Asking too much of morality, con't

Alex writes:

I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few years ago, regarding ticking-time-bomb-torture. We were discussing the legality, not the morality, but there's some crossover. My opinion was that torture should never be legal, but that if the situation really demanded it, someone in the right position should just do it anyway. If the situation were really so dire, shouldn't there be at least one person willing to risk the consequences to their own life? The idea to me was that the legal code should embody the principles that we stand by, but not literally define the bounds of our actions. That's one of the advantages of living in a lenient, humanisitic government: we leave room for the fallibility of the laws themselves.

Anyway, he thought that this was bizarre, to consciously build a set of rules into our government that would `enforce' the wrong thing in certain explicit circumstances.

I don't see why your friend should think this was bizarre; it seems to me to be very common. Take, for instance, the law against stealing bread. Even if you are starving it is illegal for you to steal the bread. And yet, if your family was starving, and you had no other options, surely the moral thing to do would be to steal bread to feed them. And yet, you couldn't simply codify into law an exception that says you can steal bread if you are hungry: universally applied, you would essentially be legalizing bread riots, and would have no end of trouble in determining the legal definition of "starving". Of course the pragmatic thing is to keep the law as it is, with no exceptions, and to perhaps take other measures to prevent people from being in the position of having to steal bread in the first place (e.g., a food stamp program). THEN on top of this, as a final recourse, build into your technocratic legal system plenty of room for ad hoc leniency by adding such elements as a trial by jury or judicial discretion during sentencing (hiring nice cops wouldn't hurt, either).

I think what applies above applies to torture law, as well. The problem is that even if you only legalize torture in some explicit circumstances, there will inevitably be "torture creep", and you will start seeing torture in non-ticking-time-bomb cases, as well (and in fact, this is precisely what happened with the torture programs under the Bush administration). Better to keep the law as is and focus on the practical problem of making it so that we will never be in a ticking-time bomb scenario (many torture apologists would say that torture is justified in preventing the ticking-timb bomb scenario. But there's torture creep already!).

So, yeah: I think we're in agreement...

Asking too much of morality

Andrew Sullivan has a pretty interesting response to Sam Harris' claim that we should not rule out torture as an ethical choice in certain extreme circumstances.

To me, I look at this sort of position--that there are some "ticking time-bomb" scenarios in which torture should be sanctioned--and I start to ask myself if we're asking more of morality than it can give us. After all, human society is a big, complex, organic system. These kinds of systems defy description by analytically rigorous and consistent first principles--you see this all the time in our efforts to model or duplicate things with computers: the more organic something is, the harder it is to duplicate. Figuring out chess moves and modeling proteins comes easy, but things like natural language and even just simple walking turn out to be the difficult problems. With this in mind, it seems weird to me that we would think that there would be an analytic, derived-from-first-principles ethical system that perfectly provides a solution to every possible human choice and dilemma. In other words: even given that there is one true morality, it's weird to think that this morality is complete in the sense of the term used to describe algorithms (an algorithm is complete if it can find every possible solution).

What this means in practice is what we also find to be pretty obviously true: though moral principles guide us through life in general, they don't perfectly apply to every situation, and sometimes remain maddeningly silent on the best course of action. We tend to think of a "moral dilemma" as something we can find our way out of by applying some code of morality ever more judiciously, but it seems to me what causes the dilemma in the first place is the absence of clearly applicable morals. When we're in a dilemma--like the ticking-time bomb scenario--we're beyond morality's ability to help us. There is no "morally right" choice--there's just muddling through.

Note that what I'm saying here isn't that morality is relative or anything like that. It's as universal as you like. It's just that it's incomplete. We're used to the idea that for every choice, our morality can tell us which one is least bad--that morality always shows us the way out. But maybe there are times when there is no way out. There are times when you are--for lack of a better word--fucked. There are times, for example, when you are President and morality tells you that it is wrong to incinerate thousands upon thousands of innocent Japanese people, and yet you do it anyway. Morality tells you to do A, and yet no one in their right mind would do A. Does this mean the moral code that told you to do A can't be right? Only if you assume that the right moral code must be complete. But if you do away with that, another answer suggests itself: you had been ethically checkmated. There was no way out. You were simply fucked.

If this sounds like defeatism, I think things make a little more sense when we think about the crucial role that wisdom must play in exercising morality. Sometimes you end up in a dilemma--an ethical cul-de-sac--out of bad luck. Ask any hard-boiled noir detective, he'll tell you all about it. But sometimes you end up there because of your own foolishness and immorality. (Or maybe it's a little of both.) You can't just run amok and expect to be able to consult your little book of moral rules whenever you have to make a decision. You need to have the wisdom and foresight to avoid getting trapped in those cul-de-sacs in the first place. If you're in a ticking time-bomb situation, the real question isn't what the moral thing to do is--morals don't matter, you're going to torture the guy no matter what--the real question is, how did we get here? This guy's about to nuke a city. Where was the anti-nuclear proliferation strategy that would have stopped this from happening? What about other security measures? Why is this guy so pissed off that he wants to blow up a city?

To me the real sign that a code of morality is correct is that when you zoom out to the macro level and consider the events leading up to these impossible, no-way-out quandaries, it turns out that morality and wisdom work in harmony. It turns out that, if we had only adhered more closely to our code of morals, it would have led, in the long run, to wiser choices, and we would have avoided the ethical cul-de-sac altogether.

A moral code giving you the wrong answer in a highly specific, constrained, and contingent scenario doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't the right code; it could just mean that, through some combination of immorality, foolishness, and plain bad luck, it's already too late and there's no way out. You muddle through as best you can and at the end someone mutters in your ear, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

The military industrial complex jumps the shark

This story is fucking incredible:

But I was a central player in the Afghan war — and if our delivery didn't make it to Kabul, the entire strategy of building up the Afghanistan army was going to fail. It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn't know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.

Read it.

How a monotheistic God undermines itself by issuing universal proclamations

There is a strain of atheism that rejects belief in God not (only) on empirical grounds, but also because such a God could have no claim to any kind of moral authority. On this view, God is no different in principle than an all-powerful dictator, who issues laws that are not subject to rational scrutiny and cannot be changed by the people who must live under them.

The reply of the religious believer to this is that God is a fundamentally different kind of thing than a human dictator, such that God's actions cannot be morally evaluated in the same way a human being such as Saddam Hussein's actions can be morally evaluated. But this reply lays bare what is at the heart of the matter, which is an ontological disagreement about the possibility--and coherence--of there being fundamentally different kinds of things in the world where different metaphysical rules apply, versus an ontologically flat, materialistic world in which no chunk of matter has any metaphysical privilege over any other chunk of matter.

What I like about this atheist challenge is that it unveils the nub of the difficulty of trying to analytically compare contradicting ontological claims--the one has no truck with the other. For the atheist analytic descriptions of the divine cannot be differentiated from assertions of a profane magic that accompanies certain convenient objects and texts; for the believer, attempts to describe divine being itself run into the same difficulty as describing a sense modality to someone who congenitally lacks that modality--while you can build descriptions in the object layer with someone who shares access to the metalayer/substrate, you cannot build a description of the metalayer/substrate itself that is independent of a reference to a shared human experience. Religious Man and Profane Man find themselves on opposite sides of a communication barrier that cannot be overcome except by a profound change in one or the other's essential way of being.

However, this does not mean that we cannot tease out certain tensions in the religious believer's ontological framework, because certain kinds of assertions imply certain thing about one's ontology. What I am thinking of here is God's penchant for issuing laws that are universally applied--that is, applied to all actors, regardless of the actor's ontological standing. What a universal law ends up doing is ontologically flattening all that it applies to, because suddenly what matters is the action being done, independent of anything about the essential being of the thing doing the action. Murder is wrong; ok, but if it applies universally than it applies equally to a king and to a peasant, thus in this instance placing the two on the same level. In fact, I would go so far as to say that universality is the key driver of any materialistic, flat ontological viewpoint, precisely because of the ontologically equalizing process of factoring a thing's essential being out of the relevant equation.

In any case, the more condensed and monotheistic the God, the more flat will this God's universal proclamations render the ontological landscape. When a universal proclamation is divine in origin, the separation between the divine and the profane is reinforced. However, this separation is doubly reinforced by the fact that these proclamations do not apply to competing entities in the divine space--another, different set of proclamations governs these intramural squabbles within the divine space. So for example, the Hebrew God says "do not kill", which is a diktat to the profane world; however to deal with rival gods, is not a question of binding them to the same rules as the profane mortals must abide by, but rather, attacking them along the appropriate ontological vector: "do not worship those other gods". For an early monotheism that is struggling against a bevy of polytheistic rivals, then, the divine space is a large and bustling one and its protrusions into the profane world many: false idols abound. However, later on a mature monotheism becomes the victim of its own success: with all competing gods eliminated, the divine space contracts to a single point and loses its vibrancy. Without an element of drama to sustain it, it recedes from human awareness except as the 1-dimensional, inscrutable source of universal proclamations that now apply to the whole world--and flatten the whole world--except for that one tiny little dot.

And so the monotheistic religion enables its self-destruction by stultifying the divine and reducing its chaotic protrusions into a profane world increasingly bridled by human will, in the forms of scientific investigation, technological innovation, self-organization, and commodification. The atheist who accuses God of moral bankruptcy is representative of a new kind of humanity that emerges, blinking, in a flat materialistic world whose only essential purpose is to provide something for human wills to work on as they aimlessly proceed through history, eating and procreating and--if they're the lucky ones with material wealth--frittering away afternoons watching Iron Man sequals.

This is a funny caption

Levy's face.

(Via here.)

The pop-culture singularity

Patton Oswalt:

That’s when we’ll reach Etewaf singularity. Pop culture will become self-aware. It will happen in the A.V. Club first: A brilliant Nathan Rabin column about the worst Turkish rip-offs of American comic book characters will suddenly begin writing its own comments, each a single sentence from the sequel to A Confederacy of Dunces. Then a fourth and fifth season of Arrested Development, directed by David Milch of Deadwood, will appear suddenly in the TV Shows section of iTunes. Someone BitTorrenting a Crass bootleg will suddenly find their hard drive crammed with Elvis Presley’s “lost” grunge album from 1994. And everyone’s TiVo will record Ghostbusters III, starring Peter Sellers, Lee Marvin, and John Candy.

For a while now I've made mention of a certain quality of "self-generated-ness" that certain pop-culture artifacts have. Like keyboard cat. It feels like it spontaneously generated out of the primordial soup of the internet...

What Wikileaks reveals about the US

Says Glenn Greenwald:

As revealing as the disclosures themselves are, the reactions to them have been equally revealing. The vast bulk of the outrage has been devoted not to the crimes that have been exposed but rather to those who exposed them: WikiLeaks and (allegedly) Bradley Manning. A consensus quickly emerged in the political and media class that they are Evil Villains who must be severely punished, while those responsible for the acts they revealed are guilty of nothing. That reaction has not been weakened at all even by the Pentagon's own admission that, in stark contrast to its own actions, there is no evidence -- zero -- that any of WikiLeaks' actions has caused even a single death. Meanwhile, the American establishment media -- even in the face of all these revelations -- continues to insist on the contradictory, Orwellian platitudes that (a) there is Nothing New™ in anything disclosed by WikiLeaks and (b) WikiLeaks has done Grave Harm to American National Security™ through its disclosures.

• Continue reading

It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, "journalists" now vehemently believe that as well. In light of what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world about numerous governments, just fathom the authoritarian mindset that would lead a citizen -- and especially a "journalist" -- to react with anger that these things have been revealed; to insist that these facts should have been kept concealed and it'd be better if we didn't know; and, most of all, to demand that those who made us aware of it all be punished (the True Criminals) while those who did these things (The Good Authorities) be shielded.

Wikileaks must-reads

In case you haven't run into it, a seminal piece of commentary on Wikileaks and Julian Assange's mission is here--it's a long essay but well worth the read, and--BONUS--even makes a reference to The Wire (you can read the interesting account of how this obscure blog post came to dominate the commentariat here).

In general, you will want to keep up with Glenn Greenwald, who is the gold standard in civil rights advocacy. I have also found NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen to be insightful.

Also, the Atlantic has a post that contains a general summary of Wikileaks and a timeline of events so far, which you may find useful.

For continuing news on Wikileaks, Assange, and the revelations from the cables themselves, the best place to check is the Guardian.

The DDoS attacks aren't lie-ins--they're tea parties

Here Boing Boing contributor and all-around internet superstar Cory Doctorow talks about the recent DDoS attacks by Anonymous and whether they can be justified:

Doctorrow from REC Radiocentrum on Vimeo.

I think I mostly agree with everything he's saying here, though I would say that, though ultimately anonymous DDoS attacks are not a legitimate and effective tactic for the reasons he describes, it's also true that in rare cases it's more important to take a drastic, imperfect action than no action at all. For all the ethical hand-wringing and negative public reaction the attacks have induced, they have also made the issue of internet freedom and corporate control of political speech front-page reading in newspapers around the world, and the subject of discussion and debate in the blogs.

As Doctorow mentions in the video, supporters of the DDoS attacks have likened them to the lie-ins of the civil rights era, but to my mind a closer historical parallel isn't the calculated, well reasoned lie-ins of the 1960s but the cathartic "fuck you" impetuousness of the Boston Tea Party in 1773. As in today's case, that act of defiance--in which 342 chests of British East India Company tea were dumped into the ocean--was carried out anonymously and, it seems, without a whole lot of forethought:

While Samuel Adams tried to reassert control of the meeting, people poured out of the Old South Meeting House and headed to Boston Harbor. That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some of them thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water.[59]

A further similarity to today's DDoS attacks is that the Tea Party--which involved the destruction of private property--was not readily embraced by supporters of the Colonial cause, and did much to anger and unify the broader British consensus against them:

In Britain, even those politicians considered friends of the colonies were appalled and this act united all parties there against the colonies. The Prime Minister Lord North said, "Whatever may be the consequence, we must risk something; if we do not, all is over".[63] The British government felt this action could not remain unpunished, and responded by closing the port of Boston and putting in place other laws known as the "Coercive Acts".

In the colonies, Benjamin Franklin stated that the destroyed tea must be repaid, all 90,000 pounds. Robert Murray, a New York merchant went to Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the losses, but the offer was turned down.[64]

Like today's DDoS attacks, the Boston Tea Party was difficult to justify and, on its face, harmful to the cause it purported to defend. But its value was not in its academic correctitude or tactical efficacy, but rather in its function as a catalyst of events and the rallying effect that such a sheer act of bravado can have on the hardcore supporters of the cause. Consider the chain of events--of harsh British responses and resulting Colonial escalation--that the Tea Party helped set in motion:

The Boston Tea Party was a key event in the growth of the American Revolution. Parliament responded in 1774 with the Coercive Acts, which, among other provisions, closed Boston's commerce until the British East India Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea. Colonists in turn responded to the Coercive Acts with additional acts of protest, and by convening the First Continental Congress, which petitioned the British monarch for repeal of the acts and coordinated colonial resistance to them. The crisis escalated, and the American Revolutionary War began near Boston in 1775.

We must remember that when Anonymous launched the attacks, it was not working with the benefit of hindsight. There was no way to know how many people would end up joining the attacks, or if they would provoke the government into some kind of blundering over-reaction, or what. And yet, it was a near certainty that if no extraordinary action were taken, the government and its corporate proxies would continue business as usual and the establishment media would do little to challenge them. So it was a way to shake things up and perhaps introduce a little serendipity into the historical proceedings.

In the end, though of course it is important to dutifully rebuke the DD0S attacks, I would hope that rather than spend our energies heaping criticism on Anonymous and their flawed methods we would instead salute their pluck and turn our attention to a more constructive task: devising an ethical and tactically sound method of internet civil disobedience.

The erosion of civil liberties: we have slipped down the slope

Quick thought:

Generally speaking, the pattern for many civil liberties arguments is of the form, "we must protect the rights of X, for tomorrow the government may go after Y", where X is someone or something unsympathetic and universally reviled, and Y is someone or something seen as meriting praise and protection from government abuse. And so we protect Larry Flynt's right to publish filth so that some future muckraker may be protected; we give an undisputedly guilty monster of a human being all the trappings of a trial and due process to insulate some future target of a witch hunt from injustice; and so on. In all these cases, we apply a general prohibition on government power in order to protect against those relatively rare instances (well, hopefully they're rare) when government power really is misused to imprison the innocent or silence dissent.

It occurred to me that perhaps what has gotten me so wound up about the Wikileaks case is that--in my opinion at least--what we're witnessing is a violation of civil liberties against not a reviled X, but a praiseworthy Y. Since 9/11, throughout the Bush years and right on up through the Obama years to today, we as a society--and the political and media establishment--have stood idly by while the government has opened up huge exceptions into the general prohibitions on its powers--the prohibitions whose very generality is the means of protection from government abuses. And now we're seeing those exceptions expand and swallow up the legal system whole, to the point where now a media organization, Wikileaks--who in the case of Cablegate has done nothing different than any other media organization--must struggle to remain online as one corporation after another bows to government pressure and withdraws its services from Wikileaks.

Even if you disagree with me that Wikileaks is serving a legitimate role, the government's due-process-free campaign to silence the organization should be causing alarm bells to go off. Should the government's campaign be successful, a precedent will be set that could allow it to target (or threaten to target) mainstream publications like the New York Times in the future. Of course, at that point we would have fallen very far down the civil libertarians' slippery slope. But as the Wikileaks case shows, we've fallen quite a ways already.

The corporate enablers--and disablers--of free speech

A few days ago I wrote a lengthy comment responding to a post by Wendy Kaminer called "Wikileaks and the Unfree Market". In that post, she observes that "corporate control over speech is nothing new":

Authors and journalists in the pre-digital age were dependent on publishers willing to disseminate their work -- without publishing support, they were mere street corner pamphleteers.... Still, recent demonstrations of corporate power over WikiLeaks seemed to resonate with the force of revelation, mocking any lingering illusions of the Internet as a frontier free from corporate as well as state control.

Yes, it's true that the Internet potentially offers significantly larger audiences to electronic pamphleteers than they'd ever find on any street corner, even in Times Square; and for better and worse, a few break through, thanks to their demagoguery or thoughtfulness, marketing acumen or luck. But the Internet is an ocean, and without a berth on a corporate or corporate sponsored ship, most people will quickly sink, or swim unnoticed. And, while the street is a public place in which the government's powers of eviction are limited by First Amendment rights, the Internet has always been (pardon the metaphor shift) a gated community. If virtually anyone can enter, the right to remain and speak your mind is generally subject to corporate control, as the WikiLeaks fracas has shown.

...

I'm not dismissing concerns about the threat that corporate control and homogenization of speech poses to the flow of information and dissent. Having worked as a freelance writer for some 30 years, I am only too keenly aware of marketplace censorship. But it's a fact of life, and First Amendment editorial freedoms, which the private press enjoys.... There is no significant political constituency for free speech on the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is right: "Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary." But we the people, not private corporations, are the weakest links in the chain.

My response, in which I try to make the argument that there is in fact something unprecedented going on here:

Wendy, I think you are mistaken in viewing Wikileaks' position as no different in principle than that of a pre-digital age individual "dependent on publishers willing to disseminate their work". Wikileaks is not a single author or publisher--it is itself a media organization, no different in principle (I argue) than the New York Times.

Suppose Lieberman had called for all companies to sever ties with the New York Times, so that the NYT suddenly found nobody could pay them using a credit card; their bank accounts were frozen; their domain name was deleted by their domain name provider; and that whoever they rent their servers from dropped them as a customer, essentially hounding the NYT from the internet. Does this strike you as analogous to a pre-digital age author who cannot find a publisher for his political pamphlet? It seems to me the proper pre-digital age analogy would be if the government told all paper and ink companies to stop selling their wares to a particular newspaper, and took steps (freezing accounts, making it difficult to transfer money) to keep that newspaper from functioning on a day-to-day basis. To my knowledge such a snuffing-out of a publisher, orchestrated by the US government in concert with corporate interests, is indeed unprecedented.

I take your point that free speech has always been dependent on the distribution mechanisms provided by corporate entities. But what has changed is the degree of this dependence, and the higher-ordered-ness of the dependence. In the pre-digital age, you would need money of course to print a newspaper, but political and cultural norms rendered the idea outrageous that the government could suffocate the operation by denying it the raw materials it needs to function or the financial infrastructure (bank accounts, credit transfers, loans, etc.) is needs to survive as a business. In other words, the individual was dependent on a wealthy corporate publisher; but the corporate publisher was not dependent on some higher, more powerful corporate entity. What we are seeing in the Wikileaks case is unprecedented and, I think, extremely alarming: now political speech is at the mercy of entities further upstream in the corporate food chain (Visa, MasterCard, Amazon), handing the government a far more powerful means for controlling political speech than anything that has come before.

My feeling is that large corporations like Amazon and MasterCard--that provide a platform for some general activity that is abstracted from the specifics of the particular activities that take place on the platform--do not like being in the position of free-speech arbiter or government-enforcer. I think their preferred outcome would be a law that ties their hands and prevents them legally from meddling in cases such as these without some kind of judicial court order, thereby protecting them from the possibility of political recriminations for not complying with the government. For example, in the current case, Amazon would have simply said to Lieberman: "Sorry! We legally cannot kick Wikileaks off our servers. You have to get a court order for that."

I would just add a couple of things. First, interestingly enough it turns out that the New York Times rents its server space from none other than--you guessed it--Amazon. So that comparison turned out to be pretty apt: if the government can get Amazon to kick Wikileaks off its servers, what's stopping it, in principle, from getting Amazon to kick the New York Times off its servers?

Second, it is worth pointing out that, ironically, the leaked cables themselves provide an insight into the ways that large corporations like Visa and MasterCard can be beholden to the US government. According to the Guardian, documents show that the US government was actively involved in lobbying the Russian legislature on Visa's and MasterCard's behalves, to ensure that the card payment companies were not "adversely affected" by some proposed legislation there. This clearly illustrates that for an international corporation to take a stand against a government request--however informally or implicitly made--is to risk political recriminations in the form of losing out to one's competitors when it comes to special favors such as these.

Wikileaks awakes me from my blogmatic slumber

Oh hi there.

A little more than a year ago Izott went silent, partly because of a conscious decision to spend less time on the internets, but mostly because I had become disillusioned and bored with politics in general. I had always meant to write a conclusionary post to tie things up properly, but just never got around to it. So Izott has been collecting dust and the odd Chinese spam comment ever since.

Now, though, with this Wikileaks story, I'm motivated to write a few posts so that I can get my thoughts straight about the matter. It's a very important story, I feel, and one that deals with a pretty foundational basic right--freedom of speech--which is not a topic that has really come up in a serious or interesting way since I started blogging. For the first time in a while, there's something new under the sun in politics.

San Fernando Valley REPRESENT

Derek Fisher lives in the Valley:

Q: OK, quick break from questions about your age and whether you're over the hill. I hear you live way out in the San Fernando Valley. What's that, like, an hour to practice every morning? I was born in the Valley and I like it there. But you know, like, there's kind of a stigma to living there.

A: I think it's just a certain lifestyle that I think is important for when you have a family and kids. Then again, even before I was married, I was in the Valley, too. I think being from Little Rock, Arkansas, it's important for there to be grass and trees and a little bit of a slower feel to where I live as opposed to being in the city in a penthouse-townhouse kind of place.

---

Q: Would you still live there now if you didn't have the family?

A: No, Even though I'd be drawn to that area I've learned a lot more of how important it is to manage your rest and your body and your time. So two to three hours out of the day in the car wouldn't be at the top of the list, but for them it's more than worth it.

I wonder if he hangs out at Twain's.

Prices come to parking in SF

I was really excited to discover today that San Francisco is implementing a plan to build an integrated system of "smart parking meters" that will be able to track parking capacity in real time, and also adjust prices depending on parking demand. So not only will you be able to see online how many and which parking spaces are available, but higher prices in peak periods will ensure that there is always parking spaces readily available (and in slow periods, lower prices will ensure that parking capacity is being used efficiently).

The program is in the pilot phase right now, and will come online in a few neighborhoods around the city this summer (including the Mission, between 16th and 24th).

Generally speaking I'm in favor of any and all policies that do something to set a proper price on driving--whether that means a carbon tax, tolls, market-priced parking, etc. So long as we continue to subsidize driving by offering cheap gas, free roads, and free parking (including the government mandated building of parking structures and parking lots), we'll be stuck in sprawling, trafficky cities that don't work very well. Setting a price on these scarce goods--parking space, road space, etc.--will change people's behavior, encouraging more carpooling, more public transit usage, more biking, and more off-peak usage of the city's roads.

Or at least, so the theory goes. It will be interesting to see what the data from the pilot program ends up telling us.

is/ought

Generally speaking, I'm sympathetic to Sam Harris. I read The End of Faith, and found it to be pretty well thought-out and argued--a useful book.

However, recently he did a TED talk in which he argued that science can answer moral questions, and I must say I find his main argument and especially his responses to critics to be pretty underwhelming. You can read one such response here.

Something especially troubling is his insistence that there really are huge moral stakes attached to this philosophical dispute--so much so that he believes people who he disagrees with should be characterized as amoral monsters who condone the hypothetical blinding of innocent people:

At the conclusion of my talk, I fell into debate with another invited speaker, who seemed, at first glance, to be very well positioned to reason effectively about the implications of science for our understanding of morality. She holds a degree in genetics from Dartmouth, a masters in biology from Harvard, and a law degree, another masters, and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of biology from Duke. This scholar is now a recognized authority on the intersection between criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. Here is a snippet of our conversation, more or less verbatim:

She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?

Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of increasing or decreasing wellbeing—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human wellbeing.

She: But that’s only your opinion.

Me: Okay… Let’s make it even simpler. What if we found a culture that ritually blinded every third child by literally plucking out his or her eyes at birth, would you then agree that we had found a culture that was needlessly diminishing human wellbeing?

She: It would depend on why they were doing it.

Me (slowly returning my eyebrows from the back of my head): Let’s say they were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In their scripture, God says, “Every third must walk in darkness.”

She: Then you could never say that they were wrong.

Such opinions are not uncommon in the Ivory Tower.

I think Harris is confused here about what function a philosophical argument like this serves--specifically, the sort of skeptical argument offered here by his interloqueter (in this case, skepticism about universal morality/grounding for cross-cultural moral claims). The point of a skeptical argument isn't to argue that such skepticism is justified or that we should walk around actually believing it; rather, it's to draw attention to an inconsistency or lack of explanation in our way of thinking about things. One of my favorite philosophers, Barry Stroud, likened it to Meno's paradox: the point isn't to seriously contend that two objects can never touch (since the closing distance needs to be infinitely halved), but rather to draw attention to an apparent contradiction--or at least bit of weirdness--in our conceptions of numbers, distance, etc. Here Harris being horrified at his interlocutor's skepticism regarding the ability to morally condemn his hypothetical cruel society would be like someone responding to Meno by saying, "I refute it thus", and knocking two rocks together--in both cases, they are missing the point of the exercise.

(Indeed, I think proof that Harris did not understand the point of his interlocutor's questioning is given by the fact that he doesn't include enough of the conversation to understand what the interlocutor was getting at. Rather than turn on his heel, Harris' next question should have been: but that is a counter-intuitive answer; you would think you would be able to make a moral condemnation of the society in such an extreme case. Explain to me why you find such a condemnation is problematic. I will be charitable and assume that you do indeed substantively believe it is wrong to blind people for no good reason.)

I find it hard to believe that Harris' interlocutor is truly a "moral relativist"--that she gives an uncomplicated shrug of the shoulders to cruelties perpetrated by foreign cultures. I also find it hard to believe that Sam Harris truly believes his interlocutor has such a set of beliefs--which makes his pretensions of horror and outrage so tiresome. The truth is, there is quite a lot of distance between someone's avowed philosophical beliefs on a relatively esoteric point in analytic philosophy and someone's actual substantive positions on the various political and moral questions of the day. I'm sure there is someone out there who considers themself to be a proud "moral relativist" or something along those lines, but who nevertheless has a substantive set of beliefs that are not very different from Harris'--I would not call this person any less moral for staking out that philosophical position. Nor would I consider someone who naively doesn't think at all about the validity of their moral claims less moral than someone who thinks a lot about it, all else being equal. Harris is caught up in the melodrama of his own intellectual quest, and is forgetting that real actions and political beliefs make moral monsters, not esoteric philosophical claims.

Of course, Harris' intent seems precisely to infuse his project to science-ize morality with a fierce moral urgency--he wants results, dammit! There are women forced to wear sacks in Afghanistan! All true enough. But if he really cares about those substantive issues--and they are of course serious issues to think about and take action on--then he must know that arguing for a philosophical grounding of morality in science has to be the most ineffective, roundabout way of addressing them of all time. It's not like on Monday you come up with a knock-down argument of Hume's is/ought distinction, submit it to Philosophy Today on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the US government is meticulously implementing your program. Philosophy in general is an ivory tower activity. Thinking it's not is exactly the sort of thing that someone in an ivory tower would think. So Harris' fierce moral urgency shtick is truly misplaced.

I acknowledge this hasn't been a substantive critique of Harris' main argument so much as griping about the way he has conducted himself. But I do think there is something very much awry when someone comes away from a philosophical tiff believing that the person they just spoke to was History's Greatest Monster, when in fact it was probably just a nice lady with lots of advanced degrees.

PS: I'm sure Sam Harris is very smart and all, but I'm also sure that David Hume was probably about a hundred times smarter. And unlike scientific fields such as physics, philosophy doesn't "advance" in a Kuhnian way that renders important conclusions quaint and invalidated years later. It's not like Hume was theorizing about humors in the body or something that a school child could refute today; his epistemological arguments are actually alive and kicking still, and difficult to get a full and complete understanding of, even for dedicated scholars. Philosophy is hard! And yet from this obnoxious passage, you would think that philsophy was a relatively straightforward exercise, and Hume some sort of obscure crank:

Many of my critics piously cite Hume’s is/ought distinction as though it were well known to be the last word on the subject of morality until the end of time. Indeed, Carroll appears to think that Hume’s lazy analysis of facts and values is so compelling that he elevates it to the status of mathematical truth:

Attempts to derive ought from is [values from facts] are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake.

This is an amazingly wrongheaded response coming from a very smart scientist. I wonder how Carroll would react if I breezily dismissed his physics with a reference to something Robert Oppenheimer once wrote, on the assumption that it was now an unmovable object around which all future human thought must flow. Happily, that’s not how physics works. But neither is it how philosophy works. Frankly, it’s not how anything that works, works.

And:

I must say, the vehemence and condescension with which the is/ought objection has been thrown in my face astounds me. And it confirms my sense that this bit of bad philosophy has done tremendous harm to the thinking of smart (and not so smart) people. The categorical distinction between facts and values helped open a sinkhole beneath liberalism long ago—leading to moral relativism and to masochistic depths of political correctness.

Look Sam Harris: it's obviously just fine to challenge arguments made by great thinkers. I mean, that's what you're supposed to do. But have some effing respect. "This bit of bad philosophy"? And when you launch a big argument about how science can be a grounding for morality, and you don't call your argument, "My Controversial Argument Against Hume's Is/Ought Distinction", shouldn't you expect the first words out of everyone's mouth to be, "what about Hume's is/ought distinction"?