injustice is systemic, so no one, and especially not property owners, can claim to be an innocent party. These persons benefit from a racist system, so burning their property is a direct action against culpable persons.” This reply is unconvincing. It justifies any act of violence against anyone who happens to live in a community saddled with the social problem in question (here, racial injustice.) Such reasoning would have justified the 1971 Munich massacre and similar acts of terrorism against innocents.  Whatever the usefulness of the idea of systemic racism in other contexts, it cannot be used to justify directly harming third parties in this way.  (By the way, the reply illustrates conceptual difficulties of the idea of systemic properties, but that is a matter for another post.)
   

Is Academia a Right-Wing Institution with a Left-Wing Cover?

In this post at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen speculates that Los Angeles is the most "right-wing" city in the US in terms of practice, rather than people's political beliefs. Here, "right-wing" signifies strong inequality in status. 

In LA, there is winner-takes-all kind of tournament, and people are strongly motivated to raise their own status while willing to accept radical inequality in prestige. People are treated differently based on their status and prestige, and in particular, how they look, whom they know, and who's in their network. All of this is tolerated and celebrated, despite the overtly "left-wing" politics people claim to espouse. 

If I recall correctly, in another post, Cowen speculates that often times the political ideology of a place tends to counteract, balance, or cover up the underlying politics. So, for instance, LA and New York are very hierarchical and status-driven, but espouse left-wing politics, while red cities often have much lower income inequality, but espouse conservative ideas.

I similarly wonder if academia is a right-wing institution with a left-wing cover. Below is a partial excerpt, modified in various ways, from a paper forthcoming in an edited anthology:

Given how poorly universities behave and given how much they undermine social justice, it’s strategic for administrators to use social justice talk as much as possible. While academia is supposed to aim at a higher mission and be non-profit, the actual people inside academia are normal, selfish, for-profit people. Egalitarian talk is often a cover or disguise for the pursuit of self-interest, just as talk of salvation in the medieval Catholic church was often a cover for the pursuit of real estate, power, and wealth. 

While academia is filled with people who posit egalitarian ideals, it is not an egalitarian place. In behavior, academia may be the most right-wing institution in the US, even more than the military or the police. (Think of how open the military and police are to accepting and promoting common people. Now think of how open the good colleges and universities are.) Higher ed serves a very right-wing function, namely, to reinforce class hierarchy. Academia is highly hierarchical; everything and everyone gets ranked, and everyone is acutely aware of such rankings. Finally, while nearly all academics pay lip service to left-wing ideals, their actual behavior is predominantly selfish. In short, academics simultaneously promote egalitarianism philosophy and inegalitarian outcomes. Status, not education, is the sine qua non and the essential product it sells; if it stopped providing this, it would quickly go out of business. Higher education strongly contributes to income inequality, especially in the United States.

 

People often use moral language to disguise their pursuit of self-interest. Academics in general are trained to use moral language in a sophisticated way. Perhaps we should regard academic egalitarianism as cheap altruism. If I say I’m an egalitarian, I come across as nice and caring, even though I haven’t thereby done anything to help others or sacrificed my self-interest to help the poor. On the contrary, many egalitarians go out of their way to explain why their egalitarian commitments do not require them to donate their excess income to others.

 

Call Outs, Proportionality, and Liability

One problem with the criminal justice system is that too many things are crimes. Another problem is that people who commit crimes are often punished in ways that are disproportionate to the wrongfulness of the crime.

 

I discuss these problems elsewhere. TLDR, I think people only forfeit their entitlements to a certain kind of treatment (non-interference, assistance) insofar as they failed to treat others in that way. And people only forfeit their rights against interference (liability) in proportion to the extent that they failed to treat others in this way. On this view, liability is set at the price of the violation and in the coin of the violation. So too many things are crimes because the law punishes people who aren’t liable to be interfered with (e.g. drug users) and even when people are liable to be interfered with, the criminal sanctions are often disproportionate to the crime. 

 

Beyond the criminal justice system though, this framework for understanding liability can also apply to informal sanctions and criticism, such as social exclusion or public shaming on social media. These practices are within the realm of social norms. No one is getting arrested or going to jail for bad tweets. But practices of exclusion and shaming still raise questions about the ethics of enforcement, just not legal enforcement. 

 

Way back in 2017, Conor Friedersdorf drew an analogy between Parfit’s case of the harmless torturer and social media call outs. In the harmless torturer case, one thousand torturers each press a button that causes an imperceptible amount of pain, but cumulatively the button pressing amounts to torturing their victim. Friedersdorf wrote,

An analogous phenomena plagues efforts to enforce social norms via social media. Each critic scolds a transgressor in ways that seem proportionate and reasonable, as if turning to a stranger at a supermarket and saying, “Excuse me, I heard what you just said, and I really think you got it wrong.” What few critics fully realize is that thousands of others are doing the same and much worse—that the cumulative effect is a digital equivalent of thousands of people gathering around a transgressor at the supermarket and angrily shouting insults for three hours. If that happened in offline space the mismatch of proportion would seem monstrous; when it occurs in the online space only the target typically notices.

Here, Friedersdorf is making a similar point about proportionate liability, even if someone acted wrongly, the online response to wrongdoing is often disproportionate.

 

Say someone says something mean, thoughtless, or offensive online. How are they liable to be treated? Before asking this, we first we should ask, should people consider mean, thoughtless, or offensive online speech a kind of moral violation? I think too often, good faith speech is considered a moral violation when it shouldn’t be. But in some cases, yeah, a person may say something that is morally bad. In these cases, setting liability (roughly) at the price of the violation and in the coin of the violation would mean that the person who said the bad thing lacked the standing to complain about social sanctioning, which would consist in other people saying mean, thoughtless, or offensive things to him.

 

And there’s also a proportionality constraint. If the person had a big following, they may be liable to experience more social sanctioning than someone who had a small following. This is because people with bigger followings are likely to have done more harm in saying whatever mean, thoughtless, or offensive thing they said. Twitter screws this up though because sometimes people with a small platform are amplified onto a big platform. So for example, when Justine Sacco made a bad joke on twitter, her joke was amplified, and then she was exposed to the big-following norms of social sanctioning even though she committed a small-following violation. It was the people who amplified their voice that amplified the harm, but they were not subject to any social sanctioning.

 

Anarchists often argue that the same moral reasons that govern our personal relationships (e.g reasons for non-violence) should also apply to political relationships. But by the same token, the same moral reasons that pertain to political relationships also apply to our personal relationships. Those who are critical of inappropriate and disproportionate forms of sanctioning by political actors should also be critical of these practices within social life.

 

I’m not claiming that people shouldn’t identify, criticize, and resist injustice when they see it. I’m claiming that moral reasons related to liability should inform how people identify, criticize, and resist injustice. And if you think it’s wrong for agents of the state to engage in excessive policing and punishment, then you should also question practices of policing the boundaries of social groups and publicly sanctioning people online.

*Grandstanding* by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke

Grandstanding is now out! You should definitely buy this book. Indeed, if you don't you're a bad person who must not care about justice or ethics, unlike me.

This may be the book of the decade, hopefully in the sense that it sells a lot, but at least in the sense that it explains so much behavior distinctive or amplified by our social media-fueled decade.

That said, the phenomenon it describes is old. Indeed, Jesus complains about it in Matthew 6:5:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.

The point is that such people are less concerned with connecting with God and more concerned with inducing other people to believe the they are good and pious.

"Moral grandstanding" refers to when people use moral language for self-promotion. As Warmke explains in an interview, "Grandstanders are moral show boaters who use public discourse as a vanity project. They aren't really concerned about helping people or contributing to a conversation." 

When people engage in moral grandstanding, they are trying to raise their own status and prestige through the use of moral language. They are trying to get others to think more highly of them or to secure various benefits for themselves.

Some example forms of grandstanding include:

1. Ramping Up: Making increasingly strong claims about the matter under discussion. Engaging in a kind of moral arms race. (E.g., "Washington was a racist slave owner." "Oh, yeah, well, he was also sexist and heteronormative too. I guess you didn't see that."). Here, people are trying to show off their moral purity and moral sensitivity by making increasingly strong claims.

2. Trumping Up: Insisting on the existence of a moral problem where there isn't one, or exaggerating a problem dramatically. Think of the story of the princess and the pea. A real princess is so sensitive that she can feel the presence of a pea under 40 mattresses. Well, some people like to show off heir moral sensitivity by finding moral problems everywhere, and then announcing their distaste and shaming others for not also finding those problems. Again, the point is to raise their own status.

3. Dismissiveness: Insisting that one's own point of view is obvious and that any disagreement is obviously stupid and vile. Here, the person is trying to signal their virtue and moral purity by being unwilling to interact with contrary points of view. You can see a great deal of this in contemporary philosophy about race and gender issues, where many of the theorists act like the controversial stuff they are saying--stuff they didn't themselves believe 3 years ago--is obviously true, and that it's beyond the pale to acknowledge or debate anyone who disagrees. "I'm such a good person I can't even tolerate reading what others say."

4. Excessive emotional displays: People go out of their way to emote in reaction to things, often in disproportionate ways. Go on Facebook today and you'll surely see some of this: You'll see friends crying and whining about bad news, acting like it destroys them. I have academic friends who brag--yes, "brag" is the right word--about how Trump's election bothered them so much that they couldn't get any writing done for six months. Here, the goal is to signal, "I'm such a morally sensitive and good person that I can't even handle the news. Oh, you kept going about your life like normal? I guess you aren't as good as I am."

The book identifies how grandstanding works, explains what makes it morally wrong, diagnoses a great deal of social and political behavior, and finally ends with recommendations about what to do about it. In particular, they recommend against trying to police others' moral grandstanding (you'll probably just engage in grandstanding yourself when you do) and instead policing yourself. 

Tosi and Warmke are now working with psychologists to run experiments testing various empirical hypotheses about grandstanding. While these papers came after the book was written, to be clear, it is a demonstrably real phenomenon. Their psychological work is able to show that people are often using moral language for self-promotion rather than for other reasons. 

If you don't buy and read this book today, you must not care about ethics.

While you're waiting for your copy to arrive, read this delightful post from Justin Weinberg on the original paper that lead to this book. 

Liberalism at Work

In general, bosses shouldn’t fire workers for stuff they do on the weekends. Bosses should be legally permitted to fire workers for this reason. But people shouldn’t cheer bosses on when they do.

Lately, several people lost their jobs based on social media postings or their conduct outside of work. (Examples here, here, here, here, and here) Each case is different, but in many of them, it seems that bosses were firing workers in an attempt to demonstrate the company’s commitment to workplace inclusivity.

 

I agree that inclusivity is an important value at work. Nevertheless, I think liberals and progressives should generally oppose these dismissals because they should oppose workplace domination. Libertarians should oppose these dismissals too because even though employers should have a legal right to fire people at will on the basis of their social media posts or behavior outside of work, they still shouldn’t do it. Workplace domination is bad even if it shouldn’t be illegal.

Elizabeth Anderson makes a compelling case against workplace domination. When she joined Russ Roberts on EconTalk to discuss her book, Private Government, one of her examples of workplace domination was political pressure at work. She described “white-collar workers who are quite commonly pressured by their bosses to contribute money to favored political campaigns or political action committees.” Employers can monitor employees’ donations and employees with disagreeable politics could be disadvantaged in promotion decisions. 

 

Roberts then noted that employers can often dictate what workers do when they are not at work. Anderson replied,

Quite right. And this, I think, is even more objectionable. Normally we think that once you are off duty, you should be free from any kind of control or regulation by your boss. But, in the United States, the default rule of employment is employment at will. And that entails that your boss can fire you for any or no reason at all, including things that the boss finds out about your off-duty activity. For instance.…stuff that you might post on Facebook expressing perhaps controversial opinions can get one fired even if the Facebook posting isn't addressed to fellow workers or harassing them in any way but just expressing an opinion that the boss disagrees with. …In reality, people are fired for what they do over the weekend, and in their leisure time.

In contrast, Tyler Cowen wrote in response to Anderson,

A business usually should have the right to fire a worker for Facebook postings or other forms of “outside the workplace” activity. For a start, a lot of workers put racist, sexist, or otherwise discomforting comments and photos into their Facebook pages. When employers fire them, very often it is to protect some notion of the freedom of the other workers….The question of workplace freedom often boils down to one set of the workers against another. In that setting, allowing for a lot of apparently arbitrary firing decisions on net may support rather than oppose worker autonomy. (Private Government p.112)

In this exchange, I think Anderson and Cowen are both half-right. Anderson is right in saying that employers shouldn’t monitor employees’ social media accounts or speech outside the workplace, nor should they pressure employees to contribute to their favored political causes. Cowen is right that employers should not be legally prohibited from doing these things.

On the other hand, I also think Anderson and Cowen are also both half-mistaken. Anderson shouldn’t support regulations that limit employers’ ability to dismiss employees at will because this solution just trades workplace domination for political domination, which is even more pervasive and less escapable.

And Cowen should have been more worried that employers would fire people for bad reasons, or that it could be bad for employers to defer to an employees’ fellow workers to decide whether a person should be fired. The same reasons Anderson gives against subjecting employees to surveillance and arbitrary threats of dismissal from their bosses are also reasons against subjecting them to the same kinds of threats from their coworkers.

Another worry about firing people for their social media posting or behavior outside of work is that it is likely to be counterproductive if the goal is creating a welcoming workplace, even when bosses target speech and behavior that would undermine the values of corporate inclusivity. 

Consider a workplace that fails to make everyone feel welcome, a workplace that does not live up to its company’s commitment to inclusivity. In a workplace like this, expanding employers’ ability to dismiss people on the basis of their speech and conduct outside of work is may seem appealing in the short run. But without deeper reforms, corporate policies that permit bosses to fire people whose private conduct is viewed as objectionable or disagreeable could backfire in the long run.

Ultimately, expanding the power of the government, the bosses, or even the majority of workers is likely to end up harming the workers who have the least social power.

Moral Catastrophes and Progress

The past is full of moral catastrophes. 

The good news is that people seem to be getting better. Moral catastrophes like slavery, mass violence, genocidal war, the use of torture as punishment, and the denial of political equality are way less common today than they were in the past. As Michael Huemer argues, this is a sign of our collective progress toward adopting better, objectively correct values. 

The bad news is that people seem to be getting better, which suggests that we are probably living through moral catastrophes that we cannot recognize because we haven’t made enough progress yet. Evan G. Williams writes about this in “The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe”. He argues that even if it’s pretty unlikely that any particular practice is wrong, it’s also pretty plausible that something we’re doing is seriously wrong. Williams then writes,

Our descendants may well view us with the same repugnance as we view our slave-owning forefathers….The fastest way to end this catastrophe, so that our wrongdoing will stop sooner rather than later, is to build a society that makes rapid intellectual progress and is flexible enough to take decisive action when the need is recognized. (981)

 

On his view, this requires the cultivation of a marketplace of ideas that is more effective at enabling good ideas to outcompete bad ideas. Williams emphasizes the importance of investing in education, effectively communicating scientific theories to people, and discouraging social norms that make it hard for good ideas to gain wide currency. 

 

The bad news about Williams's bad news is that there are also barriers to progress within education, science, and culture. For example, it’s often unclear how much education actually promotes learning (see here and here). And it’s unclear that science is set up in a way that really rewards or advances the ideas that have the most merit (see here). And it’s unclear that increasing exposure to different viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas actually makes people better at evaluating claims in a nonpartisan way.

I think Williams is right about our present circumstances, and the value of institutions that foster 'rapid intellectual progress.' So what would an investment in intellectual progress look like? 

Here are two new models that aim to improve our current approach to intellectual investment. First, consider Collinson and Cowen's proposal for a discipline of Progress Studies. And second, there's Minerva's innovative approach to effective education. Avoiding moral catastrophe will not only require that we rethink our institutions, it also requires rethinking how we rethink things. 

SSC vs. NYT

 

Scott Alexander closed his blog, Slate Star Codex.

 

As he tells it, a reporter from the New York Times was writing a story about the blog and the reporter told him that the paper would reveal his full name in an article. (Scott Alexander is the blog author’s first and middle name, but he doesn’t use his last name on the blog). Alexander decided to close the blog in the hope that it would preserve his anonymity because he was afraid that publishing his last name would put him at risk of losing his job or that it could endanger his housemates. Alexander writes,

When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that. After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.

So he closed his blog in an attempt to preserve his anonymity.

 

Should the NYT have published Scott Alexander’s real name? Saying it’s “NYT policy” doesn’t seem very persuasive for two reasons. First, I couldn’t find NYT policy on this, but the policy I did find says that the NYT permits anonymity when there is a good reason for it (e.g., in criminal justice or national security contexts). Felix Salmon points to this statement, which also says that names can be withheld when people have good reasons.

 

The paper also refers to anonymous artists like Banksy or Elena Ferrante by using their pseudonyms. The NYT also uses stage names, like “Lady Gaga, 34” rather than “Stefani Germanotta, 34.” And the NYT recently published an article that included the line “The Chapo co-host Virgil Texas (he lives and works under that pseudonym)” and also withheld the name of the co-hosts then-girlfriend who works in media because “she wants to stay anonymous; the Chapo fans scare her.”

 

And second, even if there were some kind of policy, that wouldn’t settle the question of whether the NYT should require the use of real last names in cases like Alexander’s or the Chapo story. Instead of citing a policy, Journalists and editors need to use their own judgment to decide whether publishing someone’s real name is important enough for a story that it’s worth the harm it would cause.

 

Some people may say that the NYT shouldn’t publish Alexander's full name because it is doxxing, which is the term that he uses. I’m not sure about calling it doxxing though since lots of journalism publishes people’s real names associated with events or topics that they’d rather not have their name attached to. Journalists shouldn’t be expected to give their sources veto-power over the publication of names. When someone says they have a safety concern associated with being identified, that doesn’t always mean that they shouldn’t be identified. It means they think there’s a risk. Journalists and editors must then decide whether the news value of the story is worth the risk.  

But there’s also a difference between what people should be allowed to publish and what they should publish. Sometimes the newsworthiness of a story isn’t worth the risk. For example, the Washington Post recently published a story about a woman who wore blackface to a party two years ago. They published the woman’s real name, and as a result of the story, she lost her job. That strikes me as a case where it probably wasn’t worth it to publish a random person’s real name, given the balance between the news value of a story about a Halloween party that happened two years ago and the harm it caused the woman who was named.

 

And sometimes the balance between newsworthiness and respect for privacy can shift over time. This is why some newsrooms go through old content and unpublish some stories when the news value of a story is outweighed by the harm associated with making someone’s name permanently attached to the story.

These are often hard questions though. Journalists are likely to make mistakes in both directions-- granting anonymity when they shouldn’t and revealing identities when it’s really harmful. Of course, I support a culture of openness and speech and transparency, and I don’t think journalists should lose their jobs when they make a bad call and publish something they think is newsworthy. I’m just saying that there can be pretty strong moral reasons against publicizing people’s names or personal information.

 

In Alexander’s case, unless the news story really was about his true identity, it doesn’t seem like the news value of publishing his last name outweighs the harm Alexander says it would cause in his personal life. So they shouldn’t have planned to publish his last name. Or, if the story was about Alexander’s true identity, then it sounds like that wasn’t clearly communicated to Alexander. Either way, the NYT policy on pseudonyms is really unclear and it sounds like they made a mistake here.

 

This discussion of anonymity in the news also highlights the fact that reporters are always making normative judgments even if they purport to be just reporting the facts. Judgments about what is newsworthy and judgments about acceptable risk, for example, are moral judgments. To say that something is newsworthy is to say that it is the kind of information that people have an interest in knowing. To publish someone's name is to say that the value of privacy is outweighed by the value of transparency in this case. 

These value judgments are unavoidable in journalism. And newspapers aren't 'more objective' when they are unclear and reticent about the moral reasoning behind their editorial judgment. If newspapers really care about transparency and accountability, as they often claim, then they should also be transparent and accountable when it comes to their own values.