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!

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.

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.

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!

Say Ray’s friend Lenore wants to purchase Ray’s prostitution services and she values them at $400. But when Lenore does this it bothers Ray’s other friend Tonya. If the negative utility Tonya experiences is worth more than $400, then the market provides a mechanism for Tonya to satisfy her wants: she can pay Ray $401 not to sleep with Lenore. [...]

People will probably object that this is unbelievable, and that even if it happened once in a while, in the real world this would never be enough objectors to affect the quantity of prostitution. I think this is correct. After all, the objectors would have to value preventing prostitution at more than average rate of $300 an hour in order to outbid the existing buyers. But what this tells you is that the marginal utility gained from prostitution by consumers would vastly exceeds the marginal disutility to objectors.

I think objectors know. After all, market based solutions are possible and yet you never hear objectors push for anything but prohibition. This tells me that their willingness to pay is pretty low, and therefore so is their disutility.

This misses the fact that a big part of the point of prostitution prohibition laws is to express social disapproval of prostitutes and prostitution. Indeed, people seem generally quite unconcerned about whether prostitution is occurring someplace out of sight and out of mind. But they want to reserve the right to strongly disapprove of both the prostitution and especially the prostitutes. You can analogize a person who engaged in a form of sexual or commercial conduct of which you disapprove by referring to that person as a “whore.” It’s an insult. Its insult status reflects and upholds a social consensus that whores are bad people, not just that whoring is a kind of undesirable nuisance. Side-payments can’t address this issue.

I think the best way to think about prostitution prohibition is just to observe that we’ve historically done a lot of stuff to bolster the privileged position of heterosexual companionate marriage. This has entailed a lot of avoidable cruelty to gays and lesbians, sexually active women, children of unmarried women, and voluntary prostitutes. But the cruelty isn’t a pointless side-effect that can be reduced through better policy design. The cruelty is integral to obtaining the objective. Over time, counterveiling humane impulses have tended to win out. But that’s the issue.

Jon Chait’s review of Arthur Brooks’ The Battle is focused elsewhere, but contains an interesting digression into the question of equality of opportunity:

In opposition to the punitive leveling agenda of the 30 percent coalition, Brooks puts forward what he calls the “moral case” for free enterprise. This case rests upon “equality of opportunity.” Brooks is unequivocal about the centrality of equality of opportunity to his argument. “As long as everyone has the same opportunities,” he argues, “the free enterprise movement should have no qualms about trumpeting our values as deeply American and profoundly fair.”

As Chait observes, if you take the idea of equality of opportunity really seriously you end up with an incredibly radical agenda:

Equality of opportunity is an extremely radical, even utopian proposition. The Battle betrays no signs whatsoever of having considered what equality of opportunity would mean. It is, alas, a nearly impossible ideal to fulfill, since one of the most valued ways for parents to spend their wealth is to impart greater opportunity to their children. Affluent parents can pass on money or assets to their children. They can finance private education; subsidize internships, travel, or other valuable opportunities; raise their children in safe communities that help impart middle-class values; or simply offer them stable two-parent families. All these things create massive inequality of opportunity.

Indeed, it’s been generally acknowledged by everyone from Robert Nozick to John Rawls that achieving this kind of robust form of equality of opportunity would be incompatible with any kind of recognizable form of liberty. By contrast, I think Plato seriously entertained the idea of abolishing the family and raising children in giant collective houses, a notion that I believe also blossomed a bit in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In other words, this is a goofy kind of intellectual trap that less-thoughtful rightwingers fall into. In an attempt to block the legitimacy of redistributive tax-and-transfer schemes they end up authorizing massively more intrusive government.

For whatever it’s worth, my view is that the best argument for redistribution and the best argument for free enterprise are both grounded in basic utilitarian thinking. If there’s a guy on the sidewalk dying of Anaphylactic shock and you’re standing next to him with an epi pen talking about your right to hang onto it, then the right thing for me to do is punch you in the face, take the pen, and save the guy’s life. That’s a welfare-enhancing transfer of resources from someone who doesn’t really need it to someone who needs it much more. Redistribution!

But in general more welfare-enhancing resources exist if we have a system of well-defined property rights and free market exchange. So we have a basically capitalist system full of private businesses and private property not because of the metaphysics of “fairness” but because it works well. And then you also have a certain amount of regulation of externalities, provision of public goods, and welfare-enhancing redistribution. All because the system works better with that stuff, too. And people argument about how much of that stuff we need and how it should be organized. Of course not everyone agrees with me. Indeed, probably most people would disagree if you asked them. But this is the direction the world is heading in and we’re better off for it.

But I think the more interesting thing to think about is that practices will probably evolve in directions that present-day people would find bizarre or disgusting. Today “it will put us on a slippery slope to polygamy” is considered to be a form of knock-down argument against same-sex marriage, something that supporters of marriage equality are supposed to push back against vigorously. By the same token, I’m sure if you could have convinced members of congress that within 100 years of the 19th Amendment’s ratification we’d have men marrying other men it never would have passed but of course nobody was nutty enough to even try to advance that argument.

So what does that mean for the future? Who knows? Who knows. The point is that in a century or two people are likely to be up to something so unspeakably awful by our standards that it sounds laughable to even speculate about it.

I feel like this is something out of a joke, but as Richard Pérez Peña reports, Mark Zuckerberg is not only going to give $100 million to the Newark Public School system, that donation is going to drive a substantial overhaul in the school system’s governance:

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and a founder of Facebook, has agreed to donate $100 million to improve the long-troubled public schools in Newark, and Gov. Chris Christie will cede some control of the state-run system to Mayor Cory A. Booker in conjunction with the huge gift, officials said Wednesday.

The three men plan to announce the arrangement on Friday on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.”

The changes would not formally relax the legal power the state seized in 1995, when it declared Newark’s schools a failure and took control of the system, replacing the elected school board with a mostly toothless advisory board. Rather, Mr. Christie plans to give the mayor a major role in choosing a new superintendent and redesigning the system, but to retain the right to take control back.

State takeovers of really dysfunctional school districts can drive improvements just based on the reality that if something is “really dysfunctional” any kind of change might lead to improvement. But generally I think that direct mayoral control aligns the political incentives correctly. If Corey Booker is really in charge of Newark’s schools then the voters can hold him accountable for whether they improve, and if he gets booted then the voters can hold is successor accountable as well. And that’s probably as it should be. Of course from a distance I’d kind of assumed Booker was likely to run against Chris Christie in 2013 which would seem to be made more difficult by the two of them collaborating on a high-profile initiative.

But what I think is really interesting here is Zuckerberg, who’s young to be getting into the “giving it away” portion of his life and also being kind of idiosyncratic about what cause he’s supporting. Both seem worthy of applauding to me. There’s a lot that can be said or not said about the wisdom or lack thereof of a specific policy crackdown on the super-rich, but there’s also just the separate point that billionaires have a moral obligation to give that money away and find ways of doing so that help people. People generally find the “with great power comes great responsibility” message of Spider-Man to be pretty intuitive. But we don’t have anyone in the world today bitten by radioactive bugs and blessed with the proportional strength of a spider. We do have people who through a combination of luck and skill stumbled into fortunes worth well over 10,000 times the average household income and those people have an obligation, morally speaking, to do something useful with that money and not just throw lavish birthday parties.

Kwame Anthony Appiah has a neat Slate piece looking at the curious grip of Malthusian thinking on the literary imagination that also delivers with the secret origins of Soylent Green:

Burgess’ satire came out when global fecundity was nearing its height. A few years later—with a newfound public awareness of pollution and resource depletion—novelists came around to Malthus’ side of the argument. The actuarial balance of terror had shifted. Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966), a novel of ideas cum police procedural, is set in the year 1999, when New York City has a population of 35 million, and “trembled at the brink of disaster,” seething with food riots, water riots, looting. Animals being pretty much extinct, people make do with steaks made of a soybean-and-lentils concoction known as “soylent.” (The recipe was changed for the Hollywood version, a few years later. “Soylent Green is … legumes!” presumably didn’t test so well.)

It’s worth noting that one oddity here is the continued prevalence of bad math about population density in this genre. The very same book that posits 35 million people living in a super-crowded future New York City involves a global population of just 7 billion. Today we’ve got about 6.8 billion people, New York isn’t substantially more crowded than it was in the mid-sixties, the average American family has more living space than ever before, and Asians are wildly richer than they were 45 years ago. It’s true that the combination of population growth and economic growth are putting severe pressure on the planet’s ability to absorb greenhouse gas emissions, but this is not a problem that’s beyond our technical (as opposed to political) capacity to solve.

Of course this still leaves the philosophical issue: What if Malthus were right? Suppose we could snap our fingers and increase world population to 50 billion at the cost of a drastic reduction in average living standards. Does the aggregate increase in human life outweigh the decline in the average? Derek Parfit famously argued that it did, but it goes against a lot of people’s intuitions.

Kwame Anthony Appiah taught the introduction to philosophy class I took the fall of my freshman year, and it was sufficiently impressive that I signed on to major in it. I followed that up with a seminar he taught, and he remains one of the most brilliant and learned people I’ve ever encountered. So his work is always recommended here, and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen is no exception. This is a book not about how people win ethical arguments, but about how people cause ethical practice to change. He observes that it was generally acknowledged that all the good arguments were on the side of anti-dueling in England quite a bit before dueling died out and asks how it that a practice can persist under those circumstances and what brings it to an end.

His answer, which has to do with honor, entails sort of throwing caution (and social scientific validity to the wind) but is monstrously interesting and the exact reverse of all the stereotypes of academic overspecialization and who-cares-ism.

Excerpt here, NPR segment here. This is not a work of “real” philosophy, but if you want an introduction to the disciplined as practiced in the contemporary United States Appiah’s Thinking It Through is your best bet and he also does work of the “this is boring and weird” variety.

Isaac Chotiner and James Downie are both appalled by Christine O’Donnell’s view that lying is always wrong, even if you’re lying to hide Anne Frank from the SS. I agree that this is an odd precept, but it seems worth observing that O’Donnell does have Immanuel Kant on her side and he specifically tackles the “murderer at the door” case in his essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie From Altruistic Motives.” You can see Christine Korsgaard’s “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing With Evil” (PDF) for a sympathetic treatment of the Kant/O’Donnell viewpoint.

I would further add that from a Christian perspective, I don’t think the Kantian view is all that problematic. When you lie you’re doing something wrong, and you’re not really serving any kind of greater good because the sin still exists in the heart of the murderer and for the truly innocent death is only a small penalty as it brings you closer to God. I take it that most nominally Christian people in America (of which I am not one) reject this line of argument, but that mostly goes to show that people tend not to fully think through doctrines of heaven and hell to which they’re formally committed.

A perhaps more interesting take on O’Donnell comes from Michelle Goldberg who observes that the “Mama Grizzly” phenomenon isn’t really all that new and women have long played an important role in the populist conservative grassroots essentially because they’re best-positioned to undertake a performance of traditional family values. The paradox, of course, is that once you’re doing this performance for a mass audience you’ve negated the underlying conceit:

In a 1995 New Republic article about the new crop of right-wing women representatives, Vern Smith, Linda Smith’s husband, explained, “One of the reasons we got into politics, we wanted to preserve some of the traditional lifestyle we’d grown up with. It’s funny, with Linda away, we end up sacrificing some of that traditional family life to pass on some of that heritage to our children.”

As it turns out, many smart, ambitious conservative women don’t enjoy the traditional lifestyle much at all. Beverly LaHaye, the founder of Concerned Women for America, where Christine O’Donnell worked during the 1990s, is archetypical in this regard. In The Spirit Controlled Woman—the same book in which she asserts “Submission is God’s design for women”—LaHaye writes that as a young housewife, she felt insecure, unfulfilled, and afraid to speak in public. “After all,” she asked, “who wants to hear what a young woman has to say whose only accomplishments in life were having four successful pregnancies and keeping a clean house?” By becoming an anti-feminist activist, LaHaye was able to escape the kind of dull misery and ennui that Betty Friedan identified in The Feminist Mystique.

O’Donnell is just the apotheosis of this trend, “an anti-gay activist with a lesbian sister … a family-values champion who is single, childless, and sharing a house with a man.” I would only add to Goldberg’s insights that there’s perhaps a connection here to an even older legacy of religiously-inspired women’s political activism in America that’s associated with the temperance movement, campaigns against prostitution, and other kinds of moral reform.

Brad Plumer has a nice post about climate change counterfactual scenarios asking various “what ifs” and wondering whether they could have led to a bill.

I’ve been interested in various aspects of counterfactual since college when I read Niall Ferguson’s excellent book Virtual History, studied David Lewis’ work on the metaphysics of counterfactuals, and did a philosophy of history class with Robert Nozick. To make a long story short, the upshot of that kind of analysis is that it really depends how you specify your counterfactual. If you want to ask “would a McCain administration have led to a better outcome for climate legislation,” in other words, you need to ask yourself “why in this scenario would McCain have won the election?” After all, it’s very hard to imagine a scenario in which the 2008 congressional elections come out the exact same way but Barack Obama somehow loses. In the real world, the same dynamics that powered Obama to victory also drove the election of Kay Hagan and Tom Perriello and Mark Begich and any number of other downballot candidates. A scenario in which Democrats win landslide congressional victories but Obama loses would have to entail something pretty odd happening and the precise nature of what that is would have a big impact on subsequent events.

Something similar happens when you ask about “what if climate had gone before energy.” During 2007 and 2008 both Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama fairly strongly signalled personal preferences for energy reform as a higher priority than health reform, I judgment that I also share. But Obama reversed course on this for reasons having to do with the different status of the issues inside the progressive political coalition. So there’s a difference between asking “would the outcome have been different if the underlying coalition dynamics that drove Obama’s choice had been different” (plausibly yes) and asking “would the outcome have been different if Obama made an idiosyncratic effort to swim against the tide of coalition dynamics” (almost certainly not).

The best-specified counterfactual I can think of that leads to a more successful outcome actually has nothing to do with the specific political dynamics of the climate debate. That would be something like “what if decisive Federal Reserve action had led to substantially more robust economic growth in the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010?” Had that happened, public opinion on Barack Obama and all Obama-related policy proposals would be more positive. What’s more, narrative about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would be much more positive. So GOP rejectionism on the Affordable Care Act would have been a tactical failure and rejectionism on ARRA would have been a strategic failure, and you’d see many more voices from within the conservative coalition urging people to adopt a more cooperative stance to shed the “party of ‘no’” stance.

That’s my view. Which is in part a long-winded way of saying that I’m detecting at Netroots Nation a self-critical vibe within the green community that I don’t really think is justified. In terms of what political advocacy organizations can be reasonably expected to achieve, the climate change groups have been extremely effective. But a whole set of other problems related to the economy have dragged their program down. Much the same could be said about immigration reform, which has also been the victim of a political dynamic that’s extrinsic to the immigration issue silo.

The association of progressive reform with the Great Depression sometimes confuses people about this, but if you look at the timeline correctly you’ll see that even though the 1933-37 period was “part of” the Depression it was actually a period of extremely rapid economic growth following four years of epic collapse and preceding a secondary recession. That “everything was terrible and then FDR came in and conditions improved rapidly” dynamic was highly supportive of the president’s legislative agenda.

Via Bruce Bartlett, a Will Wilkinson post from a year ago on civil rights and his version of libertarianism that I think highlights an issue that’s of broader interest than Rand Paul:

Federal intervention, while certainly limiting freedom of association and trumping more local jurisdictions, resulted IMO in an overall increase in freedom. That many traditional libertarian conservatives, such as Goldwater, seem to have been willing to sacrifice a great gain in overall freedom in order to maintain status quo levels local self-rule seems to me to betray a commitment to ancient ideals of liberty as community self-government in conflict with the modern idea of liberty as freedom from coercion.

I think this is relevant to what I’ve been saying in my recent posts on conservative freedom rhetoric. A lot of intellectuals conceptualize debates about freedom as debates about positive versus negative liberty, but when a lot of people talk about freedom they’re really talking about freedom from the Other or, per Wilkinson, “community self-government.”

Immigration is especially a key test in this regard. If you’re talking about either positive liberty or negative liberty the freedom to leave a situation you find unsatisfactory and move someplace else is going to be one of the most fundamental freedoms of all. You may or may not find there to be some compelling reasons to restrict people’s freedom to relocate, but you’ll understand it as a really profound limitation of freedom. But if what you mean by freedom is the freedom of a community to govern itself, then of course restricting immigration is going to be on a par with restricting trespassing—common sense.

One thing that I hope people will come to appreciate now that Rand Paul has given more exposure to libertarian opposition to the Civil Rights Act is that questions of racism aside, any effort to ground your political philosophy in an incredibly rigid and dogmatic division between what’s “public” and what’s “private” is ultimately going to fail. For one thing, as Charles Lane points out the way you enforce your private “no black customers in my restaurant” law is by having the police arrest someone for trespassing.

But more broadly, precisely because our society isn’t organized around the principles of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute there are no private businesses in which government activity isn’t somehow implicated. The federal reserve controls the money supply. State, local, and federal governments build the roads. Electrical utilities are regulated. Bank deposits are insured. Public policy is everywhere, and thus just about everything could be legitimately considered a subject for public regulation. That’s not to say that everything should be considered a subject for public regulation.

It makes an enormous amount of sense to give private individuals and businesses a wide degree of freedom in how they want to conduct themselves. But it doesn’t make sense to hold that there’s an impenetrable wall of principle that prevents regulation of private business affairs. Now perhaps Paul would just argue that this shows we need to return to the economic stone age—scrap the FDIC, return to the gold standard, undo a 200-year tradition of public investment in infrastructure, etc.—but that’s really nuts. And this is why I think the “Paul’s not a racist, he’s just an ideologue” defense is ultimately so weak. It may well be accurate, but it’s still incredibly damning.