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The Right to Choose the Lesser Evil

2010-02-03T15:53:00.001-07:00

I recently finished Kristin Shrader-Frechette's book Environmental Justice, which aims to apply the sort of liberal-egalitarian perspective dominant in political philosophy -- her particular version is referred to as the "Principle of Prima Facie Political Equality" -- to cases such as hazardous waste dump siting. I found her chapter on paternalism and the case of nuclear waste storage facilities on Native American land helped to clarify some of my own thinking by contrast with her perspective.

In the chapter in question, Shrader-Frechette uses the case study of tribes like the Skull Valley Goshute and Mescalero Apache who have applied to host Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) facilities for nuclear waste to examine when we can exercise justified paternalism toward people who seem to be taking a risk onto themselves. Paternalism involves restricting someone's behavior for their own (alleged) good. Shrader-Frechette concludes that we can paternalistically block tribes from hosting these facilities. I think we cannot.

Much of the chapter (like a number of other chapters) actually consists of attempts to do an end-run around the chapter's ostensible theoretical focus, for example by raising allegations that the tribe's "consent" to the MRS facility was illegitimately strong-armed through by a pro-nuclear minority. This may well be true, and would certainly justify her desired conclusion for this particular case -- no MRS on Native land -- but would also make this case irrelevant to the question of paternalism. So let's focus on whether paternalism would be justified if a tribe were to legitimately and democratically (however we end up defining that) seek out the establishment of an MRS facility. We can also stipulate that the risks will accrue to the host tribe only, as the possibility of effects on third parties is raised as a non-paternalistic reason to block the tribes from accepting an MRS facility. Shrader-Frechette's discussion is also somewhat clouded by her view that people in the eastern US, as the primary beneficiaries of nuclear power, ought to accept the risks of storing the waste -- so finding a way to block storage in the west would help force easterners to accept what she sees as their obligation to host.

Shrader-Frechette argues that the core issue is whether the tribe's decision meets the standards for informed consent, on an analogy to the medical field. I agree. We also agree that were someone to be grossly misinformed, their informed consent would be compromised. Neither she nor other authors I've read writing about the Skull Valley Goshutes and Mescalero Apaches raise misinformation as a major concern in this case. Were it so, it would generally only justify attempts to correct the misinformation, though paternalism may be justified if the misinformed person is in immediate danger of making an irreversible decision on the basis of the misinformation (Shrader-Frechette uses the example of tackling a person about to unknowingly walk off a cliff).

Where we disagree is our analysis of what constitutes the consent part of informed consent. Shrader-Frechette defines a free choice in terms of having at least one other reasonable alternative. Thus she concludes that very poor people are unable to give informed consent to economic offers that come with significant risks. They are, in her view, essentially coerced by their poverty into accepting a deal that someone who had the option of a decent income without the accompanying risk would not accept. She applies this reasoning equally to poor black communities in other chapters.

From my point of view, the justification for the informed consent requirement rests on people's right to decide for themselves what situations they prefer. No outside authority can dictate to me what I ought to like better between several options. Thus, the criterion for evaluating whether someone is making a free choice is to ask whether they had the ability to decide which option they like better, and the opportunity to select that preferred option. Free choice may be compromised by factors that impair one's ability to make rational decisions about one's own fate -- say being overwhelmed by emotion, or pathologically emotionless (a la Phineas Gage) -- though the burden of proof is on the aspiring paternalist. But nothing about the absolute or relative attractiveness of the various options being evaluated can compromise the freedom of choice. Thus, people have a right to choose the lesser of two evils, if the only options available to them are evils. This principle for me settles the version of the tribal MRS case at issue here even without getting into the issue of tribal sovereignty.

Shrader-Frechette's analysis creates the weird situation that having a lesser evil that is clearly lesser than the greater evil status quo is grounds for rejecting the lesser-evil-chooser's right to choose. If the nuclear companies offered the tribes a worse deal in terms of economic compensation, it seems that the deal would be less coercive in the sense Shrader-Frechette is concerned about, since it does less to alleviate the tribe's desperate poverty, and paternalism would be less justified -- a rather odd result. Recognizing that one of the available options is much better than the other is to me an expression of free choice, not a coercive situation. Shrader-Frechette's reasoning seems to suggest that if a decision is obvious (and hence predictable) it wasn't free because no-one in their right mind would have done otherwise.

Consider a more classic case of alleged coercion-by-skewed-options: someone puts a gun to your head and makes a trustworthy promise that they will shoot you if, and only if, you fail to eat a piece of uranium. Obviously this is a bad situation to be in. But if "get shot" and "eat uranium" are my only options, it seems that I ought to have a right to save myself by eating the uranium (and a right to refuse and get shot if the prospect of contracting cancer later in life is sufficiently horrifying to me). For a paternalist to try to protect me from cancer by stopping me from choosing to eat the uranium would just leave me dead of a gunshot. Similarly, for a paternalist to stop the Skull Valley Goshute or Mescalero Apache from accepting an MRS facility would just leave them poorer -- which, in the version of the case we're considering here, they've told us is the option they like less.

In the gun case, the obvious solution is to somehow remove the gun from the picture. Then our options are "don't eat it and live" or "eat it." In this case you wouldn't need a paternalist to stop you from eating it (though I also think you'd have a right to eat it if that's what you genuinely wanted to do). When someone is choosing a lesser evil because they don't have a good option, the best response is to give them a better option. So rather than paternalistically blocking tribes from accepting MRS facilities, we should be trying to correct the problems of land degradation and lack of economic opportunity that make accepting an MRS facility the most attractive option. I'm sure Shrader-Frechette would agree that fixing the background conditions in this way would be great. Where we disagree is what to do about the choice to host an MRS facility given that the background conditions are not yet fixed.

The principle of a right to choose the lesser evil applies in other contexts. I originally started thinking this way when considering people forced by economic necessity into prostitution. Faced with the options of "poor but no sex with strangers*" versus "making ends meet but with sex with strangers," a person has the right to decide they'd prefer the latter. To react to the acknowledged ceteris paribus badness of sex with strangers by trying to prevent the person from engaging in prostitution just makes their situation worse by forcing them into the option that they have already declared to be the worst. If you are really concerned that economic necessity is forcing people into prostitution, the solution is to create non-prostitution options for them to make ends meet. This is, admittedly, quite difficult. But if you can't accomplish it, then you have to accept that people can make their own choice about which evil is the lesser.

One caveat to this discussion is that I can imagine situations in which blocking the lesser evil creates an opening for an even better option. This is often raised as a rationale for drug testing student athletes. If the options are "say no, and lose the respect of your peers" versus "do drugs and gain their respect," many students may find doing drugs to be the lesser evil. But if drugs are banned, that may lead the peers in question to cut a non-user some slack (because they respect "I don't want to get kicked off the football team" as a more legitimate comeback than "I'm high on life"), making the options "say no and still retain the respect of your peers" and "do drugs and get extra respect." In this sort of case, though, a well-informed chooser would -- if asked -- request the paternalistic ban. Nothing that Shrader-Frechette, or any other author I've read, says suggests that this sort of situation applies to tribes seeking MRS facilities. The effect of a ban on MRS facilities on Native land would be to narrow, not reconfigure, their available options.

*Take "sex with strangers" to be my awkward way of shortening "sex with people they wouldn't have had sex with for its own sake but are willing to for money."

Cheesecake Truck Version of the Trolley Problem

2010-01-27T16:00:00.002-07:00

In my Environmental Justice class today, I used the standard "Trolley Problem" to illustrate the fact that utilitarianism would require you to sacrifice one life to save five. The students then asked what utilitarianism had to say about the distribution of benefits. So I asked them to imagine that the runaway trolley was a cheesecake truck, and instead of killing people, it was dropping cheesecakes everywhere. In this case, a utilitarian would have an obligation to make sure the switch stays switched to the track with the five people, because it's better for five people to get cheesecakes than only one person.

Begging the question against vegans

2010-01-25T18:58:00.002-07:00

Renee at Womanist Musings expands her eviscerations of PeTA into an attempt to take on veganism as a whole. The post is a mix of familiar and less familiar anti-vegan arguments, but taken as a whole they make a nice illustration of the way much criticism of veganism begs the core question: is it wrong to kill animals for food?

Renee sets up the issue when she declares that despite her anti-vegan stance she "would certainly not support intentional animal cruelty." But of course nobody supports animal cruelty -- cruelty is by definition unacceptable, so anything you think is OK to do to animals is not cruel. The real question is whether killing animals for food is a form of cruelty. Renee would say no, whereas ethical vegans (that is, people who avoid meat for animal rights reasons) would say yes. If killing animals for food is not cruel, that by itself is a sufficient argument against ethical veganism. But Renee's other arguments only work if you already assume that ethical veganism is unjustified. If, on the other hand, you start from the premise that killing animals for food is wrong, then Renee's arguments lead to different conclusions than the ones she tries to draw. Note that my purpose in this post is not to defend the premise that killing animals is wrong, but merely to show that other arguments don't have any purchase (at least in terms of showing why vegans should not advocate veganism to others) unless you can rebut that premise.

Start with the distinction Renee draws between vegans who "moralize," who are her targets, and vegans for whom not eating meat is just a "lifestyle choice," who she is OK with. The term "moralize" is a question-begging one, as in left/liberal discourse it refers to unjustified imposition of one's values on another. But whether vegans trying to get others to adopt their values is unjustified, and hence counts as moralizing, is exactly what's at issue. If there is a serious injustice in the world, then it is prima facie justified, and therefore prima facie not moralizing, to try to get others to stop contributing to that injustice. Therefore, once you accept the ethical vegan answer to the question of the wrongness of killing animals for food, you have established that trying to get others to be vegan (which would correct the injustice of widespread killing of animals) is prima facie justified (subject to tactical questions about appropriate time, place, and manner of pursuing said goal). To label this activity "moralizing" is simply to restate the fact that you disagree with the vegan answer to the question of the morality of killing animals. Vegans only "moralize" if veganism was unjustified to start with.

Renee then raises ethical concerns related to food other than animal rights, which can be summed up as worker rights and environmental concerns. In part, this is the old "you can't be perfect, so why even try?" rationale. But it also evidences the question-begging issue. Renee points out that industrial farming is bad for the environment and bad for farmworkers. I agree. I'll even grant her that the "human cost to veganism and or vegetarianism ... is rarely to never discussed" among many vegans. If you start from the premise that there's nothing wrong with killing animals for food, then this just points up an absurd hypocrisy among vegans. But if you start from the premise that killing animals is wrong, then it highlights the need to broaden our idea of justice with respect to the food system. And in fact many vegans -- from Noemi and other writers at Vegans of Color to notorious clueless-rich-white-guy Hugo Schwyzer -- have written about these very concerns. Renee proposes eating locally as an alternative form of food justice. But veganism and local eating are hardly mutually exclusive. I'd be willing to bet that the proportion of vegans at your average CSA pickup or farmer's market is higher than in the general population.

This is linked to a ridiculous factual error in the post. Renee charges that to be sustainably vegan, one would have to eat nothing but root vegetables all winter. Having lived in southern Arizona with a wonderful year-round CSA, I laughed when I read that. But in fact it's also false for people living in cold climates, like Renee does in Canada. Now that I've moved to Pennsylvania, I buy vegetables from local growers at a weekly farmer's market. And sure, there are lots of root vegetables right now -- but we also get fresh greens, presumably grown in greenhouses. And there's nothing unsustainable about canning or freezing vegetables to use when they're not in season.

Renee goes on to point out that the animal rights movement is white-dominated, which is bad on general principle as well as leading to strategic blunders such as attacking black women who wear fur without sensitivity to the role of fur as a form of resistance to de facto sumptuary laws. I agree. But this is only an argument against veganism if you have already dismissed the core premise, viz: killing animals for food is wrong. If a movement is fighting for something unimportant, then it is a deadly sin to also be racist in the way it fights for that unimportant thing. But if you agree with the premise of the movement, then it is absurd to dismiss it just because those fighting for it are doing so in the wrong way. If a movement with a good goal is trampling on other good goals, then you have two options: work from within the movement to redirect its strategy, or call for an alternative movement seeking the same goal in a more acceptable way. It's ironic that Renee explicitly compares racism in the animal rights movement to racism in the white-dominated mainstream feminist movement, since that confirms my point. Women of color's response to racism in feminism was not to conclude that sexism is OK. Rather, some fought to fix feminism from the inside, while others gave their loyalties to womanism and other movements that integrated gender and racial justice in a more appropriate way. I'm not saying that Renee has to dedicate herself to one of these forms of activism, but she should acknowledge that those are legitimate responses by which a vegan could address the criticism of racism in the animal rights movement without giving up the "killing animals for food is wrong, so everyone who can should stop doing it" premise. If these paths are available, then we once again return to the "is killing animals wrong?" question as the only way to condemn vegan advocacy as unacceptable moralizing.

Renee ends by pointing out the problems with comparing humans to animals, given the history of those comparisons being used to denigrate people of color. Again I agree, as I have written before. But such comparisons, while extremely common, are hardly inherent to vegan advocacy. Here's what I say when people ask me why I'm not eating meat: "I don't think cows (or whatever) really appreciate being killed, especially when there's so much other stuff I could eat instead." That's hardly an ironclad philosophical exposition, but it summarizes the key issue in terms of the animal's nature taken on its own terms. No "we're all animals" rhetoric, no dwelling on "marginal cases," no ever-expanding circle of concern predictions, no parallels between the meat industry and slavery or the Holocaust, or any of the other common arguments that Renee is (rightly) objecting to. If you start from the premise that killing animals for food is OK, then the oppressive implications of human-animal comparisons just add insult to injury. But if you start from the premise that killing animals for food is not OK, then Renee's points just emphasize the need for more careful thinking about the grounds for veganism and the strategies used to advocate it to others.

The final sentence of Renee's post is: "The next time you feel the need to moralize to an evil meat eater, perhaps you can pause momentarily and consider that your choices are far from perfect as well." I heartily endorse her call for vegans to be self-critical about the way their advocacy intersects with other social justice issues. But to state this as categorically condemning all vegan advocacy once again begs the question. It only makes sense to demand perfection on all other social justice issues as a precondition for vegan advocacy if you have already decided that animal rights is a lower-priority concern than those other issues -- that is, you have already decided that vegans are wrong on the core question of whether killing animals for food is OK.

The environmental implications of border-drawing

2010-01-24T13:41:00.002-07:00

The particular boundaries of our existing 50 states of the US are in some ways irrational historical relics, so there's an argument to be made for re-drawing the subdivisions of the country, as places like England and France have already done (which is not to say there aren't plenty of arguments against it as well). Matthew Yglesias passes on one proposal, originally from FakeIsTheNewReal, that prioritizes keeping the states' populations equal*.

On the FakeIsTheNewReal map, the new state of Philadelphia is formed from the city of that name along with southern New Jersey. This combination is a common one on state boundary reform proposals (e.g. this one), as the differences between North Jersey and South Jersey are quite notable (Stephen Colbert once introduced a guest by saying "I'll ask him if he's from the part of New Jersey that thinks it's New York, or the part that thinks it's Philadelphia."). This was roughly the territory of the short-lived Swedish colony, and might have retained a united identity as a colony and later state had the Swedes not gotten into a fight with the Dutch. I'll refer to the reformed state as "New Sweden" to avoid the confusion between the city of Philadelphia and FakeIsTheNewReal's proposed state of Philadelphia. What strikes me about this proposal, though, is how the history of South Jersey would be different had the boundaries been drawn in this seemingly more logical way in the first place. Much of South Jersey is taken up by the Pine Barrens, a unique ecosystem that managed to remain relatively undeveloped until fairly recently despite being adjacent to the northeast Megalopolis. Underlying the Pine Barrens is a major, but ecologically fragile, aquifer. Its location means it has long been eyed by Philadelphia as a convenient source of water -- Joseph Wharton even purchased a huge tract of the Pine Barrens in anticipation of such a development. Luckily for the Pine Barrens, accidents of colonial history placed a state boundary down the Delaware River. This put the aquifer in a separate jurisdiction from the thirsty city. And that separation of jurisdictions made it easy to frame Philadelphia's desire for water as an attempt by one state to exploit another state's resources, prompting New Jersey to pass a law to ban the transfer of water to Pennsylvania -- and leaving Wharton's tract undeveloped and eventually to be converted into a large state forest. Had Philadelphia and the Pine Barrens been part of the single state of New Sweden, this sort of incidental environmental protection due to state-nationalism and the accompanying power of separate legislatures would have had less pull against the obviousness of the Pine Barrens as Philadelphia's hinterland (while perhaps creating complications in accessing Philadelphia's current water supplies from the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, which under FakeIsTheNewReal's reform plan run mostly through the new state of Susquehanna).

*The motivation for prioritizing equal populations here is to eliminate the disproportionate power of smaller states in the Senate and Electoral College. But with respect to those issues I think eliminating the Electoral College and doing away with the one-state-two-votes system in the Senate (in favor of proportional representation) would be more feasible and more effective than rearranging state boundaries. And if we did that, we could relax the equal population criterion in favor of other important factors in drawing state boundaries, like cultural continuity, ease of travel, and ecosystem integrity.

Environmentalism using obesity metaphors

2010-01-07T20:45:00.004-07:00

I was stuck by the imageat right, which is being used by Environmental Defense as part of a "how you can stop global warming"-type promotion. We see a cartoon anthropomorphized earth flexing its muscles happily while a tape measure is cinched around its quite unnaturally narrow waist. It's an interesting collision between the longstanding metaphor of environmentalism as seeking the "health" of the environment, with the modern idea of obesity as iconic of poor health.

Unpacking the idea of ecological "health" as the goal of environmentalism is something I'll mostly set aside here, except to note that it is a non-inevitable conceptualization (contrast the alternate framing of conservation/sustainability). The important thing to keep in mind is that the idea of ecological health involves conceptualizing the ecosystem, or even the entire planet, as a mega-organism -- and in particular, a mega-human-body -- for which health consists of an approximation to a particular ideal state. For a human body, health by this conception involves having all the normal parts (2 legs, both eyes, smooth skin, etc) functioning in the normal way.

What caught my eye about the ED ad was the change in the representation of what constitutes "health." A quick Google image search on "sick earth" brings up lots of examples of the old way of representing health. We get lots of earths suffering from common cold and flu type symptoms -- flushed, sweating, excreting mucus, and making use of thermometers and hot water pads. The archetype of ill health here is infectious disease, an invasion by microbes that upsets the system's functioning. The metaphorical parallels between viruses and pollution (including, in some cases, human beings) have been powerful for environmentalism.

But over the past few decades, we've acquired a new archetype for poor health: obesity. Being fat has become synonymous with being sick, and vice-versa. What I'm interested in here is not the scientific/medical question of how bad for you being fat really is (though I'll admit to skepticism of the obesity panic on these grounds), but rather the sociological question of how obesity became the key trope in our discourse about health. Thus, a healthy earth can be easily represented as one that has slimmed down, because we all know that getting skinnier equals getting healthier. The metaphor is extended in the "Low Carbon Diet Guide" that the ad encourages you to download, which talks about how "counting carbs" should apply to carbon dioxide as well as carbohydrates. Interestingly, the guide sticks to energy conservation tips, thus both continuing environmentalists' reluctance to address food habits as a contributor to climate change while mercifully avoiding blaming fat people for causing global warming by stuffing their faces.

An important element to the conceptualization of obestity as the archetype of ill health is the way it's tied to ideas of personal responsibility. While genetics and social conditions play a huge role in determining who gets fat, our discourse about obesity promotes the idea that on the one hand you can control your own weight, and on the other fat people can be blamed for their condition. This is reflected in the content of ED's Low Carbon Diet brochure, which is is a fairly standard compendium of personal behavioral changes that will make you a better, less-carbon-emitting, metaphorically slimmer person. Obviously this sort of thinking long predates the ecological-health-as-thinness metaphor, but there's a synergy between them in terms of the emphasis on the small scope of personal control within a larger issue.

This is not the first, or most extreme, time environmentalists have tried to link up with the concern over obesity. But it was striking to me that the thin = healthy idea is so engrained that it can be used as a metaphor by causes outside of the public health field.

"Anymals"

2009-12-24T09:51:00.003-07:00

I recently read an academic article by Lisa Kemmerer* in which she used the term "anymal" to refer to non-human animals. Google brought me to another article in which she gives an extended defense of the word. This second article mixes together four basic rationales: filling a linguistic gap, signaling a larger philosophical position, provoking discussion, and altering our dualistic attitudes that lead to oppression of "anymals." She seems to put the greatest weight on the last point, but I find it the least convincing.

It's clear that we have a linguistic gap created by the fact that "animal" has two meanings -- members of Kingdom Animalia (which includes humans), or all members of Animalia *except* humans. This linguistic gap can create confusion in conversation about animal rights, and lead to people making false inferences from the fact that (someone says that) humans are animals by the first definition to the conclusion that (they are claiming that) we have the characteristics of animals by the second definition. I'm not sold on solving this problem by introducing "anymal" for the second definition -- it seems too close in spelling and pronunciation to "animal." But this is in a general sense a reasonable thing to try to do.

The use of "anymal" as a position-signaling shibboleth and as a conversation-starter I'll leave to the side for now.

Kemmerer's main argument is that our mistreatment of "anymals" derives from a dualistic hierarchical conception, and that the use of "anymal" can challenge that conception. I agree with the former, but not the latter. Beyond its signaling and conversation-starter qualities (such that using the term is like adding a footnote to everything you say that says "remember not to think dualistically!"), I don't see how the term itself directly challenges dualism. The underlying concept is the same, and is equally dualistic, whether we label non-human animals "animals" or "anymals." Kemmerer quotes J. Dunayer commenting on the absurdity of dividing Kingdom Animalia into squids and non-squids. This is only absurd because it's hard to think of a situation in which we would need to refer to all non-squid animals together -- but if such a linguistic need were to arise, it would be perfectly sensible to refer to them as "non-squids." And in fact we do have a linguistic need to refer to all non-human animals as a group, since prevailing ways of thinking treat them all as less morally worthy on the basis of their non-human-ness.

Kemmerer claims that the alternative term "non-human animal" reinforces the dualism by defining one side by its not-us-ness, and instead we need a term that puts both sides on an equal footing (there are parallels here, though she doesn't explicitly draw them, to the use of "person of color" instead of "non-white person," and in a more complicated way to "cis" instead of "non-trans"). I'm not entirely convinced on this point -- after all, the only thing that bees, bears, sea cucumbers, and sea gulls have in common with each other but not with humans is that they have historically been defined as lower on the moral hierarchy due to their lack of humanness and treated accordingly. But even if we accept that part of the argument, "anymal" doesn't solve it. Kemmerer defines "anymal" as a contraction of "any animal who does not happen to be the species that I am." Thus the not-us definition is right there in the etymology, albeit pushed back a bit out of view. If we can't even define the term without using dualistic thinking (contrast our ability to define "people of color" or "cis" without contrasting them with white people and trans people), it's going to be a dualistic term no matter what set of letters we use for the label. Kemmerer is certainly right to argue that our ways of talking about things can shape how we think about them and can even amount to a form of activism -- in the animal rights context, for example, we should oppose expressions that say that misbehaving people were acting like animals. I just disagree that the "anymal" terminological change fits that bill.

Kemmerer tries to draw parallels with replacing "chairman" with "chairperson" and discarding terms like "Negro" or "cripple." With respect to the chairs, the problem with "chairman" is that it puts the presumption of male leadership right there in the term. No such presumption of animal inferiority is in the term "animal" or "non-human animal." With respect to disparaging terms, "animal" is actually quite morally neutral in its usage -- it is neither inherently disparaging (like "cripple") or indissolubly connected to a history of oppression (like "Negro"). This concern could apply to a term like "brute," though I note that the only people today who seem to use "brute" in its original literal sense as applying to non-human animals are animal rights activists criticizing the word.

In sum, while it would be helpful for conversational clarity to have different terms for the two meanings of "animal" depending on whether you're including humans, I doubt I'll be using "anymal" anytime soon -- and whatever term I use, I won't expect the term itself to overturn dualistic hierarchical attitudes that enable mistreatment of non-human animals.

*The specific article, "Killing Traditions" from Ethics, Place, and Environment in 2004, was a strongly pro-animal-rights and anti-tribal-sovereignty take on the Makah whaling controversy. On this particular issue, I'm much more in sympathy with Greta Gaard's 2001 article in Hypatia "Tools for a cross-cultural feminist ethics." Were I to be asked by the tribe for advice on whaling, I would reply that killing whales for reasons other than physical subsistence or obligatory environmental management** is wrong. However, in light of the history of dispossession and assaults on their identity and livelihood faced by Native Americans, I am extremely reluctant to advocate the abrogation of treaty rights if the Makah decide they want to hunt. Further, as an outsider I have neither the right (due to general considerations of cultural autonomy and specific considerations of the historical and ongoing power imbalance between white and Native Americans) nor the ability (due to a lack of knowledge about traditional and modern Makah culture and a lack of acceptance by the tribe as a legitimate interpreter and re-performer of that culture) to propose how to integrate non-killing of animals into their socio-ecological context. That's the job of anti-whaling and animal-rights activists from within the tribe, of which there are several. Indeed, it may be that the best thing an outsider can do for the whales is the best thing for the Makah as well -- strongly defend tribal sovereignty and oppose other outsiders' racism and paternalistic judging of what's genuinely traditional, which can give the Makah more breathing room to maintain and rework their culture for modern circumstances, a reworking which may -- but can't be forced by outsiders to -- include restructuring their relationship to whales and other animals.

**Some in the pro-whaling camp -- and I'm not enough of a marine biologist to know whether this has any truth to it -- argue that 20th century restrictions on whaling have led gray whales to become overpopulated. Culling in such circumstances is a complex question, but is not something that I think can be prima facie ruled out.

The rationality of going to the Brunce Springsteen concer

2009-12-21T21:06:00.003-07:00

Tom Schaller proposes two analogies to highlight the respective irrationalities of progressive opponents and supporters of passing the US Senate's current health care bill. I can't comment on the applicability of these analogies to the health care debate, but I think his interpretation of the two allegedly analogous scenarios is too quick to cry irrationality.

Here's scenario one:

Let�s say you have a front-row ticket to a Bruce Springsteen concert, for which you paid $200, but on the night of the show a scalper outside the venue offers you $1,000 for it. You love Bruce, but you also need a new laptop, so you sell it. Then, walking toward the parking lot, you spot another front-row ticket on the ground. Nobody is around to claim it, so you head back toward the arena, where the same scalper again offers you $1,000 for the second ticket. Do you sell it or go to the show?

From a purely rational choice standpoint, you should sell again. Moments earlier, you valued a front-row ticket less than $1,000. (In fact, you paid $200 for the first ticket, so you actually valued it less than $800.) To value an identical ticket, mere moments later, more than $1,000 is irrational, right? Yet, many people would go to the show with that second ticket: It�s a "freebie," you still love Bruce, and something about having already profited $800 from the previous sale makes the second $1,000 offer seem less attractive.

I see nothing inherently irrational about selling the first ticket but keeping the second. Schaller notes that the reason you accepted the scalper's first offer is that you needed a new laptop. You can get a decent laptop for around $800. And most people only need one laptop. So it makes perfect sense that, now that your laptop needs are met, even $1000 is no longer worth giving up the concert for. That's the perfectly understandable "something about having already profited $800" that Schaller seems befuddled by.

Here's scenario two:

You're on a game show and the host offers you a choice of a guaranteed $500 in cash or a 50/50 chance to win $1,200. The expected value of the first option is $500, whereas the expected value of the second is $600 (half $1,200), meaning the latter is more preferable. Yet people typically opt for the guaranteed payout: They prefer a "bird in hand" instead of two�or in this case, 2.4�in the bush, so to speak. But again, taking the cash in hand is technically the less "rational" option.

Neither risk-seeking nor risk-avoiding are necessarily irrational when the sums involved make up a substantial portion of a person's wealth and the gamble is a one-time deal. Imagine that you learned just before going on this game show that you had no money in your bank account, and the rent -- which is $500 -- is due. What kind of fool would pass up a sure chance of avoiding eviction* for a chance at a little extra cash? On the other hand, if the rent is $1000, it would be quite irrational to take a sure thing that's less than that, even if it's greater than the expected value of the gamble (say, $800), since you can't pay part of the rent and get just part-way evicted. This is not to say that people are never irrational about risks -- after all, casinos are still in business -- but merely comparing someone's choices to the expected values of the options isn't enough to tell you when irrationality is occurring.

Both of these scenarios depend on subjecting one-off, personal decision-making to the expected utility calculations that are deemed economically rational. Consider how the calculation of the expected value of a gamble is justified in the decision-making literature -- $600 would be your average per-gamble payoff if you played the game many times. If this was the actual situation you faced, it would be quite irrational to stick with the sure thing. But in life (and certainly in health care reform) you only get to play gambles a few times at most. A similar logic applies to the concert tickets. If you knew you had the opportunity to do some bulk leveraging of cheap tickets to scalpers, it would make sense that each deal should be evaluated on equal terms. But if you're just one person with one ticket, a strategy that works in the abstract aggregate no longer matches what is really rational behavior.

I think psychology has pretty conclusively shown that humans are a deeply irrational species. I just don't think these two scenarios support that conclusion.

*We'll assume you've already exhausted your landlord's patience for extensions, installment payments, etc.

Discrimination against people with weird names

2009-12-19T16:52:00.003-07:00

There's a funny feature to the Democratic National Committee's holiday video e-card. The video my wife got in a mass email from the DNC was "personalized," meaning that "Christina" had been inserted into signs at various points in the video, culminating in Obama signing a card that said "Happy Holidays, Christina." Out of curiosity, she clicked to send a personalized video card to me. I opened it, only to find that everything was addressed not to "Stentor" but just to "Friend." It really made me feel like the president cared about me personally ... (I'm not sure whether the fact that I didn't get an email link to this directly from the DNC is due to the fact that I have finally been successful in removing myself from their email list, or because they were smart enough not to send this email to people with unusual names that their system doesn't recognize.)

Presumably the reason they limited the personalization to common names recognized in their database was so that pranksters didn't start sending around videos where Obama signs a holiday card addressed to Hitler or Poop or something else embarrassing. But it's funny considering that if he wasn't the president, I doubt "Barack" would be in their name database and thus Mr. Obama's card would be addressed to "Friend."

There's a joke here relating to the fact that John McCain always called everyone "my friends," but it's taking me too long to figure out how to word it.

Changing tests mid-stream

2009-12-17T12:56:00.003-07:00

Janet Stemwedel poses a question about fairness in multi-section exams. If you discover a problem with the exam -- say, a poorly written question -- after one section of a class has taken the exam, but before the second section takes it, is it fair to fix the question before the second group takes it? I think this question highlights a tension between two ways of looking at grading: as measurement and as compensation.

Grading as measurement is the view I try to adhere to. This view holds that a grade is a measurement of a characteristic of a student -- mastery of certain skills and knowledge -- just like you might measure the student's height or temperature. It's admittedly a difficult measurement to interpret, since we all know what the freezing and boiling points of water are (the reference points for the temperature scale), but it's much less clear what "the stuff Dr. X wants you to get out of this class" is even if we know from your B+ that you got 87-89% of it*. Under the grading as measurement view, the grader's overriding responsibility is to accurately measure each student's mastery of the material. If the grader has good reason to believe the measuring instrument (test) is flawed, there is then a duty to fix that flaw for all future measure-ees, even if some people have already been measured with the flawed instrument. To measure future students with the flawed instrument does nothing to make one's treatment of the first group fairer. Rather, the duty owed to them is to either adjust the measurement to account for the instrument's flaws (e.g. granting credit for answers based on understandable misreadings of a poorly-written question), or in extreme cases to throw out that measurement and either re-measure with a less flawed instrument or calculate the final figure without using that incorrect measurement. But note that this correction is the same as one's duty to those students even if there is no second section with the option of taking a corrected test. Consider the analogy of a doctor taking patients' temperatures. If the doctor discovers that the thermometer is miscalibrated, the obvious course of action is to get a working thermometer ASAP, then either adjust the earlier patients' records (if we know that, say, the broken thermometer was reading consistently 5 degrees too high), or throw out their temperature records altogether. It wouldn't make sense for those earlier patients walking around wrongly thinking they had a fever to say that fairness demands that later patients also be misdiagnosed with fevers.

However, there is a competing model of grading that is prevalent among students and has some pull on teachers as well: grading as compensation. Here, a grade is a reward given to a student in return for doing certain work in the course. A grade is then more of a valuable good, like money, rather than a measurement of a characteristic. So if instead of a doctor we analogize the teacher to a boss, there seems to be some grounds for concern that fixing the test for the second class is unfair to the first class. Imagine that the manager of a McDonald's tells the employees on the first shift to cook up some fries, with the understanding that the employees' wages will be docked if they screw it up. After noting the difficulty the first shift had with the task, the manager poses the same task to the employees on the second shift, but with clearer instructions on using the fryer. The first shift employees could reasonably claim that their wages were docked unfairly. And it's at least conceivable -- though obviously people of different political persuasions may disagree about whether it's right -- that justice to the first shift could be established by giving equally unclear directions to the second shift, so that everyone is earning their wages on an equal footing. It does seem unfair that the boss would give some people an easier way to earn money than others, in a way that it's not unfair to fix a broken thermometer.

Under the measurement view, the difficulty of a test is a function of the standards of the professor, the student's mastery level, and extraneous bias in the measurement instrument. Each individual has a right to as small a contribution from that third term as possible (i.e. a right to be measured accurately) regardless of whether others have secured that right as well. Under the compensation view, the difficulty of a test is a function of the demands of the professor (i.e. what the student gives them on one side of the exchange bargain) and the abilities of the student to meet those demands. Here the student has a right to the same offer or same terms of the deal as every other student.

On a philosophical level, the measurement view seems much easier to defend, and there's clearly a lot of pernicious behavior, such as grade-grubbing, that is rooted in a compensation view. But the compensation view is hard to escape, and it's common to use grades as punishments and incentives. And grades are often turned into quasi-goods because they can be in a sense exchanged for goods, as when you use your grades to convince an employer to hire you. In the case of the poorly-worded test question I think the measurement view gets the right answer, but there's a good reason the idea of fixing a test feels unfair at first glance.

*Here we're assuming each individual is graded against an independent measuring stick, rather than the class being forced into a normal distribution with a pre-defined shape. The latter would raise obvious issues. But I have yet to hear of any good defense of such grading practices, though I admit I haven't looked that hard.

Banning Meat

2009-12-15T08:11:00.002-07:00

I disagree with Keith Burgess-Jackson's post about a possible ban on meat in three ways, even though both of us are advocates of plant-based diets.

First, I disagree with his empirical prediction that we're likely to see a ban on (or even just serious restrictions on) raising animals for meat on environmentalist grounds. The world's major governments can't get it together to propose serious restrictions on fossil fuel use, which everyone knows are bad for the environment. So how are they going to make a move against meat eating, whose environmental impacts aren't even on the radar screen? The meat industry is a powerful lobby, and the general public is far more attached to the type of fuel they put in their mouths than the type of fuel they put in their cars. This is not to say that taking on the meat industry is not a worthy cause, just that it's not a cause I can confidently envision succeeding in the next, say, half-century.

Second, I disagree with his objection to an environmentalism-based rationale for anti-meat legislation, of which he says "the ground is improper." I agree that we ought to be skeptical of good policies that are implemented for incorrect reasons. The problem -- as I see it, which may not match Burgess-Jackson's rationale -- is not that it's intrinsically wrong to have a wrongly-motivated policy, but rather that the motivation for a policy will inevitably influence its implementation, quite possibly skewing it away from accomplishing the thing you hoped it would accomplish (hence my skepticism of using national security/anti-foreign-oil arguments for investing in renewable energy). I also agree with Burgess-Jackson's defense of sentience-centrist ethics and criticism of ecocentrism. The environment has no intrinsic value, only value to beings that care about what kinds of interactions they have with it. There is a long history of animosity between sentience-centric and ecocentric philosophers, which seems to have spilled over into Burgess-Jackson's thinking on this question. As I see it, there are strong sentience-centric reasons for environmentalism -- environmental destruction causes sentient beings to suffer. And reducing the meat industry would have serious sentience-centric environmental benefits in addition to its direct sentience-centric benefits. That is, it's good for sentient beings if the climate does not rise several degrees, because things like disruptions to plant agriculture and flooding of coastal areas are bad for sentient beings -- and restrictions on meat production would help avert that fate, since animal agriculture produces significant amounts of greenhouse gases and climate-causing land cover change. The benefits here seem significant enough to outweigh the concerns of mismatched rationales. This is particularly so given that I find it more likely that if any restrictions on meat were ever to be implemented, they would have a strongly anthropocentric basis, rather than the econcentric one Burgess-Jackson discusses. Anthropocentric-environmentalist concerns are consistent enough with (and are mostly a subset of) sentience-centric-environmentalist concerns that anthropocentric anti-meat policies deserve sentience-centric support despite some incompatbilities around the edges (i.e. the policy in question would allow small-scale organic meat farming, which is environmentally innocent (in the eco- sentience- and anthropo- flavors) despite still raising direct sentience-centric concerns). We all should be able to agree that it's bad if the people of Tuvalu lose their island, even if some of us don't care about their animals and some don't care about the ecosystem itself.

Third, I disagree with Burgess-Jackson's blanket dismissal of coercive policies in favor of social change purely by persuasion. Certainly there are cases in which coercive policies will be ineffective, and a situation in which the legitimacy of the coercion is not widely accepted -- as is the case for an substantial restriction on meat production at the present time and, to my mind, the foreseeable future -- is one such situation. And there are issues for which coercive policies would be inappropriate or overkill. Burgess-Jackson fears a backlash, which is a reasonable concern in present circumstances (ranchers recently got whipped up about an unsubstantiated rumor that there would be a cow-fart tax), but present circumstances are not the only possible ones. Further, I don't entirely buy the underlying ontology by which solutions consist in either coercion or persuasion. Burgess-Jackson's model of persuasion is a highly individualist one, by which individuals decide to switch their diets until nobody is eating meat anymore, and the alternative is for government agents to slap handcuffs on anyone caught with a hamburger. But policymaking is not so simple or individualistic. Is it impermissible coercion to cut farm subsidies and price guarantees that help maintain the size of the current animal industry? Is it coercion for a town to deny a zoning permit to a proposed hog farm? Is it coercion for the BLM to reduce the amount of land it offers for grazing leases? Is it coercion for a school administrator to decide they will only put vegetarian meals on the menu? Is it coercion to tax cow farts to pay for the damage they do to others? Any of these policies will result in people eating less meat without said people having been persuaded that meat eating is morally wrong, but they also don't seem to be coercive of those people in the same objectionable way as the "make meat a misdemeanor" type of policy would be.

Utilitarianism and homosexuality, again

2009-12-12T10:41:00.002-07:00

I've long been one of the top Google results for the utilitarian view of homosexuality, but I discovered today that I'm losing out in some permutations of the search. One of the new top results is this post slamming homosexuality along with a long list of other deviations from 1950s sexual mores, from what I can only conclude is a Colbert-esque parody of a conservative blog. It includes such prize arguments as: single people go to restaurants more often, so cohabitation is bad for the economy. The author's twisted visions of sex and utilitarianism are an amusing break from the usual claims about unnaturalness or "because I said so."

Testing Capitalism

2009-12-10T09:52:00.003-07:00

Matthew Yglesias is right to note, in response to Chris Blattman, that Karl Marx was actually a fan of capitalism in certain respects. Marx saw capitalism as an improvement over pre-capitalist economic systems, and a necessary stage on the road to communism. Indeed, his followers had to do quite a bit of rethinking of the doctrine when it turned out that communist revolutions were occurring in "backward" countries like Russia and China, but not in the capitalist heartlands like Germany and Britain.

But in his focus on dispelling misunderstandings of the specifics of Marxism, Yglesias implicitly accepts Blattman's claim that observing whether poor Africans would do better working for wages in a factory is a test of the capitalism-is-better view (held in different forms by Blattman and Marx) versus the views of those leftists who actually do think capitalism is a step backwards (Vandana Shiva or Immanuel Wallerstein, for example). I don't think this is the case, because said Africans are not being offered the choice between participating in capitalism or remaining in a pre-capitalist economy. African economies* are already deeply impacted by colonialism and the capitalist system that grew out of it (Blattman does reference this possibility in an offhand way). The death of Africa's pre-capitalist economic system began in the 1500s with the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, which disrupted African societies by taking away large numbers of young able-bodied men and women, fostering conflict between tribes/kingdoms, and introducing a treadmill of new goods (if your tribe gets guns, my tribe suddenly needs guns for self-protection). Later direct colonial control of African territory by European powers resulted in widespread dispossession of land for elite use and the further disruption of traditional economic systems to encourage dependence on European companies as buyers and sellers of goods. Post-colonial rulers focused on their own profit and prestige, and limited in their ability to swim against the currents of the foreigner-dominated global economic system they found themselves tied into, have not done much to set the situation right.

The choice faced by a poor African farmer, therefore, is often not between pre-capitalism and capitalism. It's between two ways of participating in the capitalist system -- as low-wage workers on the bottom of the production hierarchy, or as the dregs tossed to the side by the system. That they would choose the former says nothing one way or the other about the relative merits of the pre-capitalist economic system. And those leftists who praise pre-capitalism aren't arguing for simply a removal of capitalist employment opportunities. Rather, they seek conditions under which Africans can have the opportunity to rebuild an economy on its pre-capitalist basis (e.g. through the return of lands that were critical to that economy but are now white farms or national parks). And since this same story of the bloody process by which capitalism first established itself has been repeated so often around the world, I doubt you could ever find the kind of clean test that Blattman seeks of which economic system people would choose.

(I'd also note that his test involves comparing the fortunes of wage laborers and non wage laborers within the same village. The utility of such a test depends on assuming that joining the capitalist labor force is an individual decision with individual consequences. That assumption is consistent with one branch of the capitalism-is-better camp, but runs against the premises of significant collective/structural effects held by traditional Marxists as well as most of the capitalism-is-worse camp.)

(There's a lot of debate about the specific content of a "pre-capitalist" economy. Here I use the term to refer to whatever economic system Africa had in the time period in question, and I think the argument holds regardless of whether you side with the Karls (Marx and Polanyi) in holding that modern capitalism constitutes a fundamental qualitative break with earlier tribute- and kin-based economic systems, or with people like Andre Gunder Frank and the neoclassical economists who hold that markets and long-distance trade have always been important components of human economies.)

*To the extent that I can generalize to an entire continent.

Test

2009-12-07T14:30:00.001-07:00

Publishing this to try to get the archive page for this week (which would include the post I posted a minute ago) to show up.

Putting Government-Haters In Charge of Government

2009-12-07T13:53:00.003-07:00

Mustang Bobby mocks a Sarah Palin fan who describes her appeal thus:

She's a down to earth person who will fight against the government. I can see her out there fishing with the guys. Plus, she's hot.

Fishing camaraderie and hotness are obviously not good criteria for judging a politician. The first two criteria I don't think are that bad on the face of it, though the devil is in the details and I'm sure Palin's fans interpret them in quite different ways than I do.

The comments to Bobby's post fixate on criterion #2 and quickly turn to a common liberal jab against conservatives -- that if conservatives don't believe government is good, why should we trust them to run it? I don't think this really holds up to scrutiny. Were it valid, it would propose that increased government intervention into all aspects of life is always a good thing, or at least that rolling back said intervention is always an incoherent idea.

But of course we don't think that. One area where I think the government doesn't do a good job and should back off is deciding who should be allowed to marry who. I wouldn't be very convinced -- nor would, I imagine, the people in the linked post -- if a conservative said to me that it's ridiculous to trust Tom Duane because he doesn't think government should be regulating people's marriages, and I should vote instead for an anti-marriage-equality candidate since said candidate is confident that government is good at dictating how intimate relationships should be structured. Conservatives sometimes do make an argument of basically this form with respect to war -- claiming it makes no sense to elect politicians to run the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who think said wars are bad, since their lack of drive for victory will lead them to fight poorly. Anti-war voters reply, rightly, that the point of electing anti-war politicians is that they will get the government to stop having a war at all.

Similarly, if a conservative believes that tax rates are too high because the government just wastes all that money, there's nothing incoherent about trying to elect a politician who will lower the tax rates and stop the waste. The idea that it's incoherent seems to be based on the assumption that the size of government is fixed, and thus electing an anti-government candidate would just lead to them doing a crappy job of managing the government they don't believe in*. This may carry some weight with respect to heads of agencies, who have limited ability to fight for reductions in the size of their responsibilities and are obligated to carry them out in the meantime, but not against elected top-level policymakers (i.e. it could be an argument against Michael Brown, but not against Palin).

I disagree with the reasons that most conservatives believe the government is a failure, but given that someone does buy those reasons, there's nothing additionally wrong with them voting for politicians who will shrink the government in corresponding ways.

*Some may point out that in practice anti-government candidates have accomplished little in terms of reducing taxes and spending (and of creating marriage equality and ending wars, for that matter). This kind of cynicism, however, is a separate argument from the claim that it's a priori incoherent to aim at smaller government.

Oversimplifying population

2009-11-19T14:22:00.002-07:00

The latest issue of the Colgate Scene, my alumni magazine, has an article by Albert Allen Bartlett in which he fancies himself a bold, politically incorrect truth-teller for pointing the finger at population growth as the key threat to the future of humanity.

Bartlett starts out on decent ground, describing exponential growth and reminding us how easy it is to misunderstand. And he's right that if the Earth's population grew to one person per square meter of land (which would happen in 2780 if we maintained a 1.3% annual population growth rate), it would be a bad thing. But then his argument goes downhill.

Bartlett notes that the world's population growth rate has fallen from 1.7 in 1986 to 1.3 in 2000. This is not just two isolated data points -- it's part of a larger historical trend, in which the world's population growth rate peaked in the 1970s and has been falling ever since. The most industrialized countries are increasingly facing sub-replacement fertility rates (replacement fertility is 2.1 children per woman, which will maintain the population size if there is no migration). There would have to be a significant change in the world's current trajectory for us to approach Bartlett's one-person-per-square-meter future. Demographers generally predict that the world's population will stabilize between 9 and 10 billion by 2050-2100 (that's .07 people per square kilometer). So runaway population growth is probably not on the table, and Bartlett's invocation of a simple exponential growth rate misses the mark.

That being said, it's quite possible that the growth rate still isn't falling fast enough, and that 9-10 billion people will be too many. Bartlett attempts to offer evidence that we're already at or near the overpopulation threshold, but his evidence fails. His first argument is that the US imports 60% of its oil, 15% of its gas, and 20% of its food. But import levels alone (particularly for globally traded resources like oil and food, somewhat less so for more localized ones like water and electricity) tell us nothing about sustainability, except under the absurd premise that the people living in any arbitrarily defined segment of land ought to be able to supply all of their needs from that same segment of land. By this logic my apartment is inherently unsustainable, since I have to import 100% of my food from outside of the building. The reason the US imports so much oil is that oil is unevenly distributed -- there's lots of it in Canada, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, but not so much in the US anymore. It would be quite odd to say that Barack Obama should buy a Prius because the US has little domestic oil, whereas it's fine for Hugo Chavez to drive an SUV because his country has lots of oil within its borders. It's unfortunate that Bartlett chose such a silly way to try to make his point, since limits to oil supply are a significant issue.

Bartlett also asserts that if any amount of climate change is anthropogenic, that proves the world is overpopulated. This too does not follow, despite the fact that it gestures toward a serious issue. In passing, Bartlett adds the clause "living as we do" to his statement about overpopulation. But that's a critical issue. Overuse of the Earth's resources and sinks is a function of both population and the per capita use implied by our lifestyle. Considering the enormous variation in per capita carbon emissions, it's rather silly to elide the lifestyle side and place the blame squarely on the population side -- especially when population growth rates are falling but carbon emission per capita is rising.

Let's grant, though, that population growth rates aren't falling fast enough. What can we do? According to Bartlett, "bad things." He lists a series of "good things" that unfortunately also increase population: "large families, medicine, public health, sanitation, peace, law and order, and accident prevention." Then there are the bad things that would inhibit population growth: "small families, violence, stopping immigration, and pollution."

Bartlett asserts that we're going to have to pick from the "bad" list, or nature will pick for us. However, he isn't bold and politically incorrect enough to tell us which bad thing he personally advocates (indeed, his whole article reads as an awareness-raising exercise, despite casting doubt on the effectiveness of education as a solution). The only specific "solution" he mentions is his contention that AIDS should be seen as a case of nature choosing for us. It strikes me as a highly dubious proposition that population growth itself caused the AIDS epidemic, much less that AIDS can be understood as some sort of inevitable correction by nature for our overpopulation. Certainly crowding can, ceteris paribus, promote disease epidemics. But there is much more at play than simple population density in determining the course of epidemics. And if we look at the global scale distribution of population and HIV infection rates, it certainly doesn't look like AIDS is preferentially attacking the densest parts of the world -- or even the densest parts of Africa.

In any event, Bartlett is simply wrong to say that only "bad" things will slow population growth. In fact, the most effective means to slowing population growth is a very good thing: increasing women's rights. Put simply, when women have the ability to make their own choices about pregnancy, and have access to opportunities in life beyond "barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen," they will on average choose to have far fewer children than they do under more severe forms of patriarchy. Equitable economic improvements for people are another good thing that can reduce population growth rates, since people who are economically secure tend to focus their energies on a smaller family (directly contrary to Malthus's prediction that if you let the poor earn a better wage they would just blow it all on cranking out babies). It certainly makes you more politically incorrect to warn that fixing overpopulation will require "bad" things, and there is a history of overpopulation fears being used to justify imposing bad things (like forced sterilization and Hardin-esque "lifeboat ethics") on the poor and people of color. But luckily we can deal with population through good things.

The essay ends with an absurd rhetorical question: "can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by having larger populations?" This is easy -- any problem that would benefit from more brainpower. Think of the great technological innovations and amazing novels that we'd have with 148 trillion people (that one-person-per-square-meter prediction) working on it. Further, anyone with an unusual fetish could find a big community of like-minded individuals in that world, rather than feeling like an isolated freak. Bartlett speaks as if it's absurd to imagine increasing the population of Colgate -- but any alum of a big school like ASU could rattle off a long list of cool things that were available to them that Colgate doesn't have a big enough student body to support. The point here is not that I necessarily support either of those scenarios, but just that saying growth is always entirely bad is a silly oversimplification.

What does masculinity mean?

2009-10-30T18:36:00.005-07:00

A series of guest posts by Clarisse Thorn at Alas raises questions about how to envision masculinity that is non-oppressive yet still manly. This sort of question has an unfortunate tendency to veer into "what about the menz?" territory, and I think the writer does sometimes seem too concerned about the burdens that traditional masculinity and the rejection thereof place on normative men (particularly in the final installment, which she admits sounds like MRA stuff and "marketing" feminism), but the commentariat has generally approached the questions in a productive spirit.

The thing that makes some of the core questions -- like "How men can be supportive and non-oppressive while remaining overtly masculine?" -- difficult is that there's a lack of clarity about what constitutes "masculinity," or even what criteria we might use to sort through the question. There are a few obvious answers that we can throw out:

1) Biological essentialism -- This is a non-starter because nearly every alleged biological difference between men and women (or even just cis men and cis women) has, upon further investigation, turned out to be 1) a result of social processes, 2) nonexistent, or 3) statistically significant but practically meaningless (e.g. a 1% difference on some measurement).

2) Extra-human dictate -- A devout adherent of a particular religion might feel that God dictates a particular form of masculinity as the proper one, but this seems like a non-starter in a religiously diverse and atheist-heavy group like the folks discussing this issue at Alas.

3) Tradition -- On the one hand, using tradition to define masculinity requires acceptance of some form of cultural-historical relativism since ideals of masculinity have varied so much (as well as cultural purification so that we know which definition applies where). And it also seems odd for people adhering to a gender egalitarian philosophy to privilege tradition -- as several commenters point out, "thinking about gender" and "being non-oppressive" are traditionally inherently un-masculine activities.

4) Pure definition -- I suppose there may be a few people who value having the word "masculine" applied to them but have no attachment to any specific content, such that if we all agreed to call wearing a pink tutu super-manly they would go buy a closetful of them. But only a few. And this kind of Humpty Dumpty strategy would make the original question vacuous -- it's easy to construct a non-oppressive masculinity if you can just decree that any old thing you come up with is now officially masculine.

An important starting point, I think, needs to be asking people "what does masculinity mean to you?" This would be a question posed both to people who identify as (or aspire to be) masculine, as well as those who find masculinity sexually/romantically attractive.

I suspect, too, that what we'd find is that there is no one definition of masculinity -- and therefore no one answer to Clarisse Thorn's questions. What one person finds valuably manly may have little if any overlap with what another person says. A while ago I read Bond's description of what specifically constitutes her masculinity/butchness -- and I found it an interesting mix of things I do but don't see as contributing to my personal sense of manliness, and things I have little interest in regardless of whether they might be more manly. Bond herself recognizes this sort of issue and is very clear that she's talking about what makes her personally feel more masculine and strongly opposes judging others' gender expressions as excessively or insufficiently manly or womanly.

It's not entirely clear whether I'm among the people Clarisse Thorn is addressing her questions to -- the series is framed as being directed to "cis het men," which certainly describes me, but elsewhere she refers to her target group as "straight/dominant/big-dicked," on which I answer yes, no, and I've never bothered to compare. There are certainly ways that I vary from the prevailing cultural norm of masculinity (to the point that Christina and I joke that I'm the wife and she's the husband), and maybe that would make me un-manly enough (and un-manly in the right ways) that someone like Clarisse Thorn who has a thing for manly men wouldn't be attracted to me, but that has never made me feel that my masculinity is in question in any way. Indeed, there's little that I can imagine that would make me feel less like a man. Certainly I would feel uncomfortable doing a lot of traditionally feminine things, and my maleness may be the cause of that discomfort (I wasn't born liking a shirt and tie better than a lacy blouse), but it's not a conscious justification. That is, I don't take "because it is/isn't manly" to be a valid reason for me to do something. Perhaps this is an expression of deep-rooted privilege -- I've always fit so well into the masculine role, and been able to easily get away with the parts where I don't fit without serious social penalty, that I've never had to consciously work on masculinity. But it does mean that a fortiori feminism has never felt threatening to my masculinity. Certainly I didn't instantly become some sort of super-feminist, and while my current views all fall within the scope of what feminists believe I might still be on the wrong side of some intra-feminist debates. And some of my resistance to some feminist ideas may have been caused by ideals of masculinity that I internalized. But I didn't consciously experience this resistance as aversion to emasculation, nor did I have to defensively construct an alternate masculinity (e.g. along the lines of the oft-suggested "it's manly to fight for gender equality" argument). So in the end it's hard for me to say how to be non-oppressive yet still manly because I have trouble imagining the quest for non-oppressiveness leading me to a problematically unmanly conclusion.

Sorry, Greenland

2009-10-20T17:09:00.004-07:00

I was poking around at the IMF's Data Mapper website, and I was amused to note that their world map appears to be in the Oops-Greenland-looks-too-big-and-some-people-flip-out-about-that-so-let's-just-shrink-it-a-bit-nobody-cares-about-Greenland-and-it-doesn't-have-any-data-anyway Projection. A little horizontal squishing got a Miller Cylindrical Projection (red outlines) to fit nicely over the IMF's map (orange and green), with Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago conspicuously mismatched (Severnaya Zemlya and Svalbard look a bit off too, though I can't tell if that's just my imperfect sqishing or if they really manipulated that too).

Michael Steele's two immigration policy rationales

2009-10-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

Arguments against immigration generally take one of two forms: rule-of-law and ethnocentric. Rule-of-law arguments usually purport to oppose only illegal immigration -- i.e. the "just wait in line" theory -- though there is some spillover when other criminal activity by immigrants comes into the picture. Ethnocentric arguments focus on the cultural incompatibility of immigrants and natives, and express concern for the country's culture being changed or diluted.

In a recent interview on Univision, RNC chair Michael Steele blends the two forms of argument:

So that is the first and foremost thing, we got to stay true to our character as a nation, we must recognize that. Number two, I think as I found with a lot of Hispanics, particularly those who have been her for several generations, they understand and respect the rule of law that is so important as a foundational principle of this country...I can sum it up for you this way, the party as I said is always the party, its been the party of assimilation and that is something that we believe in very firmly and basically what we should be saying is that there are rules that you need to get into the country, go the right door, fill out the right form, have some apple pie, hum a few bars of the star spangle banner and get to work, God bless you, and I think that that begins to set us on the right road to dealing with this issue.

At Shakesville, where I found the link, the discussion focuses on the final sentence. Taken alone, that sentence seems to exude a negligently naive optimism about how functional the process for legal immigration currently is. But it also seems to cash out the apparently pro-migrant implications of a pure rule-of-law position, by preemptively offering a positive response to the question often asked to sort out the real rule-of-law-ers from those using rule-of-law as a cloak for ethnocentrism: "Would you be OK with tons of immigration as long as people had access to, and followed, a legal process for getting here?" I was tempted to remark that I weirdly enough agree with Steele about how to reform immigration.

But note the requirements Steele lists in his proposal -- not just going to the right door and filling out the right form, but also taking on two core symbols of cultural Americanness, apple pie and the Star-Spangle[d] Banner. In the larger context, this reflects his earlier points that immigration reform must be primarily guided by "our character as a nation," and that the GOP is the "party of assimilation." In other words, he's happy for immigrants to come here as long as they fit in, as long as they assimilate to, rather than threatening the hegemony of, Anglo culture. He says it in a nice and optimistic way, since he has enough political acumen to know that Univision's audience is probably not too receptive to stories about the grinding oppression of having to press "1" for English, but it's the same ethnocentric philosophy.

Steele blends the two rationales at both ends. On the one hand, he describes respect for the rule of law as "a foundational principle of this country,"* implying that merely being undocumented is inherently un-American. On the other hand, the content of the rules that you must respect and follow mandate not just peaceful coexistence but full cultural assimilation. Thus, as conceptually separate as the two rationales purport to be, there is a strong resonance between them -- rooted, I would suspect, in the "this particular order or chaos" fallacy, by which cultural difference is a form of dangerous un-rule-governed-ness while lawbreaking provokes anxiety about how it can be condemned if cultural difference is accepted as a value.

*This is a hilarious comment considering that this country was founded by people who showed up uninvited and took over the land by military force, breaking not just moral laws and the laws of the people who were already here but also the treaties that they swore were binding under their own system of law.

The deal with Mongolia

2009-10-17T13:13:00.002-07:00

Someone recently found this blog searching for "what's the deal with mongolia". Surprisingly, Google found no sites with that exact phrase. So I'm rectifying that with this post, which will state "what's the deal with Mongolia?" several times. For countries in Mongolia's population size range, it appears to be pretty hit-or-miss in terms of whether Google brings up any "what's the deal with ..." results, though I imagine Mongolia would be happier to get no results than to get the one (now two because of this post) hit for "what's the deal with Lesotho". Weirdly enough, "what's the deal with the united states" turns up only a single result, but luckily those wishing to find out what our deal is can find more information by searching on "... the US" or "... America."

As to what the deal with Mongolia is, Mongolia is a country in Asia. Beyond that, I admit I don't know much. Get back to me next semester, after I teach World Regional Geography.

Vandana Shiva's "Earth Democracy"

2009-10-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading Vandana Shiva's Earth Democracy. If you've read a bit of her work, there probably won't be much in this book to surprise you. It's a longer -- but not necessarily deeper -- manifesto of the overarching political-cultural-ecological perspective she has been advocating for some time. If you haven't read much of her work, this is a good overview of what she has conlcuded (her Reith lecture covers most of the same ground in far fewer words but without citations).

The book is organized around a contrast between corporate-dominated globalization and "earth democracy," her term for a form of localized, compassionate, communitarian, sustainable way of life that globalization has attacked but which is seeing a resurgence in anti-globalization activism. The obvious criticism here (and one that's somewhat ironic, given that she condemns globalization for its Manichean either-or logic) is that the world is a lot more complex than this. Those who have lambasted her for romanticizing pre-colonial India will find little in this book that responds to their concerns (and they may scratch their heads when in the same page she lauds India for being the world leader in textile manufacturing and exports until the 1700s, then blasts the British for imposing abstract faceless commerce on the country). Whether this criticism is persuasive depends on the reader, and thus whether the simple contrast functions as a useful polemical device to clarify the kind of society she's calling for, or as a rose-colored glass obscuring the difficult navigation of the world's hybridities.

When discussing any social trend -- whether corporate globalization or earth democracy -- it's necessary to answer the questions of why and how. That is, why is this trend occuring, and how does it work. Shiva spends a lot of time on the how of globalization, describing the means by which, for example, free trade rules and US/European agricultural subsidies drive Indian farmers into crushing debt. But the why is left unanswered except for occasional references to "greed." Thus the structural forces driving the rise of capitalism are reduced to an apparent policy choice by evil individuals. On the other hand, while the why of earth democracy is apparent (who is going to say no to compassion and diversity?), the how is glossed over to a great degree. Thus Shiva calls for important resources like water and farmland to be managed as commons rather than privatized. That's fine as far as it goes -- but there's a huge literature on commons management because successfully managing a commons is a complex sociopolitical project. It's not enough to say (though Shiva doesn't even explicitly go this far) that as long as it's a commons it's good and the details can be left up to local communities. I doubt the problem is that Shiva doesn't know this, since she's worked extensively with a variety of local and global social movements. Rather, she just doesn't talk about it in this book.

Shiva's overall analysis of the state of the world sometimes reads like a compendium of left-leaning criticism of modern trends, from Karl Marx to Markos Moulitsas. She moves from fundamentally questioning the institution of private property as it emerged during the 1600s in England, to blasting specific policies of the Bush administration. Many of these criticms are gone over in an offhand way, such as her occasional references to the "Cartesian worldview" in a way that presumes the reader is familiar with it and why it's bad despite the fact that she never stops long enough to say "Rene Descartes." I agree with most of these criticisms, but in Shiva's book there are clearly times when the seams show. For example, she presents the National Parks as a government effort to protect the commons that's under seige by neoliberalism, without acknowledging how the parks were built on the disposession and destruction of Native American (and in a few cases, poor white) ways of life. Having spent a lot of time in the progressive blogosphere, it also jumped out at me -- though it plays a very minor part in the book -- that she accepts the "obestity crisis" narrative as straightforwardly true. It would have been nice to see her grapple a bit more with the complexities raised by critics of that narrative (even if she didn't ultimately agree with the fat acceptance movement the way she endorses every other leftist movement she mentions) rather than just saying #oh, and globalization makes you fat, too!#

The overall evaluation of this book depends on what its purpose is. As an overview of Shiva's philosophy in particular or left-wing criticism of globalization in general, it's quite apropos. As a rallying cry for people who have already signed on to earth democracy but could use a pep talk, I expect this book is useful as well. As a detailed analysis of the workings of the global market, I think there are better places to turn, even for people (like myself) who are disposed to share much of Shiva's political leanings and conclusions.

Fall cartography

2009-10-04T12:02:00.003-07:00

Via Mapas, Mapas, I came upon this handy Google Map of fall foliage. What I found particularly interesting was what happens when you scroll down away from New England proper, where the fall colors are in full swing. The remainder of the eastern US is colored in green, with a smattering of counties in yellow (indicating that the foliage is starting to turn). But these turning counties are not distributed in any ecologically sensible fashion -- rather, they're disproportionately the home of large cities. For example, the only two non-green counties in Tennessee are Davidson (home of Nashville) and Shelby (home of Memphis). It's possible that there's some ecological reason that urban areas would provoke trees to change their leaves sooner (some brief Googling didn't turn up anything, and I haven't noticed any significant tree color gradient in my commute between Pittsburgh and Slippery Rock). But if you click to see the underlying data, the explanation is clear -- big cities have more people, and therefore a higher likelihood that someone in the city would have started thinking about fall leaves, heard of this site, judged the leaves to have crossed from "green" to "turning," and submitted a report. Such are the perils of crowdsourced data. It would be interesting to compare the underlying data from this map, particularly dates at which counties were switched over, to population size and some more systematic measurement of foliage (perhaps from satellite data). I would guess that in addition to the urban-rural difference, there would be a general tendency for the Google Map to switch counties over quicker, because people like to be the one to announce something new and see it marked on the map. On the other hand, if there's any tendency for foliage in areas accessible to people to change faster or slower than in inaccessible areas, a crowdsourced map like this would be more appropriate, since the reason people would look at a map like this is to see where they can observe fall colors -- it's irrelevant to map users if trees in the deep woods are a different color.

Criticize the Olympics, please

2009-09-28T10:33:00.004-07:00

One of the unfortunate features of our political discourse is that real concerns get ignored because one side will get worked up about a stupid angle to a story, and the other side will respond by dismissing the story altogether.

A case in point is a recent flap over a Chicago TV station killing a short piece on residents who oppose the city's bid to host the Olympics. Conservative bloggers jumped all over it because of the insinuation that the orders to kill the story were somehow linked to Obama, who is a big Chicago 2016 supporter. Steve Benen knocks down that insinuation, pointing out that the orders came from the station's higher-ups, at the prompting of the Chicago Olympic committee.

So far so good -- but Benen then declares that the story "isn't especially interesting." But I think it's plenty interesting, and plenty reason for concern, that a media outlet would cave to pressure from an outside group like that. Certainly the media should be responsive to legitimate concerns about its reportage that outsiders raise (e.g. "stop calling trans people by the wrong gender," "stop trying to 'balance' stories about evolution and global warming"). But "stop making the city's Olympic bid look bad" is not one of these cases. Having recently read some research done on Sydney's Olympics experience, there is definite pressure on the public, exercised through the media, to sign on to a pro-Olympics patriotism. But there's also plenty of research showing that mega-events like this are economic and urban-planning boondoggles. I'd oppose Pittsburgh making a bid for the Olympics, and I would hope that despite the wheedling of the Olympic committee, the media takes a critical eye toward Chicago's efforts.

Immigration as Trespassing

2009-09-18T06:56:00.003-07:00

Slacktivist has an interesting post that I think springs from a false premise. His core argument is that nativists like Joe Wilson would be threatened if we started referring to undocumented immigrants as "trespassers," because that would remind them of the line in the Lord's Prayer that asks us to "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."

There are certain elements of the post that he gets right. A rigid "they broke the law and must be punished" rationale has two weaknesses even when taken on its own terms. First, there is value in -- and in the Christian tradition from which most US nativists spring, a command for -- forgiveness of some wrongdoing. Second, the scale of the wrongdoing matters, as a trespass sounds less extreme and thus deserves less of a punishment.

But the reason I say the premise is false is that many nativists do conceptualize undocumented immigrants as trespassers. I don't have time to search for it, but I recall a conservative editorial cartoon from a year or two ago that explicitly analogized undocumented immigration to a stranger breaking into your house and helping himself to the food in your fridge. I can't speak for Joe Wilson, but there have been repeated efforts in Arizona and elsewhere to declare presence in a jurisdiction without legal status to be a form of trespassing, thus giving state and local police authorization to round up anyone without papers even if they committed no other offense. Any discomfort they may feel on being reminded of the Lord's Prayer is overwhelmed by their desire to get those people punished and deported.

What's more, I think that conceptualizing immigration violations as a form of trespass gives us the wrong overall framing of the issue, by presenting the country as a sort of private property owned by its citizens, to which we may admit guests and new members at our whim. I find it odd, and difficult to justify, that we apply this property schema to countries and to actual private properties, but not to intermediate jurisdictions like states, counties, and municipalities. I would rather move the country toward the state/county model. A key difference here, which runs counter to the trespassing framing, is that the burden of proof shifts -- rather than the immigrant having to justify their entrance and continued presence, there should be a presumption in favor of free movement and the natives have to justify any restrictions. Precisely what policies derive from that framing is a question I don't have space for here (though longtime readers may recall I find relatively few restrictions on entrance and activity while present to be justifiable). But the trespass framing would tilt the discussion toward a more restrictive policy system.

Moses meets Wegener

2009-08-10T10:57:00.003-07:00

While looking for some things for the geography class I'm teaching, I stumbled across a site that's apparently a 7th Day Adventist homeschooling resource, with a craft project and lesson notes about geography. It's a pretty trippy melding of ideas from Biblical literalist Christianity with actual geoscience. So according to this site, Pangea existed, but only 6000 years ago, and the plates drifted to their current position on the underground waters that the Flood later released. Farther down, we learn that monocropping is Biblically mandated, and that in order to survive animals need to know God.