DISQUS

Rebuilding the education system from the ground up is a great idea. But if the goal is to equalize opportunities for children, child-oriented early interventions need to begin before school starts.

I would qualify the "Brigham Young was a douche" comment (although it is more accurate than the plaster saint of the LDS literature). How about "weird organizational genius in a savage time"? If the category for judging him is "religious leader of an oppressed community", he wasn't Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or the Dalai Lama. If the category is "Civil/military leader of a colonialist group", he was better than Phil Sheridan or the ethnic cleaners who settled Texas (the Mormon exodus coincided with the Mexican War).

His literary persona is a Catholic version of Dana Carvey's Church Lady, the innovation being keeping a straight face. I'm not christian, but maybe a serious attempt to be one would require the neuroticism that Kerry describes.

"Joe Biden is qualified to be president in much the same way McCain is; he is a lifelong asshole and American senator."

My nomination for Tyler's best sentence of the day.

<<Yes. Parents morally ought go beyond their “simple judgment.” I’d be happy to have polygamists make their case to my kids. Pedophiles too, as long as they’re not philing my peds. The thing is, these will likely be bad arguments that appeal to dubious values and I intend to help my kids develop a sound sense of epistemic and moral judgment.>>

I completely agree with your last sentence. Suppose, though, that despite your efforts, you find one of your adolescent children spending time with peers or adults in situations that you think put them at significant risk of sexual exploitation, exposure to harmful drugs, or involvement in crime. Now what?

The Heckman reference is Science 30 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5782, pp. 1900 - 1902. His point is that the marginal benefit of social investment in human capital is very high in utero and falls quickly and consistently thereafter. You get a dollar's return for a dollar spent sometime in early childhood. He isn't arguing against spending money on adolescents or high schools. His point is that we are missing huge opportunities for improving human capital by not investing more in preventing prematurity, screening for developmental delays, and the like.

"And since I think morality is for enabling human flourishing..."

And the reason for setting a boundary at that species is?

"Why? Because I’m a soulless, reductive, naturalist, I think there’s a good answer to that: because heeding the constraint will tend to make the person who heeds it better off, conditional on others heeding it, too. This is where a lot of people will part ways from me. They feel uncomfortable seating normativity in individual flourishing. However, I find all the relevant alternatives to be basically religious."

Well, I think you can practice Buddhism in a way that allows you to be soulless, reductive, naturalist; believe that moral action can be seated in human flourishing; and be basically religious. Go ahead and laugh.

I'll try to say that more clearly. Your concern is that the noise in the market will obscure the small impact of my one time decision to buy a chicken. But if the problem is noise, the expected effect of consistently abstaining would be small but non-zero. (One chicken / week, though, is not small, if you think that life matters.)

"At the time of your choice, all of the relevant chickens have already been killed. And your choice not to eat one tonight will have no detectable effect on demand (won’t depress the price of chicken meat) and so will not induce lower future chicken meat production."

Thanks, excellent answer. Clearly, I am wrong to think that I have a moral relationship to an individual chicken. So this _is_ a collective action problem -- thanks for showing me how this is so.

I drafted an answer that was more or less what conchis wrote. I'll respond to your answer to him. "A single individual’s choice in isolation will be completely lost in the noise of normal fluctuations in demand (caused by a sale in a close substitute, e.g.)." Yes, my effect on demand will not be noticed. Does that mean it does not exist? In the long run, do we not expect the price to respond to the actual demand for chickens, not the perceived demand for chickens? (So I am now talking about the practice of vegetarianism, not the decision to eat chicken tonight.) And, so, smoothing over my lifetime, won't I exert a small, unmeasurable, but non-zero force of (say) 1 chicken / week on the suppliers?

It seems like this is a different collective action problem than, say voting. The chance that my vote will affect a binary outcome is more or less nil. But the slaughter of chickens is not an all or nothing event.

I'm not sure there is a collective action problem in vegetarianism. If I do not serve a chicken at tonight's dinner, one less chicken would be killed. The relevant moral sphere encompasses me and the chicken, no?