DISQUS

What a peculiar argument. Building your strength so as to better play baseball implies that the goal of baseball is to be be strong. Really? Barnard seems to think that there aren't such things as instrumental goals, only terminal goals- or he thinks enhancement advocates think thus.

It's amusing to roll this kind of objection backwards in time- imagine cavemen Wilk and Barn:

WILK: Barn, I've found these two rocks that you can bang together and make fire! No more rubbing sticks for hours to cook dinner!

BARN: Wilk foolish, point of fire-making not to get done fast. Point of fire-making to eat good food, share stories, bring warmth and community!

WILK: Yes, but now we can do all those things more eas...

BARN: No! Wilk not understand existential meaning of fire-making. How can life have meaning if no struggle for fire for hours and hours?

Higher goals can't be served by the satisfaction of subordinate aims. Acting to better (or more easily) satisfy subordinate aims must (must!) debase the higher goal.

That sounds like not only a (bad) argument for stopping enhancement studies, but also a (bad) argument in favor of cognitive diminishment studies. Just think of how much we'd appreciate a home run then!

Will,
I believe you may have missed another strategic option:

Decry Obama's policies while voting for them.

Democrats will take credit for success regardless of Republican choices, yet Republicans can only succeed if they A) were perceived as being opposed to Democrat boondoggles and B) did not "sabotage" the legislation that "would have saved the economy".

You were right that voters aren't logicians. I say they are aware of only what is said on the cable news, and do not check voting records. The above strategy allows the Republicans to be blameless in any Democrat failure while ceding the inevitable Democrat victory that follows success.

As to why the Republicans have not done so... We can conjecture that Republicans would prefer individually to vote against the democrat package because doing so increases the credibility of their objection and gets them cable TV time (and causes them to feel less spineless). The would all prefer that every OTHER republican vote yes and they vote no. The equilibrium result is that they all vote no in the hopes that the "other guy" will pick up the slack. And there we have the current situation.

Ah Vitriol. Is there an argument for bailing out the companies rather than simply providing income support to the laid-off workers post-bankruptcy? The later would be cheaper and allow GM's assets to be put to use in more productive projects.

Perhaps I should rephrase: is there an argument for bailing out the Big 3 that doesn't hinge upon the inherent nobility of working in an automobile factory?

If we must choose between bailing out the company or doing nothing, I can understand the argument for postponing the inevitable bankruptcy of Detroit- now might not be the best time for another big firm to go belly-up. But if we are going to postpone the inevitable, how do we ensure that we don't end up in this situation in perpetuity?

Or do we think that all GM needs is the expertise of congress to teach them how to make great cars?

I agree in principle that volatility doesn't debunk the idea of investing for retirement, but I think that you're assuming away one of the primary purposes of Social Security.

Social Security exists to assist those who are too feckless to plan their own retirement effectively. We don't really care about the retirement of people who can manage money, they'll be fine. We have Social Security to keep our lottery-ticket-buying, slightly-senile, Ponzi-scheme-credulous gampers from having to eat cat food as a result of their poor, age-addled decision-making.

Now, if we can find a better way to do that, sign me up, but I don't see how assuring Granny that everything will be fine as long as she remembers basic portfolio theory is going to work.

Will, have you considered the political risk implications of privatization? Market "corrections" will inevitably cause the expected future cash flows from private retirement accounts to gyrate- perhaps significantly so. How will the voting public react to drastic changes in value of their government-mandated-privately-invested portfolio?

I tentatively predict that you would see a much larger number of businesses fall into the "too big to fail" category. Riding to the rescue of voters' bubble-generated wealth will be politically irresistible.

If we decide to restrict private account investment to low-risk instruments, how do we decide what's low-risk? Once upon a time, some tranches of CDOs were considered low-risk. Are there regulatory-capture issues related to deciding what instruments will gain access to the new market?

Do private accounts imply that we should expand FDIC coverage?

Will, I'm not sure how to parse your claims about volatility. If assets (in the retirement account) are going to be liquidated to finance retirees, then volatility should matter. Perhaps not daily fluctuations, but monthly variations can't help but impact expected cash flows from a retirement account. Rather, volatility doesn't matter unless it happens to be the volatility your account experiences when you're drawing it down.

Since a dollar invested now has a fair amount of variability in expected return over say, forty years, private accounts will have to yield some premium over and above Social Security to compensate for risk. The real question is whether or not the market provides the premium- I suspect it does, but I have no evidence.

Webgrrl, why would you assume that signaling is binary (you signal or you don't) or that signaling is uniformly distributed (we all do it the same)?

The available evidence is that some portion of our political views must consist of signaling, but surely some of us have a higher mix of in-group/out-group signaling in our political beliefs. Furthermore, signaling behavior is likely to incrementally distort astute policy preferences, not eliminate them entirely.

If we can get those individuals to stay home. We should have less signaling-related inputs in our political process in the aggregate.

Imagine a world where giving medical advice was considered both a natural right and public virtue. Wouldn't you say that encouraging people without medical training (or emotional preferences for, say, faith-healing) to influence the healthcare decisions of others is likely, on balance, to result in more bad decisions about health? Would a policy of "if you don't know what that lump is, don't feel obligated to speculate" improve or impair the quality of medical discourse?

[i] The Glass Bead Game [/i] by Hesse.

KJ gets to the meat of the issue, although not in the way he intends, I think.

"It is impossible to look at the growth in inequality (which now mimics the graphs of the 1920s) and not see this as an affront to basic fairness unless you are writing or speaking from ignorance."

The important point here seems to be "fairness". The Right looks at a policy and says "Policy X advances fairness" while the Left sees the same policy and denounces it- "policy X is the veritable acme of unfairness!" In this situation, it seems easy to conclude that the other side of the debate could only be motivated by idiocy or malice. Neither side has time to ask "what is this fairness thing?"

If we replace "fairness" with its definition, as defined by each party, then the two statements cease to contradictory, and become merely tradeoffs. A little reductionism can go a long way here. KJ is right, failing to see the monstrous unfairness in the Gini coefficient is simply ignorant.... provided, of course, that you share his definition of "fair."

We'd probably see a dramatic increase in the quality of discourse about inequality if we could ban the use of "fairness" as a descriptor for policies and distributions.

KJ- would you say this is accurate? Some of the people with whom you disagree have shiny degrees from fancy institutions and work full-time in this very field- their ignorance would seem to be unusually narrow in scope and deep in effect. Or are we all somehow unusually evil? It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the disagreement is definitional.

p.s. glad you're back, Will. My condolences on moving to Iowa.

Oddly enough, Chinese bikers don't seem to feel the need to follow traffic laws either, but since they are the majority of vehicles on the road here, it tends to yield a giant, dangerous mess. I think that your flagrant disregard for traffic laws is only workable in an environment where biking is comparatively rare.

I find the confidence in the competitiveness of modern, liberal values heart-warming. Unfortunately, the longer I live in a distinctly foreign, illiberal culture (Mainland China) the more I lose confidence in this basic assumption.

Typically, I'm suspicious of argumentation via personal annecdote; but I've seen far too many Chinese youth (including exchange students studying for long periods in the West) roundly reject modern, liberal principles in favor of traditional, authoritarian, ethnocentric beliefs. I think it's a cornerstone of modern liberalism that the fruits of post-Enlightenment thinking are so mind-blowingly obvious that no one could fail to be persuaded. It is a source of terrible existential discomfort to find out otherwise. I do, however, think that if you believe that liberalism can take all comers in all venues, then you don't get out enough.

Despite all of this, as the US-citizen spouse of a non-citizen, I'm tremendously pro-immigration. While I don't believe that freedom will necessarily out-compete tyranny, I do believe in the fundamental virtue of the immigrant. Immigration is, in a way we can barely understand, a drastic psychological trial that self-selects exclusively for those who are willing to entertain the possibility that one way-of-life might be superior to their own. Tellingly, all of people I've met who have rejected modern liberalism are still here (in China).

A tangentially connected examination at Vox EU as to why paternalistic transfers are generally more popular than effective transfers:

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/809

More generally, it's probably true that if you think you know what the optimal social distribution is, you probably ALSO think you know what kind of social organization best gets you there. The calling to change an entire society's distribution of resources probably selects for the presumptuous exclusively.

A pure reliance on transfers, flavored by only the sparsest interference, also leaves our Ivy-educated technocrats with precious little to do save cut checks. Insofar as everyone wants to feel useful and clever, direct interference is surely more temptation than most politicians can stand. After fighting so hard for a seat at the levers of power, one's ego demands more than a mandate to fund transfer programs- great projects and carefully laid planning-initiatives are so much more appealing. Imagine how true this is of someone with an...exaggerated... sense of their intellectual capabilities and personal destiny.

Furthermore, if said meddling also allows you to line the pockets of your closest supporters, how could you possibly refuse?

As for the hoi polloi and their preference for planning over redistribution- I think you get part of the story right. I'd only add that the human need for narratives means that no lay-off can ever be the result of normal economic functions- we need villains. Harm, always and everywhere, in the mind of masses, derives from wickedness or failure. These impulses argue for correction and oversight, rather than cushioning. When did you last hear a bed-time story about a beautiful princess who was wronged by perfectly natural forces that required only the largess of the handsome prince to indemnify?

I think we are in total agreement about the "liberaltarian" (clever, but ineloquent) agenda and the good that it can do. I don't, sadly, see how it's even remotely possible.

I'm not totally familiar with all of the moral justifications that Sartwell purports to demolish, nor the fiendishly clever argumentation that he (purportedly) employs to do so; however, are we asking the wrong question?

If the main line of argumentation runs: "force without consent is wrong, and force with consent be no force at all", as I assume, then are we really objecting to the State, or are we objecting to our inability to consent to the State?

If a man walks into your house and hands you 1 kg. of solid platinum and then demands (at gunpoint) that you pay $5, then that transaction is morally illegitimate. The objection isn't to the trade of Pt for $ in general (those are excellent terms!) but to your lack of choice in the matter.

We clearly have the same relationship with the State as you do with the platinum-bequeathing villain. It seems to me that the argument against State coercion isn't an argument against the trading of total autonomy for certain protections, rights, and social services. To make an argument [b] for anarchism [/b] you'd need to show how consenting, collective trade in rights and property (a la, the State) is [b] always [/b] wrong regardless of how much the participants favor it.

Arguments against coercion seem to point towards an opt-out model of citizenship which is distinct from anarchy. Upon adulthood, you'd have the choice to either opt-in to the social contract and become a citizen, or opt-out and become 'outlaw' in the most original sense of the term.

The pre-Christian Icelanders reserved this as sort of punishment. People could be sentenced to skoggangur (literally "outlaw") and were placed outside the legal norms of Icelandic society. Viking people being, well, Vikings, you can guess that this usually didn't work out well for the outlaws- they could murder and steal with impunity, but all others could steal and murder them without the slightest consequence and indeed received considerable bragging rights for the act.

I heartily endorse an opt-in/opt-out citizenship model.No one should have to suffer the burdens of the State without consent. But I fail to see how arguments against coercion disallow consenting citizens to make certain transactions involving their rights and property. Of course, I haven't read Sartwell's book.

Would that we lived in a world where Sartwell could, with a stroke of a pen in a notary's office, sign away all of the burdens and benefits of the State. If that happy day ever dawns, remember, I have dibs on his car.

MK, I think, has got it. However I also think that most people, when considering equality, are actually thinking of some putative "base bundle". People are measured based on their distance from this base bundle in either direction. It's considered unethical for the rich to exceed this base bundle by too much if the poor fail to meet this bundle by too much.

I think this kind of thinking is inherent in the idea of the "living wage" or "dignity wage" that is so often bandied about- also consider "it's obscene for Tiger Woods to spend X when there are people in this country without Y." People aren't upset about the yacht per se (not many people pine over not having a yacht) but they DO see the yacht as representing a multiple of what consider to be "basic needs".

If this is the attitude you take, which is fundamentally different from strictly caring about inequality in the abstract, then finding out that prices rise steeply beyond the base bundle won't satisfy you very much.

The hard-core egalitarians are picking a bundle X and measuring inequality relative to the cost of X over time. They're indexing to one bundle. I think that this is essentially the emotional logic behind egalitarianism- a rich man can afford 10,000 bundles of X while the poor man can't even afford .7X. Never mind that no one wants 10,000X or .7X, rather they prefer Y and Z.

The egalitarians seem to think that there's a set consumption bundle that is the moral minimum level of consumption in a society. If someone falls below the base bundle X, then the needed amount can be transfered, you can't use 10,000X anyway. I'm not sure what the bundle X is, but it would probably make for an excellent paper.

This little fact means that inflation in the top consumption baskets is (emotionally at least) irrelevant to the egalitarians. That's what I suspect anyway.

I think you answered your own question when you said

"the system pre-haggles the price"

I don't think the existence of a haggling system is based on a collective action problem- no one is choosing to haggle rather than post prices, or rather, no in the US is choosing to post prices.

Set, posted prices exist when both consumers and producers in a market are capable of rapidly and accurately comparing prices. If I can query the price of 50 rug dealers in an afternoon, competitive pressure will force the market price out into the open.

In markets where you can't compare prices easily (tourist markets, fragmented economies, highly differentiated goods, collusion-prone environments) you don't get a set price because the lets-look-somewhere-else effect is blunted.

Everyone keeps the capability to price discriminate if they possibly can.

As to refraining from shopping because you quiver with terror that someone my take a taste of your surplus- I'll affectionately submit that most people aren't as crazy as you are.

I'll admit to being under-equipped to handle the larger meta-ethical issues, but it seems to me that there isn't an is-ought problem if we restrict our moral conclusions to similarly equipped humans. We're not trying to make extrinsic moral propositions, rather, we're trying to generate an ethical framework in a game-theoretical environment with multiple, largely-identical, agents. "Ought" is consequentially derived from a common "is" within a local contextual environment.

I suppose we can go back and forth about this forever, but if you set the bar from ethical propositions too high, you end up reducing ethical theory to mere numerology- a wonderfully consistent intellectual framework that gets you exactly nothing. Winning the argument then means that best you can hope for is being better armed than I am when I show up at your house to carry you off into slavery. Most people would probably tolerate a second-most-coherent ethical framework if it avoids this kind of situation.

While we're on the topic of generalizations, it's incorrect to argue that generalization is impossible because "reasonable-sounding generalizations" can be excessively exclusive. That's an argument against bad generalizations, not generalization per se- the fact of shared DNA and brain structure allows us to test and reject bad generalizations.Sociopaths don't disrupt the validity of general moral principles in the same way that amputees don't invalidate the general utility of stairs. Things like S&M only mean we need to be careful about where and how we make generalizations. Abandoning generalization is only coherent in a world with infinite diversity, which clearly isn't the case here. I can't help but think you knew this when you wrote your arguments down, TGGP.

I'd be interested in hearing how raising someone in total isolation to believe that you're Jesus differs from drugging someone. I'd guess that you'd say the later is physical in that it disrupts brain function while the former is purely psychological. This distinction seems to rest on the bizarre assumption that brain functions that we can't see on today's MRIs occur in some magical non-physical realm that is somehow intrinsically less determinate than visible neurological structures. The fundamental difference between psychology and neurology is equivalent to the difference between chemistry and physics: there isn't one.

Will, thanks for the kind words, I think you're swell too.

I can buy that there aren't any fundamental ethical principles that are entirely intrinsic to reality- CERN isn't likely to discover, Ten Commandments-style, some fundamental ethical principles engraved into every proton.

At the same time, the objection to broad moral generalizations about humans seems like pointless sophistry to me. We have generally similar preferences and drives as a result of generally similar DNA and neural equipment. There's a fair amount of plasticity built into our little gray-cells, but not enough generate the kind of unique preference-sets that would legitimize torture, captivity, and child-rape. Fire is hot, rejection hurts, and everyone dances when they think no one is looking.

Refraining from normative moral observation might make sense if we had to create ethical codes of conduct for dealing with space aliens (phasers to maximum, I say!). But we aren't dealing with aliens, we're talking about people. H. Sapiens, so we CAN generalize certain preferences and go about making normative moral claims based off of those preferences. Those ethics might not apply to Martians, but unless the FLDS is hiding more than just child-rape, we can forget about that.

Since we all have the same cognitive equipment, I can say that child-abuse is "bad" in the same way that I could say drinking paint thinner is "bad". It's silly for me say "well, when I was a kid, I had a strong preference for not having Dad burn me with cigarettes, but maybe those FLDS kids think it's neat."

It's especially silly to use the professed consent of the child as an excuse when we already know that our preferences, and the cognitive equipment that actualizes them, can be just as subject to damage as any other organ.

It seems to me that niggling over the meaning of "informed consent" and "moral capacities" is a bit obtuse. It's laughable to assert that one can't make normative judgments about human conditions (rape/violence/deprivation=bad) and it should therefore be easy to develop SOME objective, working definition of moral capacity.

If human conditions (being raped or enslaved) can possess normative values, then clearly any prior condition that prevents one from making cost-benefit decisions about those states is one that we can label "impaired". The question seems to be "where does influence transition into abuse?" rather than "can we distinguish abuse and influence at all?"

Teaching my daughter that her 'place is in the kitchen' differs from locking her in the basement in that in the prior case my daughter is exposed to multiple sources of information (media etc) regarding her 'place'. The clearest possible brightline (that I can think of) would be to insist that children not experience a monopolized flow of information.

Admittedly, this brightline seems impossible in practice- the potential for abuse by State bureaucracy is too high. It may be that a bit of child abuse now and then is the price of admission into a free society in the same way that the occasional KKK rally is the price of admission for Free Speech. This is sad, but considerably better than the alternatives.

I'd hazard that the laws weren't created with age-of-consent incest in mind. I can't come up with a morally persuasive argument why these two should not be allowed to copulate apart from "ewww", which suggests to me that they should be free to do as they wish.

To play devil's advocate (an odd position in this case), I'd say that the standard age of consent brightline is inadequate with regards to incest. While I may be expected to possess independent agency at 18 with respect to other sexual interactions, the pre-existing and pervasive influence of parental authority means that I won't be capable of responding to daddy's amorous advances in the same way. Parental influence degrades the ability to give consent.

Well... that's an argument for raising the age of consent for incest, not outlawing it AND it doesn't seem to apply in this case where the couple had no pre-existing familial contact.

Not very good, but the best I can do.

ewwwwww, though.