Afghanistan expert Rory Stewart offers a sympathetic, yet not uncritical, analysis of President Obama’s war strategy. For my part, I remain skeptical: I was initially supportive of the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which I thought amply justified, but over time the justification for staying on in a nation-building capacity seemed increasingly elusive. Nevertheless, I hope that Stewart is right that a limited mission could yield real benefits for both the US and the Afghan people and that the President is shifting US policy away from “extravagant, brief, Manichaean battles driven by exaggerated fears, grandiloquent promises, and fragile edifices of doctrine” and toward the “responsible exercise of limted power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty.”
Month: December 2009
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A debate on animal rights
Just catching up on some of my post-Christmas reading: in Sunday’s Washington Post there was a mini-debate between Andrew Linzey and neuroscientist Adrian Morrison over the rights of animals.
Linzey is certainly right that Morrison misses the thrust of his central argument. The question isn’t whether humans are different from non-human animals, but whether that difference justifies disregarding animal suffering. On the other hand, I’m not sure Linzey adequately grapples with the genuine dilemma of foregoing potentially life-saving medical research by ending experiments on animals.
In some ways, I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to focus the debate on medical research (though given the participants, I suppose that was inevitable). The fact is that, by any reckoning, the vast majority of human-inflicted animal suffering comes from animal agriculture. And it’s pretty clear that the benefits of the factory farming system (i.e., the pleasures of the palate that come from eating meat instead of vegetarian alternatives) are far outweighed by the vast quantity of animal suffering they demand. Morrison’s argument that we can’t make judgments about the relative weight of pleasures that people get from, say, going to the rodeo or eating meat is frankly ludicrous.
Compared to our present world, a vegetarian one would be immeasurably better in terms of animal suffering. I’m not saying that animal rights activists shouldn’t criticize the practices of animal experimentation, particularly since a lot of that experimentation serves no vital human interests. But the case for changing our treatment of animals in fairly substantial ways doesn’t hinge on resolving all the hard cases like choosing whether to forego the benefits of a life-saving drug for your child.
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2009: the year in music
With the sheer amount of music being released nowadays, it would be presumptuous for anyone who’s not a professional music critic to declaim on the “best” music of a given year. And that’s true even if you confine yourself to a particular genre.
Nevertheless, it might be worth mentioning the music that I personally enjoyed the most this year. The rankings are more or less arbitrary.
Metal. By nearly everybody’s account, it’s been a fantastic year for metal. Here are just 9 great albums that came out in ’09:
1. Baroness, Blue Record
2. Lamb of God, Wrath
3. Revocation, Existence Is Futile
4. Between the Buried and Me, The Great Misdirect
5. Slayer, World Painted Blood
6. Obscura, Cosmogenesis
7. Hacride, Lazarus
8. The Red Chord, Fed Through the Teeth Machine
9. Mastodon, Crack the Skye
Honorable mention:
10. God Forbid, Earthsblood
11. Chimaira, The Infection
12. Kylesa, Static Tensions
13. August Burns Red, Constellations
14. Shadows Fall, Retribution
15. Converge, Axe to Fall
Bonus album that didn’t come out in 2009 but which I listened to for the first time this year and really liked:
16. Textures, Silhouettes (Released in 2008)
Man does not live by metal alone: great non-metal music of ’09:
1. Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
2. Sunset Rubdown, Dragonslayer
3. The XX, XX
4. Blacklist, Midnight of the Century
5. Regina Spektor, Far
Holiday album:
1. Tori Amos, Midwinter Graces
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Rights-talk and some distinctions
I think I unhelpfully ran a few ideas together in the post on libertarianism that should be more clearly distinguished. First, there is the distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights. That is, I asserted that, in practical political terms, this distinction is fuzzier than often imagined because the protection of any right–positive or negative–requires dedicated resources. For example, my right to life isn’t a mere claim against others not to kill me, but something that we think society is obliged to take positive steps to protect (via laws, police, courts, etc.). Similarly with other rights. So, the distinction between a “negative” right to life and a “positive” right to, say, welfare does less work than libertarians sometimes suppose.
The second issue, which I didn’t adequately distinguish, is how rights are justified in the first place. A consequentialist justification would be that, all things considered, having a society that protects certain rights will, over the long run, result in a balance of good over evil consequences (bracketing the question of what “the good” consists in). As Mill said, they are the precondition of our pursuing any worthwhile projects. A deontological justification, on the other hand, would be that people (and possibly other animals) have rights simply in virtue of the kinds of beings they are. Specifically, they cannot be used merely as means for the benefit of others. Or one might say that they have the right to freedom and well-being, independently of any value they may contribute to others.
I’m more amenable to deontological arguments than the post made it sound. Indeed, I think my main point–that strict (anarcho-) libertarianism has unacceptable consequences–could be couched in more deontological terms. If human beings have certain rights in virtue of the kinds of beings they are, then a just society is one, at least, in which those rights are adequately protected. My claim was that the anarcho-libertarian utopia will not adequately protect rights because, inter alia, the rights of the weak and dependent would be dependent on either their ability to pay or on the charity of others. Moreover, if one of the rights that people have is access to the basic goods which are the precondition of any meaningful life, there are good reasons to think that a thoroughgoing laissez-faire regime would also fail miserably at securing those rights.
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In praise of diminished expectations
Paul Krugman makes the case for passing the Senate version of health-care reform:
With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.
At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.
Assuming it works, this sounds pretty good. And I wonder if there would’ve been less acrimony if the bill hadn’t been sold as a comprehensive overhaul in the first place. Because people were expecting so much more, the current bill looks like a miserable sellout. But as a first step, it sounds promising. Of course, if this scaled-down version had been pitched from the get-go, who knows what we would’ve ended up with?
It’s analogous in some ways to the wildly inflated hopes people seem to have had for Barack Obama’s presidency in general and the ensuing disappointment in some quarters on the Left. If you think of him as a pragmatic, center-left politician, he seems like a dramatic improvement over the previous administration. But if you had the idea of a paradigm-altering progressive superhero in mind when you voted for him, you’re no doubt sorely disappointed about now.
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Baillie on the problem of the historical Jesus
In light of some of the reading I’ve doing lately on the historical Jesus, I decided to re-visit D.M. Baillie’s God Was In Christ, which was published around the middle of the last century and addressed the then-current controversy about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It holds up remarkably well, largely because the basic positions haven’t changed all that much. On the one hand, “liberals” appeal to the Jesus of history against the Christ of ecclesial tradition; on the other, “confessionalists” (we might now add postmodernists, Radical Orthodox, etc.) uphold the tradition of the church against “secular” historicism. Baillie (wisely, in my view) rejects both extremes. Turns out that I wrote a long post on his argument a couple of years ago, which is here if you’re interested.
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Sustainable food and the importance of class
Interesting article from Tom Philpott at Grist on the connections between cheap food and cheap labor, and the need for the sustainable food movement to address issues of class. Key paragraph:
In short, an economy hinged on cheap labor needs cheap food. And that’s the structural problem faced by Slow Food and other would-be reformers of the food system. The challenge of food reformers isn’t just to reform the food system; it’s to reshape the entire economy—to create new economic models that revalue labor along with food, so that people can afford the revalued food.
The increased availability of cheap consumer goods has long been the justification offered by apologists for free trade, corporate globalization, and the rest of the bi-partisan economic agenda. But if, as Philpott argues, “cheap” food is not sustainable, then we need to re-think the entire premise of a cheap-goods/cheap-labor economy.
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Needed: better friends
Salon has an article this morning written by a “closeted” Christian in New York who’s afraid that her liberal, atheist Brooklynite friends will look down on her if they find out she’s a church-goer (which, presumably they now will unless she’s writing pseudonymously). I can sympathize with not wanting to be identifiedid with conservative strands of American evangelicalism; sometimes I wonder if it’s really worth trying to hold onto a religion that threatens to become synonymous with far-right politics. But, really, maybe this lady needs to get a better set of friends. I move in circles here in D.C. that are similar to the ones she describes (eductated, gen-x, liberal/progressive) but have never felt like I needed to hide the fact that I’m a Christian from my non-religious friends. Maybe the problem is that her friends are just a**holes.
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“The very groundwork of our existence”: Mill on rights
Relevant to the post below; from Utilitarianism, chapter five:
To have a right, then, is, I conceive to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask, why it ought? I can give him no other reason than general utility. If that expression does not seem to convey a sufficient feeling of the strength of the obligation, not to account for the peculiar energy of the feeling, it is because there goes to the composition of the sentiment, not a rational only, but also an animal element, the thirst for retaliation; and this thirst derives its intensity, as well as its moral justification, from the extraordinary important and impressive kind of utility which is concerned. The interest involved is that of security, to every one’s feelings the most vital of all interests. All other earthly benefits are needed by one person, not needed by another; and many of them can, if necessary, be cheerfully foregone, or replaced by something else; but security no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment; since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us, if we could be deprived of anything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves. Now this most indispensable of all necessaries, after physical nutriment, cannot be had, unless the machinery for providing it is kept unintermittedly in active play. Our notion, therefore, of the claim we have on our fellow-creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence, gathers feelings around it so much more intense than those concerned in any of the more common cases of utility, that the difference in degree (as is often the case in psychology) becomes a real difference in kind. That claim assumes the character of absoluteness, that apparent infinity, and incommensurability with all other considerations, which constitute the distinction between the feeling of right and wrong and that of ordinary expediency and inexpediency. The feelings concerned are so powerful, and we count so positively on finding a responsive feeling in others (all being alike interested), that ought and should grow into must, and recognised indispensability becomes a moral necessity, analogous to physical, and often not inferior to it in binding force.
The argument here is fairly straightforward: we need our basic interest in security to be protected because it is the precondition of pursuing any other interest whatsoever. Thus, simply on utilitarian grounds, it makes sense to assign a higher status to this interest to ensure that it’s protected. Otherwise, no one could pursue any worthwhile projects without constantly looking over their shoulder and having to be on guard against their fellow man. (There are shades of a social contract account here.) Mill can, he thinks, account for the importance we attach to certain rights without needing to ground them in anything other than the principle of utility. I’m not 100% convinced that he’s correct here, but I do think there’s something persuasive about the idea that rights are grounded in the protection they provide to certain vital interests.
A Thinking Reed 