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anonymous

Why All Indiscretions Appear Youthful - 0 views

  • In recent years psychologists have exposed the many ways that people subconsciously maintain and massage their moral self-image. They rate themselves as morally superior to the next person; overestimate the likelihood that they will act virtuously in the future; see their own good intentions as praiseworthy while dismissing others’ as inconsequential. And they soften their moral principles when doing a truly dirty job, like carrying out orders to exploit uninformed customers.
  • In piecing together a life story, the mind nudges moral lapses back in time and shunts good deeds forward, these new studies suggest — creating, in effect, a doctored autobiography.
  • “We can’t make up the past, but the brain has difficulty placing events in time, and we’re able to shift elements around,” said Anne E. Wilson, a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. “The result is that we can create a personal history that, if not perfect, makes us feel we’re getting better and better.”
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  • “People honestly view their past in a morally critical light, but at the same time they tend to emphasize that they have been improving,” the authors concluded.
  • But the mind seems particularly prone to backdating when it comes to cruel, greedy or cowardly acts — the physical evidence people weigh against stand-up deeds to judge whether they are as good as their parents told them they were. In a 2001 paper titled “From Chump to Champ,” Dr. Wilson and Michael Ross of the University of Waterloo demonstrated in a series of experiments that young adults described their teenage selves in far more negative terms than they did their current selves, often skewering their past judgment.
  • “The weirdest thing about reading about all these bad moral choices,” Dr. Escobedo said, “is that it makes you kind of feel good about yourself. Just seeing how everyone makes mistakes and regrets not doing what was morally right: It makes you feel more attached to humanity.”
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    "In recent years psychologists have exposed the many ways that people subconsciously maintain and massage their moral self-image. They rate themselves as morally superior to the next person; overestimate the likelihood that they will act virtuously in the future; see their own good intentions as praiseworthy while dismissing others' as inconsequential. And they soften their moral principles when doing a truly dirty job, like carrying out orders to exploit uninformed customers. " By Benedict Carey at The New York Times on October 4, 2010. Thanks to Shannon Turlington for the pointer.
anonymous

Rand & Human Nature 3 - 0 views

  • The first strong hint that this might be the case was unconvered by Hume, who persuasively demonstrated that, logically speaking, it was invalid to derive an ought conclusion from two is premises.
  • in the absence of some desire, sentiment, or other natural and emotive need, no moral end could arise.
  • The second strong hint comes from George Santayana, who, in his demolishment of Moore's ethical philosophy (as limned by Russell) , noted that all arguments for morality committed the ad hominem fallacy
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  • The third strong hint was noticed, among others, by Pareto when, in his mammoth work investigating the relation between conduct and belief, Trattato di sociologia generale, he noticed that most moral philosophies were devoid of specific ethical content.
  • the purpose of moral philosophy is not to provide guidance
  • but to coddle and flatter human sentiments.
  • Scientific experiments on human behavior only serve to reinforce Pareto's hypothesis. What they demonstrate is that human beings develop a sense for morality well before they are ever exposed, or could even understand, abstract moral philosophy
  • When we apply these insights to the Objectivist ethics, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Rand's moral system, like the moral systems of so many other philosophers, consists almost entirely of the rationalization of moral ideals that existed well before any set of abstractions was built around them.
  • the strongest evidence of all consists in the rather surprising fact, unnoticed and evaded by most Objectivists, that Rand's ethical philosophy is devoid of specific content, and that no one could actually use it as a guide for behavior
  • Lacking a "technology" means that no Objectivist, including Rand herself, actually follows the Objectivist morality.
  • Other than a few vague hints, Rand and her disciples never bothered to explain how to distinguish those contexts in which such virtues as honesty, productivity, integrity, and rationality were absolutes from those contexts in which these fine virtues no longer applied.
  • If Rand's ethics were intended (as Rand insisted) to provide a manual for survival, how come the manual doesn't come with any instructions?
  • The most plausible explanation is that the Objectivist ethics is a rationalization of Rand's own moral preferences, many of which were the product of her own, private cognitive unconscious, which she misidentified with "reason" and objective truth.
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    "Moral Philosophy = Rationalization. There are convincing and powerful reasons to believe that nearly all that passes for what might be called exhortive, "normative" ethical philosophy is almost certainly rationalization."
anonymous

Your Media Diet is Immoral - 0 views

  • here are two important and related limits that I would like to focus on: the limits of our truth-seeking capabilities, as best documented in the biases literature, and the limits of what Daniel Kahneman calls our “slow thinking” capabilities.
  • In the first case, I refer to the fact that we are not some ideal Bayesian-updating computer, but in fact rely primarily on a ton of mental shortcuts that are usually useful but can and do often lead us systematically awry.
  • In the second case, I refer to the fact that deliberation and making choices consume energy, just as surely as physical exercise does.
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  • What this adds up to is the simple fact that there’s a finite amount of things we can devote careful thought to on a given day, and the more we burn our energy doing other things the smaller that limit becomes.
  • As Kahneman and Haidt and others point out, even when you’re deliberating carefully there are shortcuts going on in the background. Nevertheless, for something like a math problem, “slow thinking” is much more likely to perform well when we are rested and our blood sugar is high, relative to where we are by the end of a full day of mental or physical activity.
  • Effective deliberation is bounded by these conditions.
  • Even our more telescopic friends do not have the stamina or the time to carefully investigate the relevant moral context of all of the stories that they consume. The feast is far too great, and the eating feels far too good, to examine all of the parts and bother to ask how all of it was made.
  • And most people are not so telescopic, or only take on the posture of being it. Nearly all of us prioritize deliberation about near things; what to wear today, how to best finish a task at our job, or what to say to comfort a friend going through something. And that’s how we should be. After all, the things that are in our lives are what we have the most context for.
  • Given the limited nature of careful deliberation, and given how our biases are likely to respond to out of context stories we carelessly consume, we are not likely judge most news stories accurately.
  • Storytelling in the public sphere, in its best form, is like an ongoing conversation that has no end in sight. Ask yourself: what conversations matter to you? Which are relevant to your life, and which are relevant to your interests? After figuring that out, be stricter about excluding stories that fall outside of those conversations.
  • Most importantly, let go of any pretense of telescopic morality. It will only hold you back from the things that really matter, the things on which you can make a difference and for which you have the most context on which to deliberate.
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    "Moral determinations require context. Modern journalism, which faces a powerful tension between the context that is morally relevant and the context which makes a good narrative, has to cope with difficult ethical problems. However, journalism is not really serving two masters, the ethics of journalists on the one hand and the craft of storytelling on the other. No, journalism serves but one master-its audience. If a particular outlet is morally deficient, its audience must bear at least some culpability, for no outlet can continue without its audience."
anonymous

'The Righteous Mind,' by Jonathan Haidt - 0 views

  • That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.
  • David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions.
  • To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided.
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  • The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others.
  • Haidt’s account of reason is a bit too simple — his whole book, after all, is a deployment of reason to advance learning — and his advice sounds cynical. But set aside those objections for now, and go with him. If you follow Haidt through the tunnel of cynicism, you’ll find that what he’s really after is enlightenment. He wants to open your mind to the moral intuitions of other people.
  • The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don’t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order. They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality.
  • These moral systems aren’t ignorant or backward. Haidt argues that they’re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we’re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn’t, we reject it.
  • This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet.
  • Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.”
  • Saving Darfur, submitting to the United Nations and paying taxes to educate children in another state may be noble, but they aren’t natural. What’s natural is giving to your church, helping your P.T.A. and rallying together as Americans against a foreign threat.
    • anonymous
       
      From Chris Blattman: Haidt's previous book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was a fantastic introduction to the psychology of behavior and morality. And I think the basic message of the new book rings true. So I am inclined to recommend it. My impression from the last book: Haidt has a very slight tendency to hyperbole, and it's a shame he doesn't distinguish between the weak and strong evidence. He's a skilful writer and his own research looks clever, and so I think he could fix this without making his books boring. I'm curious, though. Readers who actually know something about cognitive psychology: what's Haidt's street cred? http://chrisblattman.com/2012/03/27/the-tyrany-of-moral-intuition/
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    You're smart. You're liberal. You're well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can't understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they're being duped. You're wrong. This isn't an accusation from the right. It's a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. 
anonymous

The Banality of Systemic Evil - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Tellingly, a recent Time magazine cover story has pointed out a marked generational difference in how people view these matters: 70 percent of those age 18 to 34 sampled in a poll said they believed that Snowden “did a good thing” in leaking the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.
  • Hannah Arendt made an observation about what she called “the banality of evil.”
  • a statement about what happens when people play their “proper” roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences.
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  • The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”:
  • (1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.
  • Swartz, who committed suicide in January at age 26 (many believe because of his prosecution), said that “Moral Mazes” did an excellent job of “explaining how so many well-intentioned people can end up committing so much evil.”
  • Swartz engaged in an act of civil disobedience to liberate that knowledge, arguing that “there is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”
  • Upon investigating the matter, Manning discovered that none of the 15 had previous ties to anti-Iraqi actions or suspected terrorist organizations. Manning had the allegedly anti-Iraqi literature translated and found that, contrary to what the federal police had said, the published literature in question “detailed corruption within the cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi people.” When Manning reported this discrepancy to the officer in charge (OIC), she was told to “drop it,” she recounted.
  • The bureaucracy was telling him to shut up and move on (in accord with the five rules in “Moral Mazes”), but Snowden felt that doing so was morally wrong.
  • But wasn’t there arrogance or hubris in Snowden’s and Manning’s decisions to leak the documents? After all, weren’t there established procedures determining what was right further up the organizational chart? Weren’t these ethical decisions better left to someone with a higher pay grade? The former United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, argued that Snowden “thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us … that he can see clearer than other 299, 999, 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason.”
  • For the leaker and whistleblower the answer to Bolton is that there can be no expectation that the system will act morally of its own accord.
  • The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision.
  • The media’s desire to psychoanalyze members of generation W is natural enough. They want to know why these people are acting in a way that they, members of the corporate media, would not.
  • But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if there are psychological motivations for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure within a system — in this case a system in which corporate media plays an important role.
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    "In recent months there has been a visible struggle in the media to come to grips with the leaking, whistle-blowing and hacktivism that has vexed the United States military and the private and government intelligence communities. This response has run the gamut. It has involved attempts to condemn, support, demonize, psychoanalyze and in some cases canonize figures like Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden."
anonymous

Can Jared Loughner help us get beyond good and evil? - 0 views

  • Feeney's piece is worth reading in its entirety, as is Beyond Good and Evil. It's a lot to sum up in a blog post, but Nietzsche basically says there are two types of moral systems: master-morality and slave-morality. His best summary is section 260. In master-morality, the ruling class makes the rules and thus considers itself noble, while in slave morality, there is a suspicion of those in power and in what they consider "good."
  • In other words, it's all a big misunderstanding based on your point of view, kind of like how you might see Palin as evil when your neighbor sees her as good.
  • What's interesting in relation to mass murders like the Tucson incident is that people can rationalize their way into an internally consistent logic that normalizes their thoughts and actions.
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  • When Giffords gave an apparently unacceptable response to Loughner's obtuse question about language not being real, she seems to have caused him some cognitive dissonance. He apparently expected her to recognize his intellectual superiority, and when she didn't, he became fixated on what he saw as a slight that threw his self-assessment into question.
  • Everyone, myself included, probably has a delusion or two in their belief system. Once in a while they combine with other factors in a person to create a lethal combination: anger, incompetence, rejection, isolation, lack of empathy, drug-induced hallucinations, participation in economies of violence, unthinking behavior, production of a flawed script. That's not evil. It's simply a tragic nexus of human flaws that can culminate in what is too easily dismissed as evil.
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    "Nietzsche is frequently a fave of angry young men who might qualify as what Pesco called confident dumb people. Nietzsche works well for the modern kook with web-induced attention deficits: The fourth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil is a series of 122 Twitter-length aphorisms, and his work is snarky and occasionally humorous. Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil to criticize earlier philosophers who made assumptions about morality based on pre-Christian and Christian beliefs about "evil." Below I discuss why we need to steal Nietzsche back from these people, and I look at a couple of other writers who have examined what gets called "evil" and have attempted to explain it in more nuanced and rational terms."
anonymous

1848: History's Shadow Over the Middle East - 0 views

  • ethnic interests in Europe soon trumped universalist longings.
  • While ethnic Germans and Hungarians cheered the weakening of Habsburg rule in massive street protests that inspired liberal intelligentsia throughout the Western world, there were Slavs and Romanians who feared the very freedom for which the Germans and Hungarians cried out. Rather than cheer on democracy per se, Slavs and Romanians feared the tyranny of majority rule.
  • There are fundamental differences between 1848 in Europe and 2011-2012 in the Middle East.
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  • his polyglot Habsburg system, lying at the geographical center of Europe, constituted a morality in and of itself, necessary as it was for peace among the ethnic nations. This is why Metternich's system survived, even as he himself was replaced in 1848.
  • While there is no equivalent in the Middle East of the Habsburg system, not every dictatorial regime in the Arab world is expendable for some of the same reasons that Habsburg Austria's was not.
  • That is the burdensome reality of the Middle East today: If conservative -- even reactionary -- orders are necessary for inter-communal peace, then they may survive in one form or another, or at least resurface in places such as Egypt and Iraq.
  • Iraq in 2006 and 2007 proved that chaos is in some respects worse than tyranny. Thus, a system is simply not moral if it cannot preserve domestic peace.
  • nobody is saying that conservative-reactionary orders will lead to social betterment. Nonetheless, because order is necessary before progress can take hold, reactionary regimes could be the beneficiary of chaos in some Middle Eastern states, in a similar way that the Habsburgs were after 1848. For it is conservative regimes of one type or another that are more likely to be called upon to restore order.
  • To wit, if the military is seen to be necessary for communal peace between Muslims and Copts in Egypt, that will give the generals yet another reason to share power with Islamists, rather than retreat entirely from politics. The overthrow of Mubarak will therefore signify not a revolution but a coup.
  • Indeed, democratic uprisings in 1848 did not secure democracy, they merely served notice that society had become too restive and too complex for the existent monarchical regimes to insure both order and progress.
  • So one should not confuse the formation of new regimes in the Middle East with their actual consolidation.
  • If new bureaucratic institutions do not emerge in a more socially complex Middle East, the Arab Spring will be a false one, and it will be remembered like 1848.
  • Syria is at this very moment a bellwether. It is afflicted by ethnic and sectarian splits -- Sunnis versus Shia-trending Alawites versus Druze and Kurds. But Syria also can claim historical coherence as an age-old cluster of cosmopolitanism at the crossroads of the desert and the Mediterranean, a place littered with the ruins of Byzantine and medieval Arab civilizations. The Western intelligentsia now equate a moral outcome in Syria with the toppling of the present dictator, who requires those sectarian splits to survive.
  • But soon enough, following the expected end of al Assad's regime, a moral outcome will be associated with the re-establishment of domestic order and the building of institutions -- coercive or not. Because only with that can progress be initiated.
  • 1848 had tragic repercussions: While democracy in Europe flowered briefly following World War I, it was snuffed out by fascism and then communism. Thus, 1848 had to wait until 1989 to truly renew itself.
  • Because of technology's quickened advance, political change is faster in the Middle East. But for 2011 to truly be remembered as the year of democracy in the Arab world, new forms of non-oppressive order will first have to be established. And with the likely exception of Tunisia -- a country close to Europe with no ethnic or sectarian splits -- that appears for the moment to be problematic.
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    1848 in Europe was the year that wasn't. In the spring and summer of that year, bourgeois intellectuals and working-class radicals staged upheavals from France to the Balkans, shaking ancient regimes and vowing to create new liberal democratic orders. The Arab Spring has periodically been compared to the stirrings of 1848. But with the exception of the toppling of the Orleans monarchy in France, the 1848 revolutions ultimately failed. Dynastic governments reasserted themselves. They did so for a reason that has troubling implications for the Middle East: Conservative regimes in mid-19th century Europe had not only the institutional advantage over their liberal and socialist adversaries but also the moral advantage.
anonymous

Ayn Rand & Human Nature 19 - 0 views

  • In the first place, it is logically fallacious to reason from two is premises to an ought conclusion, something Rand appears not to have understood. Secondly, it is psychologically impossible to derive the an end from reason. Reason is a method, a means for attaining an end. But an end must be wished for it's own sake, because it satisfies some sentiment or desire.
  • And finally, there exists an immense body of research demonstrating that reason is not used to make moral decisions; on the contrary, where reason comes in is after the decision has been made. The role of reason is not to make moral choices, but to defend them after the fact.
  • If reasoning played a central role in moral judgments, we would expect better reasoners to arrive at different conclusions from inferior reasoners. But this is not what the research finds. Smarter, more educated people don't reach different conclusions, they just provide more reasons to support their side of the issue. When people reason about issues of morality, they are blinded by confirmation bias.
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  • Reason, as Nietzsche warned us, is a whore. She will sleep with any premises you throw at her, no matter how anti-empirical or absurd.
  • "skilled arguers ... are not after the truth butafter arguments supporting their views." This explains why the confirmation biasis so powerful, and so ineradicable. How hard could it be to teach students toalways look on the other side, to always look for evidence against their favoredviews? Yet, in fact, it's really hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it.It's hard because the confirmation bias is a built-in feature..., not a bug thatcan be removed...
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    Rand places enormous stress on individual conscious reasoning. "Reason" is her chief moral virtue and is considered a necessity to man's survival. Not surprising, Rand regarded "reason" as particularly important in ethics. Rand regarded any attempt to derive ethical behavior from intuition or gut feelings or emotion as mere "whim worship," which she denounced in fierce, vigorous language.
anonymous

What is a Dictator? - 0 views

  • Deng Xiaoping was a dictator, right? After all, he was the Communist Party boss of China from 1978 to 1992. He was not elected. He ruled through fear. He approved the massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.
  • But he also led China in the direction of a market economy that raised the standard of living and the degree of personal freedoms for more people in a shorter period of time than perhaps ever before in recorded economic history. For that achievement, one could arguably rate Deng as one of the greatest men of the 20th century, on par with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
  • So is it fair to put Deng in the same category as Saddam Hussein, or even Hosni Mubarak, the leader of Egypt
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  • Or what about Lee Kuan Yew and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali? During the early phases of Lee's rule in Singapore he certainly behaved in an authoritarian style, as did Ben Ali throughout his entire rule in Tunisia. So don't they both deserve to be called authoritarians? Yet Lee raised the standard of living and quality of life in Singapore from the equivalent of some of the poorest African countries in the 1960s to that of the wealthiest countries in the West by the early 1990s. He also instituted meritocracy, good governance, and world-class urban planning.
  • Dividing the world in black and white terms between dictators and democrats completely misses the political and moral complexity of the situation on the ground in many dozens of countries.
  • The twin categories of democrats and dictators are simply too broad for an adequate understanding of many places and their rulers -- and thus for an adequate understanding of geopolitics.
  • But because reality is by its very nature complex, too much simplification leads to an unsophisticated view of the world. One of the strong suits of the best intellectuals and geopoliticians is their tendency to reward complex thinking and their attendant ability to draw fine distinctions.
  • Fine distinctions should be what geopolitics and political science are about. It means that we recognize a world in which, just as there are bad democrats, there are good dictators. World leaders in many cases should not be classified in black and white terms, but in many indeterminate shades, covering the spectrum from black to white.
  • Nawaz Sharif and his rival, the late Benazir Bhutto, when they alternately ruled Pakistan in the 1990s were terrible administrators. They were both elected by voters, but each governed in a thoroughly corrupt, undisciplined and unwise manner that made their country less stable and laid the foundation for military rule.
  • They were democrats, but illiberal ones.
  • The late King Hussein of Jordan and the late Park Chung Hee of South Korea were both dictators, but their dynamic, enlightened rules took unstable pieces of geography and provided them with development and consequent relative stability.
  • They were dictators, but liberal ones.
  • Amid this political and moral complexity that spans disparate regions of the Earth, some patterns do emerge.
  • On the whole, Asian dictators have performed better than Middle Eastern ones.
  • All of these men, including the Muslim Mahathir, were influenced, however indirectly and vaguely, by a body of values known as Confucianism: respect for hierarchy, elders, and, in general, ethical living in the here-and-now of this world.
    • anonymous
       
      This would work nicely with John Green's bit on Confucianism in Crash Course World History.
  • Rather than Confucianism, Saddam and al Assad were motivated by Baathism, a half-baked Arab socialism so viciously opposed to Western colonialism that it created a far worse tyranny of its own.
  • Beyond the Middle East and Asia there is the case of Russia. In the 1990s, Russia was ruled by Boris Yeltsin, a man lauded in the West for being a democrat. But his undisciplined rule led to sheer economic and social chaos.
  • Finally, there is the most morally vexing case of all: that of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pinochet created more than a million new jobs, reduced the poverty rate from a third of the population to as low as a tenth, and the infant mortality rate from 78 per 1,000 to 18.
  • Pinochet's Chile was one of the few non-Asian countries in the world to experience double-digit Asian levels of economic growth at the time. Pinochet prepared his country well for eventual democracy, even as his economic policy became a model for the developing and post-Communist worlds.
  • But Pinochet is also rightly the object of intense hatred among liberals and humanitarians the world over for perpetrating years of systematic torture against tens of thousands of victims. So where does he fall on the spectrum from black to white?
  • The question of whether ends justify means should not only be answered by metaphysical doctrine, but also by empirical observation -- sometimes ends do justify means, sometimes they don't.
  • Sometimes the means are unconnected to the ends, and are therefore to be condemned, as is the case with Chile. Such is the intricacy of the political and moral universe. Complexity and fine distinctions are things to be embraced; otherwise geopolitics, political science, and related disciplines distort rather than illuminate.
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    "What is a dictator, or an authoritarian? I'll bet you think you know. But perhaps you don't. Sure, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong were dictators. So were Saddam Hussein and both Hafez and Bashar al Assad. But in many cases the situation is not that simple and stark. In many cases the reality -- and the morality -- of the situation is far more complex."
anonymous

What will future generations condemn us for? - 0 views

  • First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
  • a look at the past suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation.
  • Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")
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  • And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.
  • four contenders
  • Our prison system
  • Industrial meat production
  • The institutionalized and isolated elderly
  • The environment
  • Roughly 1 percent of adults in this country are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. No other nation has as large a proportion of its population in prison; even China's rate is less than half of ours.
  • People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they're doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in our industrial abattoirs.
  • Other elderly Americans may live independently, but often they are isolated and cut off from their families. (The United States is not alone among advanced democracies in this. Consider the heat wave that hit France in 2003: While many families were enjoying their summer vacations, some 14,000 elderly parents and grandparents were left to perish in the stifling temperatures.)
  • Look at a satellite picture of Russia, and you'll see a vast expanse of parched wasteland where decades earlier was a lush and verdant landscape. That's the Republic of Kalmykia, home to what was recognized in the 1990s as Europe's first man-made desert.
  • Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, is the author of "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen."
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    "Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today." By Kwame Anthony Appiah at The Washington Post on September 26, 2010.
anonymous

Middle-Aged Columnists Think America Is In Decline. Big Surprise. - 0 views

  • A Google search for the phrase “America’s decline” turns up 42,500 hits. Comparisons to Rome and other once-powerful empires abound, as in Cullen Murphy’s popular 2007 book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. From the Tea Party right comes the constant, screeching cry that President Obama and the Democrats are “destroying America.” The National Intelligence Council itself, a few years ago, predicted the “erosion” of American power relative to China and India. Clearly, the most popular classical figure in America today is that high-strung Trojan lady, Cassandra.
  • Twenty-two years ago, in a refreshingly clear-sighted article for Foreign Affairs, Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington noted that the theme of “America’s decline” had in fact been a constant in American culture and politics since at least the late 1950s.
  • What is particularly fascinating about these older predictions is that so many of their themes remain constant. What did our past Cassandras see as the causes of America’s decline? On the one hand, internal weaknesses—spiraling budget and trade deficits, the poor performance of our primary and secondary educational systems; political paralysis—coupled with an arrogant tendency toward “imperial overstretch.” And on the other hand, the rise of tougher, better-disciplined rivals elsewhere: the Soviet Union through the mid-'80s; Japan until the early '90s; China today.
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  • What the long history of American “declinism”—as opposed to America’s actual possible decline—suggests is that these anxieties have an existence of their own that is quite distinct from the actual geopolitical position of our country; that they arise as much from something deeply rooted in the collective psyche of our chattering classes as from sober political and economic analyses.
  • nations do not in fact behave like individuals.
  • But the psychological impulse to see the country in decline leads writers again and again to neglect these differences, and to cast the story of a huge, complex nation as a simple individual morality play.
  • Would Rome not have fallen if a group of clear-sighted, hardheaded Roman commentators had sternly told the country to buck up in the late third century, lest the empire share the fate of Persia? Was Great Britain’s decline in the twentieth century a product of moral flabbiness that a strong dose of character-building medicine could have reversed?
  • We would do better to recognize that calling ourselves “the new Romans” is really just a seductive fantasy, and that our political and economic problems demand political and economic solutions, not exercises in collective moral self-flagellation.
  •  
    "Yet again this Sunday, Thomas L. Friedman used his column in The New York Times to issue an ominous warning about America's decline. Quoting from Lewis Mumford about the moral decadence of imperial Rome, he commented: "It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it sends a shiver down my spine-way, way too close for comfort." He ended the column with a call for a third-party candidate in 2012 with the courage to say to the voters: "I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world's leaders, not the new Romans."" By David A. Bell on October 7, 2010.
anonymous

Who Makes The Randroids? Inside an ARI Weekend Workshop. - 0 views

  • A typical Objectivist assurance that rational debate is welcome and encouraged. So how did it measure up? Well, let's find out.
  • One, while arguing that abortion is permissible in the third trimester, added this classic Objectivist line to his argument: A is A. A is A entails that abortion is moral? Call the press! The pro-lifers have been officially refuted. And absolutely hilarious was the debate between a Randroid and an ideological anarchist (Editor: did the anarchist call the Randroid a "statist"?? They really hate that!). If only we had a dogmatic libertarian, we could have had the cultist right trifecta!
  • And another remarkable statement: Mr. Biddle told several students that morally we would be justified in overthrowing our government because it is more powerful than the one the Founders overthrew (he does not advocate it because it would be unpractical - but then what happened to Rand's claim that the moral is the practical?)
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  • To be fair, I don't think that most students were as enamored of the book as he was, but still there was an air of fawning about the sessions. The professors helped guide the discussions but otherwise generally stayed out of the way. Interesting to note that the handful of times I criticized Objectivism or Atlas, they were sure to 'correct' me. Not brusquely or rudely, but nonetheless the message was that we were supposed to believe what Rand said (in the group think model, they would be the "mind guards").
  • Unfortunately, his topics were pretty standard fare for those well versed in libertarianism: communism is evil, the welfare state is pretty darn bad too, we need to go back to a commodity standard, and the Fed was the prime mover behind America's Great Recession.
  • So what is the net sum of this potpourri of ideas, quackery, and economics? Some good, I'm sure, but a dangerous potential for evil. I had been a libertarian and Objectivist fanatic for long enough to be familiar with most of the ideas presented in Clemson, but my roommate, who is new to the movement, said he learned a lot, so there's a good chance that many students picked up on a lot of radical right ideas. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
  • The trouble is that there were almost no caveats. Dr. Thomson's encouragement to free thinking aside, Rand's ideas were presented as the truth, without any warnings that they were controversial.
  • All too often, as Robert A. Heinlein once said, man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. And what's been 'proved' with 'reason' usually turns out to be some arbitrary claim by Rand. As Dr. Eric Daniels said: "To understand political economy, you need to understand man". Sadly, man is perhaps what Objectivism understands the least.
  •  
    "Our ARCHNblog mole "Mr A" goes undercover at an Ayn Rand Institute weekend student workshop. Once a year, the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism hosts a free conference for college students on "The Moral Foundations of Capitalism" and the greatest book ever written in defense of it...oops, I forgot, Atlas Shrugged isn't primarily about capitalism, but hey, it STILL made the best defense of capitalism in the history of the world!"
anonymous

Machiavelli's Virtue - 0 views

  • For the state must organize the lives of millions of strangers and protect their need to selfishly acquire material possessions. If everyone stole from everyone else there would be anarchy. So the state monopolizes the use of force, taking it away from criminals. The state appeals not to God, but to individual selfishness. Thus, it clears the path for progress.
    • anonymous
       
      I positively *love* these 'meta' discussions about the state. I also love the idea that right-wing StratFor subscribing nutjobs, normally excited to learn about American military power, also have to wade through hard thoughts about the nature of the state.
  • Thomas Hobbes conceived of the modern state in his Leviathan, published in 1651. Hobbes is known wrongly as a gloomy philosopher because of his emphasis on anarchy. Hobbes was actually a liberal optimist, who saw the state as the solution to anarchy, allowing people to procure possessions and build a community. Hobbes knew that in the path toward a better world, order first has to be established. Only later can humankind set about making such order non-tyrannical.
  • But what did Hobbes' philosophy ultimately build on? It built on the first of the moderns, the early 16th century Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli, whose masterpiece, The Prince, was written 500 years ago in 1513. Here is an anniversary as important as the 500th anniversary of Columbus discovering America, celebrated in 1992.
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  • By taking politics away from the narrowing fatalism of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, Machiavelli created the very secular politics from which Hobbes could conceive of the idea of the state.
  • The Prince may be less a work of cynicism than an instructional guide to overcome fate -- the fatalism of the Roman Catholic Church at that time. Thus, Machiavelli, more than Michelangelo perhaps, was the true inventor of the Renaissance.
  • The founders of the American Republic, who conceived of a polity in which church and state were separate and in which government existed to lay the rules for individuals to compete freely in the struggle to acquire wealth, owed much to Machiavelli and Hobbes.
  • But it is with Machiavelli, more than with Hobbes, where the principles of Western modernity truly begin.
  • Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. Mansfield knows that it is more important to tell hard truths than it is to be liked and to get good reviews.
  • For by setting the terms for political reality, Machiavelli helps lay the foundation for geopolitics.
  • necessity frees people from religious faith. People may pray to God and go to church or synagogue or the mosque, but they must also acquire food and possessions for the sake of their loved ones, and thus they must enter into competition with their fellow human beings
  • just as nations must enter into competition with other nations.
  • Self-interest informs compromise with other human beings, and thus a state governed by self-interest is likely to compromise with other states: whereas a person or state governed solely by religious or moral virtue will tend to delegitimize as immoral those with whom he or it disagrees -- and therein lies conflict.
  • Virtue, in other words, is fine. But outstanding virtue -- because it tempts sanctimoniousness -- is dangerous. It is ultimately with this maxim that we find philosophical justification for moderation in contemporary politics and statecraft.
  • Those who find such thinking dark or cynical may be under the illusion that politics can bring respite from primitive necessity. Machiavelli, as Mansfield explains, is doubtful of this.
  • Yes, politicians may announce their intention to strive for truth and justice, but their unspoken concerns and desires, even in a democracy -- especially in a democracy -- are really about satisfying the selfish needs of their constituents.
  • Face it, primitive necessity is a fixture of the human condition. And, therefore, the only way to reduce conflict and suffering is through anxious foresight: the ability to foresee danger and necessities ahead. Thus are intelligence agencies more likely to prevent atrocities than humanitarians.
    • anonymous
       
      Ouch... This hurts. Probably because, though my monkey mind keeps resisting, I suspect it is very true.
  • In politics, explains Machiavelli (through Mansfield), one who does good often cannot be good. One must even learn how to be bad, or at least devious, for the sake of the common good. This is not necessarily the end justifies the means, for Machiavelli is careful to stipulate that only the minimum amount of cruelty should be applied for the sake of the greatest amount of good.
  • Machiavelli is all about results. He believes that you define something in politics not by its inherent excellence, but by its outcome.
  • A leader may be honest, unselfish and moral, but if he starts a war that later proved unnecessary and killed many people, he lacks virtue -- despite being on a personal level very sympathetic.
  • Conversely, a leader may be cynical, selfish and excessively ambitious, but if he keeps his countrymen away from danger he can still be said to have virtue -- despite being personally unappealing.
  • Likeability has nothing to do with virtue, it turns out.
  • For politics -- and especially geopolitics -- is concerned, according to Machiavelli, with knowing about the world rather than knowing about heaven. Indeed, precisely because Machiavelli was concerned with men and not with God, he was a humanist.
  • Machiavelli has his limits. For example, he could not have foreseen 20th century totalitarianism that mirrored the self-righteousness of the medieval Church with which he was in conflict, but on a much larger scale.
  • Because the stakes are arguably higher now because of weapons of mass destruction, there is a danger of taking Machiavelli too far and using his philosophy to justify all sorts of risky subterfuges.
  • But there is a greater danger in simply dismissing his philosophy as unworthy of our so-called enlightened age. For our age is determined less by globalization than by the battle of space and power, both between states and between groups within states themselves -- as witnessed most recently by the ethnic and sectarian turmoil throughout the Greater Middle East. An American leader who is forced to grapple with such anarchy, even as he must take care to adopt the right tone with a militarily ascendant China and with an economically rising Latin America, could do worse than act "Machiavellian." And thanks to Professor Mansfield, we now know the true meaning of that adjective.
  •  
    "What is modernity? Is it skyscrapers, smart phones, wonder drugs, atomic bombs? You're not even close. Modernity, at least in the West, is the journey away from religious virtue toward secular self-interest. Religious virtue is fine for one's family and the world of private morality. But the state -- that defining political structure of modern times -- requires something colder, more chilling. "
anonymous

What Isn't for Sale? - 1 views

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 12 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?
  • For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption
  • Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction.
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  • These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.
  • The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
  • The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?
  • This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today.
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    WE LIVE IN A TIME when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets-and market values-have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.
  •  
    One particular issue is that we even have a system for some of this commodification in the courts. All sorts of things, from "pain and suffering" to "intentional infliction of emotional distress" get converted into cash values for the sake of assigning damage awards.
anonymous

The Origins and Implications of the Scottish Referendum - 0 views

  • the idea that the union of England and Scotland, which has existed for more than 300 years, could be dissolved has enormous implications in its own right, and significant implications for Europe and even for global stability.
  • In many ways, this union was a pivot of world history. To realize it might be dissolved is startling and reveals important things about the direction of the world.
  • Scotland and England are historical enemies. Their sense of competing nationhoods stretches back centuries, and their occupation of the same island has caused them to fight many wars. Historically they have distrusted each other, and each has given the other good reason for the distrust.
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  • The British were deeply concerned that foreign powers, particularly France, would use Scotland as a base for attacking England. The Scots were afraid that the English desire to prevent this would result in the exploitation of Scotland by England, and perhaps the extinction of the Scottish nation.
  • From an outsider's perspective, Scotland and England were charming variations on a single national theme -- the British -- and it was not necessary to consider them as two nations.
  • We need a deeper intellectual framework for understanding why Scottish nationalism has persisted.
  • The French Enlightenment and subsequent revolution had elevated the nation to the moral center of the world. It was a rebellion against the transnational dynasties and fragments of nations that had governed much of Europe.
  • After the French Revolution, some nations, such as Germany and Italy, united into nation-states.
  • After World War I, when the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov and Ottoman empires all collapsed
  • A second major wave of devolution occurred in 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed
  • The doctrine of the right to national self-determination drove the first wave of revolts against European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, creating republics in the Americas.
  • The second wave of colonial rising and European withdrawal occurred after World War II.
  • the entire world could not resist the compulsion to embrace the principles of national self-determination through republican democracy. This effectively was codified as the global gold standard of national morality in the charters of the League of Nations and then the United Nations.
  • The incredible power of the nation-state as a moral principle and right could be only imperfectly imposed. No nation was pure. Each had fragments and minorities of other nations. In many cases, they lived with each other. In other cases, the majority tried to expel or even destroy the minority nation. In yet other cases, the minority demanded independence and the right to form its own nation-state. These conflicts were not only internal; they also caused external conflict over the right of a particular nation to exist or over the precise borders separating the nations.
  • After the war, a principle emerged in Europe that the borders as they stood, however imperfect, were not to be challenged. The goal was to abolish one of the primary causes of war in Europe.
  • The point of all this is to understand that the right to national self-determination comes from deep within European principles and that it has been pursued with an intensity and even viciousness that has torn Europe apart and redrawn its borders.
  • One of the reasons that the European Union exists is to formally abolish these wars of national self-determination by attempting to create a framework that both protects and trivializes the nation-state.
  • The possibility of Scottish independence must be understood in this context.
  • Nationalism, the remembrance and love of history and culture, is not a trivial thing. It has driven Europe and even the world for more than two centuries in ever-increasing waves. The upcoming Scottish election, whichever way it goes, demonstrates the enormous power of the desire for national self-determination. If it can corrode the British union, it can corrode anything.
  • There are those who argue that Scottish independence could lead to economic problems or complicate the management of national defense. These are not trivial questions, but they are not what is at stake here.
  • At best, the economic benefits are uncertain. But this is why any theory of human behavior that assumes that the singular purpose of humans is to maximize economic benefits is wrong.
  • Humans have other motivations that are incomprehensible to the economic model but can be empirically demonstrated to be powerful.
  • If this referendum succeeds, it will still show that after more than 300 years, almost half of Scots prefer economic uncertainty to union with a foreign nation.
  • This is something that must be considered carefully in a continent that is prone to extreme conflicts and still full of borders that do not map to nations as they are understood historically.
  • The right to national self-determination is not simply about the nation governing itself but also about the right of the nation to occupy its traditional geography. And since historical memories of geography vary, the possibility of conflict grows.
  • Consider Ireland: After its fight for independence from England and then Britain, the right to Northern Ireland, whose national identity depended on whose memory was viewing it, resulted in bloody warfare for decades.
  • England will be vulnerable in ways that it hasn't been for three centuries.
  • This is not an argument for or against Scottish nationhood. It is simply drawing attention to the enormous power of nationalism in Europe in particular, and in countries colonized by Europeans.
  • the idea that Scotland recalls its past and wants to resurrect it is a stunning testimony less to Scottish history than to the Enlightenment's turning national rights into a moral imperative that cannot be suppressed.
  • At a time when the European Union's economic crisis is intense, challenging European institutions and principles, the dissolution of the British union would legitimize national claims that have been buried for decades.
  • But then we have to remember that Scotland was buried in Britain for centuries and has resurrected itself. This raises the question of how confident any of us can be that national claims buried for only decades are settled.
  • For centuries, nationalism has trumped economic issues. The model of economic man may be an ideal to some, but it is empirically false.
  • I think that however the vote goes, unless the nationalists are surprised by an overwhelming defeat, the genie is out of the bottle, and not merely in Britain. The referendum will re-legitimize questions that have caused much strife throughout the European continent for centuries, including the 31-year war of the 20th century that left 80 million dead.
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    "The idea of Scottish independence has moved from the implausible to the very possible. Whether or not it actually happens, the idea that the union of England and Scotland, which has existed for more than 300 years, could be dissolved has enormous implications in its own right, and significant implications for Europe and even for global stability."
anonymous

Efficient Isn't Moral - 0 views

  • When our distant ancestors sat around debating if to change locations, expel a troublemaker, or attack neighbors, they were often ambiguous about whether they were choosing what they wanted or what was moral; they preferred to pretend these were the same.  We similarly prefer ambiguity when we argue policy today.
  • Frameworks for finding win-win deals should also try to include as many things as possible that can have wants and participate in deals.  This includes racists, pedophiles, slaves-owners, robots, animals, distant past and future folk, and future folk who may or may not end up existing.  Yes many may be morally offended if racists get what they want, but that offense counts in what other folks want, and therefore enough offense will ensure that win-win deals will not give racists much of what they want.
anonymous

Libertarianism and Hegemony - 0 views

  •  
    The comments are a hoot. "My views on foreign policy tend to diverge from mainstream libertarian doctrine. Take American hegemony. Many people are predicting (usually with glee) the demise of American power (see, for example, Ronald Dworkin). Regardless of the accuracy of these predictions, I think libertarians have reasons to support American global hegemony. Realistic alternatives to hegemony are the international state of nature, balance of power, and governance by an international institution such as the United Nations. The state of nature is undesirable for well-known Hobbesian reasons: defensive efforts would undermine productive cooperation. Balance of power is inherently unstable; sooner or later will morph into hegemonic power. And, at least in today's world, governance by an international institution would be plagued by legitimacy deficits and agency costs that would surely threaten liberal values. So, if we are going to have hegemony as the only arrangement capable of providing global public goods, the United States is the least bad because American institutions and culture embody liberal values. Any likely competitor is certainly to be worse for those who cherish liberal values. I believe history supports this, too: three times during the 20th century the United States saved liberal culture from onslaughts by illiberal forces. Objections to hegemony are often condemnations of means rather than ends, and I certainly agree with those where applicable. Let us concede that the United States sometimes pursues moral ends (say, helping other nations achieve freedom) with immoral means (say, bringing about unjustified collateral harm). Citizens in liberal democracies must oppose the use of immoral means, even for a good cause. However, this kind of criticism cannot be a wholesale condemnation of hegemony, because there are world powers, such as the Soviet Union, who pursue immoral ends. Surely these cannot be saved even when they use moral means (whi
anonymous

Nigerian Characteristics - 0 views

  • To talk about an individual's personality and tendencies is easy for those who know the person well; to talk about the personality and tendencies of millions of people who form a nation is much trickier and fraught with moral risk.
  • For the result is often simplistic stereotyping of what are often very complex identities.
  • national traits are the product of a people's experience of living on a singular terrain for centuries and longer, leading to an identifiable national or ethnic culture and thus to specific characteristics.
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  • To deny this altogether is to immobilize observation, which, in turn, leads to analysis that is both unrealistic and naive.
  • Thus, we come to Nigeria, a country of more than 166 million people with severe overcrowding due to the fact that much of the country is desert and swamps where few people can live.
  • For too many Nigerians, life is a Hobbesian, zero-sum game that adds up to an aggressive, predatory system of survival of the fittest. Nigeria is a place where life is too often a matter of who can intimidate whom. Indeed, war, crime and thuggery are the province of young males, and Nigeria's population is composed of many of them.
  • Nigeria is an assemblage of several British-ruled territories: specifically a Muslim north that the British governed indirectly through traditional rulers and a non-Muslim south that the British ruled directly. The tension between the different parts of Nigeria has dominated political life for decades, leading to coups and counter-coups and significant periods of democracy characterized by exceedingly high levels of corruption, which is, in turn, part of the spoils system that staves off civil war.
  • For Nigerian politics at the highest levels is as predatory as life on the street.
  • There are essentially three geographical parts to Nigeria:
  • a Muslim-dominated north of desert and semi-desert, which produces the Hausa officers' corps that for decades has dominated the military and, by association, politics for significant periods
  • a southwestern region dominated by the Yoruba people, which contains the commercial capital of Lagos
  • and the southeast where much of the oil is located, dominated by the Igbo tribe.
  • Abuja, to no one's surprise, is less the capital city than the point of arbitration for a weak and sprawling empire otherwise known as the state of Nigeria. Abuja is where the economic spoils are distributed -- the benefit of upwards of 2.5 million barrels of oil pumped daily.
  • Ignored for decades and violently intimidated during the 1990s, the Ijaw in the 2000s waged an increasingly militant campaign to assert their presence. Pipeline sabotage and bombings of oil facilities effectively held the country's economy for ransom. The Ijaw were accommodated in 2007 and were rewarded with the vice presidency, in exchange for curtailing the sponsorship of militant groups like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND.
  • Indeed, Nigeria attests to the triumph of naked power and geography over the realm of ideas. Nigeria's strength is evinced in the fact that its peacekeepers have successfully led intervention forces in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and in the fact that Nigerian businessmen are all over West Africa playing pivotal roles in local economies.
  • Nigerians can be found as captains of continental and even global industry, if the black market sectors of business scams and drug, human, car and crude oil smuggling rackets are included. But Nigeria is weak in the sense that its own condition of semi-anarchy makes it impossible for Nigeria to police the region the way a great regional power should.
  • Nigeria and South Africa both should be imperial powers in West Africa and southern African respectively, helping to stabilize places like Mali and the Congo. But they clearly are not due to their own internal weaknesses.
  • Nigeria will totter onwards. It will not descend into civil war because all the regional and ethnic groups understand limits -- and how they can all, at one point or another, benefit from a flagrant system of spoils and kickbacks. Corruption, make no mistake, while it contributes to misrule, is also a pacifying force in Nigeria. But neither will there be the emergence of a strong state.
    • anonymous
       
      Corruption = Semi-stability. Depressing.
  • It is a maxim of Western elites that economic development and global integration will lead to civil societies in places like Nigeria. There is an important element of truth in that, but such a truth has severe limits. Economic growth also leads to wider disparities as well as more spoils to fight over.
  • In the case of Nigeria, there is effectively one spoil: those 2.5 million barrels of crude oil per day. And global society has sunk roots mainly among the elites, not among the tens of millions of people in a place like Nigeria for whom life is a constant, predatory struggle. Nigeria should keep us humble about the human condition and the persistence of national characteristics.
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    "Individuals are more concrete than the national or ethnic group of which they form a part. To talk about an individual's personality and tendencies is easy for those who know the person well; to talk about the personality and tendencies of millions of people who form a nation is much trickier and fraught with moral risk. For the result is often simplistic stereotyping of what are often very complex identities. Nevertheless, to assume Danes harbor the same national characteristics as, say, Chinese, is absurd. The fact is, national traits are the product of a people's experience of living on a singular terrain for centuries and longer, leading to an identifiable national or ethnic culture and thus to specific characteristics. To deny this altogether is to immobilize observation, which, in turn, leads to analysis that is both unrealistic and naive."
anonymous

Hellfire, Morality and Strategy - 2 views

  • On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets.
  • On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process.
  • Let's begin with the weapons systems, the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper. The media call them drones, but they are actually remotely piloted aircraft. Rather than being in the cockpit, the pilot is at a ground station, receiving flight data and visual images from the aircraft and sending command signals back to it via a satellite data link.
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  • Most airstrikes from these aircraft use Hellfire missiles, which cause less collateral damage.
  • Unlike a manned aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles can remain in the air for an extended period of time -- an important capability for engaging targets that may only present a very narrow target window. This ability to loiter, and then strike quickly when a target presents itself, is what has made these weapons systems preferable to fixed wing aircraft and cruise missiles.
  • The Argument Against Airstrikes
  • The modern battlefield -- and the ancient as well -- has been marked by anonymity. The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability. In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment. He was killed because of his membership in an army and not because of any specific action he might have carried out.
  • This distinguishes unmanned aerial vehicles from most weapons that have been used since the age of explosives began.
  • There are those who object to all war and all killing; we are not addressing those issues here. We are addressing the arguments of those who object to this particular sort of killing. The reasoning is that when you are targeting a particular individual based on his relationships, you are introducing the idea of culpability, and that that culpability makes the decision-maker -- whoever he is -- both judge and executioner, without due process.
  • Again excluding absolute pacifists from this discussion, the objection is that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is not so much an act of war as an act of judgment and, as such, violates international law that requires due process for a soldier being judged and executed. To put it simply, the critics regard what they call drone strikes as summary executions, not acts of war.
  • The Argument for Airstrikes
  • The counterargument is that the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war.
  • The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals -- particularly the commanders -- isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible. Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.
  • The argument for using strikes from unmanned aerial vehicles is that it is not an attack on an individual any more than an artillery barrage that kills a hundred is an attack on each individual. Rather, the jihadist movement presents a unique case in which the individual jihadist is the military unit.
  • The argument in favor of using unmanned aerial vehicle strikes is, therefore, that the act of killing the individual is a military necessity dictated by the enemy's strategy and that it is carried out with the understanding that both intelligence and precision might fail, no matter how much care is taken.
  • It would seem to me that these strikes do not violate the rules of war and that they require no more legal overview than was given in thousands of bomber raids in World War II.
  • Ignoring the question of whether jihadist operations are in accordance with the rules and customs of war, their failure to carry a "fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance" is a violation of both the Hague and Geneva conventions. This means that considerations given to soldiers under the rules of war do not apply to those waging war without insignia.
  • Open insignia is fundamental to the rules of war. It was instituted after the Franco-Prussian war, when French snipers dressed as civilians fired on Germans. It was viewed that the snipers had endangered civilians because it was a soldier's right to defend himself and that since they were dressed as civilians, the French snipers -- not the Germans -- were responsible for the civilian deaths.
  • the onus on ascertaining the nature of the target rests with the United States, but if there is error, the responsibility for that error rests with jihadists for not distinguishing themselves from civilians.
  • There is of course a greater complexity to this: attacking targets in countries that are not in a state of war with the United States and that have not consented to these attacks. For better or worse, the declaration of war has not been in fashion since World War II. But the jihadist movement has complicated this problem substantially.
  • In a method of war where the individual is the prime unit and where lack of identification is a primary defensive method, the conduct of intelligence operations wherever the enemy might be, regardless of borders, follows. So do operations to destroy enemy units -- individuals. If a country harbors such individuals knowingly, it is an enemy. If it is incapable of destroying the enemy units, it forfeits its right to claim sovereignty since part of sovereignty is a responsibility to prevent attacks on other countries.
  • If we simply follow the logic we laid out here, then the critics of unmanned aerial vehicle strikes have a weak case. It is not illegitimate to target individuals in a military force like the jihadist movement, and international law holds them responsible for collateral damage, not the United States.
  • since al Qaeda tried in the past to operate in the United States itself, and its operatives might be in the United States, it logically follows that the United States could use unmanned aerial vehicles domestically as well. Citizenship is likewise no protection from attacks against a force hostile to the United States.
  • There are two points I have been driving toward.
  • The first is that the outrage at targeted killing is not, in my view, justified on moral or legal grounds.
  • The second is that in using these techniques, the United States is on a slippery slope because of the basis on which it has chosen to wage war.
  • The enemy strategy is to draw the United States into an extended conflict that validates its narrative that the United States is permanently at war with Islam. It wants to force the United States to engage in as many countries as possible. From the U.S. point of view, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because they can attack the jihadist command structure without risk to ground forces. From the jihadist point of view as well, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because their efficiency allows the jihadists to lure the United States into other countries and, with sufficient manipulation, can increase the number of innocents who are killed.
  • In this sort of war, the problem of killing innocents is practical. It undermines the strategic effort. The argument that it is illegal is dubious, and to my mind, so is the argument that it is immoral. The argument that it is ineffective in achieving U.S. strategic goals of eliminating the threat of terrorist actions by jihadists is my point.
  • The broader the engagement, the greater the perception of U.S. hostility to Islam, the easier the recruitment until the jihadist forces reach a size that can't be dealt with by isolated airstrikes.
  • In warfare, enemies will try to get you to strike at what they least mind losing. The case against strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles is not that they are ineffective against specific targets but that the targets are not as vital as the United States thinks. The United States believes that the destruction of the leadership is the most efficient way to destroy the threat of the jihadist movement. In fact it only mitigates the threat while new leadership emerges. The strength of the jihadist movement is that it is global, sparse and dispersed. It does not provide a target whose destruction weakens the movement. However, the jihadist movement's weakness derives from its strength: It is limited in what it can do and where.     
  • In the long run, it is not clear that the cost is so little. A military strategy to defeat the jihadists is impossible. At its root, the real struggle against the jihadists is ideological, and that struggle simply cannot be won with Hellfire missiles.
  •  
    "Airstrikes by unmanned aerial vehicles have become a matter of serious dispute lately. The controversy focuses on the United States, which has the biggest fleet of these weapons and which employs them more frequently than any other country. On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets. On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process."
  •  
    I'm starting to come around to the objections of expeditionary troops trying to put down the American colonial revolt. There's something to having to look someone in the face when you kill them.
anonymous

Obama's Tightrope Walk - 0 views

  • Begin with the fact that the United States was not the first country calling for military intervention in Syria after pictures of what appeared to be the dead from a chemical attack surfaced. That honor went to France, Turkey and Britain, each of whom called for action. Much as with Libya, where France and Italy were the first and most eager to intervene, the United States came late to the feast.
  • The United States did not have any overriding national interest in Syria.
  • The United States is in the process of recovering from Iraq and Afghanistan, and is not eager to try its hand at nation building in Syria, especially given the players.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • What started to draw the United States into the matter was a statement made by the president in 2012, when he said that the use of chemical weapons would be a red line.
  • He didn't mean he wanted to intervene. He set the red line because he figured that it was the one thing Assad wouldn't try. It was an attempt to stay out, not an announcement of interest. In fact, there had been previous evidence of small-scale chemical attacks, and the president had dodged commitment.
  • A significant faction pressed him on this in his foreign policy apparatus.
  • The point is that, leaving Iraq, this faction felt that the United States failed to carry out its moral obligations in Rwanda, and applauded the intervention in Kosovo. 
  • This faction is not small and appeals to an important tendency in American political culture that sees World War II as the perfect war, because it was waged against an unspeakable evil, and not for strategic or material gain.
  • That war was more complicated than that, but there was an element of truth to it. And the world, on the whole, approved of American involvement there.
  • Secure behind distance and power, the United States ought not be a typical insecure political power, but should use its strength to prevent the more extreme injustices in the world. 
  • There was a romantic belief that the crowd in the street was always more virtuous than the tyrant in his palace. Sometimes they were right. It is not clear that the fall of the Shah reduced the sum total of human suffering.
  • Obama had learned a thing or two about the crowd, Arab and otherwise. He was far less romantic about their intent, particularly after Libya. After Libya he was also aware that after the self-congratulations, the United States would have to live with the chaos or new tyranny. He didn't want to attack, and that was clear in the first days after the affair.
  • There were two reasons.
  • First, he had lost confidence in the crowd.
  • Second, he had vowed not to go to war as Bush had, without international support validated by the United Nations
  • Pressed by the human rights faction in his administration to take action in Syria, he was also under pressure from three key countries: Britain, France and Turkey.
  • Obama resisted not the principle of attack but the scale Turkey wanted. 
  • This was one that the British had helped concoct, and the parliament voted against it, with many parliament members saying the United Kingdom was no longer the Americans' lap dog.
  • Obama, who had worked so hard to avoid leadership, had become George W. Bush to the British Parliament.
  • The Russians were completely committed to the survival of the regime.
  • The United States was less passionate, but Obama, while willing to do the minimum gesture possible to satisfy his human rights impulse, did think about what would come later and didn't want to see the regime fall. In this, the Russians and Americans had common interests. 
  • The Russian calculations came down to its read of the United States, which is that it was not in a position to impose an international system in the region because of internal political weakness.
  • Therefore the Russians had a rare opportunity to impose if not a system, then a presence. Most of all, the Russian view was that it had nothing to fear from the United States, in spite of its power imbalance. Obama was not likely to take action.
  • Others, like Poland, that had been with the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan also bowed out. The Poles are interesting because they had been the most eager for collaboration with the Americans, but felt the most betrayed by not getting an American commitment for significant military aid and collaboration.
  • By the end of the week, the Russians were hurling insults at Obama, the British finally freed themselves from American domination, and the Turks were furious at American weakness.
    • anonymous
       
      Haha.
  • The French -- and France's interventionist flow is fascinating (Libya, Mali, now Syria) -- stood with the United States. This is a tale to consider in itself, but not here. And the Canadians decided that much as they disliked chemical weapons use, they would not be available. The wheels just came off the strategy.
  • It is easy to blame Obama for losing control of the situation, but that is too simple. Every administration has its ideologues, and every president wants allies and no one wants to go to war without those allies flying aircraft beside them. And it would be nice if the United States could be just another country, but it isn't. The moment that it enters a coalition, it leads a coalition.
  • The United States had a strategic interest in neither faction taking power in Syria -- its Lebanonization. That is brutal, but it is true, and the United States was not the only country with that interest.
  • The real problem is this: After the Islamist wars, the United States has, as happened before, sought to minimize its presence in the world and while enjoying the benefits of being the world's leading economy, not pay any political or military price for it.
  • It is a strategy that is impossible to maintain, as the United States learned after World War I, Vietnam and Desert Storm. It is a seductive vision but a fantasy. The world comes visiting.
  • driven by an insufficient national strategy, the president was trapped by internal ideologies, the penchant of foreign allies and the temptation to do something, however ineffective. But as we know, the ineffective frequently becomes more expensive than the effective, and choosing where to be effective -- and where to pass -- is essential. 
  • This is not over yet. If Congress votes for strikes, it is likely that Obama will do something. But at that point he will be doing it by himself, and the inevitable death of innocents in even the smallest attack will bring him under fire from some of those most insistent that he do something about the war crimes in Syria. 
    • anonymous
       
      Yes, because all national actions happen flawlessly, with no negative repurcussions, as long as your heart is in the right place.
  • It is not easy to be president, nor is it easy to be the world's leading power. It is nice to be able to sit in moral judgment of men like Assad, but sadly not have the power to do anything. Where life gets hard is when sitting in moral judgment forces you to do something because you can. It teaches you to be careful in judging, as the world will both demand that you do something and condemn you for doing it.
  •  
    "Last week began with certainty that an attack on Syria was inevitable and even imminent. It ended with the coalition supporting the attack somewhere between falling apart and not coming together, and with U.S. President Barack Obama making it clear that an attack was inevitable, maybe in a month or so, if Congress approves, after Sept. 9 when it reconvenes. This is a comedy in three parts: the reluctant warrior turning into the raging general and finding his followers drifting away, becoming the reluctant warrior again."
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