Saturday, June 10, 2006
"All things aside"?
Public Sex, Privacy and Shame
An appeal to cultural liberalism could justify a general policy of reticence. As Nagel writes (HT: Velleman):
[B]oundaries between what is publicly exposed and what is not exist for a reason. We will never reach a point at which nothing that anyone does disgusts anyone else. We can expect to remain a sexual world deeply divided by various lines of imaginative incomprehension and disapproval. So conventions of reticence and privacy serve a valuable function in keeping us out of each other's faces.
Such compromise is pragmatically sensible. But, politics aside, it leaves open my questions about which stance is the ideally rational one. (The whole point of cultural liberalism is that we should tolerate potential irrationality through tactful non-acknowledgment, rather than violating others' privacy in attempts to enforce conformity to our own conception of perfection.) To draw any stronger conclusions, we will need to look more closely at the nature of privacy and shame.
The right to privacy is of monumental importance, for reasons explained in the latter half of my post 'Living as Storytelling' (with further reference to Nagel). The flourishing autonomous individual must not be constantly burdened with the weight of the public's gaze. He has a right to be free of it. But what if he (incomprehensibly, to me) chooses such exposure? Our rights are granted for our own sakes, and we may refrain from exercising them if we so please. A right to privacy in one's sex life does not by itself entail a duty to refrain from sex in public. So what must be established here is no mere right to privacy, but the more dubious claim that we have a duty to keep our business private. Where would such a duty come from?
Laurence Thomas writes:
Privacy is about two things that operate in tandem: what others have access to without seeking permission and what people can offer to others without seeking permission... Self-disclosure is not appropriate merely because a person want[s] to do so.
Presumably this is due to consideration for the listener, and particularly the desire to avoid causing offence. If both speaker and audience welcomed such disclosure, then it's surely unobjectionable. So this brings us back to my original question: are there any good reasons why we should be offended by another's self-disclosure? Or are our feelings here fairly arbitrary, and hence the need to respect them (i.e. the "duty of privacy") correspondingly contingent?
What of shame? Drawing on Velleman, my earlier post suggested that feelings of shame derive from awareness of one's failings as a self-presenting agent, due to unintentional self-disclosure. But if the disclosure is voluntary and intentional (cf. porn stars), then no shame results. We might say such people are "shameless". We feel that they shouldn't be so keen to expose themselves. But why not? That's the crucial question I haven't seen anyone address yet.
The closest is Laurence Thomas' claim that "a very clear indication that a person does not take himself sufficiently seriously is just the fact that the individual discloses way too much about himself." Is that true though? Why should such openness indicate a lack of self-respect (rather than, say, abundant self-confidence)? Perhaps the idea is that we need to have a restricted public persona, while holding something back, in order to be fully human. But again, it's easier to offer such proposals than to justify them. Perhaps excessive public openness precludes private intimacy: there's just nothing special left to share. Shamelessness might then be seen as a crime against one's intimates, or even against one's own humanity.
But all that sounds a little flimsy to me. Does anyone have any better ideas? In the absence of such, I have trouble seeing any wrongmaking features intrinsic to shamelessness. Perhaps the only real problem with it is the extrinsic worry about needlessly causing offence to others. (What do you think? Comments welcome.)
There are special cases, of course. In response to Sage's post on public masturbation, one person commented:
a person who is masturbating in public while looking at another person is making that person a part of their sex act, often without the other person's consent. that's why public masturbation makes me angry - if someone is watching me while they jack off, they're making me a sex object and they're including me in something sexual without my permission.
This bears clarification, however, for it risks implying "thoughtcrime". The problem cannot simply be that they've made you their "intentional object" (i.e. the object of their thoughts) -- I assume there's nothing wrong with sexual fantasy. One needn't ask another's permission merely to think about them, even in a sexual way. Rather, the problem here must involve the blatant disclosure of such thoughts. And this case plausibly goes beyond the mere risk of causing offense. Rather, the action seems to have overtones of aggression or disrespect. One supposes that the twisted individual's intention is not merely to enjoy the thought of you (which is surely innocent enough on its own), but rather to demean you, to announce to the world that he only cares about you as an instrument to achieving his own ends. One supposes that he might just as well spit on you when he's done.
The suppositions might not always apply, but they certainly indicate a class of public sexual activity that would be grievously immoral. The problem there derives not from general concerns about excessive self-disclosure, nor sexual prudishness specifically, but rather the vicious and degrading intentions that were expressed in that particular case. Being dependent on this social communication, I suspect that the moral status of public masturbation is highly dependent on social context. The case described above depends heavily on the backdrop of a misogynistic culture, for instance. Without that cultural background, the intentions communicated by the action might be very different indeed, and perhaps entirely innocent. (We might imagine a culture where such behaviour was interpreted as a polite compliment on one's appearance, for instance!)
For a rather different case, we might also imagine a shameful creature so overcome by desire at seeing a topless woman walking down the street that he simply cannot restrain himself. If we stipulate that he feels no ill will towards those exposed to his self-gratification, then he seems more deserving of pity than moral outrage. The earlier discussion implies that he will feel great shame for his lack of self-control. The rest of us may disapprove of his sub-human failure, but in a very different way from the previous case. This guy's pitiful behaviour communicates his powerlessness before the Other. The earlier case involved deliberate action meant to communicate the actor's power over the Other. ("I can do what I want with you, and there's nothing you can do about it." -- I think Sage metaphorically dubbed this "rape at a distance" in her comment thread.) So, some important differences there, I think.
Right, I'm all thought out, curious though these issues are. Your turn...
Friday, June 09, 2006
June Open Thread
(1) We're woefully short of submissions for the upcoming Philosophers' Carnival. I guess it's a busy time of year. But if you've blogged some philosophy in the last couple of weeks, do consider submitting something by Sunday!
(2) A big (albeit belated) thankyou to Stephen of Singpolyma for helping me get my sidebar categories working again!
Anyway, over to you... What philosophical problems have been on your mind recently?
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Why We Need to Idealize Ethics
Naive relativists sometimes ask what objective moral facts are meant to do. Abstract objects can't prevent murders, for example. (Of course, being causally impotent, they can't do anything. That's our job.) But I've explained before that this misses the point. We need objective morality not to causally influence the world, but to provide an ideal standard to which we may aspire. (Much like historical truths provide an ideal for historians to pursue.) Moral objectivism offers us a goal, not the means to get there. Note also that the reason for idealizing ethics is primarily to enable the (personal or collective) endeavour of rational self-improvement, not the political project of influencing others.
[Doctor Logic once objected: "The only basis you have for selecting an absolute morality is your subjective opinion." But, as my response explained, this is either trivial or false. It's trivial that our beliefs reflect what we ("subjectively") judge to be the case. But it's false -- or at least question-begging -- to claim that there are no reasons for concluding one thing rather than another. Morality is no different from any other form of inquiry in this respect. Unfortunately, the good Doctor continues to advance that argument, neglecting to note that he might just as well ask what historical truths are "really good for".]
Curiously, there is a more sophisticated form of moral relativism which can avoid these woes, as I learned from Andy Egan's pre-talk this afternoon. The key is to introduce idealization without removing the agent-relativity. The resulting view goes something like: 'X is wrong' is true for you iff your idealized self would disapprove of X. (The relevant idealization might concern what you would conclude under ideal rational reflection, if you had full factual knowledge and perfect reasoning skills, unlimited cognitive capabilities, etc.) It's similar to the kinds of constructivist non-cognitivism I favour, though Andy explicated it in a rather novel way:
Some (esp. indexical) statements are not about the world, but rather your location in it. By saying "I am in Canberra," you locate yourself as one of the in-Canberra people. The claim is not about which possible world is actual, but rather where (or who) you are within the actual world. Similarly, moral claims aspire to locate yourself according to attitudes that would be held under idealization. To say "Theft is wrong!" is to locate yourself as one of those people whose idealized selves would share that moral attitude.
The great advantage of this view (over naive relativism) is that it grants us moral fallibility. Being non-ideal ourselves, we might be mistaken about what conclusions our idealized selves would reach. (And surely we must, in theory, defer to their superior judgment? I'm puzzled by why anyone would hold naive relativism over this view.)
It also allows for genuine moral disagreement, on the assumption that the disputants' idealized judgments would converge. The question effectively becomes the shared one of what we (rather than just "I") would think under idealized conditions. Though on the contrary assumption, i.e. of idealized divergence, apparently conflicting claims could in fact be mutually compatible. (It might be that my idealized self would approve of theft but yours wouldn't. Then 'theft is wrong' would be true for you but not for me. You could affirm it while I deny it, and we could both be right.)
The base view seems pretty hard to deny, actually. After all, if we add the assumption that all rational agents would ultimately converge to the same moral attitudes, then we arrive at the sort of moral universalism Michael Smith advances, and to which I'm very sympathetic. Moreover, it seems right that universalism requires this convergence fact. If the convergence claim is false, and even fully informed and ideally rational agents could disagree morally, then there would seem to be no basis for universal moral truths. (The same plausibly holds for all a priori endeavours, e.g. metaphysics.) The most we could get, in cases of divergence, would be agent-relative truths. Is this better than no truth at all?
At least sophisticated relativism is still "objective" in the sense that it upholds the distinctions between belief and truth, appearance and reality, or -- most importantly -- between actual and ideal judgments. Recognizing the possibility of defects in our present perspective, idealized conceptions of ethics carve room in logical space for a sort of moral progress that is impossible under naive relativism or subjectivism. And I think that's what is really important for a meta-ethics we can live with. The possibility that others might have different ideal ends seems rather less of a worry in comparison to the sort of nihilism which admits of no ideality whatsoever.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Upcoming Carnival
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Time Travel
An interesting question arises concerning in what sense the time-traveler actually "travels" back into the past. Such descriptions seem to require Multi-Dimensional Time, as the agent progresses (along her personal timeline) into the historical past. First she is now, and then (later) she is earlier. To avoid contradiction, the 'later' and 'earlier' must be indexed to different temporal axes. It is later in her personal time, but earlier in historical time. If that makes any sense.
But I'm not sure that it really does make much sense to speak of a second temporal dimension, or 'personal time'. More plausibly, the static historical dimension is the only temporal dimension that there is. Suppose S travels far back in time, from t2 to t1. A more careful description might be this: at t1, S pops into existence [call this event A] -- fully formed with "memories" and all -- lives for a while, and then dies. At some other point she is born, lives for a while, then at t2 she pops out of existence [call this event B]. Further, event B causes event A. If B hadn't occurred, then neither would have A.
Excepting minor details, that's the full story of S's time travel, explained with only one temporal dimension. There's no real (metaphysical) sense in which S experiences t1 after t2. It merely seems that way to her because at t1 she has pre-existing memories of t2, whereas at t2 she does not have any memories of t1. We may wish to construct a kind of "representational timeline", i.e. the timeline of her life as she represents it. But that doesn't mean that this other temporal dimension really exists, in any mind-independent sense. It's just a mental construction. (We are inclined to read more into it because we fall under the illusion of endurance, thinking that our momentary self "passes through time" yet retains its absolute numerical identity as it exists wholly in each moment.)
For those who aren't fussed with the eternalist picture, here's a more intuitive argument for the impossibility of changing the past from what it was. (But "what it was" when? Again, we seem to require multiple dimensions, but this time in a plainly incoherent sense. There's t1 as it was originally, without any time travellers. Then there's t1 as it was after the time-traveller went back and "changed" it. But t1 is just t1, the moment in itself, which cannot intrinsically change over time. Before t1 is t0, let us say, and after it is t2. There's no sense to be made of a t1 "before you went and changed the past", as compared to the t1 that exists "after" the time-traveller does their work.)
Oops, lengthy digression. The perils of late-night blogging, hmm. Anyway, my intended argument was this: Suppose (for reductio) that you were to go back in time and change the past. Let's say you assassinate Hitler. Who assassinated Hitler, and why? You -- some guy from the future -- did it, because Hitler wasn't assassinated and that made the world turn out badly. But hang on. Now Hitler was assassinated. So when the future comes around, "you" won't exist. At least, not like that. Not with those memories, those motivations. So the original time-traveller no longer exists, and so cannot do anything at all, let alone assassinate Hitler. So who did assassinate Hitler? Your ghost?
By changing the past, you change the future, and thereby prevent your original time-travelling self (the one with the original past) from ever having existed quite as you had. It's not as obvious as killing your infant parents. But the essential logic is the same. You (with properties P) cause a change, which causes you to not have existed with properties P, and so you-with-properties-P cannot have caused the change after all. Paradox.
(Though note that one way out of this, which I've blogged about before, might be the possibility of branching timelines. On that view, you don't really change the past. You simply change location, i.e. which of the multiple alternative histories you are in. But that would seem to require cross-history causation, and it isn't clear whether that's possible. But maybe it could be made to work. Logically, I mean. We'd just have to treat the multiple spatiotemporal regions as tenuously-connected parts of one big "universe". But then it's more like Sliders than genuine time-travel.)
Positive and Negative Rights
[A draft of my latest essay, minus the footnotes. Comments/suggestions welcome!]
Rights claims may be classified according to whether they make ‘positive’ demands on another’s actions, or – in case of ‘negative’ rights – merely require others to abstain from harmful interference. Human rights are often considered to be purely negative rights against political oppression. Refraining from oppressive actions thus suffices to satisfy the corresponding negative duties. On this “libertarian” view, human rights simply ask that you leave the rights-bearer alone. However, the desperately poor do not obviously suffer from a lack of being ignored. Some may require positive action on the part of others in order to secure their vital interests and continued survival. A purely negative interpretation of the “right to life” thus begins to look like an empty formalism, insufficient to protect the vital interests of persons. Motivated by this problem, the present essay examines the distinction between positive and negative rights, and explores some considerations that may recommend its deflation.
The duties associated with negative rights are typically thought to be far less demanding than positive ones. A negative duty acts as a side-constraint on action, effectively picking out one act and saying to the agent, “you may do anything else, but not that.” A positive duty, by contrast, would seem to impinge much more on the agent’s liberty by insisting that they carry out some particular action. (“You must do this, and not anything else instead.”) They also seem more costly. Intuitively, it doesn’t cost the government anything to respect our civil rights – they merely forsake the opportunity to benefit from exploitation. But if ‘subsistence rights’ require governments to provide for the basic needs of rights-bearers then that would seem a more significant burden. Further, human rights are typically considered to properly constrain government power. Critics may argue that subsistence rights would instead serve to increase the power of governments against their subjects, and are thus antithetical to the guiding ideal of human rights.
Matters are not so simple, however. To stand idly by as a murderer attacked would disrespect the victim’s (negative) right to life. If negative rights are to be significant, then there must be a positive duty to protect and uphold them. Applying this insight to the political sphere, Thomas Pogge argues that official indifference towards private rights violations is one way for a state to exhibit the “official disrespect” constitutive of a human rights violation. A just government cannot neglect the business of law enforcement, and so publicly funded institutions – such as a police force and courts of law – are needed to protect the rights of citizens. Hence Holmes and Sunstein observe that “all legally enforced rights are necessarily positive rights.” They entail duties of positive action, and not mere non-interference. So we are naturally lead from a minimal commitment to negative rights to a more substantial commitment to positive duties. This does not entirely collapse the distinction, however, for as Gewirth notes, “the ground or justification for the positive assistance in question is to see to it that potential offenders refrain from the prohibited actions.” It remains to be seen whether the libertarian is further committed to recognizing subsistence rights, though at least we have begun to narrow the gap.
We can make further progress by noting that we do not live in isolation, and that almost all of our actions affect – or “interfere with” – others to some extent. This means that focussing solely on negative duties will not actually restrict the scope of our obligations all that much. Compare J.S. Mill’s famous harm principle: “the only purpose for which power may be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” The obvious objection arises that any action can be broadly interpreted as causing some harm to another. This is no great problem for Mill himself, as he can appeal to indirect utilitarianism to ground the notion of “certain interests, which… ought to be considered as rights.” But deontic libertarians have no such foundation upon which to make a pragmatic distinction here. The position under discussion instead treats the notion of ‘coercive interference’ as fundamental. They rule out positive rights as a matter of principle, so it suffices for my purposes to show that the distinctions they wish to draw here are not deeply principled ones. In particular, I will argue that initial acquisition of property, the ongoing enforcement of property rights, and our participation in the global institutional order all involve coercive imposition of harms, thus violating what libertarians should acknowledge as negative duties of non-interference. Importantly, libertarians hold that a breach of negative duty gives rise to a positive duty of rectification. So if there are negative rights that we cannot help but violate, then we likewise cannot avoid the burden of compensatory positive duties. I will argue that this state of affairs obtains, and effectively entails a duty to institute positive subsistence rights.
Consider the libertarian problem of ‘initial acquisition’: whenever one claims a property right over previously unowned resources, they are peremptorily excluding others from its use. Indeed, though this is too rarely recognized, libertarian principles of autonomy and non-interference would seem to require that affected individuals “have a veto over appropriations which exclude [them] from the commons.” By depriving others of what they would otherwise have access to, the appropriating action constitutes a kind of harmful interference, and so – by the libertarian’s own lights – the actor ought to recompense them accordingly.
This problem becomes all the more pressing when we consider intergenerational justice. There is no way that appropriations of unrenewable natural resources – including land itself – can meet the Lockean proviso of leaving “enough and as good” when we take into account indefinitely many future individuals. Hence the negative duty not to harm others will require one to either abstain from appropriating natural resources, or else adequately compensate those who are – or will be – left propertyless. The most plausible way to achieve such ongoing large-scale rectification would be through institutions of redistributive taxation, such as a basic income guarantee. Such positive welfare schemes are justified – indeed, mandatory – on libertarian grounds because they compensate individuals for the harms imposed on them by their initial exclusion from the appropriation and distribution of common natural wealth.
Even after the establishment of property rights, their enforcement constitutes a continuing form of interference. Not all interference is unjustified, of course. One may rightly pin down a violent offender in order to protect the innocent, for example. So we will need to return to the question of whether this particular intervention is justified. But first we must establish that interference does indeed occur, so that poverty is a form of negative unfreedom, and thus warrants the libertarian’s prima facie concern.
On the one hand, it is perfectly obvious that the enforcement of property rights involves intervention. If a poor man tries to take a loaf of bread from a store, the security guard will step in and physically prevent him. As a brute fact, described in neutral, non-moral terms, the enforcement of property rights conflicts with the negative liberty of others to not be interfered with as they take the goods in question. Again, one may consider the interference to be justified – a question we will return to shortly – but there’s no denying that it is physical interference.
On the other hand, right-wing rhetoric concerning property rights is so ubiquitous that it may be difficult to overcome one’s deeply ingrained assumptions and recognize the aforementioned brute fact. Poverty is commonly viewed as a kind of natural and merely ‘unfortunate’ lack, like lacking the strength or intelligence that could improve one’s opportunities. We thus (mis)conceive of the poor as lacking the positive ability to achieve their ends, as if their misfortune were a natural rather than social imposition. An illustrative thought-experiment may help us to see things in a new light.
G.A. Cohen asks us to imagine a society where people are issued with legal “tickets” specifying their liberties, i.e. what actions they may perform. Armed officials intervene to thwart attempts to do something not licensed by one’s tickets. Cohen continues:
“But a sum of money is nothing but a highly generalized form of such a ticket. A sum of money is a licence to perform a disjunction of conjunctions of actions – actions like, for example, visiting one’s sister in Bristol, or taking home, and wearing, the sweater on the counter at Selfridge’s.”
A poor person has the capacity to approach and board the train to Bristol. But security guards would intervene to physically prevent this, were she to attempt it. Thus, “as far as her freedom is concerned, this is equivalent to ‘trip to Bristol’ not being written on someone’s ticket in the imagined non-monetary economy.” This illustrates how poverty is a socially imposed unfreedom. The poor do not suffer any natural lack or inability. Rather, our institutions are such that poor people will be physically prevented from performing actions that would otherwise be open to them.
Having established the fact of interference, we can now address the moral question of whether it is justified. Too sweeping a negative answer would not be plausible, of course. A universal right to take another’s holdings would be self-defeating – as they could simply take it back in turn – and lead to chaos. But there are less foolish proposals worth considering. I will focus on J.P. Sterba’s more careful contrast between (i) the liberty of the rich to use their surplus resources for luxury purposes without interference; and (ii) the liberty of the poor “not to be interfered with in taking from the surplus possessions of the rich what is necessary to satisfy their basic needs.” A right to this second liberty is perfectly universalizable, and so escapes the standard objection mentioned above. We thus find ourselves with a genuine conflict between negative liberties, each of which warrants our prima facie concern and consideration.
To resolve this conflict, Sterba appeals to The Conflict Resolution Principle: “moral resolutions of interpersonal conflicts of interest cannot be contrary to reason to ask everyone affected to accept”. In other words, the demands of morality must be reasonable demands. This principle is surely beyond dispute. The idea of an unreasonable moral obligation is incoherent – if a demand is unreasonable, then one isn’t obliged to meet it.
To apply this principle to the present discussion, note that it would be patently unreasonable to ask the poor to sacrifice their liberty in (ii) above – and hence their basic needs – for the sake of the rich man’s luxury liberty in (i). As Sterba notes, “[i]n the extreme case, it would involve asking or requiring the poor to sit back and starve to death.” The Conflict Resolution Principle thus establishes that the poor cannot be morally required to make such a sacrifice. Sterba further suggests that it would be equally unreasonable to ask the poor to accept any resolution that fails to explicitly favour (ii) over (i). For example, if we held that the two liberties were equal or incommensurable, and that the conflict should be resolved by a struggle between rich and poor, this would be practically equivalent to a ruling against the poor. Importantly, while the rich might not like being required to sacrifice their liberty in (i) for the sake of (ii), it is not such an unreasonable ask, so they cannot offer any parallel objection. Thus, if there is to be any resolution at all, it must be to favour (ii) over (i).
But must there be a resolution at all? This presupposes that there can be no genuine moral dilemmas, or situations in which it is impossible to avoid treating someone unreasonably. Consider a gladiator fight in Ancient Rome between two mismatched slaves that are forced to fight to the death. Once in the arena, what are they to do? If they refuse to fight, we may suppose that both will be killed in punishment. A moral resolution asking the stronger slave to lay down his life would be unreasonable to ask him to accept. But any other alternative – including the “might is right” default struggle – would seem unreasonable to ask the weakling to accept. So the assumption of possible resolution may be a flaw in Sterba’s general argument. Let me offer an alternative.
Note that, by modus tollens, the rich cannot have any absolute right over their holdings that would entail the aforementioned unreasonable duty on the part of the hapless poor. [Footnote: To make my argument explicit: Right -> Duty, ~Duty, / ~Right.] To institute a defensible system of property rights, then, will require pre-emptive measures to ensure that no-one will be in a position to claim the liberty in (ii). In particular, it must be that no-one is left in a position whereby appropriating another’s holdings is the only means available to them to meet their basic needs. Our institutions must guarantee them some other means to welfare. This is necessary to ensure that the rich may justly defend their post-tax holdings against would-be appropriators. We thus find that subsistence rights are a precondition for a legitimate system of property rights.
This ties in nicely with Pogge’s claim that human rights are “moral claims on the organization of one’s society… The normative force of others’ human rights for me is that I must not uphold and impose upon them coercive social institutions under which they do not have secure access to the objects of their human rights.” This understanding provides us with yet another route from negative to positive rights. By constraining ourselves to only negative duties, we find that “human rights give you claims not against all other human beings, but specifically against those who impose a coercive institutional order upon you.” But this is close enough to be practically the same thing. We are all participants, contributors, upholders, and hence imposers of the current global institutional order. Our actions thus cause harms to those who suffer unjustly under this order. It is wrong to impose such harms – a violation even of merely negative duties – so we have a corresponding duty to recompense the victims accordingly.
The arguments of this essay establish that the purported distinction between positive and negative rights cannot do the job its right-wing proponents might ask of it. It cannot justify neglecting the basic needs of the poor, or favouring civil rights to the exclusion of subsistence rights. Once negative rights are granted, positive ones are sure to follow. Most obviously, there is the positive duty to protect negative rights – though this might still be purely ‘civil’ in nature, and so does not suffice for the more radical reconception of rights recommended above. More significant progress is made by realizing that our interference in others’ lives is far more wide-ranging than typically recognized. Since we cannot avoid imposing certain harms on others, a positive duty of rectification is owed, according to the libertarian’s own theory of justice. In acquiring property, recompense is owed to other individuals – present and future – for depriving them of the material resources one appropriates for oneself. Further, I argued from Sterba’s incontrovertible Conflict Resolution Principle to the conclusion that instituting subsistence rights is necessary in order to ensure that enforcement of property rights is legitimate. Finally, Pogge’s institutional conception of human rights reinforces the central argument of this essay: that our actions affect others, and that even the libertarian must thus concede that we owe them recompense for the harms thus imposed. The gap between negative and positive rights is thus bridged.
References
Cohen, G.A. (1995) Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gewirth, A. (1996) The Community of Rights. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holmes, S. and
Sunstein, C. (2000) excerpts from ‘The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes’ in Steiner, H. and Alston, P. (eds) International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morality. Oxford.
Kymlicka, W. (2002) Contemporary Political Philosophy (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Lippke, R.L. (1995) ‘The Elusive Distinction Between Negative and Positive Rights’. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 33, 335-346.
Mill, J.S. (1859) On Liberty.
Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Pogge, T. (2002) ‘How Should Human Rights be Conceived?’ World Poverty and Human Rights, chp 2. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Steiner, H. (1981) ‘Justice and Entitlement’ in P. Jeffrey (ed.) Reading Nozick. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield.
Sterba, J.P. (1998) Justice for Here and Now. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Parijs, P. (1992) ‘Introduction’ in Van Parijs, P. (ed.) Arguing for basic income. London: Verso.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Cohen on the money
A property distribution just is, as I have argued at length elsewhere, a distribution of rights of interference. If A owns P and B does not, then A may use P without interference and B will, standardly, suffer interference if he attempts to use P. But money serves, in a variety of circumstances (and, notably, when A puts P up for rent or sale), to remove that latter interference. Therefore money confers freedom, rather than merely the ability to use it, even if freedom is equated with absence of interference.
... The only way you won't be prevented from getting and using things that cost money in our society - which is to say: most things - is by offering money for them.
So to 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.
Philosophy Intro Courses
Oddly enough, the best overview of philosophical methods I received was in a linguistics class ("semantics"). It included first-order logic, scopal ambiguity, possible worlds analyses, counterfactuals, referential opacity, the de dicto/de re distinction, etc. Very useful -- and interesting too, if taught in the right way, with fun examples, etc. So I think it'd be great to introduce all that in a standard phil course, along with standard "critical thinking" topics, informal fallacies, and crucial philosophical distinctions like necessary vs sufficient conditions, soundness and validity, truth vs. certainty, and so forth. (I would also include a special section on thought experiments!)
The course could be called The Philosopher's Toolkit, and make use of the book of the same name. The core goal would be to impart to students the conceptual "tools" which can aid their critical thinking generally, and prepare them for academic philosophy in particular. The challenge, of course, is to impart these skills in an engaging way.
My second ideal course, Problems of Philosophy, has two parts. (1) It would begin with a very broad and shallow survey of the major fields, just so that students get a taste of the kinds of questions that are asked (and some of the important arguments), and hopefully perk their interest in the more specialized later-year courses. (2) But it would conclude with a much more in-depth section on a particular topic (I'd choose ethics) with the goals of (i) showing students how philosophy is actually done; (ii) thereby establishing that it's not all just a matter of arbitrary opinion; and (iii) giving students a chance to do some real philosophy for themselves.
I'd also suggest an option course on Philosophy of Life that addresses the sorts of wishy-washy subjects that I've taken to rambling about recently under that category. You know: sexual ethics, existentialism, authenticity, the meaning of life, etc. Students love that stuff, and if you can't find it in a philosophy department, who else is going to offer it? It'd be loads of fun, and potentially very popular (I imagine), even if the more serious professors would scoff. Besides, they are important topics, and philosophers shouldn't feel above discussing important things every now and then. ;-)
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