How the Internet Enhances Autonomy

[Part Four in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]

We’ve seen that a networked information environment can enhance citizen autonomy in two key respects:

• It empowers citizens to express their creativity through the production of social media (from amateur film and music “mashups” to critical blogging).


• Better access to information (including “niche” information) enables citizens to consider a wider range of alternatives, and so make better informed decisions.

Benkler (pp. 138-9) elaborates on the first point:

In the industrial economy and its information adjunct, most people live most of their lives within hierarchical relations of production, and within relatively tightly scripted possibilities after work, as consumers…

The emergence of radically decentralized, nonmarket production provides a new outlet for the attenuation of the constrained and constraining roles of employees and consumers… We are seeing the emergence of the user as a new category of relationship to information production and exchange. Users are individuals who are sometimes consumers and sometimes producers. They are substantially more engaged participants, both in defining the terms of their productive activity and in defining what they consume and how they consume it. In these two great domains of life—production and consumption, work and play—the networked information economy promises to enrich individual autonomy substantively by creating an environment built less around control and more around facilitating action.

The emergence of radically decentralized nonmarket production in general and of peer production in particular as feasible forms of action opens new classes of behaviors to individuals. Individuals can now justifiably believe that they can in fact do things that they want to do, and build things that they want to build in the digitally networked environment, and that this pursuit of their will need not, perhaps even cannot, be frustrated by insurmountable cost or an alien bureaucracy. Whether their actions are in the domain of political organization (like the organizers of MoveOn.org), or of education and professional attainment (as with the case of Jim Cornish, who decided to create a worldwide center of information on the Vikings from his fifth-grade schoolroom in Gander, Newfoundland), the networked information environment opens new domains for productive life that simply were not there before. In doing so, it has provided us with new ways to imagine our lives as productive human beings. Writing a free operating system or publishing a free encyclopedia may have seemed quixotic a mere few years ago, but these are now far from delusional.

He adds: "Human beings who live in a material and social context that lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in their own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others, are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency. We can live a life more authored by our own will and imagination than by the material and social conditions in which we find ourselves. At least we can do so more effectively than we could until the last decade of the twentieth century."

As for the second point:

The emergence of the networked information economy makes one other important contribution to autonomy. It qualitatively diversifies the information available to individuals. Information, knowledge, and culture are now produced by sources that respond to a myriad of motivations, rather than primarily the motivation to sell into mass markets. Production is organized in any one of a myriad of productive organizational forms, rather than solely the for-profit business firm. The supplementation of the profit motive and the business organization by other motivations and organizational forms—ranging from individual play to large-scale peer-production projects—provides not only a discontinuously dramatic increase in the number of available information sources but, more significantly, an increase in available information sources that are qualitatively different from others. (p.162)

This diversity of information sources is important, because our autonomy is enhanced by putting the full diversity of human experience on display. Why? Because learning about other ways of life is vital for making a fully informed and reflective decision about our own:

In order to sustain the autonomy of a person born and raised in a culture with a set of socially embedded conventions about what a good life is, one would want a choice set that included at least some unconventional, non-mainstream, if you will, critical options. If all the options one has—even if, in a purely quantitative sense, they are “adequate”—are conventional or mainstream, then one loses an important dimension of self-creation. The point is not that to be truly autonomous one necessarily must be unconventional. Rather, if self-governance for an individual consists in critical reflection and re-creation by making choices over the course of his life, then some of the options open must be different from what he would choose simply by drifting through life, adopting a life plan for no reason other than that it is accepted by most others. A person who chooses a conventional life in the presence of the option to live otherwise makes that conventional life his or her own in a way that a person who lives a conventional life without knowing about alternatives does not. (p.151)

By making it possible for many more diversely motivated and organized individuals and groups to communicate with each other, the emerging model of information production provides individuals with radically different sources and types of stories, out of which we can work to author our own lives. Information, knowledge, and culture can now be produced not only by many more people than could do so in the industrial information economy, but also by individuals and in subjects and styles that could not pass the filter of marketability in the mass-media environment. The result is a proliferation of strands of stories and of means of scanning the universe of potential stories about how the world is and how it might become, leaving individuals with much greater leeway to choose, and therefore a much greater role in weaving their own life tapestry. (p.175)

Creative Media

[Part Three in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]

Creativity is a key value promoted by the new media environment. The enhanced capacity for both individual- and peer-production enables our transformation from passive consumers to engaged producers of social media. This is not to wholly replace polished, professional ("Hollywood") production, as Benkler notes (pp.55-6):

It does not mean that there is no continued role for the mass-produced and mass-marketed cultural products—be they Britney Spears or the broadcast news. It does, however, mean that many more “niche markets”—if markets, rather than conversations, are what they should be called—begin to play an ever-increasing role in the total mix of our cultural production system. The economics of production in a digital environment should lead us to expect an increase in the relative salience of nonmarket production models in the overall mix of our information production system, and it is efficient for this to happen—more information will be produced, and much of it will be available for its users at its marginal cost.

The point, again, is to supplement commercial mass-media products. Peer-produced niche products and information may prove valuable to diverse audiences, but – no less importantly – their production engages the creative capacities of their amateur producers, which – as every amateur hobbyist well knows – can be an extraordinarily empowering and meaningful human experience. As Benkler (pp.134-5) writes:

[Home-made film] Jedi Saga will not be a blockbuster. It is not likely to be watched by many people. Those who do watch it are not likely to enjoy it in the same way that they enjoyed any of Lucas’s films, but that is not its point. When someone like Cejas makes such a film, he is not displacing what Lucas does. He is changing what he himself does—from sitting in front of a screen that is painted by another to painting his own screen. Those who watch it will enjoy it in the same way that friends and family enjoy speaking to each other or singing together, rather than watching talking heads or listening to Talking Heads.

Social media creates communities, and empowers the participants. They become contributors to their culture, rather than passive “consumers” of an (often imported) mass-media. Such cultural engagement exemplifies the core ideals of democracy, whereby active citizens work together to build a society, sharing their individual and collective experiences.

Ethnicity and Voluntary Associations

H.E. at The Enlightenment Project offers some interesting thoughts on multiculturalism and social capital:

Maybe the fundamental mistake of multiculturalists who advocate the salad bowl rather than the melting pot is thinking of ethnic groups on the model of civic organizations, coops and the like, as repositories of bridging rather than bonding social capital. Each group will operate its own ethnic restaurants and produce its own float for the Fourth of July parade. But this is precisely NOT how ethnic groups operate: if they did they wouldn't be ethnic groups but voluntary cultural preservation societies. There's nothing objectionable about cultural preservation societies if they admit anyone who has an interest in ethnic cookery, dance and costume and if their business is participating in "ethnic faires," reading and discussing the history of their chosen group, learning about the language and so on. But real "ethnic communities" are not voluntary associations and, even if they engage in cultural preservation as a side line their main business is to access political power and gain economic clout in order to get apprenticeships, jobs, contracts, grants and other scarce resources for their members. To this end they promote bloc voting and operate patronage systems.

I know what this system is like because I was brought up with it and I can't think of any arrangement that's more effective in undermining public-spiritedness, transparency and trust--social capital on the large scale.

What do you think?

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.

Democratizing Culture

[Part Two in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]

"Culture, shared meaning, and symbols are how we construct our views of life across a wide range of domains—personal, political, and social. How culture is produced is therefore an essential ingredient in structuring how freedom and justice are perceived, conceived, and pursued. In the twentieth century, Hollywood and the recording industry came to play a very large role in this domain. The networked information economy now seems poised to attenuate that role in favor of a more participatory and transparent cultural production system." (p.274)

Networked culture is more participatory because anyone can contribute:

The radically declining costs of manipulating video and still images, audio, and text have... made culturally embedded criticism and broad participation in the making of meaning much more feasible than in the past. Anyone with a personal computer can cut and mix files, make their own files, and publish them to a global audience. (p.275)

When anyone can produce and share information, bypassing industrial bottlenecks, the resulting culture is far more diverse:

[H]owever one wishes to discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience. They have diverse interests—as diverse as human culture itself. Some care about Viking ships, others about the integrity of voting machines. Some care about obscure music bands, others share a passion for baking. As Eben Moglen put it, “if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It’s an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another’s pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone.”

It is this combination of a will to create and to communicate with others, and a shared cultural experience that makes it likely that each of us wants to talk about something that we believe others will also want to talk about, that makes the billion potential participants in today’s online conversation, and the six billion in tomorrow’s conversation, affirmatively better than the commercial industrial model… (p.55)

It also has the effect of making culture more transparent, by opening commercially imposed meanings to criticism. Benkler (p.277) points out:

A nine-year-old girl searching Google for Barbie will quite quickly find links to AdiosBarbie.com, to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), and to other, similarly critical sites interspersed among those dedicated to selling and playing with the doll. The contested nature of the doll becomes publicly and everywhere apparent, liberated from the confines of feminist-criticism symposia and undergraduate courses. This simple Web search represents both of the core contributions of the networked information economy. First, from the perspective of the searching girl, it represents a new transparency of cultural symbols. Second, from the perspective of the participants in AdiosBarbie or the BLO, the girl’s use of their site completes their own quest to participate in making the cultural meaning of Barbie. The networked information environment provides an outlet for contrary expression and a medium for shaking what we accept as cultural baseline assumptions. Its radically decentralized production modes provide greater freedom to participate effectively in defining the cultural symbols of our day. These characteristics make the networked environment attractive from the perspectives of both personal freedom of expression and an engaged and self-aware political discourse.

To reiterate: networked media enable citizens and other non-commercial actors to contribute to our shared understanding of the world, and to respond critically to existing cultural symbols. These characteristics of participation and transparency make a culture fundamentally more democratic than is possible in an exclusively mass-mediated environment.

WoN: Information Economics

[Part One in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]

How does information production differ from the production of material goods? Two key differences that I want to explore in this post concern (1) access to the means of production, and (2) the "non-rival" nature and marginal cost of information.

1) The means of production are more widely distributed and accessible than ever before. Anyone with a computer and internet connection is capable of contributing valuable information to society, through such “peer production” efforts as Wikipedia. Add the right software into the mix and they may also contribute to our cultural stock, through creative or satirical “mash-ups” and other media production. As Benkler explains:

The high capital costs that were a prerequisite to gathering, working, and communicating information, knowledge, and culture, have now been widely distributed in the society. The entry barrier they posed no longer offers a condensation point for the large organizations that once dominated the information environment. Instead, emerging models of information and cultural production, radically decentralized and based on emergent patterns of cooperation and sharing, but also of simple coordinate coexistence, are beginning to take on an ever-larger role in how we produce meaning—information, knowledge, and culture—in the networked information economy. (pp. 32-33)

Individual human capacities, rather than the capacity to aggregate financial capital, become the economic core of our information and cultural production. Some of that human capacity is currently, and will continue to be, traded through markets in creative labor. However, its liberation from the constraints of physical capital leaves creative human beings much freer to engage in a wide range of information and cultural production practices than those they could afford to participate in when, in addition to creativity, experience, cultural awareness and time, one needed a few million dollars to engage in information production. From our friendships to our communities we live life and exchange ideas, insights, and expressions in many more diverse relations than those mediated by the market. In the physical economy, these relationships were largely relegated to spaces outside of our economic production system. The promise of the networked information economy is to bring this rich diversity of social life smack into the middle of our economy and our productive lives. (pp. 52-53)

Peer production involves breaking a task up into discrete “chunks” that may be easily completed by volunteers. The cumulative effect of these non-market contributions – spurred on by diverse human motivations, from reputation gain to the artistic thrill of creation – is the production of a hugely valuable information resource. Wikipedia is but one example; SETI@home is another, whereby ordinary citizens contributed their spare computing capacity towards creating the world's most powerful super-computer. (The SETI@home screensaver performs computations when the user’s computer is otherwise idle, and then send the results over the internet back to SETI.) “Peer to peer” networks, or p2p, have shown themselves to be among the most efficient information distribution mechanisms society has yet discovered – much to the chagrin of incumbent industries.

It's worth noting that peer produced ("open source") software is often judged to be of higher quality – more dependable and secure – than its closed, proprietary, counterparts. As Eric S. Raymond put it, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." (Proof: compare LINUX to Windows.) Hence, the U.S. Presidential Technology Advisory Commission “advised the president in 2000 to increase use of free software in mission-critical applications” (p.321).

2) The economics of information production differs importantly from material production. Information is non-rival: when one passes along information, it does not make the provider any poorer (unlike if I passed along their jewellery!). Distribution of pure information has a zero marginal cost – additional listeners do not raise the production costs at all. Since economically efficient pricing is, by definition, the marginal cost of the product, it follows that any (non-zero) pricing for pure information is necessarily inefficient.

This inefficiency may be tolerated for the sake of incentivizing initial production. (Hollywood won’t make blockbusters for free; by artificially restricting access to the digital information film-makers produce, we encourage them to produce it in the first place.) But we shouldn’t blindly assume that granting ever stronger exclusive access rights (“Intellectual Property”) over information will necessarily improve outcomes, the way we might expect of markets in material property. In addition to the local inefficiency of excluding those unwilling to pay the artificially inflated price – who could otherwise have gained a benefit at no real cost to anyone else – there is also the “big-picture” concern for stunting down-stream production.

Present info-cultural productions build on our info-cultural heritage, or what past production has contributed to the public domain. This is known, with reference to Isaac Newton, as the “on the shoulders of giants” effect. But if today’s info-cultural productions are locked away behind excessively strict and long-lived IP protections, this raises the costs for tomorrow’s producers. Balance is thus needed to ensure that present incentives don’t become future disincentives.

In summary: The combined effect of these two general observations is to highlight the economic desirability of open access to information, in at least some contexts. The information economy increases the viability of widely distributed, large-scale production efforts that take place outside of both state and market action. Such production is valuable and efficient enough to be worth nourishing, but is highly dependent on open access to “the shoulders of giants”. Although some artificial restrictions on information access may be beneficial, we should be aware that IP extremism diminishes the public domain, and may thus prove an obstacle to future creativity. Further, much information production is not motivated by IP revenue in the first place -- the growing role of peer-production should not be neglected -- so for this class of activities, strengthened IP law imposes costs without any corresponding benefit at all.

Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks

This is the "contents page" for a short series of posts that will highlight my favourite bits of Yochai Benkler's brilliant book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. (Though if you want to read the whole thing, download the free PDF of the book!)

The individual posts will cover:
1. "Growing Knowledge" - the economics of information
2. Cultural Transparency and Participation
3. Creative Values, Peer-Production, and Social Media
4. How the Internet Enhances Autonomy
5. Shifting from Passive Consumers to Active Citizens
6. Safekeeping Cyberspace

Allocating Citizenship

Global justice concerns may be raised about not only material resource allocations, but also "social resources" such as citizenship, which arise from networks of permission and restraint. Note that whether someone is accepted as a member of a functioning society -- permitted to work and live within the nation's borders, bound and protected by its institutions -- makes an extraordinary difference to their life chances. Yet, Will Wilkinson writes:

Strangely, there appears to be next to nothing in the mainstream political philosophy literature (though maybe I’m missing something), that drives home the arbitrary distribution of citizenship. It’s funny, because citizenship, unlike wealth, can be created out of thin air, and is distributed according to a few largely arbitrary principles.

Further, in starkly physical terms, it's not as though citizenship is some positive entity that we're simply omitting to provide. A non-citizen is not lacking in any intrinsic capacity. What citizenship provides is permission -- it simply serves to remove the obstructions we would otherwise place in their way. In other words, social resources are liberties, and arguably should be considered the natural 'default' or baseline position. Citizenship isn't something we grant; it's something we cease to deny.

So: is the current global allocation of social resources just? Or should, for example, functioning societies deny citizenship to fewer people?

[Cross-posted to the International Network for Ethical Issues in Resource Allocation blog.]

P.S. Note that money, likewise, is arguably more a social than material resource, in the above sense.

The Traveller's Dilemma

Two people independently pick a dollar value between 2-100. If they pick the same number, then both are paid this amount. Otherwise, the lowest value is paid out to each, with the greedier person paying a $2 penalty to the other player in addition. If you want to maximize your earnings, what number should you pick? Cue the game theorists:

To see why 2 is the logical choice, consider a plausible line of thought that Lucy might pursue: her first idea is that she should write the largest possible number, 100, which will earn her $100 if Pete is similarly greedy. (If the antique actually cost her much less than $100, she would now be happily thinking about the foolishness of the airline manager's scheme.)

Soon, however, it strikes her that if she wrote 99 instead, she would make a little more money, because in that case she would get $101. But surely this insight will also occur to Pete, and if both wrote 99, Lucy would get $99. If Pete wrote 99, then she could do better by writing 98, in which case she would get $100. Yet the same logic would lead Pete to choose 98 as well. In that case, she could deviate to 97 and earn $99. And so on. Continuing with this line of reasoning would take the travelers spiraling down to the smallest permissible number, namely, 2. It may seem highly implausible that Lucy would really go all the way down to 2 in this fashion. That does not matter (and is, in fact, the whole point)--this is where the logic leads us.

Jason Kuznicki has an interesting response:

The smallest figure only becomes a reasonable strategy when neither Pete nor Lucy have any guidance whatsoever about how the other traveler might respond. In the world of actual prices, this never happens. In other words, the $2 solution is only plausible when it is entirely divorced from economics, and when neither player has any cues at all for giving an answer.

I don't think market cues are relevant here. There's a perfectly salient "default option" even in the abstract case, namely, the maximum value of $100. Suppose the market price is $50. The recursive "race-to-the-bottom" reasoning will apply just as disastrously from 50-49 as it originally did from 100-99. Changing our starting point doesn't really change anything. It's the reasoning that's the problem.

The real solution, then, is to affirm norms of global rationality: look at the big picture, and reason according to a decision-procedure that will predictably yield better results. That means ditching the economist's "local rationality" of backwards induction and its race to the $2 bottom. The SciAm writer has it right:

If I were to play this game, I would say to myself: "Forget game-theoretic logic. I will play a large number (perhaps 95), and I know my opponent will play something similar and both of us will ignore the rational argument that the next smaller number would be better than whatever number we choose." What is interesting is that this rejection of formal rationality and logic has a kind of meta-rationality attached to it. If both players follow this meta-rational course, both will do well. The idea of behavior generated by rationally rejecting rational behavior is a hard one to formalize. But in it lies the step that will have to be taken in the future to solve the paradoxes of rationality that plague game theory and are codified in Traveler's Dilemma.

We Need Better Tribes

Arnold Kling summarizes Robin Hanson:

First, he is saying that most people seek a political comfort zone. They join the tug-of-war game over familiar policy arguments. They signal which side they are on by giving out what I call trust cues...

Next, he says that if one wants to add value, one stays out of tug-of-war and instead looks for issues or positions that are outside of the standard clumps. I think that his strategy is not costless. True, one encounters less resistance by "pulling sideways." But on the other hand, having not offered trust cues to either side in the tug-of-war, one is considered a freak by both.

The academic ideal of a "community of inquirers", united more by procedural than substantive values, strikes me as a much preferable option. Intellectual honesty should be the ultimate "trust cue". A commitment to being reasonable and co-operative is all anyone should demand (as opposed to reaching a pre-determined conclusion). Why can't all the world be like this?

Blogging, Masks and Self-Expression

There's an interesting article at Inside Higher Ed about "risky writing", or self-disclosing essays, in English classrooms:

I was still their teacher, but I had now become another member of the class, one who was struggling, like everyone else, with a personal issue. I had never used the word “intersubjective” in class, but the classroom suddenly became a space where every person, including the teacher, was sharing aspects of his or her own subjectivity with each other.

It's curious how thoroughly impersonal most philosophy (that I'm aware of) is, in contrast. Especially as it seems that one of the deepest philosophical questions is that which immediately confronts us in life, namely, how to live? We discuss abstract moral dilemmas, and formulate broad theories and principles, all from an emotionally disengaged, "God's eye" perspective. Such work is plenty valuable in its own right, of course; but I don't know how often it really helps anyone to live better. So I wonder whether insights might also be gleaned by grappling more directly with the human condition, confronting the problems we struggle with in life, and thinking about how best to respond to them. Is this not a proper role for philosophers? (Should we engage with emotions, as well as reasons?)

Maybe self-disclosure in the public sphere is problematic, though. I'm reminded of Nagel's 'Concealment and Exposure', where he defends social conventions of reticence and non-acknowledgment:

The trouble with the alternatives is that they lead to a dead end, because they demand engagement on terrain where common ground is unavailable without great effort, and only conflict will result. If C expresses his admiration of D's breasts, C and D have to deal with it as a common problem or feature of the situation, and their social relation must proceed in its light. If on the other hand it is just something that C feels and that D knows, from long experience and subtle signs, that he feels, then it can simply be left out of the basis of their joint activity of conversation, even while it operates separately in the background for each of them as a factor in their private thoughts....

In a society with a low tolerance for conflict, not only personal comments but all controversial subjects, such as politics, money, or religion, will be taboo in social conversation, necessitating the development of a form of conversational wit that doesn't depend on the exchange of opinions. In our present subculture, however, there is considerable latitude for the airing of disagreements and controversy of a general kind, which can be pursued at length, and the most important area of nonacknowledgment is the personal -- people's feelings about themselves and about others. It is impolite to draw attention to one's achievements or to express personal insecurity, envy, or the fear of death, or strong feelings about those present, except in a context of intimacy where these subjects can be taken up and pursued. Embarrassing silence is the usual sign that these rules have been broken. Someone says or does something to which there is no collectively acceptable response, so that the ordinary flow of public discourse that usually veils the unruly inner lives of the participants has no natural continuation.

These concerns only seem to apply in social settings, though, where others are physically trapped in the same room as you. Written discourse may be ignored at will, and left "unacknowledged" in subsequent settings where it might otherwise cause conflict. (Though the unspoken awareness could still cause tension, I suppose.) Blogs, especially, are addressed to no-one in particular -- the audience is purely voluntary and self-selecting -- so they arguably provide a distinctively unassuming form of self-expression. Anyone who doesn't wish to read it can simply stop.

So much for other-regarding concerns, then. How about prudential objections? Most obviously, you might not want your personal struggles to be public knowledge. But why not, exactly? We're all human, it would hardly be reasonable for anyone to hold it against you. On the other hand, people can be unreasonable, and it's at least possible that your future employer (for example) will be one of them. Unscrupulous characters may even seek to use your disclosures against you. So there's some risk. Enough that we should be deterred from self-expression in this context?

This raises a prior question: would one already face comparable risks in discussing controversial topics? One's views are, perhaps, revealing in their own way, though it would seem more conducive to free inquiry for others to refrain from explicitly drawing attention to this in practice. Cf. the very public shaming of a well-meaning libertarian blogger, here:

Ironically for a series of posts concerned with the boundaries of public displays of private sexual behavior, the disturbing thing about EV’s post was that I felt I was getting a window into his mind that I really, really didn’t want to look into. Somebody close the drapes up in here!

Ouch! Though the writer did qualify her criticism somewhat:

[I]n real life, we share polite acquaintanceship with all sorts of people who think all kinds of wrong and crazy stuff. We just don’t usually have to hear about those crazy things. At a party we will edge away from the crazy “let me tell you about my views on minarchy RIGHT NOW” guy. Then again, we might have a great time discussing the latest Italian election results, say, or poor draft choices recently made in the NFL, with someone who was, in fact, a crazy minarchist, but who didn’t go out of his way to tell you about it. Unfortunately, the blogosphere is like an extended drunken party in which the probability of you having to hear the crazy minarchist’s theories about government asymptotically approaches 1. But while it’s appropriate to get into high dudgeon if one of the Catallarchy guys says something you find morally repugnant, it isn’t necessarily a good idea to start picturing him to yourself as some sort of moral monster, slavering away in a basement.

Given my contrarian sympathies, I can't help but feel that there's something disturbingly oppressive about accusations of "thought-crime", and subsequent witch-hunts. But then, I'm kind of attached to the free exchange of ideas, even "wrong and crazy" ones. (I'm sure J.S. Mill wrote a word or two on this once.)

Back to the main issue, consider Nagel's observation:

We don't want to expose ourselves completely to strangers even if we don't fear their disapproval, hostility, or disgust. Naked exposure itself, whether or not it arouses disapproval, is disqualifying. The boundary between what we reveal and what we do not, and some control over that boundary, are among the most important attributes of our humanity.

Velleman notes that deliberate self-exposure doesn't undermine one's status as a self-presenter in this way, though. So it's still unclear why that would be a problem. Perhaps there's a clue in the following:

[O]thers cannot engage you in social interaction unless they find your behavior predictable and intelligible. Insofar as you want to be eligible for social intercourse, you must present a coherent public image.

Would multiple masks/"public images" undermine this coherence? I shouldn't think so. Nagel discusses the example of an author engaging in polite small talk with their harsh reviewer. They both refrain from acknowledging the potential source of conflict, even though it is out there in the public domain. They wear different "masks" at the cocktail party than at the publishing house, and know not to confuse the two.

Still, I've a niggling feeling that I'm missing something really obvious here. So here are two questions for the reader:

(1) Is there anything essentially problematic about public self-disclosure? (See also my related discussion, on a different kind of self-exposure, here.)

(2) Would the world be a richer place if more such (unobtrusive but openly accessible) self-expression took place? Or is it better to keep it locked away in the strictly private sphere?

Virtual Violation

Brandon offers 'Some Disjointed Thoughts About Rape', including the following:

Virtual violence is not violence; but virtual violation is violation... The disanalogy between violence and sex arises from the fact that violence is a physical activity whereas sex is a physically expressible mental activity.

I'm not sure about this. It seems like there's also a mental component to violence, that could potentially be separated from its typical physical expression. This should capture the kind of violation that also occurs through, say, verbal bullying. Since it's possible for virtual (non-sexual) violence to still be violating, the posited disanalogy seems a bit artificial.

What we really need, I think, is to disambiguate two senses of "virtual violation":
(1) A real violation that occurs within a simulated, or 'virtual', setting.
(2) A merely simulated/'virtual' violation.

The distinction generalizes. Consider the example of "virtual bullying". In the first case, one could genuinely bully a fellow game-player whilst inside the game, if the bully intended to use the game to (emotionally) hurt the other player. But in the second case, I might merely simulate it, i.e. role-play having my character "hassle" another, whose real-life player understands that no real animosity is meant. In the second case, but not the first, it's just a game.

Similarly, two people might have (real) sexual relations within a virtual world, or they might merely simulate it -- depending (at least in part) on their respective intentions, I suppose.

One can imagine a game, then, where "virtual rape" occurs purely in the second sense. Perhaps it's part of the rules of the game that if you lose to the boss monster, it will "rape" and "kill" your avatar. If that's a normal part of the game, I assume no-one would feel violated by it. (Especially if the boss monster is just a computer program, rather than another player. But even in the latter case. Real-world sexual roleplaying provides a vivid example of this -- handcuffs, anyone?)

The distinction, I suppose, concerns whether real consent is given for one's avatar to be acted upon against its (merely virtual/represented) "consent". By playing a game, one gives a sort of global implicit consent to all the normal happenings -- getting killed by monsters, and so forth. (Even though in the "local" moment of a game you try your best to survive, of course!) So we can also imagine cases where a player gives a similar global consent for their avatar to be virtually "raped" in certain legitimate circumstances. The problem with the Second Life virtual rapes, of course, is that no such global consent was given. Virtual rape is not a "normal" or legitimate kind of interaction within the world of Second Life; it is not what the players signed up for. So when their avatars are violated in these ways, so -- to a degree -- is the player.

The virtual violation was a real violation, because not only was virtual consent missing -- so was real consent. This general principle applies to non-sexual virtual interactions too, e.g. virtual bullying. The difference we see between this and normal cases of "virtual murder" isn't so much in the type of act, but in the type of consent.

More links

- Week 2 of the Online Philosophy Conference is now up.

- The Humanist Symposium is a promising new carnival for blogs that "affirm the inherent dignity and worth of human life and our ability to seek truth, gain wisdom, and tell right from wrong through the application of reason." The latest edition is here.

- The new Feminist Philosophers blog is well worth a read.

Radical Skepticism vs. Anything Goes

Surely this post's title is a false dilemma. Nevertheless, it seems to be a popular defense of religious belief, to say that "atheism is a faith position too", e.g. because we need to assume that our senses are a reliable guide to reality [HT: OB], or because objective morality is no less "mysterious" than God, etc. This strikes me as not so much an argument as a negotiation: "Your beliefs are unjustified too, so I won't say anything if you don't!" Let's all just lower our epistemic standards and be one big irrational family.

Or let's not.

Not all axioms are created equal. Some assumptions are more reasonable than others. Given our commitment to making sense of the world as best we can, we are rationally obliged to believe in the preconditions of our success, i.e. that our basic methods of inquiry (science and reason) are on the right track. This is an entirely reasonable assumption to make, and in no way does it legitimize making further - arbitrary - assumptions in addition.

This becomes even clearer if we reject the foundationalist model of justification in favour of coherentism. One's maximally coherent belief-set would contain the claim that one's senses are generally reliable. It would not (atheists argue) contain the claims made by pop theism. They just don't fit together so well with everything else we (take ourselves to) know about the world.

If it's really the case that we have no good reason to believe something, then we shouldn't believe it. So it would be irresponsible to accept the theist's cease-fire; their reasoned criticisms should instead be welcomed! But, I would argue, we actually do have good reasons to believe in those other things (e.g. morality, the external world) in the alleged analogy. On the other hand, we don't have such good reasons to believe in pop theism. So, I think we should simply reject the analogies.

Granted, even atheists must make some assumptions. But, again, some assumptions are more reasonable than others. It's not always obvious what we should (most reasonably) believe. It's not always easy to avoid falling off into either extreme of complacent skepticism or complacent relativism. But of course this challenge calls for more, rather than less, critical epistemic discernment. Don't throw up your hands -- think!

Perfect is the Enemy of Good Discussion

I'm occasionally chided for blogging about a topic without having first read up on all the relevant literature. The latest example is here:

So: my complaint is that the discussion above unwittingly touches on and conflates some issues in philosophy that have a much deeper literature than you assume; and, one SHOULD go off and read the collected works of these people ['Plato, Aristotle's Nich. Ethics, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Spinoza, Decartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and more recent philosophers Stanley Cavell, Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault, and Arnold Davidson'] and others, precisely because it is directly concerned with the discussion attempted on this web-page. Do I really want to make serious claims on astrophysics without having read Einstien [sic]?

Of course, if I were truly obligated to read the collected works of every commenter's 13 favourite philosophers before blogging, I'd never get anything posted. And, imperfect though this blog and its discussions might be, I still find them to be of value (and hope others do too). So I consider the posturing of such self-appointed gatekeepers to be both offensive and wrongheaded. Would you interrupt a lunch conversation to tell the participants that they 'SHOULD' spend more time in the library before opening their mouths? They'd be apt to punch you in yours, and rightly so.

Don't get me wrong, I like libraries, and welcome suggestions for further reading. I have a long reading list, and will no doubt benefit from getting further through it. But in the meantime, there's also much to be gained from exploring one's own half-formed ideas, and having others respond to them. Indeed, it's this process of dialogical learning, of mutual engagement and constructive exchange, that I find most exciting about philosophy! So I don't welcome attempts to shut down casual conversation until such a time as all participants are so perfectly educated and well-read that they can perform "up to standard". What an oppressive demand!

To blog is to participate in an ongoing conversation. I'm throwing some ideas out there, and responding to others. That's all. I don't purport to present only well-researched, polished work. There are journals for that. Blogging fills a different niche.

Of course, the aim is still to reach the truth through good reasoning. So constructive criticism is always welcome. If I say something misguided, I very much hope others will respond by explaining how my views could be improved. In other words: join the conversation! That's always helpful.

But what's not helpful is to declaim the discussion from on high, dismissing it as worthless because the participants haven't yet read the right texts or otherwise "qualified" against the gatekeeper's chosen criteria. (As if philosophical banter were a blameworthy offense, and the "ignorant" would do better to remain in embarrassed silence.) Such an attitude is not just rude, but downright anti-philosophical -- can you imagine a better way to stifle intellectual curiosity than to condemn the curious for their "failure" to already know everything? So much for 'the examined life'.

Infinity ain't everything

Steve Esser drops an interesting comment at FQI:

If the actual universe is infinite, wouldn’t it contain all possibilities?

Not necessarily. A collection may be infinite whilst making systematic exclusions. Consider the set of even numbers. It's infinite in number, but it doesn't contain all the numbers. Granted, the odd numbers never really had a chance, in this artificial case. So perhaps the thought is instead that an infinite expanse will contain every finite pattern that it possibly could. This seems more intuitive. But in fact this too turns out to be false.

Consider an infinite sequence of coin-flips. Suppose it is a fair coin, so for each individual flipping event, there is a 50/50 chance of it landing heads or tails. So one obvious possibility is for a "tails" event to occur. But is it guaranteed to occur, at some point in the infinite sequence? Well, no. There is, after all, some (infinitesimal) chance that the coin will land heads on every single flip whatsoever! In this case, all the other possibilities that might have obtained, won't. So, infinity is no guarantee of actualizing every possibility.

Wealth and Liberty

Richard Epstein writes:

A person does not become more free because he has more wealth; he becomes wealthier, which confers on him more opportunities to use the liberty that he has.

Not necessarily. Granted, if one lives in a resource-poor society (or a desert island) then one may suffer purely from a lack of capability, rather than from imposed coercion. But in a wealthy society like ours, no individual lacks the physical or material capacity to meet their needs. There are plenty of resources nearby, sitting in shop windows. Anyone is capable of taking those resources. Their problem is that other people in society won't let them. Security guards will interfere, using force to block the individual's access, or to reclaim what they now call "stolen" goods. Money is a ticket that stops others from barring your access to society's wealth. For example, it can be used to stop the security guards from impeding your liberty when you want to claim the resources in shops. If you lack money, you lack the means to stave off their coercion. That is, you lack negative freedom.

As G.A. Cohen put it, in what I think may be the most insightful paragraph of political theory ever written:

[T]o lack money is to be liable to interference, and the assimilation of money to physical, or even mental, resources is a piece of unthinking fetishism, in the good old Marxist sense that it misrepresents social relations of constraint as people lacking things. In a word: money is no object.

The Cheek!

From the mailbag:

I made the mistake of copying your "Rousseau and Freedom," paper from your blog [link]. I am sorry. My university is going to charge me with cheating. Can you please do me a big favor and temporarily take down "Rousseau and Freedom,"??? I will owe you forever. Please let me know if you can help! Thank you!

Thanks,
[Name redacted]

I guess it's too much to hope that the additional question marks indicate his implicit understanding of the question's absurdity...

Still, it raises an interesting philosophical question: is it a pragmatic contradiction to apologize and then seek to escape culpability? Ben suggests, "an apology is not really a true apology if the person in question does not attempt to right the wrong that has occurred." Is this right -- does attempting to evade responsibility entail that an apology is insincere? Or is it possible to genuinely admit culpability, and yet seek to avoid what you recognize to be your just deserts?

Some Links

Check out the 2nd annual Online Philosophy Conference. I hope I'll have time to read the papers and chip in with some comments soon.

The 47th Philosophers' Carnival is here, with a focus on "practical philosophy". We need more volunteers to host future editions, so email me if you're interested.

I found the entry on sexual perversion especially interesting. It's a fundamental question whether an act might ever be wrong due to its being "abnormal" or "perverse", independently of any harmful consequences. Whence comes the normative authority of these externally imposed "purposes" that mustn't ever be replaced? (In other contexts we praise innovation, after all!)

Finally, I note that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy finally has an entry on the meaning of life:

English-speaking philosophers can be expected to continue to find life's meaning of interest as they increasingly realize that it is a distinct line of enquiry that admits of rational enquiry to no less a degree than more familiar normative categories such as well-being, right action, and distributive justice.

Doesn't it reflect poorly on our discipline's recent history that this doesn't "go without saying"?

Coherence and Comprehension

Responding to my post on verificationism and base facts, Jim Ryan writes:

I wonder whether Richard's view entails that one can understand an incoherent term (such as "square with only three sides"). After all, "I know what it means, I understand it, but I just don't see how it could be rendered coherent" sounds Richardesque. I suppose he might say that the incoherence precludes comprehension. But that seems arbitrary. Why won't he also allow that evidential vacuity precludes comprehension, as well? Again I say that the mind is large and its imagination powerful. It can imagine a logically impossible thing (especially if it's in a sort of dreamy state: try it, you can do it. Or if the contradiction is buried deep enough, you can accomplish the task in a clear-headed state.) It can mistake this for comprehension. It can imagine the correct application of an evidentially vacuous term (e.g., "zombie") and mistake this for comprehension, too. How can Richard distinguish these two, such that in the latter case there is in fact no mistake?

Granted, our claims to understanding are fallible -- one can't be certain that further reflection won't reveal some hidden incoherence in a notion. There's a gap between prima facie conceivability and ideal conceivability. A nice example of this is the Grim Reaper paradox:

There are countably many grim reapers, one for every positive integer. Grim reaper 1 is disposed to kill you with a scythe at 1pm, if and only if you are still alive then (otherwise his scythe remains immobile throughout), taking 30 minutes about it. Grim reaper 2 is disposed to kill you with a scythe at 12:30 pm, if and only if you are still alive then, taking 15 minutes about it. Grim reaper 3 is disposed to kill you with a scythe at 12:15 pm, and so on. You are still alive just before 12pm, you can only die through the motion of a grim reaper's scythe, and once dead you stay dead. On the face of it, this situation seems conceivable — each reaper seems conceivable individually and intrinsically, and it seems reasonable to combine distinct individuals with distinct intrinsic properties into one situation. But a little reflection reveals that the situation as described is contradictory. I cannot survive to any moment past 12pm (a grim reaper would get me first), but I cannot be killed (for grim reaper n to kill me, I must have survived grim reaper n+1, which is impossible). So the description D of the situation is prima facie positively conceivable but not ideally positively conceivable.

How should we interpret this? I guess I am a bit tempted by the line Jim attributes to me: "I can understand the set-up, I know what it means, and I see that it's incoherent!" But this trades on an equivocation. I can understand each of the descriptive components in isolation, but that's all. It remains a total mystery how they fit together -- what is supposed to happen after the strike of 12? It can't be understood. It's incoherent. But I repeat myself.

It's not arbitrary to say that "incoherence precludes comprehension." On the contrary, it's analytic! Coherence just is comprehensibility. To call something "incoherent" is precisely to say that it cannot be comprehended by any rational mind whatsoever. (Of course, something coherent but complicated might be "incomprehensible to me" in the limited sense that, due to my contingent cognitive limitations, I simply happen to not understand it. But that's not the relevant sense of the term here.)

On the other hand, I just don't see any reason to think that evidential vacuity precludes comprehension. And I do see reasons -- in the form of apparently coherent counterexamples (zombies, multiverses, etc.) -- to reject such a stringent requirement.

Jim concludes:

Richard needs to say what is the difference between "comprehensible" and "suspiciously incomprehensible" other than a feeling of "I've got it!" I don't trust that feeling. I need epistemic, evidential terms.

That seems fair enough, given how fallible such intuitions are. The difference between true and false intuitions is a matter of fact that won't always be transparent to us, namely: would further reflection lead me to change my mind?

Is Santa a Lie?

Richard Brown argues that it's wrong for parents to lie to their kids about Santa:

It is commonly recognized that we have a duty to be truthful and yet millions of Americans engage in the most elaborate deceit imaginable all aimed at duping their children... Santa Claus is portrayed as real, not only in the story but also by the parents. No parents pretend that Darth Vader is real but when I was on a plane on Christmas Eve the PILOT announced over the intercom that he had spotted Santa on the radar!!!! And, while it may be Ok to omit certain information in order to protect a child it is absolutely immoral to actively perpetuate a lie.

However, I don't really think this is (necessarily) lying. Such an interpretation would be excessively literal-minded. Not all statements are genuine assertions, meant to be taken literally. Kids are well versed in pretense, as Chris explains at Mixing Memory:

Cognitive psychologists, especially Jaqueline Woolley, have developed rather sophisticated ways of understanding children's ability to distinguish fantasy and reality. As I've discussed before, children are pretty good at separating fantasy from reality, but in cases of acceptable fantasies like Santa Claus and imaginary friends, children seem to exhibit a third ontological category, "pretend," which they have in addition to "real" and "unreal." While there are individual differences in children's ability to make the fantasy-reality distinction, overall, by about age 3, children are pretty damn good at telling pretend from real, even if they may play as though the pretend is as real as anything else.

So, I think it's a good thing for adults to engage children's imaginations by pretending with them that Santa is real. I agree that parents shouldn't deceive their kids, e.g. into thinking that Santa is real in the same way as Grandma. But children are sensitive to playfulness, and should pick up on the game if their parents play it right. At least, that strikes me as the ideal. To joylessly pop the pretense is not to advance the cause of truth and learning. It's merely to call a halt to play.

Half-pie Atomism?

Is methodological individualism a stable position? It's atomistic in the sense that the value of society as a whole is reducible to the value of the individual lives it contains. But it is an incomplete kind of atomism, if we are holists about the value of a person's life, insisting that this value is not further reducible to the momentary time-slices of the life. Such "half-pie atomism" is under pressure from both fronts: if an atomistic approach is best, why privilege temporally extended persons over their momentary time-slices? Conversely, if the whole is more than the sum of its parts, why stop short of full-blown collectivism? These are the twin challenges that an individualist must answer.

Despite my individualism, I actually think that fully-blown (time-slice) atomism is the place to start. However, from this perspective in the here-and-now, I realise that I care about more than just my present stage. The present stage, on its own, lacks meaning. It is only by situating my present stage within the narrative arc of a whole life that it becomes comprehensible. Likewise for each other momentary stage. So I am willing to make momentary sacrifices in order to construct a whole life that has a certain coherence and value that outstrips the mere sum of its parts. Or so I conceive of life: it's the whole thing, rather than each moment, that I find myself concerned about on reflection.

But if we go this far, why stop there? Given Parfit-style reductionism about personal identity, I don't think there's any really deep metaphysical unity between my temporal parts. (At each momentary stage, I choose to "identify" with the larger, temporally-extended whole, but this a "rationally constructed" sort of unity, rather than anything that comes built into the world itself.) On a metaphysical level, I think there is a strong formal analogy between 'my present stage' vs. 'myself' (temporally extended) and 'myself' vs. 'humanity' (inter-personally extended). Should this lead us to identify more with the latter, as a collective that in some sense transcends us all?

My initial argument is easily reapplied:

Starting from this individual perspective of mine, I realise that I care about more than just my own life. This life, on its own, lacks meaning. It is only by situating my life within the narrative arc of a whole society (/civilization) that it becomes comprehensible. Likewise for each other individual. So we are willing to make personal sacrifices in order to construct a whole society that has a certain coherence and value that outstrips the mere sum of its parts. Or so we conceive of civilization: it's the whole thing, rather than each individual, that we find ourselves concerned about on reflection.

This clears plenty of room for what I call "super-human" values -- i.e. accomplishments of humanity, such as constructing the Great Pyramids, or exploring deep space, regardless of their impact on individual welfare. It could also legitimize the (otherwise irrational) practice of caring about a socially salient mass event more than the analogous aggregate of widely distributed events. (For example, compare 9/11 to car crashes. The threat of terrorism seems to have far greater social significance for Americans, out of all proportion to the mere aggregate-individual impact.)

But there are some important disanalogies, of course. Most importantly, perhaps, there is a greater rational unity among the stages of a life than among the individuals of a society. My momentary stages are bound together by psychological continuity -- a sameness of character, values, goals, etc. There is far more diversity and conflict among the individuals in our society. Arguably, we just don't have enough in common to construct a rationally unified entity from society, as we can for an individual life. What typically happens, of course, is that the "mainstream" or majority group claim to constitute the whole society, and so freely trample over dissenting minorities. But tyranny is not community, and majority will is not the same thing as the general will.

Still, perhaps we may be led to a form of communitarianism on a smaller scale, whereby a broad political liberalism enables people to enter (and exit) niche "communities" of choice. After all, some of the deepest satisfaction we can find in life is from contributing to projects that are larger than ourselves, and that we consider to have enduring worth. These may go beyond "weak" communities of convenience and mutually-beneficial cooperation, to the kind of so-called "strong" community that is valued by its members over and above their individual interests in it. In such a case, the methodology of rational expansion forces us to consider the strong community a locus of value in its own right.

That is, just as a unified person may be rationally constructed from appropriately related temporal parts, so too a unified community might be rationally constructed from appropriately related individuals. In either case, the value accruing to the whole may transcend the sum of its parts: something may be good for a person without being good for any particular momentary stage, or good for a community without being good for any particular individual. (But note that in either case the holistic goods will presumably be valued by the atoms, even if they are not, strictly speaking, valuable for the isolated entity alone.)

Sound plausible? (Yikes, I'm turning into a communitarian...!)

Fun with Neural Grounding

It's amazing what brains can do (if we assume that they "ground" every subject that we think about):

Because Homo sapiens is the only species to construct complex moral systems, morality has to be grounded in some distinctive property of the human brain

Reader challenge: On the assumption that this is a valid argument form, what's the most outlandish reductio you can come up with? (E.g. "Because Homo sapiens is the only species to construct complex electrical systems, electricity has to be grounded in some distinctive property of the human brain." Zap!)

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.

Immoral Awareness?

There's some interesting discussion at The Splintered Mind about thought-dependent desires. Justin Tiwald explains:

If I allowed myself to dwell on the thought of taking someone's fancy new laptop, I would probably feel an inclination to do so. But it's highly unusual for me to contemplate such a thing. I can sit in a classroom for hours without noticing open bags and backpacks that might have laptops inside. Often students will use their laptops in class and it won't even register. In contrast, a kleptomaniac would be well aware of those open bags, and would need to remind herself that it would be wrong to steal them.

What's the best way to describe such thought-dependent desires: are they created by the thought, or merely suppressed by its absence? (Is this even a sensible distinction?)

And what are the moral implications? Eric comments:

Part of being a morally good person is its not even being in the space of possibility to do certain things.

An example I use in my Chinese philosophy class is this: I may be running late for an appointment, but when a pedestrian is crossing in front of me it doesn't even occur to me to run him over in my hurry (even if I could get away with it!). One aim -- maybe the aim -- of Xunzian moral education is that it no more occurs to me to cheat on my taxes, needlessly insult someone, cut in line, break my promise, than it occurs to me to run over the pedestrian.

There seems something right about this. On the other hand, it would seem awfully harsh to blame someone merely for being aware of an immoral possible action, especially if they felt no inclination towards it at all (but merely suffered from a perverse imagination, or whatever). What's worse, the "don't think of an elephant" phenomenon might create a vicious spiral, whereby one's anxiety to avoid "bad thoughts" makes them all the more painfully salient. That can't be healthy.

Other problematic cases involve paying inappropriate attention to some irrelevant personal characteristic, e.g. disability, weight, height, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. These may take on an unwelcome salience, especially if we know that we really shouldn't be attending to such things. But repression didn't work out so well for Austin Powers:

"Mole! Bloody mole! We're not supposed to talk about the bloody mole, but there's a bloody mole winking me in the face!"

So, what should he do about it? (Aside from poking it with a twig...)

Verification and Base Facts

Jim Ryan defends a form of verificationism according to which a term (e.g. "zombie") is meaningless if there's no possible evidence that would indicate whether it's being correctly applied. As Jim summarizes the core intuition: "if a person has no idea how to tell whether what he's saying is true, then he doesn't know what he's saying and doesn't mean anything by it."

I'm sympathetic to this, insofar as I think that there is an epistemically transparent component to meaning (i.e. primary intensions). That is, if a person makes a meaningful assertion, then given enough information about the actual world, they will be in a position to tell whether the assertion is true. [This is a loose version of what Chalmers calls "the scrutability of truth".] I think this captures the core of Jim's intuition. But - importantly - this proposal does not require that the given "base facts" be themselves knowable.

Consider the term 'zombie'. This is meaningful, as I know very well how to apply it for any given scenario. Give me a world where the physical base facts are identical to ours, but -- perhaps due to a lack of bridging psycho-physical laws of nature -- no phenomenal properties (i.e. conscious experiences) are found among the psychological base facts. I can tell, here and now (indeed, a priori), that my claim 'Jim is a zombie' is true of that world, comprising those base facts. What I can't tell a priori -- or, perhaps, at all -- is what base facts truly obtain, or which coherent scenario (possible world) is actual.

Jim's verificationism might be understood as starting from the above scrutability thesis, but adding further restrictions on what the contingent "base facts" of reality may consist in. In particular, he requires that the base facts themselves be epistemically accessible, at least in the limited sense that we can envisage possible evidence for and against them. But while this starts in the right place, I think the added restriction goes too far. We should merely require that the base facts be comprehensible, in the sense that someone could understand the difference between scenarios where they do or do not obtain.

Thus, for example, my inability to comprehend the difference between a world with chairs vs. one merely with atoms-arranged-chairwise, (assuming it isn't just a contingent mental block on my part,) leads me to conclude that there is no such difference to be found in reality.

However, I surely can understand the difference in positing any number of spatiotemporally isolated "universes" besides our own, even if causal closure precludes any possible evidence for their existence from reaching me in this universe. Similarly for zombies: we can understand physical properties, and phenomenal properties, and what it would be for one to hold without the other. There's no need for these (even insuperable) epistemological problems to translate into metaphysical ones. We can make sense of reality being "all possible evidence"-transcendent in these cases, so long as it remains rationally apparent precisely which base facts the posited difference consists in.

A final example: Jim uses his verificationism to support "the Humean view" that internal incoherence and factual error are the only possible reasons to revise one's values. There's no sense to be made of a fully-informed and maximally coherent view that somehow remains in "error". For what in the world is left for the idealised agent to be wrong about?

I'm with Jim on this point (and would expand it to all philosophical claims, not just ethical ones). But we don't need his full-blown verificationism to get there. It's enough to note that free-floating moral properties would not make for a comprehensible addition to the base facts of the world. (There's no moral equivalent to the zombie world, e.g. where Hitler acts exactly the same, and yet fails to be immoral.) Add to this our thesis that all truths are rationally scrutable from the base facts, and it follows that any moral truths, in particular, will be accessible in this way.

[Is that right? The argument feels a bit slippery, to me...]

All up, I think my proposed alternative captures the main benefits of Jim's verificationism, without the costs. Suspiciously incomprehensible entities may be rightly discarded, without losing the grip we surely have on familiar physical and phenomenal properties that could conceivably be arranged in undetectable ways.

Property and Coercion

Over at Cato Unbound, Daniel Klein draws on the traditional conception of coercion as "the initiation of physical aggression" to argue that minimum wage laws (and the like) are coercive:

It threatens physical aggression against people for engaging in certain kinds of voluntary exchange. To me, that is coercion. Just imagine if your neighbor decided that he would impose a minimum wage law on us. Wouldn’t we all agree that he was coercing us? If it is coercion when he does it, why isn’t it coercion when the government does it?

While I have some sympathy for his general project, Klein's essay risks reinforcing three conceptual errors of libertarian ideology:

(1) It neglects the coercion inherent in the very institution of property. To claim ownership of a resource is to prevent others from making free use of it. If another attempts to use the resource in the same way as you do, you can call it "theft" and initiate force against them (or have the police do so on your behalf).

That's not to say that property ownership is necessarily wrong, of course. But you can't pretend that laissez faire provides any sort of neutral starting point. It involves coercion, just like every other system. The real question, then, is how significant are the impediments created by each institutional framework, and whether the opportunities they open up are worth it.

(2) It neglects other kinds of constraints that can impede us, leading to an impoverished conception of "freedom" that fails to track what really matters to us (namely, capability). Negative liberty is fine as far as it goes, but it makes for a rather one-eyed approach to evaluating policy. A better maxim would be to seek to enable people to achieve their goals. Economists (like everyone else) should be concerned with opportunities, not merely interference.

(3) It conflates personal and institutional action. This is the difference between vigilantes and magistrates. Just because it would be illegitimate for your neighbour to do something in their role as an ordinary citizen, doesn't necessarily mean there's no legitimate way it could be done.

A well-ordered society is governed by the rule of law. This means that there are institutional processes to govern certain classes of action. The outcome of a just institutional process -- whether it be a guilty verdict, or minimum wage legislation -- has a different normative status than the corresponding action of a neighbour who takes it upon himself to unilaterally impose his will on others.

*     *     *
The upshot: yes, instituting a minimum wage involves an element of coercion. But not in the same way as if your neighbour did it. More in the way that instituting property itself involves an element of coercion. Whether either set of laws counts as "coercive in any significant sense" will depend on context. It's not as cut-and-dried as someone who makes the above three errors might assume.

Finally, I should emphasize that the alternative to ideological libertarianism is not a blank cheque for statism. I wouldn't claim that "whatever stuff you have really belongs to the government", or anything like that. It's possible to set up an unjust institutional order, and even within a largely just order it's possible for government agents to violate their (e.g. constitutional) obligations. So there's plenty of room for political criticism. The point is simply to warn against the complacent assumption of laissez-faire as the "natural" or default system, to be contrasted with all the "coercive" alternatives. In principle, it ain't so different. As with every other system, it must be assessed on its practical merits.

The Examined Life

I went along to an interesting discussion group the other day, on whether "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think the strongest affirmative argument concerns autonomy: if you don't reflect on your life and values, and instead are merely "going through the motions", then there's an important sense in which your life is not even really yours. You're a cog in the machinery of the universe; a mere animal. Experiences happen to you, for better or worse, and may trigger this or that quasi-reflexive "response". But you're not a true agent until you stop and question your own drives and actions, reshape your character into a mould of your own devising, and thereby craft a life that makes sense to you as you live it.

The story of a life is a credit to the author. But an unexamined life has no author. It's a mere force of nature, no more meaningful than a hurricane. So, to live a meaningful life, one must first claim it as their own, and actively author the rest of the story. That's why the unexamined life is not worth living.

But there's probably no such thing as a wholly unexamined life in this sense. Everyone questions themselves, to a greater or lesser degree. So the real question would seem to be: how far should we take this?

Brandon recently pointed out the need for a local/global distinction here. It would be absurd to try to maintain a state of rational self-examination at every local moment. Rather, it is the global exercise of rationality we should endorse, whereby the agent considers the "big picture" of their life as a whole, which will certainly include many local moments at which critical reflection would be wholly inappropriate -- "one thought too many", as Williams put it.

This issue was brought up in our discussion, as one student wondered what to make of a person who, upon reflection, decides that they wish to live an unexamined life henceforth! Would this one moment suffice to establish a considered "global preference", that they spend the rest of their apparently thought-free life acting out? It's a troubling case! I reflectively prefer a life that contains much more actual reflection; but maybe that's just me?

Finally, I was surprised by the assumption of hedonism that drove much of the group's discussion. There are many things I want out of life, and happiness is but one of them (and not necessarily the most important). I'd expect most people to agree. Better to strive for excellence, or help others, than be a blissful couch potato.

So, the challenge to the Socratic mantra doesn't come from blissful passivity, to my mind. Rather, it is the life of non-philosophical activity -- e.g. developing other talents, cultivating loving relationships, and providing for one's family -- that seems the most obvious counterexample. But, in light of the autonomy argument, could such a life still have (intrinsic) value even in the total absense of any self-reflection whatsoever?

Objective Structure

Does the world have objective structure? As Jack defines it: "That is, for any two simples x and y, there is a fact of the matter about whether their fusion, x&y exists."

This strikes me as a fascinating question, because it's so difficult to understand what such facts would consist in. (Thus my skepticism about whether there is any such thing.) I have no objection to the analytic project of systematizing our intuitions, or finding the most coherent and sensible way to project structure onto the world. That -- like its ethical analogue -- makes perfect sense. But why go the extra step of thinking that the answer is really "out there", built into the world, an additional fundamental fact about the universe?

Perhaps there could be "objective structure" in a derivative sense, say if the structural facts supervened on (or reduced to) the distribution of physical qualities, or some such. That would seem less objectionable. But let's put that aside for now and consider the hard-core realist view of objective structure as primitive, and wholly independent of other facts.

Doesn't that mean there could be a world with two physically identical "chairs" (speaking loosely), only one of which actually counted as an object in its own right? That is, it's a primitive fact that the first bunch of simples-arranged-chairwise comprise a chair, whereas the qualitatively identical second bunch - for no particular reason - do not. That seems weird.

Maybe this is just my deflationary intuitions repeating themselves, but it just doesn't seem like there should be any further (i.e. unsettled) question about whether the simples compose a fusion. Fix the base facts about the qualitative nature of the world, and all else follows. That makes most sense to me. What need do we have to posit further fundamental facts about "objective structure"? (That's a genuine question -- I haven't read enough to know how proponents of objective structure motivate their position, but would be curious to learn...)

Fission and Identity

Johnny-Dee quotes Swinburne's take on fission:

Reflection on this thought experiment shows that, however much we know about what has happened to my brain—we may know exactly what has happened to every atom in it—and to every other material part of me, we do not necessarily know what has happened to me. From that it follows that there must be more to me than the matter of which my body and brain are made, a further essential immaterial part whose continuing in existence makes the brain (and so the body) to which it is connected my brain (and body), and to this something I give the traditional name of ’soul’. I am my soul plus whatever brain (and body) it is connected to. Normally my soul goes where my brain goes, but in unusual circumstances (such as when my brain is split) it is uncertain where it goes.

I prefer Parfit's solution, which is to deny that there is any further fact here to know. The physical and psychological facts exhaust the facts. Once those are all specified, there is nothing left to know about the world. It would seem strange to posit two possibilities, alike in every objective and subjective respect, yet somehow differing in virtue of the "identity facts". For what would those consist in, and how could we ever grasp them? Our commonsense concept of identity tracks a familiar kind of continuity, but we have no reason to think there's anything further underlying it.

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?