Sockpuppet Journalism

The dismal ABC debate raises many questions about journalistic ethics and the civic obligations of the media. One thing I want to explore is the use of quotes from "ordinary voters", in light of revelations that Nash McCabe - the woman used by ABC to ask whether Obama "believes in the flag" - has had past media exposure:

Presumably, a researcher for ABC or Gibson saw the piece in the Times, figured, hey, this lady hates Obama and is seriously ginned up about the lapel issue. Let's send a camera crew and film her slamming Obama to his face. It'll be great in the debate.

A TPM reader adds:

In [certain other debates], citizens asked questions that weren't obvious or oriented toward sound bytes. They were the kinds of questions that would not, for whatever reason, be asked by these tv moderators. Moreover, these were their questions. In this case, the producers put the producers' question into the mouth of a voter, because it made the question seem more authentic, as if people care in large numbers about the flag pin question. That is, the woman was used to legitimize the traditional media's focus on these frankly trivial and, yes, distracting issues.

So it's not just bad that they sought out someone to ask the question, but that they did it in order to avoid asking the question themselves because, you know, it's sort of embarrassing. It's not about content; it's about TV content and TV optics. There's no way for Gibson to ask that without looking petty and stupid. So they used this woman.

Let's define journalistic sockpuppetry as the practice of starting with a preconceived statement 'X' in mind, and purposefully searching for someone (anyone) to echo it, so that you can present your desired statement 'X' under the guise of neutrally reporting someone else's words.

I suspect that journalistic sockpuppetry is fairly common. Such gratuitous dishonesty also seems pretty clearly unethical. (Any counterarguments?) Journalists shouldn't use others merely as a mouthpiece. If you've stacked the deck in such a way as to ensure that your final quote matches some preconceived content, the quoted person is no more the author of that content than my keyboard is the author of this post. They're merely a mechanism through which you've expressed yourself, and it's deceitful to pretend otherwise.

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Good political blogs?

There are a number of good, thoughtful liberal blogs out there. I'd say hilzoy's Obsidian Wings is far and away the best.

There are a number of good, thoughtful libertarian blogs out there. Here my top vote goes to Will Wilkinson.

Can anyone recommend some comparably good, thoughtful conservative bloggers? (Jeremy Pierce is decent, but only occasionally writes on politics. Russell Arben Fox is also thoughtful, if idiosyncratic -- he certainly doesn't present a mainstream conservative perspective. So neither is quite what I'm looking for here.) Are there any Burkean traditionalists out there, offering wise counsel on the pressing issues of the day?

Consider this an open thread. If you can't recommend any conservatives, feel free to recommend someone else.

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Precautions and Moral Responsibility

Is it advisable to take precautions that reduce one's risk of suffering victimization? That seems like an easy question. But in specific cases, people sometimes fear that an affirmative answer risks "blaming the victim", or excusing the actual wrongdoer. Consider the unwillingness of some conservatives to even consider the ways that U.S. foreign policy might raise the causal probability of terrorist attacks. Or, at the other extreme of the political spectrum:

when I suggest to campus sexual assault administrators that they could stop what Koss calls the “rape pandemic” overnight if they persuaded girls to exercise more prudence, I inevitably receive responses like the following (these are my interlocutors’ actual words): “I am uncomfortable with the idea of ‘recommending that female students exercise more modesty and restraint’—this indicates that if they are raped it could be their fault—it is never their fault.” Or: “Yes, modesty would have a certain impact, but who’s responsible?”

There are two possible reasons why the administrators refuse to take the most efficacious, practical action to end campus rape—counseling sexual prudence. Either they know in their heart of hearts that what is happening on campuses is not really rape, but something much more ambiguous and also much less traumatic than real rape. Or—and this possibility is too horrible to contemplate—these self-professed women’s advocates really do believe that a drunken hookup is rape, and yet are withholding from women the simplest, surest way to prevent being raped, simply in order to preserve the principle of male fault. If the latter situation actually prevails, I conclude that the campus rape movement is purely political, interested solely in casting men as the evil perpetrators of the patriarchy rather than in most effectively protecting potential victims of a traumatic crime.

I wonder how many people are consistent across both (terrorist and rapist) examples?

See also: how moral posturing can get in the way of actually achieving the good.

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Draft Lessig!

Lessig '08:


You can join the Facebook group to encourage Lessig to run for congress.

Update: Julian Sanchez has more: Lessig wants to build a "creative commons in Congress"

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False beliefs are worth upsetting

Goodness. (HT)

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed. It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

Less Sensitivity, please.

Correction: apparently 'some teachers' in this context refers to one teacher. [Thanks David.] Still, the broader issue bears highlighting:

The report concluded: "In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship."

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Motivated Incomprehension

Take the following passage, written by a respected academic:

Hillary Clinton suffers from being a Clinton, as well as having one of the most unappealing public personae of a national politician in recent memory. Dick Cheney is creepier and scarier, to be sure, but “fake” is the only word that captures the impression Ms. Clinton makes every time she opens her mouth.

Now, could any competent speaker of the English language reasonably interpret this as RM does?

“unappealing,” meaning–I, Brian Leiter, would not want to sleep with her?

Because that just sounds completely loony to me. When I asked RM to explain how she[?] could possibly interpret the talk of 'appeal', in this context, as referring to sex appeal, RM wrote:

the “context” is the historical characterization of women being evaluated in terms of sexual appeal. This context is always present, regardless if it is explicitly referred to or not.

So apparently it is impossible in our linguistic community to successfully refer to any kind of 'appeal' other than sex appeal, when speaking of a person who is female. That would surprise me. At least, when I read the original quote, the "sex appeal" interpretation did not even occur to me. Yet RM leaped at it as the only possible interpretation. So one of us must be way out of touch with the rest of the speech community. (I assume it's RM who's wrong here, but I'd encourage any readers to report their linguistic intuitions in the comments, just so I can be sure.)

This illustrates one of the things that really bothers me with ideological movements: they seem to impede clear thought (to put it mildly). Paranoia leads ideologues to see threats and insults where none exist. Further, some seem motivated to twist others' statements and read them in the most uncharitable light, willfully misunderstanding them in order to get that dark rush of moralistic pleasure that comes from thinking ill of others. (Cf. Hilzoy's 'Hatred Is A Poison' - possibly the best blog post I've ever read.)

Indeed, RM repeats the debacle later in the very same comments thread. I wrote: "if we are to take sexism seriously, then wrongful accusations of sexism are also pretty serious, to my mind." To which RM responded:

Richlet,

This my last comment. If you feel the need to get the last word in, well, I’ll write that off to your nature.

Have you ever heard of Modus Tollens (it’s related to Transposition)? When we have a conditional statement if A then B, and if not B is shown to be the case, we can conclude not A. This means that B not being the case can, indeed, show that A is false (or as you loosely put it, call A “into doubt”).

In your example, B NOT being the case would be making false accusations of sexism, i.e. if we prove that there are lots of false accusations of sexism then we should not take sexism seriously.

So, my dear boy, given that you think that Leiter has been falsely accused of being sexist, we have at least one instance of not B that could call A (taking sexism seriously) into doubt. Granted, how many more of these “false accusations” are needed before you really begin to question sexism is not clear.

Regardless, I suggest you take a quick look at Modus Tollens. Google it. I teach it in my intro logic class.

Hugs,
RM

Never mind the patronizing false intimacy, or the passive-aggressive posturing re: getting the last word in. Here we have a logic professor suggesting that "if we prove that there are lots of false accusations of sexism then we should not take sexism seriously" is the contrapositive of the previously quoted conditional (apparently misreading the actual consequent, i.e. 'wrongful accusations of sexism are serious', as the very different claim: 'wrongful accusations of sexism don't occur'). The mind boggles.

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Less Sensitivity, please

Ophelia Benson offers some apt remarks on hypersensitivity:

'As a Christian I am offended' - there's one of the worst, most repellent formulas in the discourse of complaint we have today - but boy is it popular. Variations of it were all over Nova's 'Judgment Day': one stalwart citizen of Dover after another talking about being offended. I think that was the first thing the awful Bill Buckingham said - 'I am personally offended by evolution because the Bible etc etc etc' - the 'personally' was a nice annoying touch. So you're 'personally' offended by reality, so what! The world doesn't revolve around you, so suck it up...

['Sensitivity' is] another one - it's like the mirror-image of 'offended.' It's what you're supposed to run to the closet and fetch when someone is offended - sensitivity. They're a co-dependent couple, those two words... But all the same, there is something very stomach-turning about the idea that a university is supposed to deploy 'sensitivity' about the organ of offendedness in godbothering students when planning its lectures on academic subjects.

It's so depressing how arbitrary subjective responses are presented in public discourse as though they were legitimate reasons ('Shut up! Shut up! You're making me feel bad! So do as I say!'). We've developed a disastrous social norm according to which anyone can win instant brownie points by claiming to be a "victim" -- and doubly so if their claim is made qua membership in some "community" ('As an X, I'm offended...'). Maybe the thought is that all communities are equal, so if one is feeling a bit hard done by, this must reflect some injustice, and certainly not any shortcoming on their part.

There's no more vicious character trait, we're taught, than being insufficiently "sensitive" to others' feelings. Manipulative liars are hunky dory - nobody cares about intellectual honesty - but the moment you make someone feel bad, social disapproval is sure to follow. Maybe this is legitimate when it comes to personal interactions: as private individuals, we should of course be considerate of others. But the public sphere should not be governed by the same norms.

It's vital for the progress of civilization that there be a space for open debate and unhindered intellectual inquiry into controversial issues. People won't always like what they hear, but that's an inevitable consequence of seeking the truth. A truth-seeking society cannot allow public discourse to be derailed by merely subjective complaints. Feeling offended is not a public reason that has any place in the discourse. It's a purely private fact about yourself (or your faction, if you're angling for the "community" bonus points) that has no claim on society at large.

The underlying problem, I suspect, is that our public culture has become so infected with subjectivist assumptions that people don't realize that there's a difference between desires and reasons. Sentiments are taken as given; no-one ever stops to question whether their reactive attitudes are warranted. Any kind of negative emotion is not just evidence, but constitutive, of suffering injustice. You're offended, therefore they're in the wrong. It's fucked up.

Social norms exert great influence over public behaviour. In recent times, they've been pressing us to become more sensitive to others' arbitrary feelings (and to cultivate our own feelings of victimhood). One gains instant sympathy by playing the victim, and others risk social censure if they don't play along. This is daft. A more sensible society would privilege the truth, placing great weight on intellectual honesty and warranted - rationally defensible - emotions. We have it backwards: unreasoned emotional appeals should lead us to roll our eyes, not roll over -- such coddling simply encourages the blithering idiots!

Of course, if it can be established that you've truly done bad, then that must be taken seriously. But merely making someone feel bad is insufficient. That's a fact about them, not you. If the feeling is unwarranted, then it's their problem, not yours. The quality of public discourse would, like, double overnight if everyone would just remember this. A just society seeks to give each their due -- a matter that calls for measured assessment, not pandering to whingers and whiners.

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Moral Sacrifice and Bitter Deserts

Jeremy Pierce suggests that there should be legal loopholes to allow torture in those rare (ticking time bomb) cases where it could be morally justified. (Similarly for genocide, terrorism, and other such evils we would normally treat with a blanket ban.) I think that's a bad idea, as loopholes tend to be widened and abused, so the end result would be more legal cover for immoral torture. A better way to look at it is this: if an end is worth torturing someone for, then it's worth going to prison for. It's actually a good thing that the decision-maker burdens some of this cost, since it provides a much-needed cautionary incentive. They won't engage in illegal torture unless they really, really have to.

For similar reasons, it's important that Civil Disobedience be punished by the law, no matter how sympathetic we may be. Sometimes, right actions ought to be punished. It's unfortunate. But not as unfortunate as the alternatives (excessive torture, general lawbreaking, etc.).

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Apoorcalypse

$5000 for every U.S. baby? Maybe Clinton is not so bad after all. This is the very best kind of left-liberal policy, (a) being universal rather than means-tested, and (b) offering cash rather than specifically delimited goods, and thus ceding control over the spending decision to the recipients. It's really wonderful to see this idea floated in mainstream politics. (See here for why it is such a good idea.)

It's strange to read the objections from right-wingers in the comments here. There are some real head-scratchers. (Some appear to confuse the end of poverty with the end of the world.) 'Justin', for example, mockingly asks:

If she's serious, why not pay for all basic food products? You shouldn't have to pay for things like flour!

But one of the major arguments in favour of general (cash) redistribution is that it doesn't distort incentives and price signals the way specific interventions (flour) would. We're talking about redistribution whilst maintaining a market economy. That's a pretty important difference.

'The Ghost' adds: "there's nothing you can do that would aggravate American poverty more than promise every poor kid $18,000 when they turn 18."

Yeah, there's nothing like an unconditional cash injection to keep people poor. I guess we ought to ban trust funds for rich kids too. We shouldn't want them to be disadvantaged by all that money waiting for them when they grow up, just because they were unfortunate enough to have wealthy parents. They should enjoy the same freedom from resources as everyone else.

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Hilzoy on Repentant Warmongers

'I don't mean this to be some sort of "I was right" triumphalism. What interests me is not so much who was right and who was wrong, but this particular version of being wrong -- a version that involves not just error, but errors like "I didn't realize until it was too late that I had to take reality into account", or: "I didn't fully appreciate the fact that making nice speeches isn't all there is to being President." And I'm also interested in why people seem willing to confess these kinds of profound error without any sense of intellectual shame, and why they continue to be given platforms in public life. Because until we find some way to ensure that we hear the opinions of people who know these sorts of things in advance, rather than having to learn them after hundreds of thousands of people have died, we are in deep, deep trouble.'

Read the whole thing.

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Dying in Vain

Gravel seems to be the only presidential candidate willing to admit the obvious truth that it's possible for American soldiers to die in vain: "There's only one thing worse than a soldier dying in vain; it's more soldiers dying in vain." Obama, disappointingly, parrots the silly dogma demanded of him by the American public: "I never think that troops... who do their mission for their country, are dying in vain."

What does that mean, exactly? The nationalist dogma seems to imply that it's always worthwhile for your soldiers to die. But why would anyone want their politicians to believe that? Gravel's position seems to show deeper support for the troops, as he recognizes the moral duty of a commander in chief to not throw their lives away. The other politicians, by contrast, all piously profess that it's impossible to throw away the lives of soldiers; whatever the commander tells them to do is ipso facto glorious and worthwhile. (Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.) They thus trivialize the moral burden of leadership. It's easy to see why a failed leader might want to do this; but why in the world would the broader public fall for it -- and all in the name of "supporting the troops", no less!?

The problem seems to stem from the sort of insecure patriotism that's so unwilling to admit mistakes that it forsakes any opportunity for genuine improvement. (Such self-idolizing "patriots" are arguably the biggest obstacle to true American greatness.)

It may also be an unfortunate encroachment of non-cognitive discourse. That is, the public don't care about the literal truth of whether troops are dying in vain. It's just a tribal signal. Bad, anti-American people claim that the troops are dying in vain. So, whether it's true or not, public figures must deny the claim merely to distance themselves from the bad tribe. (Cf. their public professions of religious "faith". Only evil communists are atheists, after all!)

Now, to create a society where politics was rational and truth-oriented... that would be worth dying for.

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"Eugenics" or just family planning?

No Right Turn accuses Dr. Jim Flynn of advocating eugenics -- "putting contraceptives in the water supply to stop the poor from breeding." He goes on to insinuate that Flynn is sexist and illiberal. That's an awfully vicious misreading of what the guy actually said:

"The lower down the educational scale you go, the less people are in control of their lives, and less in control of planning for children," [Flynn] said. [...] Unplanned pregnancies by less educated women could be reduced, perhaps by future scientific advances.

"I do have faith in science, and science may give us something that renders conception impossible unless you take an antidote," he said. "You could of course have a chemical in the water supply and have to take an antidote. If you had contraception made easier by progress, then every child is a wanted child."

Contra NRT, this is not an attempt to "justify state interference and coercion" to "stop the poor from breeding." Flynn merely wants to reduce unplanned pregnancies, by making contraception the default state: in other words, switch to an 'opt out' rather than 'opt in' policy. There's nothing remotely illiberal or coercive about this (assuming the antidote - 'opt out' option - is widely accessible). On the contrary, the proposal is plainly intended to increase the control that poor people have over their reproductive options. Flynn's suggestion is akin to family planning, not forced sterilization.

Update: Flynn's clarification confirms my above interpretation.

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Spurious Associations

The 'Live Earth' concerts were intended to raise awareness about global warming. Yet several performers sported t-shirts with the slogan: "Say No to Nuclear Energy". Is this the left-wing equivalent of linking Iraq with 9/11?

I wonder how common it would be for people to accept just one or the other alleged connection. Perhaps this could provide a quick test of tribal affiliation?

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Fair Pay and Price Signals

Social justice is a fine goal, but we should be careful how we pursue it. Too often, it leads people to manipulate economic exchanges in a way that disrupts the efficient functioning of the market. For example, they might oppose a Pigouvian tax on gasoline -- or, even worse, support gas subsidies (!?) -- "for the sake of the poor." Or they might advocate "pay equity" across diverse jobs, in hopes of ensuring that people are paid "what they deserve." But the idea that income should track desert is deeply misguided, as Elizabeth Anderson (drawing on Hayek) explains:

First, if you fix prices on a backward-looking standard [e.g. desert], they will no longer be able to perform their informational function. Producers will produce for what was demanded last quarter, even if it isn't demanded today. This creates enormous waste and generates huge opportunity costs. We'd be much poorer in an economy that worked like this...

[Second,] there is no coherent way to determine how much of what people get is due to luck, and how much is truly their responsibility...

[Third,] any attempt to regulate people's rewards according to judgments of how much they morally deserve would destroy liberty. It would involve the state in making detailed, intrusive judgments of how well people used their liberty, and penalize them for not exercising their liberty in the way the state thinks best.

Forget desert. Our economic institutions should be forward-looking, and use prices to incentivize socially beneficial behaviour. That means paying people for providing desired goods and services -- and paying more for what society needs more of. This won't necessarily track desert: just because engineers are in higher demand than librarians, doesn't mean there's anything especially virtuous about the former. Still, we need more of them, and offering greater rewards is the way society can induce its members to meet this need.

The price system serves to signal scarcity (relative to demand), and - thanks to the profit motive - provides incentives for individuals to respond accordingly. Hayek illustrated the economic principles with a simple example:

Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all his without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process.

Conclusion: If you want to help the poor, then just give them more cash. Far better to increase their purchasing power than to artificially deflate the market price for a particular good. Offering "cheap gas" is bad for society, as it disrupts the signaling function of market prices. Moreover, offering an unconditional basic income (or the like) is better for the poor. Redistribution is thus superior to price regulation in every important respect.

In other words: leftists should be left-libertarians.

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Conservative Progressivism

Looking at the 'big picture', should utilitarians care less about (present) welfare? John Broome argues [PDF] that the population effects of global warming will ultimately dwarf any direct suffering caused. More generally, impacts on present people dwindle to near insignificance when one considers the indefinitely many people that are yet to come. A dangerous thought. For example, does it mean that we should care less about temporary suffering, so long as an end is in sight?

Consider the vegetarian's arguments against factory farmed meat. The present system causes huge and unnecessary suffering to animals. But, we may think, it's only a matter of time until the industry is replaced by bioengineered meat (no animal required). If so, perhaps vegetarianism isn't the pressing moral issue Peter Singer says it is. Factory farming causes massive suffering today, but very little in the grand scheme of things.

The most pressing issue, on this way of looking at things, is to promote 'viral' or compounding goods (e.g. wealth and education) and the social/moral infrastructure that will support continued progress.

There's a sense in which this 'progressivism' is deeply conservative. We should be less concerned about making progress ourselves, than in ensuring that progress may continue to be made in future. Procedural liberalism trumps social justice. We should care more about improving the state of public debate than pushing our particular agendas. (The two aren't necessarily exclusive, of course.)

Further, perhaps we should embrace some degree of perfectionism, and prioritize excellence over mere welfare (assuming that high attainment is more likely to benefit future generations -- think scientific breakthroughs).

Plausible?

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Patriotism and Tough Love

Jason Kuznicki compares conceptions of 'patriotism':

Today, the word “patriot” can scarcely be distinguished from the word “nationalist;” a patriot is above all one who is loyal to his government, his country, and his fellow citizens... For most Enlightenment thinkers, to be a patriot was to favor the people of the country rather than the country’s rulers.

Given the simple definition of 'patriotism' as "love of country", I think the real problem lies not with the popular interpretation of 'country', but of 'love'. Too many Americans think that loving their country means coddling it, ignoring its faults, and proclaiming its virtue without regard for reality. Unsurprisingly, this produces a spoilt brat. But surely genuine love would not be so predictably destructive. Real patriots appreciate the great potential inherent in their country, and hope to nurture this and make it a reality. They stand by their country in hard times, not in the pretense that it is faultless, but in the faith that it can redeem itself.

(As Blar noted, the full version of the famous phrase is: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right.")

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Hilzoy on Torture

In light of expert testimony that "the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable", this bears repeating:

Arguing about torture without asking [whether it is actually effective] is like arguing about whether you must, absolutely must, eat your children to keep yourself from starving to death without first checking to see whether you have any other food available...

People who don't bother to ask that question are not serious about winning; they're in love with a fantasy of themselves as the person who is tough enough to do all those dirty things that have to be done while other people just wring their hands and whimper.

If you're serious about war, you should ask yourself, at every juncture, what will best achieve your objectives, rather than embracing some sort of Rambo fantasy. That would require asking very serious questions about the effectiveness of torture, and also about the effect it is likely to have on our long-term objectives, and the possibility that by forfeiting our moral authority, we lose much more in the long term than we could gain even if torture did work. If you're serious about loving your country, you should never be willing to degrade it, or to embrace in its name the kinds of techniques that made us rightly despise Stalin. And if you're serious about morality, you should know that there are lines you cross only at the risk of losing your soul. It's bad enough to lose your soul because you had to choose between two great evils, and you chose wrong. But there's no excuse for letting your soul slip through your fingers because you're too busy striking a stern and heroic attitude to notice.

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Bangladesh vs. Human Rights

Damn, we live in a screwed up world. Bangladeshi security forces have just kidnapped investigative journalist Tasneem Khalil:

“We are extremely concerned about Tasneem Khalil’s safety,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “He has been a prominent voice in Bangladesh for human rights and the rule of law, and has been threatened because of that.” ...

In Bangladesh, security forces have long been implicated in torture and extrajudicial killings... To date, no military personnel are known to have been held criminally responsible for any of the deaths.

Ophelia Benson adds:

I know Tasneem... he's a fan of B&W and sends me links to his excellent articles; I think of him as a friend in Bangladesh... Bangladesh does not have a good record on this kind of thing - which is exactly what Tasneem has been reporting on - which is why they showed up at midnight and took him away. Make noise. If you have any way to make noise (blog, newspaper, captive audience, etc), make it. Spread it around.

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Is Corporal Punishment So Bad?

Punishment is never particularly pleasant, of course. But is there any principled reason why corporal punishment must be worse than other kinds? In practice, it may be more subject to escalation and abuse. But suppose we could avoid that risk (e.g. through mechanized administration). Would that make it okay, or is the infliction of physical pain different in principle from other kinds of punishment?

If anything, momentary pain seems like the perfect punishment. We are strongly motivated to avoid it, and yet -- unlike incarceration -- it is over in moments and has no lasting ill-consequences. (Prisons should be used only for purposes of removing threats from society. They're too inefficient for mere punishment.) Perhaps fines and "community service" are better still, since they produce benefits to others rather than merely imposing harms. But corporal punishment could replace jail-time as the ultimate punishment, for when all others have failed. Why not?

Criminals aside, consider children. Some people claim that smacking is an inexcusable act of violence, intrinsically "abusive" no matter how light it may be. But again, why is physical discipline picked out for special treatment? Isn't this arbitrary?

Perhaps we have (indirect utilitarian) reason to promote the norm that one's body is inviolate. But parenting and legal punishment are a special cases, where we may allow things that we wouldn't normally allow (e.g. locking people up against their will!). So I don't see why we couldn't do just as well with a more restricted norm of bodily autonomy that can be overriden by appropriate authorities (i.e. a young child's parents, and the legal justice system). It needn't have broader implications for how we treat each other in society.

Compare the extreme case of torture. Torture is intrinsically problematic because it essentially involves the use of extreme pain to induce psychological breakdown (and subsequent compliance). The mark of abuse is that it leaves the person physically or mentally "broken", unable to function properly as a fully autonomous agent. This consequence is atrocious.

But if light physical punishment can safely avoid such effects, what else is left that's so objectionable? Perhaps being physically dominated by another induces feelings of helplessness. But it is the domination -- i.e. arbitrary power -- that's the problem here, rather than the infliction of physical pain per se. I agree that this is a severe risk in practice, but suppose for sake of argument that corporal punishment could be delivered in a measured and non-dominating way. Would it still be objectionable, even then?

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Moral Failure ≠ Military Defeat

Peter Levine offers a conciliatory narrative on the Iraq War:

Whether or not we should have invaded Iraq in the first place, we succeeded in removing a hateful dictator and smashing a major army halfway around the world with hardly any casualties on our side. That is a sign of enormous strength. A civil war then broke out. That conflict is morally our responsibility, because we might have been able to prevent it. In any case, we are accountable for what happens to a population whose nation we chose to invade. Nevertheless, there is very little we can do to end the civil war. We lack the necessary skills and knowledge. More important, civil conflict is just not something that can be resolved by an outside force; it must be negotiated by the parties. Possibly, if we imposed an effective martial law for many years, the factions in the Iraqi domestic conflict would run out of energy and resources. But the odds favor disastrous results even from such an enormous investment of our resources. Therefore, it is past time to leave. This is a moral failure but not a military defeat, and it is certainly not a "surrender."

(An interesting way of putting things, though it reminds me of a certain Monty Python sketch...)

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