NEW DOMAIN: update your links
Dear Readers,
We have moved to our permanant home at www.thepublicphilosopher.com.
New updates will be going there. RSS should update automatically, but please test it out. Thanks to our former host Reaxion for hosting and helping us move.
Regular posting should resume shortly.
Chait on representation
Jonathan Chait ponders the complexities of representative democracy while thoroughly skewering conservative commentator Fred Barnes:
Even funnier, if it wasn’t so morally deranged, is the way Barnes cites a poll showing little concern for global warming and immediately concludes that nothing should be done. Uh, Fred, aren’t you skipping the step where you say that Americans are correct to think global warming is not a danger? I mean, that view’s totally at odds with the scientific consensus, but saying so at least gives the the veneer of caring about something other than the short-term political interests of the GOP.
Barnes is pretty clearly out of line here. However, Chait dismisses the argument out of hand which would argue that political parties should indeed reflect the will of the majority of the electorate and, further, that the short-term political interests of a party are simply to reflect that will and are thus entirely appropriate.
Clearly global warming is a real problem and one whose costs are not perceived in the day-to-day of the American electorate, but Chait needs to do more work here to demonstrate his conclusion that politicians should disregard the will of the public when the politicians themselves hold a different view on a given issue.
-John
The American Dream is descriptive
Sam’s post reflects on the shifting nature of the American dream, particularly a shift (of -8%) away from a conception of the American Dream defined as financial security.
Interest in the meaning of the American dream seems to be fairly constant; I want to make the argument that this new data suggests the conclusion that the “American Dream” may be defined not in terms of a political idea,l but rather as something that is obtainable by a large share of people. In this sense, the American Dream is what people have or perceive they have rather than a normative ideal or a long-project for future generations. This hypothesis, if nothing else, explains the drop in defining the American Dream in terms of financial security. It would be fascinating if this data set went back longer and could be plotted against the business cycle.
Perhaps more intriguing is the durability of language of equality of opportunity in Americans’ definition. Of course, from all we know about the nature of inequality, it is true that vast swaths of the population are extremely unlikely to “start from nothing” or “to become what I want to be.” However, I would argue that there is still a wide public perception that this ideal exists. This perception is, of course, good for a majority of the people since the successful have their achievements validated and the less successful are given some degree of hope in the future.
More than anything else, the durability of an independent American Dream is a fascinating demonstration of Americans’ continued belief in our exceptionalism.
-John
Linker, Sullivan, and torture (continued)
A quick follow-up on torture. Damon Linker had a thoughtful but, I thought, incomplete post on the nature of executive power in uncommon or emergency circumstances. I argued that, because it is in the polity’s best interest to create strong disincentives to unconventional and generally illegal actions on the part of the executive, the conversation needed to move away from punishment as retribution towards punishment of deterrence and, therefore, aggressive prosecution of the Bush torture regime is justified even if they could produce arguments for the prudence of their decision.
The debate continues. Andrew Sullivan replies here, arguing that Bush’s crime was to make the state of emergency a state of permanent transgression of the law.
Linker replies, arguing convincingly that Sullivan did not take a strong position on whether there could be a “ticking time bomb” scenario (although as Sullivan and many others have said before, such a scenario is a red herring). Linker’s conclusion seems to be that we should “treat our rejection of the Bush administration’s torture policies as a matter of prudence rather than principle.”
I am fully inclined to agree. Again I wish that Linker would move one step beyond the question of the morality of torture itself and more fully consider the implications of his argument for prudence. How will we judge that prudence has been successful? If a politician makes a good-faith effort in what s/he believes to be a case of grave danger, only for us to learn that his appraisal of the danger and thus his/her action was wrong, should we prosecute? I think Andrew would argue that we certainly should, although I think he would go a step further in making the case that the Bush regime did not in fact act in good faith.
-John
Should health care workers be compelled to work during a pandemic?
Adding to this week’s discussion of the swine flu and its impact on individual liberty, a forthcoming law review article makes the argument that forcing health professionals to work exceeds the bounds of their professional responsibility.
- John
How many votes should be required to pass bills in the Senate?
Jonathan Chait links to a neat chart demonstrating the incredible pace of the use of the filibuster — on track for 153 this term, which is 3 times the number of the previous term and 25 times the pace of 40 years ago. The question on the table is the Democrats’ potential use of the reconciliation process. Of course, this should be no surprise given the GOP’s willingness to filibuster a great majority of bills and appointments this term. As Chait points out, Republicans have created a de facto supermajority requirement for every bill with any kind of opposition. This situation is clearly not tenable for a supposedly deliberative body. Rather than bemoan the death of partisanship, the discussion needs to center around how the process can be streamlined given that each party is now willing to apply whatever procedural rules are necessary to move or block their agendas.
The relevent question coming out of this debate is really this: what should the number of votes to pass a bill in the Senate be?
Of course, the Senate rules are set up to slow deliberation and provide a sober and small-c conservative counterweight to the House, which was designed to represent the passions and furies of the people.
However, the deeply partisan nature of the Senate has annihilated the deliberative function of the Senate. that said, is there any argument to set the rules for 60 votes? if not, what argument can be made for the continued existence of the filibuster?
EDIT: While still, to me, an interesting theoretical question, the point may be moot in the current Senate due to Arlen Specter’s defection.
– John
Linker on Strauss on Torture
Hat tip to Jake for surfacing this excellent Damon Linker post on Strauss and torture.
Linker’s argument is, finally, that there are certain exceptions to “natural law” that require action normally outside the bounds of moral behavior, such as when the state faces an “existential” crisis. In such an instance, because the true nature of the crisis is often only clear in retrospect, so too the justification for the action is only clear after the fact. This is where Linker leaves it.
I want to push a step forward and discuss what this might mean for thinking about such moments of crisis in the future. A few preliminary observations that I hope will not be controversial:
- Some politicians will mistakenly invoke an existential crisis due to poor judgement
- Some politicians will mistakenly invoke an existential crisis due to lack of information
- Some politicians will mistakenly invoke an existential crisis because they take their own interests to be the interests of the state (on this see Andrew Sullivan on how the Bush regime authorized torture specifically to derive false justificaitons for the war)
Because the strong tendency of political leaders will be to to err on the side of invoking an “existential crisis,” (especially in the third category above) incentives need to be structured so as to reduce politicians’ incentives to do so.
Therefore, those politicians willing to take the risk of using immoral means for the security of the state should expect to be punished severely when they are mistaken. What Obama is missing with his “look forward, not backward” stance is that he is in effect creating incentives only to disregard the rule of law and removing the disincentives to doing so. Of course, had torture developed information that was used to prevent another terrorist attack, Cheney’s bunch would have been judged heroes. However, the strong preponderance of the evidence reveals not only did torture not reveal any information in this case, but that it generally never does so.
An objection might be that we risk punishing politicians who in fact made the right decision, but the facts justifying their action have not yet been revealed. However, A) such an argument only reveals that they acted upon false or unproven pretenses and B) the specter of false prosecution simply incentivizes politicians to err on the side of caution in following the rule of law.
Much of the debate on punishing Bush-regime torturers has centered around punishment-as-retribution. The debate needs to shift to punishment-as-disincentive.
-John
The conscience clause and liberty
by John
Stanley Fish has a luciid discussion of the question of whether health care professionals should be allowed to refuse to perform or recommend certain treatments that offend their conscience, the so-called “conscience clause.” The occasion is uncertainty of whether Obama will overturn this directive, enacted by George W. Bush. As usual, Fish takes the reader through a few competing perspectives including, as always, the perspective of the US Supreme court as well as questioning the meaning of conscience, citing Hobbes.
Fish’s last word makes the liberal argument:
This sequestering of religion in a private space is a cornerstone of enlightenment liberalism which only works as a political system if everyone agrees to comport himself or herself as a citizen and not as a sectarian, at least for the purposes of public transactions.
However, the traditional liberal argument is weaker here than Fish might imagine. [One caveat -- all of this assumes that the physician is refusing to undertake a procedure, not giving advice. The situation is quite different if the doctor is, from his or her own moral base, giving controversial or sub-optimal advice to patients who are ill-equipped to know when their doctor does not have their best interests at heart. The obvious example is a "pro-life" doctor advising women against abortion in every instance and without providing all alternatives.]
First, there are lines to be drawn as to what the preservation of the liberal order can compel one to do. The liberal case is much stronger when it’s claim is that the citizen must refrain from acting, or, stronger still, when all that is compelled is a basic tolerance for the lives of others. The arguement is weaker when, as Fish seems to claim, the rules of the liberal order compel voluntary action in ways that violate the conscience.
Secondly, Fish gives a great deal of credence to the obligations of the profession (medicine), but I do not believe these obligations are as strong or compelling as he thinks. The doctor is bound by certain rules and codes of behavior (certainly the Hippocratic oath) but the doctor does not affirm that he will complete every procedure requested by the patient. Further, the development of new procedures which shock the conscience would be a serious threat to the profession, as each new development would require each physician to re-examine their oath.
Finally, in brief, Fish seems to place a great deal of weight in the inconvenience to the patient in finding a new physician, which seems to be slight for those of us who have gotten many referrels without incident.