Citizendium Launches
Citizendium, the new competitor to Wikipedia, launched yesterday. I admit to some skepticism about this project. Clay Shirky had some cogent criticisms of its structure with which I’m inclined to agree, and one of his commenters made the amusing point that because Citizendium has an open license, if it produces such superior articles Wikipedians can simply reproduce them on Wikipedia. But it deserves a chance; whether it succeeds or fails it will be an interesting experiment.
Nevertheless, Larry Sanger really shot himself in the foot choosing such an awkward name. It is clunky to pronounce and, I just found, clunky to type as well. I actually think Wikipedia sounds kind of euphonic, and I get a kick out of telling people about cool stuff I’ve found there. Not so much with Citizendium. I don’t think I can type that again today!
Technorati Tags: citizendium
Natural Law & Biology
While sociobiology is hardly a new subject, I always like to see fresh, topical research supportive of the idea that rights are not arbitrary constructs of particular societies, but arise ultimately from human biology. This particular article, citing research from Frans de Waal among others, suggests that a proto-morality, similar to human empathy, is evidenced in primate societies:
Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.
[...]
Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.
This harkens back to Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy being the basis of morality. Naturally, though, the behavior of chimps does not tell us a whole lot about what rights people have, and to suggest something is good because it happens in nature (or wrong because it doesn’t) would be committing the naturalistic fallacy.
The naturalistic fallacy, and similarly the “is-from-ought” problem, are commonly taken as reasons for doubting that we have any natural rights. I tend to see this more as a limit of the abstract, deductive reasoning that moral philosophers like to practice.
They seem not to be satisfied with anything less than proving what is right with some kind of transcendental moral certitude. But although one cannot deduce ought from is in such a way, we can have considerably more success inferring right and wrong in terms of expected consequences from the way people actually behave. For example, don’t lie, because it harms the person being deceived, and will eventually gain you a reputation as untrustworthy.
This seems to beg the question: how do you know how people ought to behave in the first place? But that objection presumes people have no reference for their behavior other than what moral philosophers (or, perhaps, politicians and jurists) prescribe for them. The sociobiological perspective suggests that people are naturally equipped to feel empathy, to construct rules based on reciprocal empathy, and seek to punish those who violate those rules.
This provides a starting point for moral reasoning. One could say, in opposition, that a black guy in 1930s Alabama ought not date a white woman, given the expected consequences when the local white community finds out about it. But the problem with such an example is, in that situation, pre-existing concepts of normative behavior (specifically violent racism towards blacks) occlude the decision making process. The people in the situation are already predisposed toward a total lack of empathy and violence, having allowed their socially constructed notions of race override their natural, intuitive moral sense.
To discern one’s true rights you have to strip away all the layers of abstraction created in society, often created by one segment of the population to dominate and repress the others. You consider every person as an autonomous, independent equal, without regard for any pre-existing concepts of privilege or authority. And you imagine what norms would allow people to live peaceably together, or as Lysander Spooner wrote, how “to live honestly, to hurt no one, to give every one his due.”
The article also has an interesting comment about religion:
There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. “I look at religions as recent additions,” he said. “Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do.
That strikes me as potentially important, given the common argument that religion is the foundation of morality, and without it nothing but amorality can exist. The reality may actually be the reverse: humans evolved to have an underlying moral sensibility, which religion is built on top of and sometimes overrides, as evidenced in the hatred and violence that the more extreme religions inspire.
Something to think about, anyway.
Technorati Tags: law, natural rights, philosophy, morality
Torture: The difference between law and judgement
Radley Balko captures my sentiments regarding torture. He adopts a seemingly contradictory position, that torture should not be legal, but in the event it proves necessary, the president can use his pardon to forgive it — almost as if he’s saying it should be illegal, but allowed.
This position is only contradictory, though, if one operates from the assumption that law must cover every possible contingency. That assumption is an unfortunate result of our litigious and increasingly politicized society, wherein right and wrong are barely (if at all) distinguished from legal and illegal.
In reality, that something is legal doesn’t make it right; that something is illegal doesn’t make it wrong.
Another way to look at it is to consider the importance of judgement, in that sometimes you must make a decision using your knowledge, experience and intuition in circumstances that could not have been fully anticipated — in circumstances where the proper course of action can’t be written out in advance.
Thus, it makes sense to proscribe torture in general, because we want to sharply limit its incidence. Expressly allowing torture, even with restrictions, has a variety of negative consequences. I won’t repeat them here.
On the other hand, if some US personnel should find themselves in extraordinary circumstances wherein they believe, in good faith, that torture is the only way to procure information that would save lives, I hope they would do it. I would not want an attack to unfold because some people insisted on following the rules.
Put differently, this means “justified” torture would necessarily entail some risk to those doing it. There can be no blanket immunity: what sort of “public servant” wants special rights to brutalize people, but with no risk to himself? I would only trust someone to do something as awful as torture if that person was willing to put his career, even his freedom, on the line because he was confident there was no other way to prevent an attack. Someone who wants the power, but not the responsibility, cannot be so trusted.
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Ungodly Gay Babies
A forward looking Baptist clergyman, Albert Mohler, admits the possibility that homosexuality has a biological basis. More interesting, he would support hormonal treatment to “straighten” (my term) an unborn baby should this become possible. To my great annoyance the Times does not provide a link, but I did manage to google the clergyman’s blog. Quoting:
If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.
Mohler makes it clear that he supports neither genetic engineering, nor abortion of gay babies, naturally. He only suggests the possibility of a prenatal hormonal treatment that would alter the fetus’s chromosomes, eliminating its disposition for homosexuality. It’s not clear to me, however, that this is distinguishable from the genetic engineering he condemns, as it could be a less direct way of accomplishing the same thing.
Although I began writing my post to ridicule him, once I began reading the original blog I see he is a perceptive individual who has, perhaps, a better ability than most people of similar mind to grasp how the issues will unfold. In particular, he realizes how such treatment has the potential to reverse the way socially liberal and conservative people consider reproductive topics:
Feminists and political liberals have argued for decades now that a woman should have an unrestricted right to an abortion, for any cause or for no stated cause at all. How can they now complain if women decide to abort fetuses identified as homosexual? This question involves both abortion and gay rights — the perfect moral storm of our times.
I was imagining alternate scandals of the future, where some prominent conservative who has vocally condemned genetic engineering is later found to have engineered his child to be straight.
Reading Mohler’s blog is hard going; it must be like watching someone try to repair a watch with a hammer. It is delicate work, trying to reason about complex, cutting-edge issues, but then his unshakable faith in the literal truth of the Bible comes haphazardly smashing down.
One of the main, er, thrusts of Mohler’s argument is the distinction between orientation and action; i.e., gays are responsible for not acting on their inclinations, but their inclinations are not in themselves sinful. And as a point of logic, I agree. For example, it’s conceivable (I have no idea how likely) that there may be a genetic component to antisocial personality disorder, but that doesn’t excuse people with this disorder from committing crimes, regardless of their antisocial orientation.
Yet while it should be possible to get by without periodically robbing and killing people, it seems unimaginably cruel to demand someone totally curtail his or her sexuality, which is a far deeper, more intrinsic aspect of a person’s life. Imagine being told God forbids you from blinking your eyes — except it’s even worse than that, I’d say.
More important, one can advance rational arguments for punishing crime, but so far as I can tell the arguments for the sinfulness of homosexuality have no rational basis, depending on interpretations of faith (which makes me wonder why I’m bothering with this at all.)
It is at least notable that some in the gay community criticized Mohler for “playing God.” This foretells a lobbying effort coalescing in the future to prevent parents from controlling the sexuality of their offspring. Unless the social acceptance of homosexuality progresses far more rapidly than science, we may indeed get to the point where most parents “straighten” their unborn babies, resulting in the gay demographic dwindling. This would be understandably upsetting to many in that community, although perhaps not to others.
My hope is that liberal attitudes toward homosexuality progress at roughly the same pace as science, such that by the time it is possible for parents to make that choice, it is no longer such a big deal that everyone would make it. Variety is the spice of life, after all.
Web Fads
Suddenly the tech blogs I read are all over the growth of Twitter. It’s basically a service you can use to nag your friends via IM or SMS about what your having for dinner, how long you’ve been waiting in line, and such minutia. I’m providing a description so that, in case I look over my archives a year from now, I’ll know what it was.
Reading about Twitter brought to mind a recent research indicating younger people are more narcissistic than ever. That research and my thoughts on Twitter made me feel somewhat curmudgeonly, and I recollect, as a Usenet veteran, feeling similarly dismissive about blogging when it first took off. (And yes, I’m aware of the irony of publicly writing about my feelings while complaining of others’ narcissism).
I’ve seen defenders of Twitter note that blogging had nay-sayers predicting its demise. Yet blogging offers value as a medium for complex, substantive expression (even if not everyone takes advantage). It also serves as a substrate for other new media like podcasting or video blogging. Twitter doesn’t seem to offer much of anything besides the “thrill/obsession of pre-adolescent voyeurism,” as Mat Balez puts it.
Voyeurism isn’t just for adolescents, of course, and occasionally it can be interesting to see a little slice of someone’s life. I think there’s a certain charm to Radley Balko’s shelf blogging, for example. But if he blogged about every minor D-I-Y project it would get tedious really fast. Everything in moderation.
I’m with Jeff Ventura in thinking Twitter needs to transform itself into something useful if it’s going to have staying power. Five years from now, presumably the world will be even more thickly networked than it is now, with more powerful, more portable and cheaper hardware, so it’s not implausible a service like Twitter could find a role beyond amusing web geeks. And with people having so many different means by which to make contact (cell phone, SMS, IM, email…) a technology that can reach anyone by whatever means they choose to listen could possibly thrive. But count me cautiously pessimistic for now.
An abortion post
Via Hit & Run, I came across an argument that the US population is short 45 million people — i.e. the people who would have been born since the Roe v. Wade decision had they not been aborted. If not for abortion they would today be “defending our country, … filling our jobs, … paying into Social Security.“
Debates about abortion consist mostly of people going back and forth viciously attacking each other, each side operating under its own set of implied assumptions. This is reflected in the comments to the Hit & Run post. After nearly giving up on the comments I found one commenter who, I thought, made the right response to this particular argument (which I’ll get to in a moment).
Though I’m not by any means qualified in economics, one element I like about the discipline is that it forces you to consider additional (often unintended) consequences to a change in policy. My reaction to the missing 45 million figure was to wonder how the prohibition of abortion would have changed the behavior of all those women who got pregnant after Roe v. Wade.
Maybe, with the risk of unwanted children, they would have been more careful about using contraception, or chosen to have less sex. Conservatives often complain about abortion being a license for promiscuity; so if, indeed, one believes proscription of abortion would result in less promiscuity, hence fewer pregnancies, it would be inconsistent to simultaneously claim the number of abortions equals the number of lost souls — since those souls wouldn’t have existed in the first place had abortion been illegal. To be fair to Zel Miller, the conservative Democrat who was making this argument, I’m not sure if he’s guilty of that double standard, but the point still seems germane.
Another, similar point the Reason commenter Xmas raised was that “It’d be safe to assume that a good portion of the women that had abortions when they were younger eventually had children when they were older. If those women had the aborted child, then they’d also be likely to not have the later child.”
So if a woman is satisfied and able to care for no more than three kids, and she can’t terminate an unwanted pregnancy at 16, that third child she would otherwise have later in life (probably when she is more financially and emotionally secure, and probably with a more desirable mate) is erased, generating no net gain in population.
After reading all this, my general sense is that we are mistaken if we think the potentiality of a life is the same as a life, has the same value as a life. An altar boy who decides to become a Catholic priest erases the potential lives that would be created if he chose instead to become a husband and father, but has he “murdered” those lives? Breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend erases the lives that could be created if you settled down and had children with that person. Even simply choosing not to have sex one evening erases the unique, potential person who could be conceived.
Abortion opponents obviously will not agree with this line of reasoning, because they draw the line at conception. My point is that the potentiality of a life is separable from conception; a fertilized egg at conception has the potential for new life, but it is just one step in a chain of events that must take place before the life is created. Before conception, those two people had to decide to have sex that evening, before that had to decide they liked each other, etc. Similarly, post-conception, the embryo has to implant successfully in the uterus and not be flushed away in the next menstrual cycle, as often happens. Thus, the value of a life and any consequent rights we ascribe to it don’t attach to any given potential for a future life. That something could result in a new life doesn’t mean it is one.
Guns & Power
From the Times:
Interpreting the Second Amendment broadly, a federal appeals court in Washington yesterday struck down a gun control law in the District of Columbia that bars residents from keeping handguns in their homes.
This is certainly welcome news to me, though it is just a small step in in the right direction, still short of concealed carry. Several years ago some family members of mine were mugged on a DC street, just going out for a walk in their neighborhood, because a few outlaws with guns – imagine that! — could be pretty confident everyone they saw was disarmed and decided to take advantage of that fact.
One point I don’t see stressed very often is that we need not just gun freedom, but a more universal gun culture supportive of that freedom. It seems to me that gun culture is a fringe sub-culture in the so-called blue states, and is more closely associated with southern states and especially rural culture, with gun control being more prevalent in cities.
These cultural differences result in wide disparities in gun laws between different jurisdictions, DC and Virginia being a key example. This, in turn, results in power imbalances with people in some jurisdictions being disarmed and powerless, and others not.
Supporters of gun control often seem to accept this argument, if obliquely, blaming gun crime occurring within gun-controlled districts on the supply of guns emanating from other, pro-gun jurisdictions. The logical conclusion for their argument is that gun control must be universal, which would eliminate the external availability of guns for criminals to take advantage of.
Unfortunately, that still does not eliminate power imbalances. The major overlooked power imbalance is that between the citizens and government. A central but oft forgotten justification for the right to bear arms is that should the government become a tyranny, the citizens should be able to overturn it. That was, after all, how the US was formed.
I’ve seen this point ridiculed on the grounds that citizens armed with pistols and rifles are no match a modern military replete with tanks and bombers. Yet the insurgency in Iraq shows that a decentralized guerilla force possessing mostly small arms can make things difficult, perhaps impossible for a larger adversary. And, I should note, I favor allowing private citizens to own any of the same weapons the government can own, which might well be a much better way of making governments receptive to arms control!
Other power imbalances remain under universal gun control. Consider other weapons — knives, swords, clubs, tasers, chemical sprays, etc. If jurisdictions again vary in their treatment of these, it will again necessitate a universal ban to prevent permeation from more liberal to more restricted jurisdictions. The problem is that many everyday objects (vehicles, kitchen knives, or the good old pipe wrench) can become weapons, the regulation of which will be ever more costly, perhaps impossible to enforce, and require the state meddling in the lives of citizens in ever more authoritarian ways. This is already happening in Britain.
At the far end of the spectrum, even with no weapons anywhere, the strong can still physically dominate the weak with brute force. I’m not sure how the state could ban some from being stronger than others, though I’m sure the British will eventually tell us.
The answer is to go in the complete opposite direction, eliminating almost all restrictions on weapons. Some environments are tightly controlled by necessity, such as the entrance to a courthouse, or a commercial aircraft. There it would make sense to disarm people. Overall, however, we should strive for a universal gun culture, where the widespread disparities in gun ownership disappear, and with them the power imbalances that lead some to use their weapons for wrongful advantage.
That doesn’t mean guns are a panacea, or there are no costs to this strategy, or that everyone must be armed. But I’d like to get to the point where it is not considered unlawful, unusual, or threatening that any citizen, in any particular place, would choose to bear arms.
Less than Amazing…
Virginia Postrel is surprised at the proposed incandescent light bulb ban in California:
Grace Peng, who is probably the greenest person I know in her personal behavior, explains why even she is against the light bulb ban. It’s amazing how legislators and regulators are determined to reward and punish particular technologies rather than letting price signals work.
Here are a couple things we know: voters tend to remain rationally ignorant and won’t study economic theory (which would lead them to support market pricing over political control) because the benefits economic literacy confers don’t justify the cost (except for a few weirdos who are excessively interested in such topics). Thus we can expect elect officials to reflect that economic illiteracy.
Another thing we know is that power is a corrupting influence; it is hard for those in power to restrain themselves, and consider how their behavior may be harming others or corrosive to our liberty, because they are just doing so much good for us.
Now, I think Virginia Postrel is a lot smarter than me. But come on: wouldn’t it be vastly more surprising if politicians actually adhered to sound economic theory, and restrained their impulse the ban and control everything in deference to citizens’ free choices?
