debitage

Is the problem the cap or the trade?

2009-07-02T11:36:00.001-07:00

The U.S. is moving toward possibly instituting a "cap and trade" plan for reducing non-agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. As suggested by the word "and," cap and trade really consists of two policy instruments -- a cap to dictate a maximum allowable level of emissions, and a trading mechanism to determine where the needed emission reductions occur.

Environmentalists are often uncomfortable with the "trade" part of cap and trade, preferring a more traditional non-market regulatory scheme ("just cap"). There are two common families of environmentalist counterarguments to cap and trade. One is that the market is inherently degrading, that it's immoral to use dirty* money to take care of something important like environmental protection. Little justification is ever given for this way of thinking, and as a pragmatist (in the lay and philosophical senses) I don't see much merit to this sort of blanket moralism.

Another line of attack on the trade part of cap and trade has to do with the fact that the people causing the problems in the first place are the big fans of trading -- business and industry. So there seems to be reason to suspect that making a concession to them by building on a market mechanism would weaken an environmental policy. My pragmatism would again move me to reject any simplistic blanket declaration that "businesses like markets, businesses destroyed the environment, therefore markets are bad." But it's more than plausible that the market mechanism could introduce distortions and unintended consequences that undermine the environmentally protective aims of a cap and trade policy.

This article by Janet Wilson seems like it's going to lay out some of those sorts of distortions and unintended consequences by taking a skeptical look at some existing cap and trade schemes. While she shows that, contrary to some pro-cap-and-trade hagiographies, these schemes haven't achieved their goals, she doesn't show that it was the "trade" part that was the problem. In every case, it seems like the problem lies with the cap. That means that eliminating the trade and going to a pure cap wouldn't fix things.

Wilson starts off with the U.S. Clean Air Act's anti-acid rain cap and trade. Her conclusion is that it helped, but hasn't done enough. The culprit, it becomes clear, is the cap -- the science at the time the policy was made was too optimistic about how much emissions needed to be reduced to de-acidify the northeast's rain, so the cap was set too high. But this means that a purely regulatory approach, which would have been based on that same optimistic science, would have made the same mistake and also set too high of a cap.

Next, Wilson discusses a cap and trade plan to reduce smog in Los Angeles. Again, it made some progress, but didn't fix the problem. At first glance, problem #1 with the policy seems promising as a counterargument to cap and trade. Due to political pressure surrounding past recessions and the California energy crisis, pollution credits were over-allocated and compliance was poorly enforced. It's a classic case of regulatory capture by big business. However, big business did its dirty work not by fancy trade maneuvers, but by getting the cap loosened. Had LA had a pure cap, polluters could have pursued the same strategy and convinced the government to loosen or not enforce the cap. Problem #2 in this case also doesn't tell us much about the desirability of cap and trade. Much of LA's pollution comes from cars and trucks, which the state and local authorities who created this system aren't allowed to regulate through any policy mechanism.

Wilson moves on to Europe's cap and trade scheme for greenhouse gases. She points out that it has made little impact, because emissions credits were over-allocated and offsets weren't verified. Just as in the LA case, though, these are problems with setting the cap, not with trading the permits. A purely regulatory approach could just as easily have been too generous in the emissions it allowed polluters to get away with. Finally, Wilson documents the same problem afflicting the new cap and trade plan implemented by 10 northeastern states.

In passing, Wilson twice mentions something that could be a serious criticism of cap and trade plans: the "environmental justice" argument, which holds that cap and trade would allow uneven distribution of pollution (a few polluters could continue being really dirty as long as they can get credits from somewhere else that's super-clean). In addition to the straight-up distributional inequality, you could get added problems if, as is likely, the dirty polluters were the ones in poor neighborhoods and/or neighborhoods of color. The catch with this argument, though, is that it depends on the nature of the pollutant and the size of the trading area. If the dispersal of the pollutant's main effects is over a smaller area than the area in which it's traded, you can get unfair concentrations. But if the pollutant disperses more widely than the trading area, it's irrelevant where it's initially emitted. Greenhouse gases have global effects, so they fall in the latter category -- one state or country can't create a bubble of non-changed climate around itself by eliminating carbon emissions, because that reduction will be spread out to the whole world.

Note as well that another popular mechanism for controlling greenhouse gases -- a carbon tax -- could suffer from the sorts of problems Wilson outlines just as well. Setting the tax rate for a carbon tax requires estimating a cap based on the environmentally-needed emissions reduction level (plus whatever extraneous political considerations enter in), as well as monitoring and enforcement by the government. Bad science and business pressure could easily result in a too-low tax, and poor efforts in catching violators.

*There's an interesting point to be made here from a Mary Douglas-ian perspective about the foundational metaphor of money and markets as dirty and how that shapes thinking about environmental issues.

Obama's Horserace Stimulus

2009-06-30T23:30:00.002-07:00

A constant complaint during U.S. political campaigns is that the media doesn't cover the issues. They just obsess over the horserace, the strategy, how seven-figure-salary elites who have never had an original thought in their lives imagine "average Americans" will react to the latest gaffe. Instead of telling us about how candidate A's environmental proposal will affect our energy system, they tell us how it will affect the candidate's chances among coal-mining region voters.

The catch here is that issue coverage has to treat candidates' statements as communicative speech acts -- that is, it has to treat them as revealing a belief held by the speaker and aiming to persuade others to accept that belief as true. The alternative is for speech acts to be strategic -- aiming to produce some reaction in the hearer in a cause-and-effect manner. The trick with strategic speech acts is that they're parasitic on communicative ones. You can usually only cause certain effects in listeners if they (mistakenly) take your statements as expressing some sort of sincere substance.

Barack Obama has done a good job of bursting the illusion that we can ever assume campaign trail speech to be communicative. He's a smooth talker, so he fooled a lot of people, including myself. For example, when I cast my vote in November, I had been persuaded by his comments that he wanted to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Sucker. It's now abundantly clear that he does not. His claim to be a "fierce advocate" for LGBT issues was purely strategic, intended to elicit donations and votes from people who care about those issues, not communicate anything about his beliefs or intentions on the issue. The audacity involved in this kind of big-scale strategic speech doesn't come easily to most people, but it can become a way of life for those who can pull it off. Thus, to continue our example, Obama can continue to make sincere-sounding promises about his commitment to repealing DADT to the face of a serviceman who he's court-martialing for being gay.

Once you've lost the trust that candidates' speech acts are communicative, trying to cover the issues becomes a snipe hunt. We could get a great understanding of the issues, but it would do us no good in deciding how to vote. So all that's left is horserace coverage.

Double-Barreled Articles and Some Problems With Constructivism

2009-06-18T22:47:00.003-07:00

There's a tendency in political ecology and related work in geography and anthropology to write double-barreled articles. A double-barreled article is one that (on the analogy of a double-barreled question on a survey) packs together two somewhat distinct components -- a (usually radical) philosophical/social-theoretic argument, and a (usually interesting) empirical case study. Michael Watts' seminal "On the Poverty of Theory" chapter remains the best example, but I was prompted to write this post by a recent article in American Anthropologist by Mario Blaeser. I focus on Blaeser's article here for the convenience of having a running example, not because his article is a uniquely bad instance of this phenomenon (indeed, Blaeser's article was quite interesting and thought-provoking).

Blaeser's case study has to do with a failed sustainable hunting initiative in Paraguay. After several years of strict hunting bans, the Yshiro people, the Paraguayan government, and an interested NGO thought they had worked out a plan to re-open hunting. But the government soon called the project off, citing the failure of Yshiro hunters to follow the conservation rules. The cause of the problem, Blaeser shows, had to do with the clash between the conservationist ontology and the Yshiro one. According to the Western conservationists on the government's side, nature consists of organisms reproducing themselves, so if they are overhunted there will be fewer babies born and the species will go exitinct. According to the Yshiro, however, individual animals are provided to the people by "bahluts," a class of powerful beings, as part of a network of reciprocity involving ritual responsibilities and intra-human social justice (excessive hunting pressure, crucially, is not a failure of reciprocity that could lead to a reduced supply of animals*). The government negotiators thought they were conceding the Yshiro demands for social justice within the program as a way of stabilizing a project that was basically about conserving wildlife by reducing hunting pressure, whereas the Yshiro thought they were conceding the government's pointless and perhaps ulterior-motivated demands for reduced hunting pressure in order to establish full social reciprocity within their community. Once the program was in place, the Yshiro began breaking the letter of the conservation law, since they never bought into its ontological premises. The government, meanwhile, not realizing there could be any question as to its ontological premises, interpreted the Yshiro rule-breaking as a threat to the environment.

Blaeser's philosophical/social-theoretic argument has to do with the contrast between the approaches he labels "multiculturalism" and "political ontology." Multiculturalism holds that cultural differences consist in differing interpretations of a single reality -- some of which may be demonstrably erroneous, but most of which can provide enriching additional perspectives. Political ontology, on the other hand, holds that cultural differences involve different realities, which he usually refers to as "ontologies." There's some slipperiness in the term ontology -- it can refer either to what things actually exist (e.g. reproducing animal populations or bahluts), or to a theory about what things exist**. Relying on the latter definition is consistent with multiculturalism. Blaeser wants to insist we can't understand the case study or similar situations without relying on the former, that is, without saying that the government and Yshiro have not just different worldviews but that they have, and make, different worlds. In some unspecified way, the Yshiro don't just construct an idea of bahluts, they construct a world in which bahluts really exist -- and similarly for the government's modernist ecology. Blaeser makes liberal use of Bruno Latour's term "factish," a portmanteau of "fact" and "fetish" meant to indicate a fact that is made to exist by the process of discovering it, as opposed to a regular fact taken to pre-exist the discovery process or a fetish that's purely imagined.

What makes this article double-barreled is that the very interesting case study of the failed hunting program can be understood perfectly well in terms of different worldviews. Because what happened was that putting the program into practice revealed that the government and Yshiro had different ideas about the prey and how to hunt them, and both sides realized that the stated plan didn't accomplish what they had thought it would. The ontology-as-what-actually-exists -- whether singular but interpreted differently (multiculturalism) or multiple (political ontology) -- plays little role, as we're not told (and probably couldn't be, given the brevity of the program) what happens to the animals. Contrast this with case studies in which the world out there really does play a role. I have read numerous articles in which it was shown how people's worldviews led to practices that modified the world to match it (or modified it to match less, setting them up for a nasty surprise -- Michael Thompson has written a very interesting, but I fear highly stylized, account of how environmental management among Alpine pastoralists causes the environment to change which in turn prompts a change in management strategy, all leading the environment and the managers' ideas of it to cycle through the four quadrants of cultural theory). What would have made this case study a real demonstration of political ontology, and eliminated the double-barreled nature of it, would have been if the failure of the program was in some way due to each side running up against the actual things posited by the other's ontological theory -- government scientists coming upon some bahluts, or Yshiro hunters finding that heavy hunting pressure led to a drop in animals despite maintenance of social and ritual reciprocity. The failure to find some actual-ontological clash doesn't disprove political ontology, it just makes the case study beside the point of the multiculturalism-political ontology argument. (Ironically, the reason most political ecologists seem to turn to Latour is that they believe that unlike postmodernism/poststructuralism, his actor-network theory allows nature/ontology to "talk back" and influence people's constructions in this way.)

Having gone over the double-barreledness of Blaeser's article, I have a few points to raise about his philosophical/social-theoretic claims. Again, I am focusing on this article as a convenient example of some common constructivist moves, not as a particularly egregious offender.

One argument that Blaeser makes in favor of political ontology is that multiculturalism is dependent on a modernist ontology -- specifically, the ability to separate the single actual-ontology from the multiple ontological theories rests on the nature-culture dichotomy. The Yshiro, who do not have that dichotomy as part of their ontology, would thus not be able to be multiculturalists. But Blaeser seems to confuse two related distinctions -- nature-culture, and signified-signifier. The latter distinction, between an actual thing and interpretations of it, is what's being used in multiculturalism. After all, we could apply a multiculturalist analysis to differing perspectives on a cultural object -- say, the institution of government, or the text of Blaeser's article. Blaeser is correct that the Yshiro would deny the nature-culture divide, since they see the world as a network incorporating humans, bahluts, animals, and all kinds of other stuff (as opposed to the conservationists' separation between animals doing their thing and hunters as agents acting on them). But there is nothing in Blaeser's description of Yshiro ontology to suggest they would deny the signified-signifier divide -- and indeed, there is a counterexample, in an anecdote he tells about an Yshiro friend who concludes that the conservationists are simply wrong about the actual workings of animal populations and speculates on what their real ulterior motives must be since they couldn't honestly hold that ridiculous interpretation of reality.

Blaeser goes on to argue that multiculturalism is oppressive. In order to maintain the idea that there is a single world and different ontological theories are just different perspectives on the same thing, multiculturalists have to set "common sense" boundaries on what types of ontologies can be accepted. Too weird of an ontological component (e.g. the existence of bahluts) has to be denied and/or ignored, and the remainder of the ontology (e.g. the importance of social reciprocity) is reshaped to fit within the bounds.

My first concern with the "multiculturalism is oppressive" thesis is that the oppressiveness he notes -- which consists in the summary, disrespectful dismissal of ontological components that are too challenging to one's own views -- can be recognized and accommodated within the multicultural framework. A multiculturalist can recognize the ethnocentric narrowing of his or her boundaries of common sense, and resolve to work harder to expand them and be willing to take on more divergent ontologies and work out how they all can apply to the same reality.

Second, Blaeser falls into a common trap of strong constructivist arguments. The reality/signified -- here, animals and their actual reproductive process, whatever that is -- drop out of the analysis, and do not appear to play a role or have a life of their own beyond the process of being constructed by people. This means we lose sight of any sort of shared problem situation that people find themselves in. And therefore, we're left with no other way for divergent ontologies to interact with each other than plays of oppressive power, marginalizing and bullying rather than persuading and demonstrating. The idea of examining the conservationist and Yshiro ontologies for their relative usefulness in guiding responses to the various problems that the actors have -- which would seem to me to be the respectful approach -- is nowhere to be seen. Instead the main options appear to be (though Blaeser is vague on his own counter-proposal to multiculturalism and leaves much for the future work he hopes he inspired) oppressive crushing of one ontology, or the unilateral giving up of a (false?) ontology by adherents of modernism.

(This post is already quite long, so I'll simply note for my own reference that this post is in part an exercise in preparation for an academic piece I'd like to do exploring the currently popular approaches to human-environment studies -- positivist, Marxist, poststructuralist, and increasingly now actor-network -- and show how their problems can be resolved through ideas drawn from Jane Addams, John Dewey, and the rest of American pragmatism. Pragmatism offers strategies for reconciling divergent ontologies, criteria for evaluating clashing claims, and an ethical approach centered on the idea of shared problem situations. Interestingly in this context, pragmatism's roots appear to lie in part in American Indian thought and its response to European colonialism.)

*This general sort of framework -- prey animals are provided in response to maintenance of reciprocity and social obligations, while overhunting as such cannot damage the resource base -- is held by some other American Indian cultures as well, some as far away as Canada.

**Throughout this post, when I don't modify "ontology" with "theory" or "actual," I'm being deliberately noncommittal between the two meanings.

Robert Kaplan and the Revenge of Illogic

2009-06-16T18:09:00.003-07:00

I've been meaning for a while to write something about Robert Kaplan's attempt to rehabilitate Halford Mackinder's geographical determinism. Having finally had time to read it, "attempt" may be too kind a word.

Kaplan's main thesis is that geography -- by which he says he means physical features of mountains and seas and so on, though he from time to time seems to flip over into the distribution of cultural and religious groupings -- has a major impact on global politics and history. That is a claim that is on one hand too obvious to deny and on the other too vague to be of any use. What matters is the specific theses one advances as to how geography makes a difference.

Digging through Kaplan's meanderings on the impending anarchy in Eurasia and his condemnation of a vague idealist foreign policy foil, there's really not much there in terms of specific theses about the influence of geography on global politics. What is there is ad hoc, unsupported, and in some cases clearly false.

Mackinder's most famous thesis, which Kaplan endorses, is the idea that central Asia and Siberia -- controlled since Mackinder's time by the Russian Empire, the USSR, and now Russia and the post-Soviet central Asian states -- is the "pivot" of world history, control of which would ensure control of the world barring some very close containment by other powers. Kaplan takes this to have been vindicated by the rise of the Soviet Union. But the USSR was only the second superpower (after the influential but short-lived Mongols) to occupy that territory. At other points in history, the world's dominant political and economic power has been located in Mesopotamia, Persia, China (for a good long time), Western Europe, and North America. And it's not clear how Soviet control of central Asia was critical to its superpowerdom -- its demographic and economic core was in Western Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Similarly, Kaplan argues that China could become a superpower by conquering Siberia, but never explains why, since China's economic heartland is along its east coast.

Kaplan credits Mackinder with prescience for foreseeing the two World Wars when he states that with the completion of European colonialism, the world would be full and thus these powers would turn against each other. But this is a rather stupid idea even for Mackinder's time -- European powers had been fighting each other for control of Europe, and for control of particular colonial territories, for hundreds of years. Napoleon's proto-world-war, for example, was hardly "dissipated" by the possibility of trying to conquer more colonies rather than attacking Germany, Italy, etc. Indeed, there's a good (geographical!) argument to be made that the availability of new lands to colonize intensified conflict among the colonial powers.

Kaplan occasionally does the work of critique himself. One of his clearer geographical claims is this: "The ultimate land-based empire, with few natural barriers against invasion, Russia would know forevermore what it was like to be brutally conquered. As a result, it would become perennially obsessed with expanding and holding territory." But in the very next paragraph, he runs through some of Mackinder's thoughts on Western Europe's colonial expansion. A set of empires more "obsessed with expanding and holding territory" could hardly be found than the eminently sea-based ones of Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and France. Kaplan then drops the idea that geography determines who will seek an empire, and now claims geography determines whether these empire-seekers will be democratic or authoritarian: "the sea, beyond the cosmopolitan influences it bestows by virtue of access to distant harbors, provides the inviolate border security that democracy needs to take root." Tell that to nearly-land-locked, yet somehow still democratic, Germany and Switzerland. (What about the Nazis? Well, Italy and Spain, with their rational borders along seas and mountains, both went through periods of fascism as well.) Or, for that matter, tell it to the United States and Canada, which managed to become two of the world's leading democracies despite their long and irrational border. Nor, for that matter, has being an island always staved off authoritarianism in countries like Cuba, Haiti, Indonesia, or the Philippines. And South Korea managed to become a democracy with its capital separated only by a thin, geographically illogical border from one of the most threatening regimes in the world.

Kaplan goes on to argue that population growth and technological advances since Mackinder's time have made all of Asia a single pivot area (an "organic whole"). It's not clear what he means by this. Certainly not that it has become a single political-geographical unit, since the rest of the article is spent detailing the geographical and political fragmentation of Asia. Nor does he really explain the implications of this. At this point Mackinder's pivot thesis drops out of the article, and we get to more specific small-scale evaluations of geography's effects on particular places, all of it driven by his longstanding preoccupation with the idea of teeming, crowded hordes of irrational people.

Kaplan takes us on a tour of conflict-prone "shatter zones" located around the rim of Mackinder's pivot area. The Asian rim, at least -- Europe, despite sharing all of the geographical characteristics he lists for the other rim areas, and despite having been the scene of intense conflict until just half a century ago, is curiously absent.

Kaplan predicts imminent anarchy for Bangladesh, in large part because of its geographically irrational border -- there are no mountain ranges or great rivers separating India and Bangladesh, so the Bangladeshi government can't keep its people under control. But it's not as if Bangladesh was doing awesome during and immediately after British colonial rule, when the national borders corresponded more closely to natural ones -- the country was split off from India because of a major cultural gap between Hindus and Muslims that existed despite the lack of physical barriers. (The intermixing of Hindus and Muslims, plus a variety of smaller religions, in the Indian subcontinent also defies Kaplan/Mackinder's earlier easy claim that there's a neat geographical correspondence between the four heartland-ringing regions (Europe, the Middle East, India, and China) and their respective faiths (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and supposedly Buddhism).

Kaplan is on somewhat firmer -- though also extremely well-trod -- ground as he moves westward and notes that many of the borders of countries were drawn by colonial powers with little regard to the preexisting natural or cultural geography of the area. But his discussion is haunted by the idea that population density and scarce resources will inevitably create conflict, and that that conflict will spill over into other areas. This "resource wars" thesis is not tenable as a simple generalization -- resource scarcity can lead to cooperation, resource abundance can lead to conflict, and I don't see why conflict within Yemen over water rights would threaten Saudi Arabia, as Kaplan claims. The links among population, resources, culture, politics, and conflict deserve detailed empirical study, not Kaplan's breezy certainty about the coming anarchy.

Finally, we reach Iran. Kaplan says that Iran is relatively topographically unified, and has been politically unified for most of history in the form of the various Persian empires, and that it's politically pivotal because it sits at the juncture of various important trade routes. I'll grant all that. Kaplan describes Iran's various geopolitical schemes, such as supplying Hezbollah, which he says are made possible by its logical boundaries. But just a few pages ago, he had been describing similar machinations by both India (one of his prime examples of a state with illogical boundaries) and China (whose boundary logic is not assessed in the article). Kaplan concludes: "If the geographic logic of Iranian expansion sounds eerily similar to that of Russian expansion in Mackinder�s original telling, it is." The two share a logic, yes -- but it's hardly eerie, since it's the same logic used by every major world power, including the United States (how many ideologically congenial militias did we fund in Latin America?).

Kaplan then advises a strategy of containment for Iran similar to that used against Russia. Russia, we should recall, does not have particularly logical boundaries. Containment certainly makes sense as a geopolitical strategy for dealing with a hostile country, but I don't see how Iran's logically-bounded geography determines the choice of containment as opposed to, presumably, invasion and regime change.

The primary critical response to Kaplan, I imagine, will be to urge the virtues of idealism (in both the moral and "ideas shape history" senses) and free will against his materialistic determinism. While there's something to those counterclaims, I think it's important as well to highlight that even though he's right in a general sense to say geography matters, he's wrong in the specific predictions he tries to make from geographical premises. Kaplan is the evolutionary psychology of geography -- he takes an undoubtedly true but extremely vague premise ("geography affects history" vs "the mind has evolved"), and applies it in a ad hoc and post hoc fashion to put a stamp of explanation on various events, without much more coherence to the resulting claims than that given by his political preoccupations.

The Implausibility of Watchmen

2009-06-16T09:28:00.002-07:00

I recently read Watchmen, and while it was quite enjoyable, I found the ending implausible. (I'm not much of a movie person, so I doubt I'll see the film, though from what my wife says, I think much of my concerns would apply to the movie's somewhat different ending as well.)

[Spoilers follow]

I know, I know -- a graphic novel that has a radioactive superman, a psychic alien monster, and a three-term President Nixon, and I'm complaining that it's implausible? But Watchmen's appeal is supposed to be its gritty social realism. And what I find implausible about the ending was on a sociological level.

At the end of the novel, we learn that Adrian Veidt -- the alleged smartest man in the world -- has carried out an elaborate plot to bring about world peace. The centerpiece of this plan is teleporting a psychic "alien" into New York City. The threat posed by this creature, Veidt says, will unite the world against it, thus eliminating the Cold War arms race and threat of nuclear annihilation. All of the characters appear to believe this will work -- even Rorschach, who feels bound to expose the plot despite its success. And there's not much left of the book's intended moral dilemma if the plan doesn't work.

It's true that there's a "unite in the face of a common enemy" effect. So it's believable that the appearance of the alien would have caused the Soviet Union to suspend its invasions of central and south Asia. That alone isn't much credit to Veidt, since he caused those invasions in the first place by provoking Dr. Manhattan -- source of the US's deterrent power -- to leave for Mars.

The problem is that the "unite in the face of a common enemy" effect doesn't last much longer than the very immediate threat posed by the common enemy. Once the imminent danger is gone, the parties who had united begin to squabble over their response to the threat, and recall their past grievances with each other. Take, for example, what happened in the US after the September 11 attacks (obviously the writers of Watchmen wouldn't have known about this particular example in the mid-1980s). Immediately after the attacks, Americans -- and indeed, most of the world -- united in opposition to al-Qaida. But as time went on, with no more attacks on US soil, the old divisions between liberals and conservatives began to open up again. There was enough residual unity to help put Bush over the line in the 2004 election -- but by 2006, the administration's handling of the al-Qaida threat had become a net political liability. The US became as deeply polarized over terrorism as it had been over anything pre-9/11. And it's not as if al-Qaida has gone away or has stopped wanting to attack the US. But when the attacks are not in immediate memory, their ability to create unity is much more attenuated.

Thus, for Veidt's plan to work, he would have to teleport another alien into a major city every year or two in order to keep the US and USSR focused on the alien threat rather than attacking each other. There's no indication in the book that he has the means or intention to do so. Nor does the cost of his plan look so plausibly acceptable when he has to repeat the stunt multiple times.

But even if Veidt's plan worked to end the Cold War, I find it implausible that it would achieve his underlying goals. Veidt isn't just concerned about Americans and Russians blowing each other up. He's concerned about the wider ramifications of militarization, such as the way it sucks up resources that could better be used for social programs and the environmental effects of relying on nuclear technology.

I don't see any way that the response to the threat of alien invasion would be to beat swords into plowshares and implement single-payer health care. Instead, the response would be to beat plowshares into swords and raid health care budgets for military funding. The threat of alien invasion demands more militarization, a cooperative ramping-up of arms, space, and intelligence programs by both superpowers in order to have the capability to fight back. (An alien invasion could result in demilitarization if the aliens could show up and make demands that humans disarm -- but Veidt's creature is dead on arrival, and all the Watchmen are convinced that the plan would be ruined if Veidt's role, and hence his demand for disarmament, were ever to become known.)

Both sides do it

2009-06-12T22:27:00.002-07:00

Having torn into an anti-animal-rights article a few posts down, I should note that pro-animal-rights authors are hardly free from fuzzy thinking and unoriginal arguments. Such is the effort by Jan Deckers (subscription req.) in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. Deckers' theme is to deny that vegans are "sentimental" by showing that there are good reasons to hold the vegan position. The reasons he surveys are well-known ones -- harm to human and environmental health, causing pain to animals, and the wrongness of killing animals. On the first point he cites the most up-to-date research in support, but adds nothing new philosophically. On the second, he plays with some nuance that he feels Peter Singer misses, but again there's no major new claims there. The abstract would have us believe that his challenge to Tom Regan's views on the third point is a major contribution of the article. Unfortunately, his challenge consists largely of a perfunctory citation of Whitehead to call into question Regan's assumption that plants lack awareness. I'd like to argue against this view, since what little Whiteheadian philosophy I've come across has always struck me as unfounded speculation and playing up the way its conclusions sound more radical than they really are. But Deckers barely explains what Whitehead says, much less why he says it. And in any event, the practical implications are dulled by Deckers' supposition that animals have a stronger dislike for death than plants and thus it's still reasonable to be more concerned about killing the former.

Another too-brief bit in Deckers' article is his exploration of why many people suppress their feelings of sympathy for animals. I think it would be interesting and useful to read a detailed ethnographic study of how children's feelings toward animals develop, and how they incorporate understandings of pets vs wild animals vs food animals vs pests and any cognitive dissonance between categories, and how this manifests differently in different places and cultures (perhaps such a study has been written and I just haven't run across it). Unfortunately, Deckers' exploration consists mostly of briefly recalling how he and another author were urged, against their inclinations, to kill animals to prove they were real men. This exploration is overhung by a not-quite-stated presumption that children naturally see the wrongness of killing animals but are twisted by the patriarchy etc. This approach seems to be to be both based on a psychologically/anthropologically false romanticism, as well as highly ineffective at swaying anyone who doesn't already think non-vegans are morally corrupt.

The moral basis of legality

2009-06-10T22:55:00.002-07:00

Amanda Marcotte approvingly cites a claim by maha that's quite popular among liberals:

the purpose of law is to maintain conditions that allow civilizations and societies to exist and function, not to enforce morality.

I agree with the implication that while morality and (ideal) legality overlap, there are things that are illegal but not immoral and things which are immoral but not illegal, and with the substantive point of Marcotte and maha's posts that abortion should be considered both moral and legal. But I think the connection between morality and legality is closer than the standard liberal view lets on.

By maha's standard, I don't see any way to justify a legal rule about abortion -- the topic of the post -- one way or the other without bringing in morality. Neither allowing abortions under all circumstances, nor banning all abortions, nor anything in between strikes me as likely to cause societal collapse. Indeed, we have examples of societies with various policies on abortion, and none of them seem poised to collapse into anarchy or extinction as a result of how accessible abortion is. (It is in one sense unfortunate that societies are capable of continuing to exist indefinitely despite enormous grinding injustices, since that means survival of the fittest hasn't pushed us quicker toward social justice.) So then we have to ask about "functioning." If functioning is to mean anything more than "managing to continue to exist," it requires some sort of ideal of what a well-functioning society looks like. But deciding on any such ideal is necessarily a *moral* question. A society in which abortion is banned is functioning quite well if you think that one of the important things a society should accomplish is to maintain gender roles that subordinate women to men. But it functions quite poorly if you think that what a society is for is to enable its members to pursue happiness on an equal basis. Neither of these ideals is the "real" meaning of social functioning, and it would be a fallacious essentializing reification to claim so. So the only way to choose between them is to make moral arguments, which hold that freedom is a more valuable way of organizing human interactions than adherence to gender roles or vice-versa. (I'm being noncommittal on the substantive questions for the sake of focusing on my argument, but my position is not an inherently relativist one -- I think there are good reasons that freedom really is better, and that enforcement of gender roles is a bad moral position.)

Law and morality are not identical. Many things that are immoral would be too impossible, inefficient, abuse-prone, or unintended-consequence-producing to outlaw. And some things that are moral should nonetheless be illegal because it's necessary, and costs little enough, in order to enable enforcement of illegal-immoral acts. But the law still has an unavoidable moral basis.

(I would speculate that the appeal of the strict separation between morality and legality is a legacy of Christianity. Christianity has traditionally encouraged a view of morality as arbitrary rules. So when some law has a deeper justification -- e.g. "it promotes the pursuit of happiness," as opposed to "because I/God said so!" -- it seems like we're no longer talking about morality.)

Sloppy thinking on animal rights

2009-06-10T22:39:00.003-07:00

I've written before that philosophical arguments against animal rights* strike me as surprisingly weak, putting a fancy-sounding veneer on a basic refusal to take the idea of strong moral status for animals seriously. Richard L. Cupp's recent article is no exception.

Before I get to the negative part, I will say that Cupp makes an effective argument against animal rights proponents using corporate personhood and the personhood of ships to show that the law can easily extend personhood beyond individual adult humans, and thus to animals. In brief, he points out that all theories defending corporate and ship personhood ultimately rest on defending the interests of individual adult humans (e.g. corporate shareholders or those who wish to sue a company or ship for harms done by it). If the article had focused on this point, I would have been happy.

However, Cupp goes on to try to rebut the argument from marginal cases, which holds that infants and mentally impaired adults are in the same boat as animals according to any standard of personhood (aside from raw species favoritism) and thus animals deserve the same rights as these non-paradigmatic humans. In passing, he references the argument that such animal-human comparisons are unhelpful because they are detrimental to, and attempt to appropriate the still-shaky victories of, other progressives -- an argument I think has merit. But his real interest is in addressing the human-animal comparisons on their own terms by showing that animals and non-paradigmatic humans are not in fact analogous.

To do so, he rattles off the standard humanist arguments -- infants and mentally impaired humans are still humans, and only moral agents or those similar to them (by some poorly defined standard of similarity that places heavy emphasis on species membership) can be moral patients because morality is based on a social contract. My problem here is not just that I think these arguments are wrong, it's that he barely acknowledges that anyone has considered or tried to rebut them. Countless pages have been written by animal rights theorists rebutting these contractualist arguments. Maybe they were all making philosophical mistakes. But if you want to write an anti-animal rights philosophy article in 2009, you have to at least show that you recognize those counter-arguments have been made, and preferably address and rebut them. His reliance on standard, pre-animal-rights-movement contractualist arguments is quite at odds with the paper's title's claim to be going "beyond animal rights."

Cupp attempts to give some justification for taking this contractualist approach by pointing out that this view is widely held in the US. That it is -- but pointing it out just begs the question. Animal rights advocates are well aware they are asking people to change their way of thinking and acting in a fairly significant way. And the idea that animals are fair game to be raised in factory farm conditions is arguably deeper-rooted in US culture than any formal Rawlsian contract analysis that might be drawn on to justify it.

He finishes up the article's substantive content by invoking yet another fundamentally conservative principle -- giving you rights makes me less special. He massages this idea around into a semi-respectable point: if we argue that animals deserve rights because of characteristic X (sentience, practical autonomy, etc), then that opens the door to denying rights to humans who lack X. There's some truth to that -- but stating the case this way makes a question-begging move to presuppose the importance of humanness vs non-humanness. But humanness is just another possible characteristic on the basis of which rights can be assigned, another value that could be substituted in for X. So let's rewrite the claim in a more neutral way: If we argue that beings deserve rights because of characteristic X, then some beings may be denied rights because they lack X. Confronted with any being or class of beings that has been denied rights on the basis of their lack of X despite seeming prima facie eligible, we can then see that there are two possible responses. First, we may realize that these beings did not deserve rights after all, since X clearly encapsulates all of our reasons for wanting or needing to confer rights. This conclusion can in fact be drawn about a Homo sapiens by someone not that interested in animal rights -- consider Ampersand's view of Terri Schiavo. Or second, the fact that we don't like that these beings are being denied rights can prompt us to decide that there's some other factor instead of or in addition to X that provides a basis for conferring rights. Such an additional factor -- call it Y -- may invite into the circle of rights-bearers the target group as well as additional Y-holding beings who lacked X but differ from the target group in holding some third characteristic that has not (yet) been assigned any moral significance -- e.g. starting with "current sentience" (X) and then adding "past or future sentience" (Y) would admit humans in comas, but also chimpanzees in comas. Cupp argues that the only factor that can effectively work on this second path, the only factor that can fill the role of Y (and Z, etc) in bringing in all the beings that he can't bear to exclude from rights-holding, is "membership in Homo sapiens." That may be so, but that just throws us back to the argument about speciesism and whether species membership itself is a relevant moral criterion. But this detour through considering whether any X other than species membership might turn out to be too narrow has raised an additional difficulty for Cupp's argument -- it's now clear that he must not only defend the relevance of species membership, but also defend its uniqueness, i.e. why can't the criterion for rights be "sentience (or whatever X a given animal rights philosopher wants to use) AND/OR membership in the human species," or "membership in any species whose paradigmatic members are sentient" (which would include, but not necessarily be limited to, humans)**.

The article ends with a flurry of question-begging flourishes, mostly centering around the economic cost of ending violations of animals' alleged rights (the economic costs of ending human slavery are not a counterexample, we're told, because ending human slavery was morally justified) and the fact that promoting animal rights would require us to say, even to the faces of starving Rwandans, that animals have rights (no s***, Sherlock). I assume he means these to be the coup de gras to animal rights theories, but they work better as the coup de gras to his claims to be taken seriously as a critic of animal rights philosophy.

The article's conclusion argues that a focus on human responsibility, rather than animal rights, would be both more successful and better for animals. Unfortunately he does effectively nothing to flesh out what the basis or scope of this responsibility would be, leaving the claim sounding more like a way of avoiding being labeled an apologist for extreme animal abuses like dog fighting (he approvingly cites the outrage at Michael Vick) without compromising his assertion of the unique importance of humanness.

*I use the term in a broad sense to encompass all positions that assert a strong moral considerability for animals for their own sakes, including both "rights" theories in a narrow sense (e.g. Tom Regan) as well as utilitarianism, feminist care ethics, etc. In the article this post discusses, the author talks a lot about rights in the narrower sense, but I see no reason any of his arguments wouldn't extend to other considerability-for-their-own-sake views that fall under the broader definition.

**Basing the rights of one being on the characteristics of that group's paradigmatic members is highly problematic, and Cupp does raise this concern against crude extensionist uses of the argument from marginal cases. But his ability to press this claim is undercut by his heavy reliance on it in attempting to show why infants and mentally impaired people deserve rights whereas animals with similar capacities don't -- he argues that infants get rights because they can turn into typical adults later, and mentally impaired people get rights because typical adults can turn into mentally impaired people later. Giving up this reliance on relating marginal cases to paradigmatic people would require either resort to raw speciesism (which is what the argument was meant to support), or losing the ability to declare the kind of difference between human and animal cases that he seeks. (My own view is that if a being cares about how its life goes, that care counts -- and if it doesn't or can't care, then there's nothing there to count. Considerations of practical autonomy and moral agency factor in on a practical level to how beings' caring is actualized, but they don't make typical adult individual humans a paradigm or fullest case, since infants etc. care about their lives just like supposed paradigm people.)

Save the Earth with cookies

2009-06-10T22:36:00.001-07:00

Looking at this chart from a recent paper by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews in Environmental Science and Technology, the obvious lessons are that cutting back (through personal choice as well as policy instruments like altered subsidies) on red meat and dairy is important from a climate standpoint. Vegans hoping to leverage climate concerns will lose traction due to chicken, fish, and eggs being in the same ballpark as vegetables and cereals -- though I think non-climate environmental concerns like lagoons of chicken poop and collapsing fisheries could be brought in on those points. More interesting, especially to the 4-to-12-year-old crowd, is the clear climate advantage of sweets over vegetables.

It should be about the story, not the reporter

2009-06-06T12:54:00.003-07:00

Despite working for a newspaper, I have no formal journalism training, so I can't speak for what they actually teach you in J-school. But it seems like a couple of good rules for writing news -- even entertainment section news -- are: 1) respect your sources, and 2) don't try to be cute; just tell us the story.

Both of those rules were violated by the AP's John Rogers, reporting on the elimination of the "best polka album" Grammy:

LOS ANGELES (AP) � It's enough to make any serious polka fan shove his plate of sausage aside, fling his lederhosen in the closet and go out and shed a few tears in his beer.

...

Although posters to Internet sites catering to polka fans (yes, there are such places) were outraged, [18-time winner Jimmy] Sturr, who is hailed by fans the world over as the King of Polka, was doing his best to take the news in stride.

That first sentence should just be dropped completely -- it's a pile of stereotype synecdoche that tells you far more about how clever Rogers thinks he is than about what actually happened. When a reporter falls back on trying to amuse the audience with wordplay, it means one of three things: 1) the reporter can't figure out what's really interesting about the actual story, 2) there isn't anything actually interesting about the story, or 3) the reporter thinks they're more important than the story. That doesn't mean the writing has to be deadly serious, but it does mean the interest has to come from showing us what's actually going on.

The parenthetical in the second bit I quoted is also wholly unnecessary. It creates this conspiratorial tone between the reporter and reader -- #Hey fellow Normals, I know these people are a bunch of freaks. Don't get the crazy idea that I think they're respectable members of society or anything.#

I'm not saying this because polka fans are one of the important oppressed minorities of the world, or because I myself am a big polka fan and therefore took it personally*. But it's still grating to read an article in which the reporter sounds like he thinks he's too cool for all this.

*I realize this sounds a bit like "I'm not gay -- not that there's anything wrong with that!" But I will say that if an equivalent article was written about Scandinavian folk music, I would take it personally.

In defense of spite

2009-06-03T22:52:00.002-07:00

Another day, another offensive publicity stunt by PeTA. On this particular day it's billboards meant to capitalize on the recent assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller. At the end of her critique of the billboards at Shakesville, Erica C. Barnett makes a typical expression of spite, declaring her desire to buy some foie gras, which is seconded by multiple commenters. This draws a typical reaction from several vegan or vegetarian commenters, imploring Barnett et al. not to make innocent geese suffer for the sins of PeTA's humans.

As an ethical plant eater (i.e. I think there's a moral reason incumbent on everyone to reduce the amount of animal-eating, as opposed to simply having a personal dislike for animal-eating), I certainly would prefer people not eat additional animals to spite PeTA. But the comeback from the vegan side strikes me as question-begging. It presupposes that eating animals is prima facie bad, and hence something that would require a stronger argument than spite to justify. But Barnett et al. don't share that view.

Imagine if these ads had been put out by People for Encouraging Temperance in America, and urged pro-lifers and pro-choicers both to give up alcohol. I think it would be perfectly reasonable to open up the liquor cabinet and do a shot in their "honor," to spite them for the offensive way they tried to push their anti-alcohol message. Because while I don't drink alcohol, my teetotalling is a personal preference, not a moral duty, and so I don't think responsible alcohol consumption needs any stronger of a reason than spite. In the temperance hypothetical, the spite is purely for the amusement of the spite-er. But it's only a short step from this kind of spite to tactics that really do put a dent in the spite-ee's cause, such as promises of the form "for every anti-gay protester that shows up, I'll donate $10 to GLAAD!" which are widely (and rightly) approved among progressive bloggers.

In this connection, it's interesting to note moderator SKM's explanation when she asked Barnett et al. to cool it on the spite comments -- she argued not that eating animals out of spite was bad, but that it was "squicking out the vegans," i.e. bothering people who ought to be tolerated but who are not providing compelling reasons to share the perspective from which foie gras eating is squicky.

So while I hope nobody who's (rightly) offended by PeTA's ads goes out and eats foie gras out of spite, I don't think that's any better or worse a reason than if they ate the same foie gras because it's tasty.

Objectivist vs relativist arguments for judicial diversity

2009-05-27T12:08:00.002-07:00

Now that President Obama has actually nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, I'm reminded that I meant to comment on this David Schraub post riffing on Sotomayor's thoughts on the influence of experience on judging, and the importance of a diverse judiciary:

Courts are constantly forced to ask questions about the nature of justice and fairness, to make evaluative decisions, in short, to judge. The entirely body of common law is essentially one long game of "what makes sense?" Constitutional law is no different: What is "cruel" punishment? What process is "due"? What is the technical definition of "equal protection"?

These are not questions that come with objective answers; indeed, I would question quite strongly whether they are even candidates for objective truth. To be sure, we often claim they are -- we take the position held by who currently hold the ~~crown~~ gavel and proclaim it to be ~~Divine Revelation~~ Black Letter Law. But this claim to impartiality is a chimera -- it doesn't correspond to anything real. A rule that works from the perspective of one position in the social order or one bundle of value commitments may seem bizarre or oppressive to another person differently situated or with a different set of commitments. We aren't equipped with the tools to resolve these disputes by brute intellectual force: our choices are between simply entrenching the dominant view and calling it True, or honestly engaging with and grappling with alternatives, with an eye towards mutual agreement and a commitment to mutual respect. From within this paradigm, it is beyond obvious that a multiplicity of perspectives is of benefit to the judicial branch. This has been recognized by theorists left (Jack Balkin, Cass Sunstein) and right (Richard Posner).

I think Schraub/Sotomayor get the right conclusion, that the judiciary should have members from a great diversity of backgrounds. And I think they start from the right premise -- that people with different experience will see things differently, e.g. what kind of conduct is "reasonable" in a given context. But I would get from the former to the latter by a route that is in some ways the opposite to the route Schraub takes.

Schraub takes a relativist approach. Different people see things differently, and no perspective is necessarily more correct than any other. Therefore, all we can do is avoid privileging any one perspective by putting them all in the mix.

I would take an objectivist approach. The different perspectives aren't simply equally valid alternate takes. They reveal important information about situations. A Latina judge doesn't just say "X doesn't seem reasonable to me in situation Y" whereas a white male judge says the opposite. The Latina judge says "I can see that X isn't reasonable in situation Y because I can appreciate the importance of factor Z," whereas the white male judge overlooks or under-weights the importance of Z, because Z has never been a problem in his life. And in theory the reverse may happen, with the Latina judge not appreciating certain aspects of a situation that the white male overlooks (though the cultural dominance and normalization of white maleness in our society makes the latter situation rarer than the former). If the court can't appreciate how awful it is for a girl to have to take off her bra in front of school officials, its decision isn't just privileging the male perspective, it's failing to fully consider all the factors at work and thus getting the decision wrong. A diverse judiciary thus gets not just decisions that are fairer between different outlooks, but better decisions. The process is still highly fallible, but that doesn't mean there's no right answer to legal questions.

It's not totally clear to me from the linked excerpts how closely Sotomayor would endorse the middle part of Schraub's argument. She refers to wrestling with the dangers of "relative morality," and that "there can never be a universal definition of wise," which sound Schraubian. But she also says that "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn�t lived that life," which strikes me as a statement of some form of standpoint epistemology. Standpoint epistemology is an objectivist position, holding that people from certain social positions (specifically the oppressed) understand things better and therefore get the right answers when members of the dominant group accept convenient falsehoods -- more consistent with my perspective. (I don't have space here to explicate the various versions of standpoint epistemology or my particular take on it.)

Picking a Textbook

2009-05-11T13:14:00.003-07:00

As I mentioned a few posts down, I'm picking a textbook for the World Regional Geography course I'm teaching this fall. Since I've been thinking about this stuff, I thought I'd record for posterity what kind of factors I took into account.

I'd like to be able to say I put a big emphasis on logistical matters like price and consistency with older editions. Unfortunately, textbook publishers don't seem to differentiate themselves much on this count.

Turning to content factors, one thing I'd like to see is some anti-essentialism about the regions the world gets divided up into. Unlike, say, the periodic table or evolutionary clades, geographical regions aren't "real" or eternal. They're pragmatic devices for understanding -- and therefore the borders of the regions depend on what your goal in dividing things up is. I would like a textbook that addresses both the natural and social processes that create differences among areas, as well as the processes by which we come to see certain areas as composing a "region." Relatedly, it would be nice to get away from the assumption that regional and sub-regional boundaries must always follow the borders of countries.

I want a textbook that avoids lists of facts. I understand the desire not to stereotype entire continents. But if students are presented with a list of unconnected items of information -- the ethnic groups on this island are the X and the Y, the northern part of this country is more economically developed than the south -- they're not going to remember it. I certainly don't want to teach a class that mostly involves memorization.

But at least "the ethnic groups on this island are the X and the Y" is an actual piece of information. Too often textbooks fill their pages with meaningless generalities like "this region has a great diversity of environments" or "this country has a rich cultural heritage." That kind of vapid statement may get you points with someone looking to check off that you have a "multicultural" perspective, but it doesn't actually teach students anything. Give me something of substance -- an explanation of the qanat system in central Asia, or an overview of the Aboriginal Australian Dreaming -- that shows the rich cultural heritage of a place.

All the textbooks I saw tried to present personal stories and vignettes from people living in the various regions. Unfortunately, they struggled with actually presenting the voices of actual people, opting instead for unattributed statements or third-person narration sourced from Western news stories. In the age of the Internet, it shouldn't be that hard to find someone in any part of the world who can write you a 400-word box in their own words on what it's like for them living in that place.

Finally, I looked for what for lack of a better term I'll call a political economy perspective. It's too easy for students to see various parts of the world as isolated and each going their own way (at least until McDonald's opened in their capital city). So a good textbook has to avoid pulling any punches in setting out just how each region was, and still is, shaped by wider forces and other regions -- for example, the impacts of the slave trade and colonialism on Africa.

I ended up picking the textbook by Lydia and Alex Pulsipher (the second author was my housemate for a while in grad school, but I picked the book based on the considerations above), but that book is not innocent of the concerns above, nor were the other books I considered irredeemably flawed.

Propaganda backfire

2009-05-08T22:19:00.002-07:00

I got a flier in the mail today from Food City warning me not to listen to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union's criticisms of Food City. The first backfire is that I was not aware the UFCW was criticizing Food City.

The second backfire comes from the obvious hypocrisy of the few actual arguments in between the vacuous corporate "values" boilerplate. The flier says UFCW has two goals: to get more union dues, and to destroy Food City. It's not clear how a union would collect any dues from workers at a company that has been destroyed. And for a for-profit corporation to make dire warnings about how other organizations are motivated by the desire to make money was ridiculous enough -- then I noticed that the flier contains a $5 coupon!

Inside, the flier tells us that UFCW paid $200,000 to a consulting firm to help spread its message. So I can only presume that this glossy flier was hand-made by Food City executives, rather than farmed out to *gasp* a consulting company that does PR campaigns.

I have yet to investigate the particulars of this dispute, but I think I can say I'm much more sympathetic to UFCW than I was before I checked my mail.

They All Look The Same

2009-05-08T00:29:00.003-07:00

I've been assigned to teach World Regional Geography next year, so I'm looking through textbooks to decide what to assign. The first book I opened up was Michael Bradshaw et al's Contemporary World Regional Geography. Among the many sidebars and pullout boxes in the "Africa South of the Sahara" chapter is one giving a "personal view" about Yaa Boadi, a woman in Ghana who overcame poverty to become a world-class engineer. The box's text -- an excerpt of a Financial Times article that includes not a single quote from the woman whose "personal view" this supposedly is -- is questionable enough. But what boggles my mind is the picture, a mug shot captioned "A Ghanaian woman similar to Yaa Boadi."

"Similar to?"

UPDATE: An interesting twist emerged when I realized I was looking at the previous edition of the book (I had the publisher send me the previous edition, because I wanted to factor into my decision whether students would be able to get by using an older edition, since that would be cheaper for them to buy). The newer edition had the same "personal view" box, with the same photo -- but this time the photo was captioned "Yaa Boadi." The photo credit also changed -- the newer edition credited to Todd Shapera, who wrote the article, but the older edition credits it to Reuters/Corbis.

The Chalice Projection

2009-05-07T23:02:00.001-07:00

For my UU readers, I suggest projection #3 on this page for anytime the UUA decides they need to incorporate a map into their graphics to show their global consciousness or whatever -- how many other religions have their own projection?

(After I wrote that I went searching around and realized Christianity and Judaism (scroll down to Maurer's S233) do, and presumably it wouldn't be too hard to do a nine-point version of one of the ones on the Judaism page for the Baha'is. It might be a little harder to do a map projection that looks like, say, an Om and have it still be recognizable as a map.)

Objective Accountability or Subjective Expression

2009-05-01T23:12:00.003-07:00

I recently read J. Claude Evans' With Respect for Nature, which is provocative in the sense of being brimming with arguments crying out to be deconstructed. I'll hopefully come back to post on his core project of defending non-subsistence hunting and fishing, but for now I wanted to pick out a key philosophical move that he makes. Evans is attracted to many elements of Albert Schweitzer's ethical system (though disagreeing with his anti-hunting conclusion), among which is his aversion to objective moral rules. Evans writes (p. 152):

Once one has accepted the basic moral principle, the task of moral deliberation truly begins as one is confronted with the task of living one's own individual life, of taking personal responsibility for one's decisions and practices. This is the task of living constantly mindful of one's basic orientation toward life expressed in basic principles or attitudes, without a set of rules that make one's decisions for one. This means that your decision, for example, to hunt, as long as it is consistent with or a personal expression of the basic attitude, can be correct for you without necessarily being the correct decision for me, even if we both adopt the same basic attitude. The moral life is a way, not the simple application of a set of moral rules. Many paths can diverge from one another within the common pursuit of this way.

The contrast here is between objective moral rules -- those that are binding on all people and to which one person can hold another accountable -- versus subjective moral rules -- those chosen by the actor as their personal expression of how they value their moral commitments. The distinction is not unique to Evans and Schweitzer, nor is the judgment that objective rules are slavish while subjective ones allow for deep expression of oneself.

Evans' aversion to objective rules seems to me to be based on caricaturing the objective-rules position. He attributes two characteristics to it -- that it's externally imposed, and fully worked-out. That enables him to portray objective-rules-followers as slaves, forced to follow whatever the moral code demands, without thinking about their own relationship to it. This portrayal of objective rules is perhaps a lingering legacy of traditional Christianity, in which the rules flowed from God to obedient humans (with a paradigmatic positive expression in Divine Command Theory and a paradigmatic negative one in the New Testament's portrayal of the Pharisees and Mosaic law).

But this external command view of objective rules is far from the only way they can be conceived. Objective though they might be, the rules of morality are always a work in progress. They always require further thought, debate over the nature and relative strength of values, etc. to be applied to particular situations and new circumstances. There is rarely "simple application" here, but there is a requirement to be "constantly mindful."

What of the subjective-rules approach? In its extreme existentialist form (and Evans seems to have some sympathies for existentialism), it threatens to slide into relativism. Anything is permissible, even obligatory, as long as you're willing to take responsibility for it. But at this point the moral content of the whole enterprise seems to dissolve -- how can we differentiate this approach from plain enlightened egoism? And what does "taking responsibility" consist in, beyond a personal attitude in one's own head toward one's actions (since others' attempts to hold one accountable would either be impermissible because they involve imposing one person's ethical rules on another, or morally neutral because the actor has accepted the risk of the holding-accountable as a foreseeable consequence).

The ultimate problem with the subjective-rules approach, I think, is that it's asocial. You are the only possible arbiter of your own actions, because only you can know how deeply and seriously you're thinking about their grounding. Other people are at most suggestive models -- they can't directly hold you responsible for making the wrong choice because what choice is right for them has no necessary bearing on what choice is right for you, even in identical circumstances. For someone who builds his environmental ethic on the importance of participation in the natural community, Evans (and Schweitzer) seems awfully reluctant to substantially engage in the human community. Indeed, it seems to me that decision-making, and taking responsibility for one's decisions, only make sense when the rules one is seeking to be guided by are objective and hence available for others' scrutiny and judgment.

(This is not to say that there is no room in life for a subjective-rules approach -- subjective rules have free rein anywhere in life that objective ethical rules do not prescribe a certain course of action, or where the objective importance of the ability to shape one's own lifestyle is the dominates other considerations (one of the great attractions of the liberal tradition of political philosophy is the emphasis it puts on the importance of carving out a substantial sphere of life for subjective expression). But subjective rules fill in where objective ones leave off and are always vulnerable to being trumped by them, rather than being an alternative to them.)

While this problem with subjective rules is common in many moral arguments, it also goes to the heart of the problems I have with Evans' theory. He claims to base it in objective facts -- the biological interdependence of all life (here treading closer than he wants to admit to the naturalistic fallacy) and the act of participation in that interdependence. But when everything is worked out, he ends up resting the justification for hunting and fishing on subjective attitudes of the hunter or fisher. Hunting or fishing becomes about what the quarry means to me -- not what the quarry means to itself.

Emile Durkheim in Orange County

2009-04-18T13:13:00.003-07:00

Julie writes an interesting meditation on the idea of some white Americans -- she uses her childhood home of Orange County, California, as a paradigm -- feeling like they lack culture. The OC she describes is sort of an anti-Cheers, where nobody knows your name, and where all social activities, from meals to music, are purchased rather than made together. Against this background, it's unsurprising -- though no less problematic -- that discontented members of such a society go out an appropriate elements of other cultures. Julie would rather frame this not as people in the OC having less culture than the other groups they jealously appropriate from, but as their culture being shallower.

In the comments, La Lubu (riffing on a comment by chingona describing the contrasting cultures of shallow Phoenix and deep Tucson) makes an interesting point:

What is culture, if it isn�t something shared by people? I think that sense of anomie is that disconnect with other people. That's what's shallow, to answer waxghost's question on "who determines depth?" Isn't the function of culture to connect people? I mean, "culture" isn�t just something that exists in the background like air. It's a collective enterprise. When it is no longer serving that purpose, it isn't inaccurate for the people whom that "culture" does not serve (say, the way Orange County's culture affects Julie) to state that it's shallow. Culture is belonging. It's not just continuity with history, it's continuity with other people�right now.

This reminded me of a point made by Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology. In Durkheim's day (as in ours), it was common to take greater connectedness as a sign of the presence of culture, whereas disconnectedness and individualism were un-cultured states. This is paralleled in "state of nature" theories, in which people are fundamentally separate and community is a further accomplishment. Durkheim's insight was that both community and individualism were equally cultural. Individualism must be established, defined, and upheld by culture just as more solidarity-filled community does. Just think of all the norms Julie's neighbors and family in the OC have to internalize in order to maintain their isolation -- rules about keeping monetary exchanges at arm's length, about not prying in anyone's business, etc. After all, that's why discontented white Americans so often seek authenticity not by becoming truly immersed in a richer culture, but by purchasing the trappings of other cultures (kanji tattoos, dream catchers, etc.). Purchasing is their existing cultural model of interaction. These norms are shared -- hence a culture in La Lubu's sense -- even though their function is to hold people apart. A similar point can be made, I think, about cultures that emphasize rootedness in a long past versus those that try to be ahistorical. Culture is a model for how to interact, but that model may or may not constitute "connecting people" as we normally understand the phrase.

Culture exists in order to enable people to get along in the world. We can therefore judge the adequacy of a given culture, in the context of the needs of the people involved and the demands of their situation. It seems clear from Julie's description that the culture of the OC is seriously inadequate for many people, because it is unable to satisfy their deeply-felt need for a particular type of interaction. Though diagnosing the problem in this way does not necessarily tell us how to fix it.

Miscellaneous roundup

2009-04-17T11:21:00.002-07:00

First, a little Plus Ca Change Watch. Obama released the Bush-era torture memos with minimal redaction yesterday, so he gets a cookie for following the law there. Disturbingly, though, he effectively pardoned all the people who actually did the torture, because holding people accountable for their actions would be living in the past. He obviously knows he needs the support of civil libertarians and anti-Republican partisans who seized on the torture issue. But his concern to establish a precedent for immunity from responsibility for torture makes me wonder what the real message was that the CIA was sent about how to interpret his public promises to stop torturing people.*

In related news, the NSA has been (accidentally, they swear!) spying on Americans, and even prior to the latest revelations the current administration was earning a marginal grade on civil liberties.

Moving to immigration, we have a bit of "actual change" news -- the people arrested in the recent Washington state raid have been released and given work authorization. My cynical side wonders how much this represents an actual change in policy versus punishing ICE because they embarassed Janet Napolitano by springing the raid on her.

For folks who were arrested in circumstances other than the Bellingham raid, immigration continues to be a black hole of human rights, even for detainees who are U.S. citizens (my wife's coworkers were the people who helped out Rene Saldivar, the guy pictured in that story).

*I'm realizing through all this that I have a much stronger structuralist tendency than I thought -- I simply don't trust the office of the presidency, and I'm less reassured than most people by a change in which dude's butt is in the chair. Or maybe I'm just an across-the-board pessimist -- while I expect a bad institution to corrupt even a good officeholder, I wouldn't expect even the best-designed institution to be able to rein in a truly bad officeholder.

Clark U.'s punt to procedure on Norman Finkelstein

2009-04-15T23:15:00.002-07:00

My graduate alma mater, Clark University, has gotten into some controversy over canceling a lecture by Norman Finkelstein. What I find interesting in the affair is not the question of whether Finkelstein should be giving a speech -- I know far too little about the Israel-Palestine issue, much less Finkelstein's personal oeuvre, to make a judgment on that -- but the rationale that Clark President John Bassett gave for canceling the speech.

The root of the issue is the broad philosophical tradition of liberalism. Liberalism arose as a reaction to the European wars between Catholics and Protestants, in which each side was convinced it held the deep truth about the universe which the other side needed to be made to see, by force if necessary, to save their souls and discharge the evangelistic obligation of one's own side. Rather than proving the truth of Catholicism or Protestantism, liberalism sought to make the substantive question about what will send you to hell irrelevant to the political arrangements for living together. A fully-developed liberal political system would allow people to hold to and pursue whatever substantive commitments they want, because disputes could be resolved on a purely procedural basis.

Liberalism is a great thing. But unfortunately, there is not always a procedural solution to be found -- some substantive decisions need to be made (I generally tend to see a smaller scope for pure procedure than the major modern exponents of liberalism like Rawls and Habermas). Yet the allure of a purely procedural solution, which allows you to sidestep hard (even intractable) substantive disputes, leads people astray. I call this fallacy of groping for a procedural rationalization in situations where none exists the "punt to procedure."*

Now let's return to the question of Finkelstein. In general, we can divide the people who might be invited to speak at a university into three groups:
A: Those whose views are correct and who therefore will enlighten the audience.
B: Those whose views are incorrect, but who are part of the reasonable debate and who students will therefore benefit from engaging with.
C: Those whose views are so bizarre and/or dangerous that it would be detrimental to give them a wider airing.

Deciding that someone falls into group C is, I think, a perfectly reasonable basis for canceling their speech. To allow a C to speak would both spread their dangerous views (and/or cause distress among their opponents) as well as give the university's implied endorsement to their participation in the reasonable debate. As a general rule I think universities have a duty to err on the side of taking the most generous reasonable interpretation of where the line between B and C falls**, but it's a dereliction of duty to wash your hands of ever declaring anyone a C (thus in effect asserting that everyone is an A or B). The trick, though, is that deciding which group a person falls into is a substantive question -- it requires analysis of their positions and a judgment as to their reasonableness.

Since he has to be the president of both Students for Palestinian Rights (who think Finkelstein is obviously an A) and Hillel (who think he's obviously a C), it's no surprise Bassett would hope to find a purely procedural reason to cancel (or, less plausibly, defend) Finkelstein's speech. Here's what he came up with, according to the Globe story linked above:

In a letter to the university's campus newspaper, Clark's president, John Bassett, wrote: "The university remains committed to inviting a wide range of speakers to encourage diversity of opinions on controversial topics. My decision was predicated on its untimely and unfortunate scheduling."

Finkelstein's address would conflict with a similar conference hosted by the university's Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, scheduled for April 23-26, two days after Finkelstein's speech, Bassett said in his letter. That conference could draw Holocaust scholars who MacMillan said may disagree with Finkelstein.

... "It is possible that our understanding of the Middle East conflicts would be enriched by conversations with Professor Finkelstein," Bassett said in the letter. "It is my judgement, however, that having Professor Finkelstein speak on the same evening as our planned conference would only invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding."

Bassett is ostentatiously non-committal about whether he thinks Finkelstein is an A/B or C. But his stated rationale seems quite weak -- the Finkelstein speech is two days before a conference of scholars who disagree with him. Were the events on the same day, I would grant a procedural out here. But as it stands, Bassett's argument is simply a punt to procedure, a procedural rationalization to avoid taking a substantive stand.

It's quite possible Bassett doesn't actually have a position on the substantive question here -- rather than secretly believing Finkelstein is a C but using a punt to procedure to avoid having to defend his view, he may simply be looking for the option that creates the least controversy and fewest headaches for him. But Students for Palestinian Rights has dumped a problem in his lap that obligates him to make a substantive decision -- to come out and say either "Norman Finkelstein is a provocative but important scholar who students will benefit from engaging with even if they disagree with his conclusions," or "Norman Finkelstein is soft on anti-Semitism*** and therefore Clark will not elevate him to a position in the reasonable debate."

*The term is an allusion to the "punt to mystery," the fallacy by which a religious person dismisses challenges to their theological position's apparent contradictions by asserting "God works in mysterious ways."

**Thus I think Clark was justified in its decision, during its previous big speaker-related controversy, to let Paul Bremer speak.

***Or whatever the precise allegation his critics make is.

Obligatory tea party post

2009-04-15T22:58:00.002-07:00

I think it's in the Blogger terms of service that I have to post something about today's Tea Party protests. The reversal of the roles of "righteous demonstration to wake the people up" versus "showcase and mock the other side's wackier and stupider members"* after eight years of left-wing anti-Bush demonstrations is interesting. The "hur hur hur 'teabagging' hur hur hur" bit got old really fast -- though perhaps this just shows I read too many liberal blogs. I also think it could be fascinating to read a historical study of the use of the Boston Tea Party motif by protest groups in American history. It's a very striking and unique event that played a key role in our country's formation, yet it's open to a multitude of reinterpretations placing it in the lineage of different contemporary concerns. After all, the last notable use of the tea party motif before today's conservative protests was by Howard Dean in the 2004 Democratic primary.

*Yes, I know, the "Bu$Hitler" signs were the work of lone wackos or possibly agent provocateurs, whereas the "Hang 'em high" guy is the precise statistical mean of the views of the tea partiers.

Non-Christian Easter rituals

2009-04-12T14:31:00.002-07:00

We all know about the rituals that Christians practice on Easter. But I think it's important to recognize the rituals practiced by non-Christians -- particularly those of a secularist bent* -- on this holiday. I'm not talking about the pagan celebrations of spring that were incorporated into Christian Easter practices, though some people do still practice those. I'm talking about pointing out the existence of pagan celebrations and their incorporation into Christian Easter. (A similar ritual, with slightly different liturgy, is observed at Christmas.)

This ritual has the appearance of making an argument -- #many Easter traditions have a pagan origin, therefore Christianity's righteousness is somehow compromised.# But it doesn't really function as an argument. These things are mostly said not to Christians, but to other non-Christians -- e.g. in this Pandagon thread. And I doubt many Christians who are otherwise secure in their faith are particularly troubled by these historical facts (certainly I wasn't). Either they already reject all the aspects of Easter that aren't found in the Bible (including, sometimes, the very idea of an Easter celebration), or they don't see enriching their holiday with elements from another tradition as necessarily threatening the remembrance of Jesus' resurrection (coloring eggs can be just a fun thing to do, not an act of worship of Oestre).

Instead, pointing out the pagan roots of Easter functions as a ritual for affirming non-Christian identity and solidarity (a quite useful function, I might add, given the dominance of our society by Christians). It's a way of reminding everyone in the group of non-Christians' superior critical thinking skills (which are held to be the basis of non-Christianness, much like faith is the basis of Christianity), and holding up Christianity -- particularly Christianity as unthinkingly practiced by the masses -- as ridiculous to anyone who knows some historical facts. Indeed, there's an interesting parallel in that both Christian and non-Christian Easter celebrations are about affirming the group's knowledge of a hidden truth that they want to spread.

*I use the term "non-Christian" here for lack of a better one -- this ritual is not particularly common among devout practitioners of Islam, Hinduism, etc., but neither is it exclusive to people who entirely reject religion. I've even seen it among a few rationalist liberal Christians.

The mechanics of salvation

2009-04-10T11:16:00.001-07:00

(The following post has been kicking around in my head for several years, so Good Friday seems like a suitable occasion to bring it out.)

I had already drifted away from orthodox Christianity when I began to think about the following problem, but right now I'd say it's one of the biggest stumbling blocks to ever returning: How, exactly, did Jesus manage to die for our sins? In other words, what made his death necessary and sufficient to forgive us? Why couldn't God simply forgive us before Jesus' execution, and why did he have to forgive us afterward?

Growing up in the church (ELCA, to be specific), the most common framing was that Jesus took our punishment on himself. God demands that we live up to an exceedingly high standard of moral perfection, but since human nature was damaged by the Fall, we inevitably sin and thus wind up deserving eternity in hell. But by dying on the cross, Jesus took our punishment for us and so we're free to go to heaven. The imagery here is typically of a person facing God on Judgment Day and having God pronounce our sentence, at which point Jesus pops up and says "no worries Chief, I took care of it."

But this idea of Jesus taking on other people's punishments is nonsensical from the perspective of justice. Imagine trying to do a similar thing in a human courtroom. Someone has been convicted of a crime, and the judge sentences them to several years in jail. Just then, a member of the audience jumps up and says "Your honor, I will serve this man's sentence for him." By what logic would the judge agree to this deal? It's not enough that if there has been a crime, *someone* gets punished. Every theory of punishment -- retributivist or consequentialist (deterrence) -- requires that the punishment be inflicted on the particular individual who committed the crime. It accomplishes nothing to punish an innocent third party.

It is possible for a judge to be satisfied by punishing the wrong person in one scenario -- the scenario where the judge does not know the wrong person is being punished. But it seems rather odd to premise an entire religion on one part of the godhead playing an eternal trick on the other part. And it's hard to reconcile the idea of Jesus tricking God into accepting the punishment with God's omniscience, and with the Bible's claims that Jesus' life and death were a mission he was ordered by God to carry out.

On top of that, Jesus was not actually crucified for our sins. He was crucified for (allegedly) fomenting rebellion against the temporal and religious authorities in Judea. So perhaps in my example above, we should really have the audience member jump up and say "Your honor, the other day I was beaten up by a mugger. Please count my injuries as the punishment for this man's crimes." That makes even less sense than the original scenario.

Another common frame is that Jesus' death "paid our debt." In this frame, the punishment we deserve for our sins is not some sort of retribution or deterrent -- instead, our sin causes some sort of loss to God, which needs to be repaid. Unlike punishments, debts can clearly be paid off by a third party. A pure creditor doesn't really care where the money comes from as long as they get it back, on time and with appropriate interest. This model fits with the animal sacrifices made by Jews during the temple era -- and indeed, Jesus is often explicitly analogized to a sacrificial animal. Animal sacrifices work because the deity -- be it Yahweh, Zeus, or Baal -- actively enjoys the death and burning of an animal, and that enjoyment offsets their anger at the sacrificer's sin. (Animal sacrifice also often contains a claim that the sacrificer's economic loss is important because it demonstrates the depth of their concern/contrition, but that raises two problems in the Jesus case: first, it brings back the third-party problem noted with respect to taking on a punishment, and second, Jesus' death is not actually a loss, economic or otherwise, for those who get saved by it, since he came back to life three days later.)

A key element of the debt model is that debt only works if the creditor values the thing that's owed to them. If somehow someone ended up owing me a giant pile of manure, I would not ask them to pay it back, since I don't want a giant pile of manure. So God has to intrinsically enjoy the suffering that he's owed -- God likes watching people burn in hell, and he likes watching his son get crucified (likes it, in fact, exactly as much as he likes watching all the people who ever lived burn in hell for eternity). That's a pretty gruesome God we're being asked to worship. Nevertheless, people have worshipped some pretty gruesome deities in various times and places, and "gruesome" is arguably more consistent than "loving" with much of God's conduct in the Bible.

More important, though, is the question of why God doesn't simply declare our debts cancelled without indulging the sadism/masochism of killing his son. After all, no matter what you owe me, I always have the prerogative of declaring it void (and indeed, God specifically ordered the Israelites to cancel all debts every so many years). While there's an argument to be made that strict adherence to justice forbids granting mercy in cases of punishment, there's no similar argument that justice demands not forgiving debts if the creditor is so inclined.

A final bit of imagery I often heard in church was that Jesus' blood washed away our sins. It's quite opaque to me what, if anything, this metaphor tells us about how he accomplished that.

So in addition to the doubts I have about whether Jesus' life, death, and resurrection actually occurred in anything like the form described in the Bible (on which I may post later), I'm stumped as to the mechanics of his death leading to forgiveness. "Jesus died for your sins" seems like a non sequitur.

White privilege and weird names

2009-04-09T23:40:00.002-07:00

Working all day has made me late to the pile-on against Texas state representative Betty Brown, who said that if Asian-Americans want to be sure they can exercise their constitutional rights, they should change their names to something Anglo poll workers won't find so weird.

As many people have pointed out, plenty of non-Asians have weird names too. I'm one of them -- most people I meet stumble over my first name (despite the fact that it's pronounced just like it's spelled), and I've learned to respond to anything starting with an "S" (my dissertation advisor sometimes called me "Spencer" as a joking reference to a classmate who misunderstood my name long enough that I decided I didn't want to embarrass him by pointing out his mistake). My name is even misspelled on my birth certificate, so technically my various forms of ID are inconsistent.

Nevertheless, I have never encountered problems voting -- or conducting business at the DMV, a bank, or any other sort of institution -- because of my name. The people I encounter are typically solicitous about getting the pronunciation right, and sometimes make complimentary small talk about it ("that's a neat name. Where is it from?"). This is clearly not the experience of the Asian Texans who were at Rep. Brown's hearing.

I don't think it's too far-fetched to say this is about race/ethnicity. Aside from my first name, everything else about me -- my skin color, the shape of my face, my clothing and hair style, my accent, my last name* -- screams "'normal' (white) American." My name thus becomes an interesting oddity, but one that is reasonable for the person to learn to cope with because I seem like I belong, like I deserve the same quality of service as Jane Smith and Bill Jones. But when an Asian person with an unfamiliar name comes along, at least a few of those features will not match the implicit model of a normal American held by some such workers. Thus their weird name will be taken as one more mark of foreignness, making some people feel put-upon to accommodate an outsider who insists on being treated equally. This idea of Asians as perpetual foreigners is quite obvious in the way Rep. Brown spoke -- e.g. telling the Asian spokesman what "your citizens" should do -- and belies the idea that this is somehow simply about the inherent difficulty of pronouncing certain names. Accommodating "Stentor" is easy, because I'm clearly already a normal Anglo American, but accommodating Asians means not just learning new names but also admitting that the U.S. is a multi-racial, multi-cultural society.

(An aside I couldn't figure out how to work into the post: I have had two teachers in my lifetime who made "learn to correctly spell and pronounce my name" an explicit class assignment. One was my Polish 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Kolodziejski. The other was my Tamil college intro anthropology professor, Dr. Sangarasivam.)

*Interestingly, "Danielson" is much less common in the U.S. than it looks. I've never met a Danielson I wasn't related to, though I know they're out there. But since it uses the "common male first name + son" pattern, it comes off as a very common, normal name (though I do get referred to as "Daniels" from time to time) -- more normal than names like Nguyen or Vasquez which are objectively far more common in this country.

Fixing Immigration Court

2009-04-01T23:10:00.002-07:00

Apparently USA Today was jealous of the AP's big piece on immigration detention from a few weeks ago, because they did their own investigation into another blown-out tire on our nation's totalled immigration system: the backlog in immigration court (via). They found that 90,000 people since 2003 have waited two or more years to have their case decided by an immigration judge, and 14,000 have waited five or more (no indication of how long people are waiting between the final order of deportation and actually setting foot in their home country). The story doesn't break down how many of those people were detained, but I presume it's a very substantial amount. The detention angle raises the problems with immigration court from ordinary bureaucratic abuse to serious injustice.

There are a variety of things that would ease this problem:

1) More resources for the immigration court system. This is the obvious one, mentioned in the USA Today article. With more judges and clerks, they could get people on the docket quicker and get their cases underway.

2) Changing the focus of enforcement. The immigration court system is full of people. But a lot of those people are low-level offenders -- green-card holders who got caught with a bong, people who gave their life savings to a coyote to get smuggled in and given a forged social security card, kids whose parents brought them in as babies but forgot to adjust their refugee status. Prosecuting these people -- the Sheriff Joe strategy -- is not getting the most bang for your buck. There have been some encouraging noises from the Department of Homeland Security that they're going to start focusing on going after the employers and the smugglers -- the big players -- though we'll see what that ends up meaning in practice.

3) Reduce the amount of deportable offenses. If there's a problem with too many people who are in the country illegally, there are two ways to fix that -- get them out of the country, or give them an option to be here legally. I realize the second option isn't politically feasible, but it would certainly help. I have some admittedly radical ideas on what the system should end up looking like, but you don't have to go that far to get some mileage out of this idea. You could take a big chunk out of the backlog by declaring that you can't get kicked out of the country for smoking pot anymore. You could take another chunk by improving access to legal status -- more visas, lower fees, etc. Streamline the whole process of getting and keeping status, and you'll have fewer people getting caught up in technical violations (as well as ultimately a lower workload for the government).

4) Public defenders for immigration court. Anyone in the U.S. charged with a crime -- citizen, legal immigrant, or even totally undocumented -- is eligible for a public defender if they can't afford a lawyer. But since immigration is classified as civil law*, there are no PDs. That means a huge proportion of immigrants are unrepresented, while a bunch more are represented by scammers and incompetents**. This is a problem for the immigrants, obviously. But it's also a problem for the efficiency of the system. A good lawyer can help an immigrant understand which forms of relief are likely to work, and which ones would be a waste of time to pursue. A good lawyer can help the immigrant understand the court process -- when things need to happen, how to file certain things, etc. A good lawyer can keep ICE on its toes to keep the process moving. It's distressing that none of the serious immigration reform bills that have come up recently have included a PD program.

5) Reduce the use of detention. As I argued earlier, detention is a horrible thing and should be avoided if possible -- and it usually is possible. It's a lot easier to wait two years for your case to be resolved if you're out and about than rotting in a jail cell (easier for the immigrant's mental and physical health, and easier for the taxpayers' pocketbooks).

*IANAL, but as far as I can tell the criteria by which we decide whether an area of law is civil or criminal is on the basis of whether the government has decreed that it's civil or criminal.

**Immigrants facing deportation and their families are understandably desperate, and understandably ignorant about the intricacies of the second-most-complex area of U.S. law (after tax law). And if you get deported, it's tough to hold your lawyer accountable. So they're easy prey for people who make up hopeful stories about their chances and charge big bucks for pretending to fight their case.