7.8.04

Conditional Consent

Why is consent assumed to be binary -- you either consent completely to something, or you totally reject it? Will Baude asks:

What do you do when a nation wishes to enact a code of law based on Shari'a, but also wishes to consult with you-- an American criminal law professor or student with (presumably) more enlightened sensibilities-- about what that code should look like? Does the potential to liberalize and moderate the code, to find effective ways of bringing due process and other such stuff where it might not otherwise be, outweigh the necessity of affiliating oneself with dubious laws that one would not otherwise support?

Let's make up a concrete example. Say the Maldivians are inclined to interpret the Islamic requirement of female modesty to require a burqa (1), while the law professor is able to come up with a plausible interpretation of Shari'a that says only a headscarf is necessary (2), but allowing women to dress as they please (3) is clearly inconsistent with Shari'a*. The "don't do it" position is based on the idea that, in recommending the choice of (2), one implies that (2) is a good choice. But this is an incorrect implication. All choices -- and thus all consent -- are made within the context of certain constraints on the available menu of options. You can't simply decide whether each option is good in an independent sense, then select an unqualifiedly good option from the set of actually available choices. For the professor to choose the headscarf means nothing more than that, when a burqa is the only other option, the headscarf is better (and perhaps that the headscarf would beat anything that is worse than a burqa, though Amartya Sen makes a good case that transitivity of preferences doesn't always have to hold). Thus, to recommend headscarves to the Maldives is not "affiliating oneself with dubious laws." On a moral level, there is no support for Shari'a implied in considering questions whose premise is that Shari'a applies.

Now, even if one personally rejects the idea of non-contextual binary consent, there may be value in turning down the Maldives job because others will percieve your work through the binary lens. The Maldivians will focus on the fact that the professor recommended headscarves and treat that as an endorsement of the policy, ignoring the constraints under which that decision was made and the professor's stated objection to those constraints.

This principle applies more widely than writing codes of Shari'a. Consider the example of people who refuse to vote because that would imply their consent to what they see as a corrupt or oppressive political system. They're wrong if they take a "clean hands" view and believe that voting would be morally supportive of the system. But they have more ground to stand on if their concern is that voting is causally supportive of the system because it leads others to believe that they morally support the system in a non-contextual way. Refusing to consider which of two evils is the lesser is a message-sending act, not a position of moral purity. (In fact, rejecting the principle is guided by a meta-application of it -- given the constraint that "don't interpret my choice as unqualified consent" is not a realistic option, you choose "no choice" over implying unqualified consent to the lesser evil).

*I have no idea what Islamic law actually says on the topic. People more knowledgeable about it can come up with their own set of possible proposals that fit.
Stentor Danielson, 12:01,

Bonny Atlantis

Ireland Is Lost Island Of Atlantis, Says Scientist Atlantis, the legendary island nation over whose existence controversy has raged for thousands of years, was actually Ireland, according to a new theory by a Swedish scientist. ... Geographer Ulf Erlingsson, whose book explaining his theory will be published next month, says the measurements, geography, and landscape of Atlantis as described by Plato match Ireland almost exactly. ... His book, "Atlantis from a Geographer's Perspective: Mapping the Fairy Land," calculates the probability Plato would have had access to geographical data about Ireland as 99.98 percent. -- via Moe Lane

I used to be a fan of the Crete/Thera theory, and it still seems like the most plausible real-world location for Atlantis. But I also have to wonder whether the assumption that Atlantis is based on a real place is accurate. Schliemann's vindication of the stories about Troy seems to have pushed us too far toward the "myths are amateur history" side. For one, if Plato had such accurate geographical information about Ireland (or Crete), you'd think he'd also have heard the little factoid that Ireland has not in fact sunk under the ocean.

There's also the fact that we only have one ancient source for the Atlantis story -- Plato's Critias. I don't know how many sources attest most of the myths we know of from the Greeks, but it's telling that Atlantis isn't typically included in overviews of Greek mythology (at least the ones I've seen). And neither are the other myths that Plato uses in his dialogues, like the one about how people were once all siamese twins and love is the search for your lost half, from the Symposium. If Atlantis is a hazily remembered tale of Ireland or Crete, you'd expect to find it showing up, at least in reference, more often. It's quite possible that Plato used bits of real history and geography as inspiration, but in that case his Atlantis is to Crete or Ireland like Toilkien's Middle Earth is to the European middle ages.

The way that Atlantis has captured people's imaginations and made them want to believe in it demonstrates that Plato understood what makes myths work. Myths are not simply attempts to accurately remember history that get distorted by the telephone game of oral history. Neither are they pseudo-scientific hypotheses about the natural world. Both history and nature furnish raw material, of course, but myths grow and survive because of their ability to reflect on contemporary society and give people a sense of their proper place within the world.
Stentor Danielson, 10:41,

4.8.04

Travel

I'll be in New Jersey for a few days doing research. Posting will resume this weekend.
Stentor Danielson, 01:25,

Fire Priorities

Bright Sparks Rethink Wildfire Strategy The United States needs to revise its approach to forest wildfires, a group of scientists declared on Monday. They are proposing an action plan for thwarting and controlling such fires, based on growing research. ... the team proposes the creation of zones with different levels of risk. Prevention money and efforts would be focused first on high-risk areas where people live, and would include measures such as using fire-resistant building materials. In neighbouring zones, the group recommends restricting animal grazing, closing roads and carefully thinning out young, flammable trees. They propose leaving back-country forest intact, either allowing fires to burn out or deliberately torching certain areas. 'Salvage logging' of burned trees should be stopped, the researchers warn, because it damages soils and the ecosystem.

Those strike me as pretty obvious recommendations.
Stentor Danielson, 01:23,

What Celibate Guys Don't Know

It looks like the Vatican has been reading Mary Douglas. In a recent letter on the perils of feminism, the Pope's top theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, explains the official Catholic view of gender, which is firmly rooted in preserving fundamental distinctions, such as that between male and female.

Introducing the first of her well-stated denunciations of Ratzinger's letter, Echidne says:

I'm very happy to be enlightened about these questions by a man who is a celibate, of course.

The sentiment is echoed in the comments by Bryan:

I have a real hard time accepting the opinion of someone who has foresworn normal relations with half the population of the planet and then presumes to lecture others on that group.

Now, to some degree Ratzinger brings this line of attack on himself. He argues that women's nature is tied up in motherhood, and talks about "the spousal character of the body, in which the masculinity or femininity of the person is expressed." Unless he's been doing something the Pope doesn't know about, Ratzinger has disclaimed any personal acquaintance with the subject matter at hand.

From the perspective of someone who thinks womanhood is about more than making babies, though, the comments from Echidne and Bryan seem strange. The only way to understand women is to have sex with them?

I agree with the general principle that a person's experience affects how likely they are to know about a topic and how justified their pronouncements on it are. What's I don't agree with is the idea that the basic relationship between men and women is a sexual one, and that knowledge about the other sex is contingent upon that kind of relationship.

I would say that relying on sexual relationships for information about the opposite sex is likely to give you quite a skewed view of what the other half is like. I don't exactly have a long sexual history at the moment, but even if I were to wind up sleeping with a lot of people, my lovers would hardly constitute a representative sample of women. There are lots of types of women -- conservatives, those substantially older or younger than myself, etc. -- who are no less women despite the fact that I would be unlikely to want to have sex with them. Likewise, if Ratzinger were to get married, it would likely be to a submissive woman who believed deeply in Catholic orthodoxy. For one to be able to discover the essence of a sex by being intimate with one of its members, sex differences would have to be consistent and obvious.

A variety of interactions with members of the opposite sex (as well as with your own sex, as a sort of control treatment) is necessary to build up an empirical picture of what characteristics (if any) pertain to them as a group. A similar process applies to making generalizations about your own sex as well -- I can say precious little about maleness based strictly on my own life, but things get better if I can compare notes with other men.

I'm no fan of the requirement of priestly celibacy, and it's certainly plausible that Ratzinger has little contact of any kind with women. But there's no necessary reason why a celibate person (or a strictly homosexual one) can't learn a good deal about the opposite sex.
Stentor Danielson, 01:21,

3.8.04

OSP Ahoy

I've done two posts at Open Source Politics recently: one on how Tom Ridge just isn't rich enough, and one on third party candidates on the Pennsylvania ballot.
Stentor Danielson, 11:17,

1.8.04

I Didn't Even Have To Googlebomb

Looks like I've finally made it to the big time with this politics and environmentalism blogging thing. I'm the number 1 result when you Google "Kerry Kyoto."
Stentor Danielson, 19:19,