Via Alex Tabarrok:

As Ned Resnikoff observes the “that thinker does not argue what you think” foul very frequently has to be called on discussions of Friedrich Nietszche. My best advice would be that if you think you understand what Nietszche’s saying, you’re probably mistaken. Still, worth a read!

I see Karl Smith is puzzling over Richard Rorty’s account of truth.

This is clearly not a topic that will be resolved in a blog post, but as an adherent of a Rortian view I think the best way to get there is to start with Tarski, who offered the disquotational account of the truth condition:

“Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.

That seems utterly trivial. But it can be made somewhat less trivial:

“La neige est blanche” is true if and only if snow is white.

Add the element of translation and it looks a little bit less trivial. And what you’re seeing here more clearly is that truth is a property of sentences, of linguistic elements. You have the language inside the quotation marks and the language outside the marks. You’re saying things and you’re talking about things that are being said. And while people can (and do) devise formal languages on their own and by stipulation, ordinary language doesn’t work this way. English is a set of social conventions and so is French and so are all the rest. Note that this doesn’t commit you to any kind of outlandish propositions about the nature of the world, it’s an account of the nature of descriptions of the world. It says that there will always be some margins at which the distinctions between advancing false claims and misusing words breaks down. When Jonah Goldberg says that liberalism is a species of fascism, for example, he largely seems to me to be abusing English rather than abusing the facts. But there’s no definitive adjudicator of what does and doesn’t constitute an acceptable way to use English words, there’s merely a very large and diffuse community of people who use the language.

Here’s another joint from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies, this time illustrating that the use of freedom-talk as a cover for violent hierarchical authoritarian nationalism is nothing new:

The Georgia dissidents rallied behind the revealing slogan “Liberty and Property without restrictions”—which explicitly linked the liberty of white men to their right to hold blacks as property. Until they could own slaves, the white Georgians considered themselves unfree. Such reasoning made sense in an eighteenth-century empire where liberty was a privileged status that almost always depended upon the power to subordinate someone else. Under increasing pressure from a Parliament solicitous of the slave trade, in 1751 the trustees capitulated, permitting slavery and surrendering Georgia to the crown. Georgia received the usual tripartite arrangement of an elected assembly, a crown-appointed council, and a royal governor.

It’s a very interesting quirk of rhetoric. Freedom-talk tends, in practice, to have very little to do with any respectable notion of freedom.

I wrote earlier this week about the tragicomic efforts of the law firm Hunton and Williams to solicit ideas from security contractors about how to take down Glenn Greenwald. Today, my colleagues have two pieces indicating that the very same law firm did similar work for the Chamber of Commerce. Specifically, they “solicited a set of private security firms — HB Gary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop a sabotage campaign against progressive groups and labor unions, including ThinkProgress, the labor coalition Change to Win, SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.”

The sabotage concepts floated were multi-faceted, and included the idea of trying to deliberately leak misinformation in the hopes that Chamber critics would run with it and discredit themselves. But Aaron Barr, the HB Gary executive who spearheaded the initiative, also liked to circulate personal information about progressive staffers involved in Chamber-critical enterprises. My personal favorite is this email about Mike Gehrke, formerly of Change to Win, that thinks it’s important to detail which “Jewish church” he and his family attend:

I assume Barr would tell you he’s just doing his job. He has a duty to make as much money for HB Gary as possible, never mind the consequences. And folks at Hunton and Williams would tell you that they’re just doing their job. They have a duty to serve the interests of the Chamber of Commerce as zealously as possible. And folks at the US Chamber would tell you that they’re just doing their jobs. They have a duty to make US public policy as beneficial as possible to US Chamber of Commerce members, never mind the consequences. And executives at Chamber-member firms would tell you that they have a duty to maximize the profitability of their firms, never mind the consequences. So if you need to engage in a little public disinformation campaign or peer into people’s “Jewish church” activities, so be it. After all, it’s small potatoes compared to earning your daily bread by poisoning the environment.

But personally I’m old-fashioned and I think the concept of individual ethical responsibilities has traditionally served the country well.

Eye-popping chart from Kieran Healy:

I always got the sense that this mostly reflected a kind of pure arbitrary path dependency in a very small field. There are few women in philosophy, and the resulting boys club atmosphere leads to an unusually high quantity of sexist bullshi. Given that it’s not a particularly remunerative or socially influential field, there’s little specific pressure to overcome these barriers to women stay away and the cycle continues. As Ned Resnikoff notes, this seems to end up leading to a fair number of invalid philosophical arguments gaining acceptance.

Back when I was a philosophy major, I think half the professors in the department were women, and there were also (and, I think, not coincidentally) a higher-than-average number of women graduate students.

Via Karl Smith (who raises some good objections of his own), I see that Greg Mankiw is the author of a paper (PDF) proposing that economists stop using an implicitly utilitarian moral theory, and instead embrace “Just Deserts” morality:

Let me propose the following principle: People should get what they deserve. A person who contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions. Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his. This perspective is, I believe, what Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, and other classically liberal writers have in mind. We might call it the Just Deserts Theory.

I am drawn to this approach in part by reflecting on some of the public anger that we see over some very high incomes. My sense is that people are rarely outraged when high incomes go to those who obviously earned them. When we see Steven Spielberg make blockbuster movies, Steve Jobs introduce the iPod, David Letterman crack funny jokes, and J.K Rowling excite countless young readers with her Harry Potter books, we don’t object to the many millions of dollars they earn in the process. The high incomes that generate anger are those that come from manipulating the system. The CEO who pads the corporate board with his cronies and the banker whose firm survives only by virtue of a government bailout do not seem to deserve their multimillion dollar bonuses. The public perceives them (correctly or incorrectly) as getting more than they contributed to society. That is, if we take public attitudes as a gauge of our innate moral intuitions, then in evaluating distributive justice, we should focus not on the marginal utility of different individuals but on the congruence between their contributions and their compensation.

This is definitely not Robert Nozick’s view. Not the view espoused in Anarchy, State, And Utopia and not the views he held later in life either. And I’m pretty sure that Milton Friedman—like most classical liberals—was, in fact, a utilitarianish consequentialist.

And this is for good reason. It’s pretty clear if you read the paper that Mankiw doesn’t intend to be arguing for any really radical changes in the structure of American society. He wants to defend modern industrial capitalism, while bolstering the case for lower taxation of the rich and less generous spending on the non-rich. But think about his examples here. How is it that you can get rich writing books, making movies, designing MP3 players, or making TV shows? Well it’s thanks to statutory definitions of intellectual property. If the copyright on a book only lasted two years, JK Rowling wouldn’t be nearly as rich. If the inventor of the Xerox Alto owned some kind of perpetual right to the concept of a graphical user interface, Steve Jobs’ whole career would be unimaginable. And the firms involved in these industries are constantly “manipulating the system” of intellectual property to try to maximize their own advantage.

That’s not to say that Rowling just got rich manipulating the system or that she’s contributed nothing of value to society. But this whole system she’s operating in is justified in consequentialist terms (“[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”) rather than desert. You could see that in utilitarian terms or in some kind of Rawlsian prioritarian terms or various other options. But I think a serious effort to try to recreate the economy in desert-based terms would involve a pretty radical rethinking of the way society works, not extension of the Bush tax cuts.

Mankiw should also consider that peoples intuitions about desert aren’t very conservative economisty. Normal people are always talking about how professional baseball players don’t deserve to get paid more than teachers.

A Paul Krugman post gives me an excellent excuse to make a point I’ve been sitting on since Saturday. He says his approach is broadly Rawlsian in nature:

My vision of economic morality is more or less Rawlsian: we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be. And I believe that this vision leads, in practice, to something like the kind of society Western democracies have constructed since World War II — societies in which the hard-working, talented and/or lucky can get rich, but in which some of their wealth is taxed away to pay for a social safety net, because you could have been one of those who strikes out.

The further away I get from TM Scanlon’s Philosophy 178 course on Equality and Democracy the more I worry that some of Rawls’ modeling assumptions is a bigger deal than is usually made clear in these kind of undergraduate classes. Rawls basically assumes a closed economy with no trade, no immigration, and no emigration. He’s hardly the first person in the universe to do this, and indeed you see a lot of closed economy models in economics since for some circumstances it’s often approximately true and it makes the math easier. In both the philosophical and economic realms, people are of course well aware that this isn’t true. But while Rawls has a separate book on international issues and there’s a very robust controversy as to whether his take gives short slight to rich countries’ obligations to poor ones, this whole line of thought is rarely read back into the basic presentation of Rawls’ views.

And in the 1970s this was probably right. After all, you can only squeeze so much into one semester. But the mixed economy arose in a kind of odd time when a huge swathe of the world wasn’t really interested in playing host to low-wage export-oriented manufacturing and the West’s relationship to those countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) there were interested in doing so was dominated by considerations of Cold War strategy. The fall of Communism in Europe, the opening of China, the demise of the “license raj” in India, etc. are all good things for the world. But they’re quite problematic in terms of the theory and practice of egalitarian liberalism in the rich world in a way that I think isn’t always appreciated. It’s of course quite possible that teaching practice has changed a lot in the past 10 years, but in terms of my own undergraduate education I think the issues in this neighborhood were under-emphasized compared to what seems important to me in today’s debates.

Dev James has a meta-ethical query:

I would like a post discussing the tension between your anti-realist views in meta-ethics (or your quasi-realist views) and your ethical claims that are said as if there are right and wrong answers to ethical questions.

I don’t think there’s any tension here. Only misguided realists think there’s a tension. And I’d say that regular participation in normative controversies helps indicate how beside the point realist efforts to motivate their favorite questions are. I have a Wittgensteinian take on this.

Suppose I say, “DC’s barber licensing rules are bad.” You ask, what do you mean by that? Well, they reduce competition in the barbering field, leading to higher prices and worse service for customers. They reduce tax revenues and employment opportunities. They’re, you know, bad. No, no, no you say, what do you mean “the rules are bad?” Maybe you mean to ask if I think licensing is bad in principle, or it’s just that the implementation is bad. So I explain that if you assume an omniscient and benevolent regulator, you can posit a more optimal outcome than what the market provides, but in the real world this kind of commission is bound to become a playground for special interest capture.

Godamnit, I want you to tell me what it means for a law to be a bad law.

It’s bad. I disagree with it. I think its consequences don’t serve the public interest. I think it ought to be repealed. Its continuation causes avoidable suffering. Well which is it, huh? Huh? See? No! I refuse to accept your contention that the law should be repealed until you give an account of what “should” means.

At this juncture, I think, you’re just being an jerk and there’s nothing more to say. But in reality, this never happens! Just show the fly out of the bottle.

Via a justly outraged Kay Steiger, it seems that Antonin Scalia was recently asked his views on whether women deserve the equal protection of the law:

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don’t think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we’ve gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?

Scalia’s answer is basically that, no, women shouldn’t be guaranteed the equal protection of the laws:

[I]f indeed the current society has come to different views, that’s fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.

It’s amazing to me how often allegedly sophisticated jurisprudence founders on really basic philosophy of language questions. It’s probably true that in the subjective understanding of mid-19th century lawmakers “nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” didn’t contradict legal discrimination against women. That’s because in some sense they didn’t think women were “persons” the same way men are. By the same token, when the framers authorized congress “[t]o establish Post Offices and Post Roads” they obviously didn’t intend, as a matter of subjective understanding, to authorize automatic postage stamp dispensers or bridges strong enough to carry trucks. But we understand today that a well-run post office does in fact include stamp machines, computers, and all sorts of other technology that wasn’t inside the heads of 18th century constitution writers.

The whole reason human communication is possible is that words have meanings that are independent of the private thoughts of speakers. If you compare a 21st century post office to James Madison’s private mental image of a post office, they’re totally different. Nevertheless, if you ask whether a 21st century post office is in fact a post office the answer is yes. By contrast, a 21st century sandwich shop is not a post office. By the same token, a given practice either does or does not afford women the equal protection of the law to which they are constitutionally entitled. Asking what someone was thinking about 132 years ago sheds very little light on this question. Probably a 132 years ago, legislators were thinking about the next election!