So, I have to move out of my house tomorrow. But I still have some perfectly good stuff that I need to get rid of. It’s ALL FREE!!! If you’re a DC area denizen, who would be able to drop by my house this evening, and you want something, drop me a line. I have pictures of some of this things, if you’re interested. I have:

* A 5′ four drawer file cabinet

* A medium/large American Tourister suitcase with wheels and telescoping handle.

* An old but powerful Hoover canister vacuum cleaner, complete with free bags.

* A couple sets of plates. Mix & match!

* Some nice pots.

* Several electric fans.

Dibs goes to Fly Bottle readers. But act soon, before I wave this red meat at the Craigslist scavengers!

One of the reasons extra income has a small effect on happiness is that we rapidly adapt to new luxuries. A fancy new Porsche will cause a spike in my sense of well-being, but I’ll get used to it soon enough, and the happy effect will wear off. If we adapted completely to everything, then there would be little we could do to permanently alter our sense of well-being.

One thing you could do is consume more, faster. That is, buy something even nicer just before the positive effect of the last thing wears off. As far as I can tell the happiness investigators simply haven’t seriously considered this option. There seems to be a kind of bias against transient pleasure. But if you’re ALWAYS experiencing SOME transient pleasure, then you’ve permanently jacked up your level of SWB, even if EACH pleasure wears off.

One of the huge deficiencies of the happiness literature is that there is almost no data following individuals over time. So the data can tell you that, on average, buying a new car doesn’t make people happier over the long run. But it can’t tell you that always buying a new car before you get used to the old one doesn’t make you happier over the long run. There needs to be more research on this kind of individual hedonic strategy.

Also, it turns out that we don’t adapt equally to everything. So if there are things that we can spend our money on that will make us happier, and some of the effect will tend to stick, then more money could get you more happiness as long as the money is spent on the right kind of thing. The evidence shows that if you want to be happier, you should spend more time and money on exercise, meditation, and strengthening your social bonds. And It turns out that we don’t adapt much to cosmetic surgery. Looking better makes us happier, and we stay happier. Especially with boob jobs.

So, here’s my Benthamite policy proposal of the day: vouchers (and/or tax breaks)for breast implants.

Daniel Dennett’s NYT essay on intelligent design is spot on from beginning to end. If you’re confused about this issue, this is the place to go.

Dennett concludes:

Since there is no content, there is no “controversy” to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?

OK, that’s a good high school question. But how about a question for adults? Has the hegemony of secularism in public institutions, such as the schools, generated it’s own backlash? Is intelligent design a symptom of a much deeper problem: the failure of our public institutions to embody the ideals of liberal neutrality?

I’m having a moving sale tomorrow. You should come an take my stuff away and possibly give me money. Here’s the Craigslist notice:

HEY STUDENTS! YOUNG PROFESSIONALS! Lots of good stuff at bargain basement prices! No non-crazy offer refused! Everything must go. Come early for the good stuff. Come late for the free stuff.

934 Westminster St NW (off 9th or 10th Streets, between S & T Streets NW)
Saturday, Aug. 27
10:00 am - 3:00 pm

Fabulous items include:

* Mini fridge
* Full size file cabinet
* Complete set of patio furniture
* Nice-looking wood/metal futon
* Two TVs
* Two VCRs
* An adaptor box for hooking a DVD player/Xbox sort of thing to an old TV (worth more than the old TVs)
* Nice pots and pans
* Miscellaneous kitchen utensils
* Quirky antique wooden folding chairs
* Free books - literature and philosophy, mostly
* Arbitrary stuffed animals
* Portable wheeled clothes rack with breathable hanging storage bag (perfect for hanging stuff in a basement)
* Computer scanner
* ink jet printer
* Two computer monitors (15″ & 17″)
* Two defunct but surely geek fixable Windows machines
* Much much more!!!

In an actually useful HuffPo post, Michael Shermer discusses intelligent design, offering an updated version of Philo’s objections in Hume’s Dialogues. Namely, if the best explanation of various phenomena is design, then we require a theory of the designer. And the best theory may simply be a committee of super-intelligent but fallible aliens. Which, clearly, get us no closer to the God of Abraham than we were before.

Here’s Hume:

Now, Cleanthes, said Philo, with an air of alacrity and triumph, mark the consequences. First, By this method of reasoning, you renounce all claim to infinity in any of the attributes of the Deity. For, as the cause ought only to be proportioned to the effect, and the effect, so far as it falls under our cognizance, is not infinite; what pretensions have we, upon your suppositions, to ascribe that attribute to the Divine Being? . . .

Secondly, You have no reason, on your theory, for ascribing perfection to the Deity, even in his finite capacity, or for supposing him free from every error, mistake, or incoherence, in his undertakings. There are many inexplicable difficulties in the works of Nature, which, if we allow a perfect author to be proved a priori, are easily solved, and become only seeming difficulties, from the narrow capacity of man, who cannot trace infinite relations. But according to your method of reasoning, these difficulties become all real; and perhaps will be insisted on, as new instances of likeness to human art and contrivance. . .

And what shadow of an argument, continued Philo, can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove the unity of the Deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world? This is only so much greater similarity to human affairs. By sharing the work among several, we may so much further limit the attributes of each, and get rid of that extensive power and knowledge, which must be supposed in one deity, and which, according to you, can only serve to weaken the proof of his existence. And if such foolish, such vicious creatures as man, can yet often unite in framing and executing one plan, how much more those deities or demons, whom we may suppose several degrees more perfect!

Or, try this. ID, even if true, puts us in an explanatory spiral, an unclosed regressive loop.

Assume ID is the best explanation for ordered complexity. That means, our best theory of ordered complexity posits the existence of an intelligent designer, meaning that we posited intelligence as an explanatory fundamental. However, intelligence as we know it is a property of biological beings, and a form of the kind of ordered complexity we initially sought to explain.

If it is suggested that “higher” intelligence is not a form of ordered complexity analogous to our own intelligence, then there is no ground for calling it intelligence after all. If it is itself a form of ordered complexity, then we have made no explanatory advance, for we will be left positing an even higher order intelligent designer for each higher order intelligent designer.

If it proposed that we stop the explanatory spiral by positing an undesigned designer then a new question arises: What explains the emergence of the undesigned designer? Whatever the explanation for the ordered complexity of the undesigned designer may be, then it seems that that explanation could be applied to first order ordered complexity, and Occam demands we excise the useless proliferation of higher order designers.

If it is replied that there is no mechanism that gave rise to the undesigned designer, then first order ordered complexity is still unexplained, only it is now more elaborately unexplained.

Even if it’s the best explanation, ID would get us nowhere, which means its probably not.

My take on ID is that if there were any evidence for it, then the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life would be non-zero. We would then have a proximate explanation for ordered complexity as it appears on Earth. But we’d be no closer to an account of ordered complexity as such.

I’m looking for the correpsondence between James Madison and Jeremy Bentham. Bentham wrote to Madison on Oct. 30, 1811, offering generously to codify the laws of the US and extricate us from the unwieldy organic thicket of the common law. Madison replied, declining, I take it, on May 8, 1816. I’ve tracked down Bentham’s reply to Madison. And a note from John Quincy Adams to Madison about Bentham. And some back and forth between Bentham & JQA. But I can’t find the first letter to Madison and the reply online. Can anyone out there do better? I think Bentham’s complete correspondence is accessible through Past Masters, but I don’t have institutional access.

[UPDATE: I've determined that the letters I'm looking for are in: The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham: Volume 8: January 1809 to December 1816. The maddening thing is that I have access to 7 and 9 through Questia, but not 8! Argh. I suppose there are always actual libraries... Here's the National Archives scan of the orignal Bentham letter to Madison, but pretty hard to read.]

No. What she may have is moral standing, analogous to legal standing. Legal standing is, roughly, the right to initiate a law suit. Here are the conditions for legal standing from some random legal web site:

There are three requirements for Article III standing: (1) injury in fact, which means an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical; (2) a causal relationship between the injury and the challenged conduct, which means that the injury fairly can be traced to the challenged action of the defendant, and has not resulted from the independent action of some third party not before the court; and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision, which means that the prospect of obtaining relief from the injury as a result of a favorable ruling is not too speculative.

Now, don’t to be too literal about the legal analogy. Nobody thinks mothers of dead soldiers have a legal case against the President. What is clear is that Sheehan’s son died in a war that is the result of Bush’s executive decisions. How does she do, roughly, on the moral analogues to the conditions for legal standing?

(1) Has Sheehan been injured? I don’t think we can dispute that a mother has a moral interest in the life and well-being of her children. And we cannot dispute that the loss of a son is injurious. But the fact that she has suffered a moral injury does not establish that someone has morally injured her. Which brings us to

(2) The conduct Sheehan has challenged is Bush’s call as Commander and Chief to invade and occupy Iraq. It seems clear that Bush’s commands are a causal factor in the death of her son. But one may fairly argue that the action that ultimately put Casey Sheehan in harms way was his decision to enlist in the military. Casey Sheehan volunteered to occupy a role that involves the risk of death. The fact that Bush called a war, one the indirect effects being that Casey Sheehan died, injuring Cindy Sheehan, is not enough to establish her moral standing in the matter.

This pushes us back to an element of (1). Is Sheehan’s interest in the welfare of her son “morally protected” in a case where her adult child volunteered to expose himself to the risk of death?

My answer is that a volunteer soldier forfeits his morally protected interest to not be exposed to the risk of death through war when he becomes involved in a just war. He suffers no moral injury or injustice if killed in voluntary service in a morally justified war or conflict.

So the issue of Sheehan’s moral standing just is the question of whether the Iraq war is just or unjust. For Bush to recognize that the death of Sheehan’s son grants her special moral standing is to concede that the war is unjust. Which is why it would be politically insane to recognize her in particular, rather than simply sympathizing with the pain, and recognizing the sacrifice of the entire class of people who have lost loved ones in the war.

Now, I do think that the Iraq war is unjust. And I think that soldiers, and by extension their families and friends, who die in unjust wars clearly are the victims of injustice. And political and military leaders who are responsible for putting on unjust wars are the perpetrators of this injustice and so bear some moral culpability for these deaths. Because the Iraq war is not just, Cindy Sheehan’s moral interest in the life of her son, via his own moral interest in his own life, remained morally protected, and so I conclude she does have moral standing. She is fully within her moral rights to demand a justfication and/or an apology from President Bush. I do think it’s important to point out that her injury gives her no special moral authority. It simply gives her justified grounds for demanding some kind of rectification.

We’re now here at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in . . . Des Moines! Our state fair is a great state fair, the best state fair in the state! We’ll be back in the Imperial Capital shortly.

Hey! Joanna & I have organized this for AFF Underground. You should come.

———-

Indonesian film The Courtesan at the Freer Gallery; Happy hour at Café Asia

Join AFF Underground on Saturday, August 20 for a taste of Asia with an Indonesian film and pan-Asian happy hour. Come for a free 2:00 pm showing of the acclaimed Indonesian film The Courtesan at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery, check out the museum’s collection of exquisite Asian art, and then head up to Café Asia for a 4:30 pm happy hour featuring $1 pieces of Nigiri sushi and $2 on select draft beers. AFF Founder’s Club Members (join now!) get two free drinks! Come for drinks and film talk, stay for dinner. RSVP to Joanna Robinson (joanna@americasfuture.org).

A Courtesan
Saturday, August 20, 2005, 2:00 pm, Meyer Auditorium, Freer Gallery

A hit at several international film festivals, this gorgeous historical epic from director Nia Dinata was tells the story of an Indonesian woman living in Holland who returns to her homeland to discovery the mystery of the parents who gave her up for adoption. Their surprising tale, told in evocative flashbacks, reveals a forbidden romance between her mother, a “ca-kau-ban,” or courtesan, and her lover, a Chinese trader. (2002, 120 min.)

Freer/Sackler Gallery
The gallery houses a world-renowned collection of art from China, Japan, Korea, South and Southeast Asia, and the Near East. Visitor favorites include Chinese paintings, Japanese folding screens, Korean ceramics, Indian and Persian manuscripts, and Buddhist sculpture.

The Freer Gallery of Art is located at Jefferson Drive at 12th Street, SW., steps from the Smithsonian metro stop on the Orange/Blue line.

Café Asia
Café Asia celebrates the rich and varied culinary traditions of the Far East by offering delicious dishes from Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Japan, and Vietnam. While preserving these countries’ culinary traditions, Café Asia puts a modern spin on everything from presentation to performance. Boasting two full-service bars and lounges, Café Asia brings people from all different backgrounds into a diverse melting pot of hip and happening fun. Happy hour from 4:30-7:00 pm features $1 Nigiri Sushi and $2 select draft beers.

1720 I St., NW, just off the Farragut West metro stop on the Orange/Blue line, four stops from the Smithsonian station.

Coming to you live from the Country Kitchen in Warrensburg, MO, it’s Joanna’s birthday!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Joanna with giraffes at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo.

I’m off to a week long tour of Omaha, Kansas City, Marshalltown, Iowa, and the glorious Iowa State Fair in Des Moines! Posting will likely be more intermittent than usual. Stay cool!

Alex attacks Tyler’s appeals to intuition in his discussion of the moral weight of animal welfare:

Tyler wants to find a theory that both rationalizes and is consistent with our intuitions. But that is a fool’s game. Our intuitions are inconsistent. Our moral intuitions are heuristics produced by blind evolution operating in a world totally different than our own. Why would we expect them to be consistent? Our intuitions provide no more guidance to sound ethics than our tastes provide guidance to sound nutrition. . .

The reason to think deeply about ethical matters is the same reason we should think deeply about nutrition - so that we can overcome our intuitions. Tyler argues that we don’t have a good approach to animal welfare only because he is not willing to give up on intuition.

Although Alex is right that our intuitions are not likely to be consistent, there is also no way to completely “overcome” or “give up on” them.

Consider Alex’s story abut Temkin, in which Alex and Robin bullheadedly give the utilitarian answer, despite Temkin’s attempt to prime an anti-utilitarian judgment. Alex seems proud of himself. Is this a matter of Alex and Robin having “overcome” intuition? Certainly not! How did Alex and Robin arrive at the conclusion that it is even possible to compare value across persons, or that the prospect for “better” lives for more people may trump or override the respect owed to an individual’s autonomy and dignity as a seperate person? What else but intuition!

As Sidgwick illustrated with such clarity, there is simply no getting to something like utilitarianism without a rationally unsupported intuition about the coherence and primacy of “the point of view of the universe.” Now, it is true that once you embrace THIS intuition, you’ll certainly be in a position to contradict the intuitions of folk morality. But contradicting judgments derived from one set of intuitions with judgments from another set of intuitions clearly isn’t a matter of “overcoming” intuition. And it surely isn’t the basis for a sense of superiority over other people’s wooly-headedness.

(Aside: And shouldn’t Robin, of all people–champion of Bayesian rationalism–when confronted by the credible data that almost all philosophers disagree with him, realize that the probability that he is wrong is exceedingly high, and so admit that he must be the crazy one. If Robin told a moral philosopher who was arguing in favor of the minimum wage that almost all economists disagree with him, wouldn’t he think it would, in some sense, be rationally mandatory for the philosopher to change his mind right there on the spot? Or at least that ongoing disagreement would be dishonest? If this aside is obscure to you, check out Robin and Tyler’s paper about disagreement.)

Tyler is grappling with what seem to me to be Derek Parfit-like concerns. (Tyler has co-authored papers with Parfit.) If Alex accepts something like utilitarian intuitions, as he seems to in the “sacrifice your child for the others” case, he ought to pay attention. Parfit is the most brilliant utilitarian alive, and his lucid exploration of the logic of the utilitarian intuition leads to a number of paradoxes and “repugnant conclusions” that I believe serve as reductio arguments against utilitarianism. Tyler is at least taking his own intuitive normative commitments seriously and thoughtfully exploring their limits and consequences, rather than proudly pretending that he doesn’t have any.

I’d like to say a few other things about the method of reflective equilibrium, the human moral sense, and the (large) role for intuition in normative theories, but that will have to wait for later.

The Dan Savage andrewsullivan.com is more to my taste than the Andrew Sullivan andrewsullivan.com. This is great:

And make no mistake, hetero readers: Santorum doesn’t just seek to stamp out the kind of relationship I enjoy with my longtime personal secretary. The Santorum wing of the GOP is targeting your privacy, your rights, and your pleasures, too. From porn (just as popular in red states as it is in blue) to divorce (more popular in red states than in blue) to masturbation (equally popular in red and blue states), the Santorums and Scalias and Bauers and Dobsons want to tell you how to live, who to love, and how exactly you should love ‘em. When Santorum made his famous “man on dog” comments he wasn’t just defending anti-gay sodomy laws, but anti-straight sodomy laws too. Santorum doesn’t just believe that the state should have the right to regulate gay sex out of existence, but two out of three most popular straight sex acts too. . .

Personal freedom is like free speech: Some people are going to exercise their personal freedom and/or freedom of speech in ways that make you uncomfortable. So long as they’re not imposing themselves on you, they should be left alone. And, I’m sorry, Rick, but the haunting fear—or certain knowledge—that someone, somewhere, is enjoying himself in ways that you think are sinful does not qualify as an imposition.

This isn’t so hard to grasp, now is it?

Anyway, the social conservative dominance of the Republican party is about to move me, like Radley, to join the ACLU. Indeed, looking around from my lonely libertarian perch, I find that DLC Democrats are closer to my politics overall (not very close) than the mainstream alternatives. Perhaps I’ll register Democrat, and start defending the DLC against the sophisticated attacks of “progressives.”

Thomas Frank at TPM Cafe:

Times of overwhelming economic insecurity like the present ought to be times when Democrats of this variety prosper, when their values and their message find enthusiastic audiences around the country.

Is he drunk? “Times of overhwelming economic insecurity”? The sad thing is he wishes it was true, because he thinks if it was, then folks would be buying what he’s selling. Lucky for all of us that it’s not, and folks aren’t.

But I must say, I love the daily TPM Cafe festival of indignant wishful thinking. Pundit’s fallacy central!

This quote from DEA head Karen Tandy has me mad enough to actually blog about actual news:

Today’s arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

Radley comments:

That to me sounds like the country’s top drug cop announcing Emery’s bust was more because of his political activism than because of his law-breaking.

Sounds to me, too. And this means that, not joking, we ought to demand Karen Tandy’s head. She’s announced, straight out, that the United State government intends to use its ability to arrest people and put them in jail as a tactic for squelching political speech that conflicts with the government’s policies. It should come as a surprise to no one that the thrust of the free speech clause of the First Amendment is to ensure that government reflects the free deliberative will of the governed. The freedom to agitate for the alteration of government is a minimal condition for the legitimacy of government. Karen Tandy has not only announced that she is violating the fundamental conditions for the moral legitimacy of the power that she wields, but that she is also proud of it. She has flouted her oath to the Constitution, has wantonly abused her power, is a disgrace as a public servant and a citizen, and must be removed from office.

This isn’t about marijuana, although the triviality of such a benign substance really brings home the enormity of Tandy’s words. Every one of us believes, or may one day believe, that some government policy or other is deeply flawed (war in Iraq, abortion, take your pick). If a government official, with armed agents at her disposal, tries to justifies imprisoning a citizen on the grounds that he has sought through speech to change government policy, then that’s a threat to all of us.

Mr. President: FIRE KAREN TANDY!

I hope people are already making the stickers and the t-shirts, and blast faxing their senators. She’s really got to go.

David Gordon has an interesting discussion of Nagel’s new Philosophy & Public Affairs article on “The Problem of Global Justice.” Apparently, Nagel defends Rawl’s refusal to extend the two principles beyond the bounds of the nation state. I had always thought that those, such as Pogge, who attempt to extend Rawls to the global limit simply failed to truly understand Rawls’s contractarian logic of reciprocity and mutual benefit. The possibility of political obligation is a function of shared partcipation in the cooperative enterprse for mutual advantage. Those outside our system of cooperation who are doing poorly cannot have a claim on those inside our system who are doing well simply because they are outside of our system. Neverthteless, Rawls’s stipulation of a closed economic system and closed borders is not even a useful abstraction for the purposes of ideal theory. It’s a disastrous distortion of socio-political reality. There is not intelligble sense in which “our” system of cooperation is coextensive with the borders of our nation-state.

Here is what Gordon says Nagel says:

In like fashion, Nagel holds, citizens of a nation are bound together. They share the obligation to obey their country’s laws; and, if they live in a democracy, they share responsibility for enacting these laws. In Rousseau’s term, they form the “general will.” Undue inequality interferes with these common bonds; hence we have egalitarian obligations to our fellow citizens. These we do not owe to citizens of other countries, since we are not bound to them in the same way. Justice, in this view, is not a “cosmopolitan” virtue, owed to anyone in the world; it is a “political” virtue that applies only to those subject to a common sovereignty. “The important point for our purposes is that Rawls believes that this moral principle against arbitrary inequalities is not a principle of universal application. . . . Rather, in his theory the objection to arbitrary inequalities gets a foothold only because of the societal context. What is objectionable is that we should be fellow participants in a collective enterprise of coercively imposed legal and political institutions that generate such arbitrary inequalities. . . . One might even say that we are all participants in the general will. A sovereign state is not just a cooperative enterprise for mutual advantage” (pp. 127–28).

Now, I hope Nagel is not using “general will” language in any strict Rousseauian sense, because I’m pretty sure that Rawls does not accept this, and doesn’t get at the point of Rawls’s argument for democracy. The point, somewhat deflated, is easy enough to understand, though. Obviously, two American citizens are tied together through their common relationship to a particular set of democratic processes and system of coercive public adminstration in a way that an American and a Canadian are not. Americans participate in the same elections, send their taxes to the same address, and drive on roads funded out of the same bank account, etc. Insofar as my tax rate, and the roads I’m driving on are a function of my participation in the same (system of) elections as other citzens, then I and another American might be said to bound together a special way. But Nagel seems to understate or miss a large problem when he says that “A sovereign state is not just a cooperative enterprise for mutual advantage.”

No doubt I’ll have to read Nagel’s paper, but it’s not clear to me what being part of a “general will” adds that both legitimates the state, and reinforces state boundaries as the proper bounds of justice. (Why have lots of little general wills, and not just one big one?) In any case, one of Rawls’s problems is that even if the boundaries of the state and the conditions for citizenship enclose and define one particular kind of cooperation for mutual advantage, the totality of morally relevant cooperative relationships are by no means contained by borders and shared citizenship.

John Tomasi likes to tell a story about a Martian anthropologist in a spaceship above Earth who is looking at a political map of our orb. (I’m embellishing on John’s story, so don’t blame him for stupid stuff I say.) Let’s call it Glork to avoid the alien pronoun problem. Now, Glork is totally baffled about why Earthlings are so obsessed by these imaginary lines, because when Glork (with Glork’s tentacle) presses the button on Glork’s viewscreen to show the patterns of mutually advantageous cooperation among Earthlings, the relevance on political boundaries almost disappears. The geographical regions with the wealthiest and most physically robust beings areas are those where the patterns of cooperation are least constrained by political boundaries. Those places where cooperation is most limited to the inside of a region enclosed by political lines (as Rawls’s closed system assumption requires) are the places where no compassionate Martian would wish an Earthling to live.

Now, suppose Glork presses a button to light up regions in different colors depending on their system of governance. Glork finds that the inhabitants of “liberal democracies” are more likely than inhabitants of regions governed by different systems to be engaged in systematic relations of cooperation with people outside their political unit.

Now, Glork aside, isn’t this a big problem for Rawls/Nagel. The political system that they are eager to defend and justify is precisely the system where relations of cooperation are LEAST contained by borders and principles of co-citizenship. The American “general will” accounts for surpassingly little of American relationships of cooperative mutual advantage. Indeed, states are an enormous impediment to more extensive cross-border cooperation. On thing to be said in favor of liberal democratic states is that they are less of an impediment to cooperation than other political systems. Perhaps state-like jurisdictions are necessary for the stability of ongoing cooperation between people living in far-flung regions. Let’s just allow that that’s true. But if justice is the “first virtue” of a society, and a society is a fair scheme of cooperation for mutual advantantage, then I am in society with the people in Japan who made my computer. We traded on fair terms, and we’re both better off. It seems just boneheaded to argue that the principles of justice apply can’t apply extranationally simply because the Japanese don’t vote in our elections and fund our highway system, etc.

But this line of thinking just doensn’t get you to Pogge-like global justice, either. The principles of justice applies to people who are part of a shared system of cooperation. If I’m not part a shared system of cooperation with the Japanese and the Canadians, well I’ll be damned. But the problem with folks, like wretchedly poor Africans, who globalist crytpo-Rawlsians want to send first-world money to on difference principle grounds, is precisely that they aren’t sufficiently a part of a shared system of cooperation with themselves or the outside world. THAT IS WHY THEY ARE SO POOR. But that is also why contractualist logic implies that they don’t have claims on the rest of us.

So, the contractualist logic of cooperation, reciprocity, shared benefits and burdens, identifies networks of trade as the main locus of a proper theory of justice, not the nation state or the whole wide world. Such a theory will need to be cosmopolitan, polycentric, and post-statist to track the moral reality of a globally interconnected world.

“Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.”

- H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful a tooth, as indolence.”

- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to his daughter, Martha Jefferson.

Discussion:

Which famously bigoted hero of liberty knows happiness? Not Mencken!

H.L.’s flare-up of Nietzschean misogyny gets it flat wrong. Marriage has a bigger positive effect on happiness for men than for women. Married men are much happier than single men, and, it seems, even a skoche happier than married women. The feeling of security and well-being, are surely components of happiness. But what these have to do with the following sentence are a mystery lost to time.

Of course, I’m talking about the cramped, mundane happiness of the bourgeouis here, not the wild, expansive happiness of the overflowing soul and indomitable will. As Nietzshe said, “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.”

Jefferson, very much the Englishman, nails it. Unemployment is VERY bad for you. Pace economists, it ain’t experienced as “leisure.” Among the most important things for happiness are a sense of self-efficacy and self-control, and this sense slips when we’re not productively engaged. We begin to feel adrift in the world, tossed by malign external forces we are impotent to resist.

So score one for TJ, who suggests a get-up-and-at-’em slogan for t-shirts and public school bulletin boards everywhere: “Indolence: the canker that corrodes with a baneful tooth!”

At EconLog Bryan argues that one reason constitutions matter is that the content of the constitution has an affect on what people will endorse. He cites a poll showing that more people say they like free speech if the language of the question ties it to the Constitution.

I bet examples like this would be easy to multiply. I suspect, for example, that the Supreme Court’s rulings against regulation during the Lochner era not only restrained majority excesses; they also probably reduced the majority’s support for regulation. No wonder political activists spend so much time in seemingly fruitless quarrels about “what the Constitution really means.” While many people seem to think that the Constitution always favors whatever policy they prefer, there are actually quite a few people who prefer whatever policy they think the Constitution favors.

Is this empirical evidence for Rawls’s claim that constitutions create a basis for public deliberation and justification? Well, maybe. Here is, at least, a possible explanation/justification for the phenomenon Bryan observes.

The fact that a principle appears in the constitution implies that it was the outcome of an earlier political consensus. A citizen can reasonbably assume that there was some good reason why consensus settled on this principle, and so the principle has some support simply in virtue of being embedded in the constitution. In the absence of evidence that a constitutional principle is causing a problem, the rationally ignorant citizen is correct, ceterus paribus, to give more weight to a priciple appearing in the constitution than a principle not appearing in the constitution. Since rationally ignorant folk won’t know what principles are in the constitution, a poll question that tells them that a principle is, while asking them if they agree with it, is likely to enjoy a more positive response.

This is just a specific example of the general principle that it is epistemically rational for cognitively limited agents to respect the cognitive division of labor and defer to epistemic authority. If you’re shooting in the dark for epistemic authorities (identifying them is itself an epistemic problem) framers of constitutions and supreme court judges are good guesses.

By far the best overview of the happiness literature from an economics and policy perspective is Frey & Stutzer’s Happiness and Economics. Frey, a first class constitutional theorist, explores the big impact policy can have on happiness, but warns against construing the happiness function as an approximation of that unicorn of social science, the social welfare function, and then trying to maximize it. F&S point out that the goal of maximizing social welfare has traditionally faced three problems: (1) empirical emptiness; (2) aggregation (Arrow social choice stuff); (3) incentive compatibility (Buchanan public choice stuff). The happiness data perhaps solves (1), but it does not solve (2) or (3). Folks like Layard are particularly inept with respect to (3). Here’s what F&S say:

Missing incentives. Deriving optimal policies by maximizing a social welfare function only makes sense if the government has an incentive to apply the optimal policies in reality. This is only the case if a “benevolent dictator” government is assumed. (Brennan and Buchanan 1985). From introspection as well as from empirical analysis in political economy (see, e.g., the collection of papers on political business cycles in Frey 1997), we know that governments are not benevolent and do not follow the wishes of the population, even in well-functioning democracies, not to mention authoritarian and dictatorial governments. Hence to maximize social welfare corresponds to a “technocratic-elitist” procedure, neglecting the crucial incentive aspect.

This criticism applies particularly when one tries to derive optimal policies by maximizing happiness.

This point cannot possibly be emphasized enough. Even if your theory of value, or your philosophical standard for policy evaluation, is “correct” in some metaphysical sense, this gets us almost nowhere. Why? First, people, especially agents of the state, must understand and broadly agree that it is correct. This is exceedingly unlikely. Second, people, especially agents of the state, must be motivated to reliably act in accordance with its prescriptions. But if understanding and agreement is unlikely, then motivation based on them is unlikely. It may be conceivable to structure incentives so that it is as if agents of the state were motivated by a commitment to a single normative standard, but it is usually unrealistic.

Here is F&S’s approach:

There is a solution on hand that overcomes the problems posed by the impossibility theorem and by the government’s missing incentives. Constitutional political economy (e.g., Buchanan 1991, Frey 1983, Mueller 1996, Cooter 2000) redirects attention to the level of social consensus where, behind the veil of ignorance, the basic rules governing a society–the fundamental institutions–are chosen or emerge. At the same time, the approach shifts from a (vain) effort to directly determine social outcomes to shaping the politico-economic process by setting the institutions.

. . . The fundamental institutions shape the incentives of policymakers. Once these basic institutions are in place and the incentives are set, little can be done to influence the current politico-economic process. Economic policy therefore must help to establish those fundamental institutions, which lead to the best possible fulfilment of individual preferences. Research in positive constitutional economics helps to identify which institutions serve this goal, and whether they do in fact systematically affect happiness.

F&S’s research shows that procedural aspects of government, such as the directness of democratic participation and the degree of decentralized federalism, are themselves determinants of happiness. The Swiss are among the happiest people in the world not only because they are fabulously wealthy, but because the canton system allows for direct democratic rule of over local jurisdictions, with little interference from the central state.

Via Jesse Walker, comes this BBC article on the possibility of using beta blockers to blot out bad memories. This makes Jesse think of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I am put in mind of Thomas Schelling’s amazing essay “The Mind as a Consuming Organ.” A selection:

An unavoidable question is whether I could be happier if I could only believe things more favorable, more complimentary, more in line with my hopes and wishes, than what I believe to be true. That might be done by coming to believe things that are contrary to what I know, such as that my reputation or my health or my children’s health is better than it is, my financial prospects or my childrens’ better than they are, and that I have performed ably and bravely on those occasions when I did not. Or it might be accomplished by improving the mix of my beliefs by dropping out–forgetting–some of the things that cause me guilt grief, remorse, and anxiety. [emphasis added]

If the answer is, “Yes, you would be happier,” then what is the correct response? So much the worse for truth? So much the worse for happiness? A subtle and cautious blend?

Let’s go back to Layard’s attempt to justify his relative position “pollution” argument for taxation against his strawman libertarian critic:

Libertarians strongly object to this argument. They say it panders to the ignoble sentiment of envy, which ought to be disregarded. This is an extraordinarily weak argument. Public policy has to deal with human nature as it is. The desire for status is ubiquitous, and we all recognise it. Greed is also common, and libertarians do not disallow it. So why should they disallow the desire for status? Both sentiments are features of human nature. We are not perfect, and public policy should help us make the best of what we are. [Happiness, p. 153]

How many things are wrong with this argument? Feel free to count to ways in the comments.

Let me just say that it is cheap to equivocate between the desire for status and the desire for relative position in the income distribution. The latter is a contingent cultural expression of the former, as Layard himself concedes. And so public policy “dealing with human nature as it is” isn’t therefore public policy that treats our tastes for relative position in the income distribution as having normative weight. Our taste for coalitional solidarity and out-group xenophobia is natural in precisely the same way that our taste for status is. But we don’t think that this confers any significant normative weight on any old cultural expression of our tribalist impulses, such as apartheid, Jim Crow, or the Final Solution.

OK. Now try to square Layard’s “rebuttal” to the libertarian with the following. . .

First, Layard emphasizes in a number of places that many of our tastes, desires, preference, etc., are determined endogenously by institutional and cultural factors. Second, he argues convincingly that we can choose to change our own preferences.

The fact is, we can train our feelings. [p. 188]

Advocating Buddhist meditation Layard says:

Buddhism tells us to address the “poisons” that are disturbing our peace of mind: our unrealistic cravings and our tempestuous anger and resentment. [p. 189]

It is difficult not to draw the connection between this “poison” and the “pollution” that is caused by our taste for relative position. The difference is that here Layard clearly admits that the poisons are a function of our own states of mind–our unrealistic cravings–not simply the external fact that others have moved up relative to us.

Advocating the practice of cognitive psychotherapy, he writes:

If happiness depends on the gap between your perceived reality and your prior aspiration, cognitive therapy deals mainly with the perception of reality. [p. 197]

From his discussion of Buddhism, Christian mysticism, and cognitive therapy, Layard draws this lesson:

A second conclusion is that we have to control our tendency to compare ourselves with others. [p. 199]

(The first conclusion is that we ought to develop Buddhist habits of mindful attention to the present, which is also a way of controlling desire based in social comparison.)

Finally, Layard says that public policy can help by undertaking the “education of the spirit” through, naturally, mandatory state-funded spiritual education programs aimed at producing more open, compassionate, benovelent, and less comparison obsessed children.[p. 200-1]

Other than the monstrously illiberal suggestion that there ought to be a state curriculum in spiritual education, I agree entirely with Layard’s emphasis on our ability to shape our preferences through meditation, cognitive therapy, and, I would add, literary experience. But the spiritual education idea, in any case, amounts to conceding that a tax may not be the conclusion of the externalities/pollution argument, even if we insist on structuring policy around human nature as it is.

Indeed, if one of the most important lessons we should take away is that we can and should control our preferences based in social comparison, then why would we make public policy of a tax that is justified entirely in terms of those same unhealthy and controllable preferences? By choosing to treat these preferences as having normative weight in tax policy, isn’t the state sending exactly the wrong signal? Wouldn’t this be like arguing for a special tax on blacks on the grounds that this would increase total utility by pleasing the racist white majority, even though one has admitted that racist preferences are pernicious, and should be changed?

If you missed Nathan Smith’s TCS article on the ongoing saga of Social Security reform, do check it out.

Bush’s plan for carve-out private accounts would have amounted, institutionally, to a sort of Great Leap Forward. DeMint’s plan will set in motion incremental changes which may be compared to knocking down a row of dominoes. The first domino to fall is the payroll tax surplus in the Trust Fund. The second domino will be the excessive scheduled benefits that drive the program into long-term bankruptcy. The third domino will be the restriction of personal retirement accounts (initially created as lockboxes to stop the raid on the Trust Fund) to T-bonds. When that falls, all Bush’s Social Security reform goals will have been accomplished, and we’ll have a system of forced savings and private accounts.

Suppose that the DeMint plan passes and personal accounts are created from the surplus, then fast-forward two years. Now every working person under 55 — well over 100 million Americans — will own a personal retirement account consisting of US Treasury bonds. Since everyone and his brother knows that Social Security can’t pay promised benefits in the long run, most young people will see these accounts as their sole source of real retirement security. But they’ll also realize that the personal accounts are too small to underwrite a comfortable retirement. Moreover, they will learn that new money will cease being deposited in their accounts after about 2018, when the Baby Boomers’ retirement puts an end to the surpluses.

At this point, there will be pressure from younger voters to increase the size of their personal retirement accounts. If, up until now, the Social Security program has consisted of one-sided class warfare, with the old fighting against the young and the young not defending themselves, personal accounts will clarify younger generations’ stake in the fight.

Nice account of what perhaps should have been the strategy all along. I don’t have a good independent sense of what DeMint’s odds are. Probably not great, but better than than is being reported.

“I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.”

- Captain Shotover in George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House

Discussion:

No doubt it would be helpful if I had read the play, rather than just combing the Columbia Encyclopedia of Quotations, but the Captain seems to me to be making an experience machine-like point. Some kinds of happiness, the accursed “happiness of yielding and dreaming,” are worth less than other kinds of happiness, the happiness of “resisting and doing.” The problem with the happiness of yielding and dreaming, the “happiness that comes as life goes,” isn’t that it doesn’t feel good, but that it feels too good. The “sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten” is too sweet, and encourages our indolence. When we indulge in it, we become rotten. The special value of the happiness of resisting and doing lies not solely in the distinctive feeling of resisting and doing, but in the fact that we are exercising our capacities, that we are doing, that we are really living, rather than rotting sweetly, happily, and accursedly on the vine.

“Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”

– Robertson Davies

Discussion:

Brad DeLong’s head may explode, but you know what Davies means. An unhappy life is not a life without value. Indeed, there may be treasures in unhappiness. There is evidence that happier people are more self-deceiving, for instance. So it may be that unhappiness enables self-knowledge, or outward knowledge unclouded by the mists of optimism. Of course, one is not made happier by dwelling on unhappiness, so refusing to dwell on it may mitigate it. But refusing to dwell on it also allows one to reorient to other values–knowledge, virtue, spiritual communion–one may, unhappily, achieve. This reorientation may, in the end, bring some measure of happiness. Yet even if it doesn’t, life will be better for it.

This fascinating paper by Di Tella and MacCulloch shows that the simple fact that one’s favored political party is in power has a big effect on happiness:

A surprising finding of the paper concerns the relative importance of politics. We include in our partisan happiness equations a variable that measures the ideological position of the government in power. It indicates that when the government leans more to the right ideologically, right-wing individuals tick up their happiness scores. In the same periods, left-wing individuals declare themselves to be more dissatisfied with their lives. The size of the coefficient is large and highly significant. A right-wing individual living under Mitterrand would be willing to put up with an increase of 11 percentage points in the inflation rate in order to see Margaret Thatcher take charge of the government. One possible explanation for this result is that there are other policies, not linked to macroeconomics in nature, along which governments differ and that our analysis ignores. These could include agricultural policy, the approach to fighting crime, the policy on abortion and other social issues, etc. But another possibility is that politics enters directly into the utility function (or that people simply care about winning). Furthermore, the variable capturing the ideological position of the government (Right Wing Government) is strongly correlated with inflation (negatively) and unemployment (positively). Thus, there seem to be two channels through which governments affect the well-being of their constituencies: a direct channel and an indirect effect through unemployment and inflation. Our results indicate that the color of the government matters for a large part of the population. [emphasis added]

My favorite hypothesis is that coalitional success enters directly into the welfare function. Now, this is fascinating for all sorts of reasons. For instance, it would seem, then, that the need to maintain a distinct and coherent coalitional identity will limit median-voter convergence. It also implies weird things for utilitarians who insist on maximizing relative to current preferences. If the utility hit to rightwingers out of power, for example, is greater than the utility to hit to leftwingers out of power, then, other things being equal utility-wise, it could turn out that a rightwinger minority should be put in power over a leftwinger majority. The general application of this kind of thinking is that partisans will try to convince their side that being out of power is really depressing, with the result that no matter who is in power, half the population is really depressed.

But let me instead point out a picayune possible implication for libertarians. People apparently like unemployment insurance because we tend to prefer that our income changes in a relatively smooth way, rather than suddenly and drastically. Could libertarianism be a utility smoothing individual political strategy. You’re never in power, but then you’re never out of power either. No ups, no down, no anxiety about the next raise always around the corner. In a world of partisan volatility, libertarianism is a kind of insurance against hedonic swings from politics. Whether this leaves us better off on net is an open question.