A Thinking Reed

Category: Politics

  • The penal state

    I finally got around to reading this Glenn Loury piece on our scandalous rates of punitive and discriminatory incarceration. Very powerful stuff.

    The theologian William Placher has written some very good stuff on this often-neglected topic. In his book Jesus the Savior he writes:

    Practices like visiting prisoners grew out of the core of Christian faith. After all, Jesus was a crucified criminal. He was not merely punished, one important strand of Christian theology has maintained–he was guilty, for he had taken on our guilt. “For our sake,” Paul wrote, God made Christ “to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21)

    […]

    Christ takes our sin, and frees us from it. Some of us may have a more immediate need of rehabilitation, or more need to be prevented from doing harm to others in the short run, but according to Christian faith it makes no sense to think of “distinguishing the innocent from the guilty.” Apart from Christ, we are all guilty. In Christ, we can all be found innocent. We may need to be helped, both by being protected from doing further wrong, and by being helped to be better, but there is no reason to punish anyone. (pp. 153-4)

    If God in Jesus assumes solidarity not only with victims, but also with perpetrators, Christians should be the last ones to adopt the attitude of “Lock ’em up, throw away the key, and forget about ’em!”

  • Contra the contrarians

    Bradford Plumer debunks the claims of some of the recent debunkers of conventional wisdom about battling climate change, but concedes that they have a point in that navigating a “green” lifestyle is in fact a tricky thing to do (e.g. eating local food is a good rule of thumb, but there are exceptions). However, he also points out that serious political action (e.g. a carbon tax) would make this much simpler.

  • Lessons of Vietnam

    A few that the President left out of his speech, from Andrew Bacevich.

    Among others:

    Sometimes people can manage their own affairs. Does the U.S. need to attend to that mess? Perhaps not.

    Here the experience of Vietnam following the U.S. defeat is instructive. Once the Americans departed, the Vietnamese began getting their act together. Although not a utopia, Vietnam has become a stable and increasingly prosperous nation. It is a responsible member of the international community. In Hanoi, the communists remain in power. From an American point of view, who cares?

    Bush did not even allude to the condition of Vietnam today. Yet the question poses itself: Is it not possible that the people of the Middle East might be better qualified to determine their future than a cadre of American soldiers, spooks and do-gooders? The answer to that question just might be yes.

  • ATR prescience watch

    Today: AG Alberto Gonzales resigns among pressure from Democrats and many in his own party.

    November 11, 2004: this blog (well, its predecessor actually) says Gonzales is a bad pick for AG.

    Nice to know it only took DC 2 and a half years to catch up.

  • From animal rights to cosmic democracy

    The second part of Clark’s essay on “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” wades into deeper and more interesting waters.

    Clark contends that it’s “better to abandon abstract argument, in favour of historical.” Ownership, he maintains, is a social concept and thus the idea that we can do whatever we want with what we “own” is a needlessly abstract and ahistorical way of looking at things. It’s better to think in terms of “historical claims and protections, not with the pre-social rights of self-owners: rights established not by abstract argument, but by the slow discovery of a mutually acceptable forebearance and cooperation–a process, incidentally, that there is no sound reason to limit to human intercourse.”

    The early liberals, he maintains,

    did not appeal to absolute rights of self-ownership (restricted by the equal rights of others). Private property was defended as the likeliest way of enabling a society of freemen to subsist in mutual harmony, and cultivate their virtues: if we each had some portion of the land to tend we would be less likely to fall prey to tyrants, and the land itself would prosper. What we owned, however, was not the land itself, but the lawfully acquired fruits, and we owned these only for their lawful use. “Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy” (Locke, ‘Treatises’ 2.31: 1963 p. 332; see Hargrove 1980). Individual liberty rested on the value God placed in every soul, as a unique expression of His glory, such that any despotism, however benevolent in purpose, must issue in a decline of valuable diversity. Each of us has a profound and vital interest in the virtue of our fellow-citizens, and in the continued viability of the ecosystems within which we live.

    Clark brings this classical liberal insight into conversation with recent writing on “deep ecology” with interesting results. The main idea of deep ecology is that, rather than being self-sufficient individuals, we are all parts of the ecosystems to which we belong, the whole which has a certain priority over the parts. This is not to downgrade the value of the individual, but to point out that her flourishing depends on the flourishing of the whole of which she is a part.

    Individualists, and some animal rights proponents like Tom Regan, have been wary of what they call “environmental fascism” that seems to threaten to subordinate the interests of the individual to the collective. We sometimes see this tension between environmentalists and animal rights people: environmentalists are mainly concerned with preserving ecosystems even if that means, for example, culling animal herds.

    Clark, however, sees a “necessary moral synthesis” of libertarian and “zoophile” intuitions in a vision of a kind of cosmic ecology. A reasonable and proper good for individuals depends on the good of the whole: “The living world (which is itself an element or function of the cosmic whole) is like ‘the federation or community of interdependent organs and tissues that go to make up [a physician’s] patient’ (Gregg 1955; see Lovelock 1982). Claiming a spurious advantage for individuals at the price of damage to the whole is simply silly.”

    The whole he sees as the City of God. Invoking Berkeley he identifies this with the whole created universe, each in its own way reflecting an aspect of God’s glory. And each part has a claim to exist, if only for a short time. It’s reasonable that we should protect our own kind against threats to life and limb, but beyond that we ought to be content with our allotted portion. There can be no absolute “right to life” because death comes for us all and is part of the fabric of the universe; but we can aim for a “letting be” of things according to their kind:

    The rights that all self-owners have simply as such cannot include any right of immunity to disease, predation or famine. No such right can be justly defended for all self-owners, since the terrestrial economy is organized around the fact of predation. None of us can be treated absolutely and only as ‘ends-in-ourselves’, never to be material for another’s purposes. Of all of us it is literally true that we are food. If blackbirds have no right not to be eaten by foxes (and people, correspondingly, no duty to protect them), since such a general right would deny the right of life to foxes, but blackbirds have all the ‘natural’ rights that all self-owners have, it follows that we too have no right not to be eaten. The only ‘right to life’ that all selfowners might be allowed, just as such, is the right to live as the creature that one is, under the same law as all others. Foxes do no wrong in catching what they can: they would be doing wrong if they prevented the creatures on whom they prey from enjoying their allotted portion in the sun, if they imprisoned, frustrated and denied them justice. Foxes, obviously, are not at fault.

    The libertarian thesis, applied to the terrestrial biosphere, requires that no-one do more than enjoy a due share of the fruits of the earth, that forward-looking agents plan their agricultural economy with a view to allowing the diversity of creatures some share of happiness according to their kind. It does not require that everyone abstain from killing and eating animals, if that is how the human creatures that are there can live. Some people may so abstain, because they see no need to live off their non-human kindred, but this (on liberal views) must be their choice, not their duty. Libertarians, by the same token, will not see any general duty to assist people against aggressors. Even aggression, it turns out, is not necessarily unjust, a violation of right, though enslavement is. Even if some acts of aggression are unjust, there is no general duty to defend the victims. Any duty that such libertarians acknowledge to assist the prey will rest upon their sense of solidarity, not on abstract rights of self-ownership.

    Clark calls this a “radically anarchic view of human and extra-human intercourse,” but says that we might be justified in going beyond this by acknowledging the fact that, within the “cosmic democracy,” most of us animals already exist in social groupings, many of them including multiple species. “We can,” he says, “moderate the merely libertarian ethic by the ethic of solidarity: both depend upon our vision of the moral universe, both are necessary.”

    The vision of the cosmic democracy, of a universe in which each thing has its appointed part to play and its own particular dignity, eminently justifies decent treatment of non-humans, and even an extension of sympathy and mercy. “[I]t may also be compatible with justice, even required by a more elevated sense of ‘justice’, that we should give each other more than we have a right to demand: we may construct ‘laws of the nations’, and tacitly agree to assist those who are in need, so long as we may justly do so.” What Clark seems to have in mind here is what I referred to the other day as the “special duties” owed to those creatures that we share our lives with in a particular way, such as pets or other domestic animals. “Emotions of solidarity” combine with and reinforce “contractual justice” as we find our circle of sympathy expanding outward, pushed by the vision of cosmic democracy wherein we are all related as partial reflections of the Creator’s glory.

    This “visionary solidarity” seems a long way from the bare-bones political ethic of libertarianism, and Clark admits that he has pushed the liberal ethic to the point of collapse:

    If ‘we’ are illumined by this vision of the living world, we may request a like forebearance and enthusiasm from our fellow citizens. Those who show that they cannot conceive of the world in its richness, cannot sympathize with their fellow-creatures, may seem to us to be menaces. It is, correspondingly, our ‘natural right’ as self-owners so to organize society to introduce that vision into all with whom we must associate.

    Now this is heady stuff. Though it must be qualified by what Clark says a bit earlier:

    This would be a ‘fascist’ vision only if it implied that there was some elite group entitled to inflict upon an ignorant world the legislation they thought justified, at whatever cost to the ideals and lives of their victims. There is no such implication: on the contrary, it is just those elite groups which most offend against the rules of liberal solidarity.

    So it seems that what he’s getting at is this: we need something like a paradigm shift, a new moral vision that takes in the whole of the living world, not just the human sphere and this vision will naturally impace the way we order our common life. But this isn’t the sort of thing that can be imposed from the top down. So there’s no question of a kind of green fascism.

    Given what I’ve seen elsewhere of Clark’s political views, I would imagine that he would favor this vision being propagated through decentralized and non-hierarchical local communities joined in some kind of loose federation.

    From my earlier post on Clark’s “anarcho-conservatism”:

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.

    Analogously, Clark might say that a change in our evaluation of the moral status of animals can and should develop organically from existing moral traditions. And so he might find Matthew Scully more congenial than Peter Singer on this score. A gradual modification of our moral views, developing in an organic, quasi-Burkean fashion is more likely to take root than some attempted revolution from above.

  • Debating the bomb

    Apparently some people never get tired of arguing about whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Happily, though, there is a link there to G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Mr Truman’s Degree” in its entriety, which I don’t think I’ve been able to find on the web before now.

    I mean, look: in terms of traditional moral theology Anscombe is absolutely right. The bombings were murder plain and simple. The only way I can see to defeat this is by abandoning deontological considerations and making some kind of consequentialist argument that the bombings were justified, which is what defenders usually do. You also get the rare bird who actually denies that there were any “civilians” in the morally relevant sense at those targets, not seeming to realize that this repugnant doctrine would license virtually any act of terrorism since civilians can always plausibly be held to be “contributing to the war effort” if you define that broadly enough.

  • The political is the personal

    Two recent articles talking about the difficulty of being in relationships with people where sharp political differences are involved: a gay conservative writer for the New Republic writes about being dumped by his liberal boyfriend, and a guy writes to Salon‘s Cary Tennis about how he can’t stand to be around his Republican parents. I think I also recall a NY Times piece a while back about realtionships being strained on account of the partisan tensions of the Bush era.

    When my wife and I first started dating our politics were pretty far apart, but I think we’ve actually come to agree about more things as we’ve been married. I’m not sure who’s yielded more ground, though! And it took me a while to figure out that when arguing about politics with your spouse, you don’t necessarily want to go for the jugular, i.e. the way you argue can be just as important as what you’re saying. I was kind of clueless about this because when I was in college my best friends and I used to have rowdy no-holds-barred arguments about politics, religion, you name it, infused by that undergraduate willingness to follow an idea wherever it led.

    These days I usually find myself in polite (mostly liberal) circles where it’s either assumed that everyone agrees about most things or at the very least that no one wants to start a fight. Which is fair enough! There’s a time and place for everything, and the neighbor’d backyard barbeque may not be the place for a verbal throwdown over the Iraq war or abortion. But I do occasionally miss those epic battles of yore.

    In some ways I think genuine closeness allows for more frank disagreement. You can speak your mind more freely with someone that you know already accepts you. You’re not as worried about appearing as a person with the “correct” views on everything.

    But it does seem that there could be “deal-breakers,” though what they are will obviously vary from person to person. The writer of the Boston Globe piece linked above couldn’t understand why his liberal boyfriend couldn’t abide his support for the GOP. But it’s not tough to see that a gay man might take the GOP’s record on gay rights pretty personally: how do you have a relationship with someone who supports a political party that, in your view, is trying to deny you fundamental rights? Whether that’s a fair argument or not, it’s not difficult to see why someone might feel that strongly about it. On the other hand, most people won’t be moved to quite the same heights of passion by, say, the farm bill or tax credits.

    So, how about you? Do you have friends, relatives, spouses, lovers with whom you disagree strongly about politics? How do you negotiate those differences? Heated arguments? Friendly ribbing? Polite silence? Are there “deal-breaker” issues where you couldn’t see yourself in a relationship or friendship with someone who took the opposing view?

  • Libertarians and animal rights

    Jim Henley asked for a libertarian justification for animal cruelty laws here. Other libs have chimed in here and here.

    As it happens, I was recently reading an article by Stephen R. L. Clark called “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” (The Monist, Vol. 70:1, Jan. 1987) where he tries to articulate a rationale for protecting animals (and ecosystems) that arises out of liberal/libertarian ethic.

    We’ve already seen that Clark is something of an anarcho-conservative, and here he takes the tack of showing that a concern for libertarian style rights is by no means incompatible with concern for animal rights.

    What Clark suggests is, in essence, that we can’t assume that the differences between humans and animals are so great that the former always have a full complement of rights while the latter have none:

    First, it is implausible to claim that the only evil done in imprisoning, tormenting and killing even a rational agent is that we thereby interfere with her moral choices: much of the evil is simply that we do what she does not want done. That evil is also done if our victim is non-rational, not morally autonomous. What difference does it really make whether or not she has or could have a principled objection to our behaviour? If she has no will in the matter I do not violate her will, but I clearly violate her wishes.

    Secondly, what ground have we got to make so radical a distinction between wishes and the will, between the desires and projects of a nonhuman or sub-normal human and the principled will of a rational agent? Why should it be supposed that I make my claims upon the world as a carefully moral being, in some way that a non-rational being could not manage? “A cat who is being hurt will struggle, scratch and try to bite. Why is not this a claiming of its rights?” (Sprigge 1984 p. 442). Why isn’t a blackbird claiming his rights when he proclaims his territorial possession? What is lacking in too much discussion of these questions is any serious attention to what ‘animals’ are like, and what evidence there is for the vast difference in nature that humanists like [H.J.] McCloskey must conceive. It is quite inadequate to appeal to current English linguistic usage, as if that settled the question. If it is wrong (not merely imprudent) to batter human infants this may be partly because it seems likely to interfere with their future projects, but it is chiefly wrong because they do not like it, nor would they like its further consequences if they knew of them. The same wrong is done in battering baboons: who could imagine that baboons don’t mind?

    It follows, if the abstract argument for natural human rights must be extended to allow similar rights to other agents (even if not strictly ‘moral’ agents), that our property rights in non-human animals must often be suspect. A right that licenses the violation of a right is no right at all, and ‘self-owning’ is a category more widely extended than we had thought. A being ‘owns itself if its behaviour is the product of its own desires and beliefs, if it can locate itself within the physical and social world, and alter its behaviour to take account of other creature’s lives and policies (see Clark 1981). This, I take it, is [Tom] Regan’s concept of what it is to be ‘the subject of a life’, not merely living (1983 p. 243). Such self-owners are, in the relevant sense, equals, and a just, liberal society cannot allow them to be owned by others, even if it allows them to be employed on terms not strictly of their own making.

    The libertarian argument is that “self-owners” have the right not to be arbitrarily subjected to the will of another. Clark’s contention is that “self-owner” covers a wider range of creatures than just human beings. This is essentially a version of the so-called argument from marginal cases: it’s very difficult to specify a set of criteria for whatever morally important category you like (self-owner, person, rational agent, etc.) that includes all and only human beings. Either it will be drawn so narrowly as to exclude some classes of humans, or it will be drawn so widely that at least some non-human animals count.

    What’s noteworthy is that a lot of libertarians seem to want to maintain the traditional status of human beings as sole rights-bearers without the metaphysics to back it up. An Aristotelian worldview that insisted on big bright distinctions between natural kinds might be able to provide support for this view, as might some religious views. But a world of evolutionary development where living things exist along a continuum without sharp breaks seems to sit more comfortably with the idea of a continuum of moral rights.

    Clark’s distinction between animals being “owned” and being “employed on terms not strictly of their own making” injects some fuzziness into thinking about what might actually be entailed by all this. Is there a sense in which animals could be said to “consent” to at least some of the relationships that have evolved between them and human beings? Could domestication be understood as somehow analogous to the entering into of a partnership? Wherever we draw that line, though, some forms of wanton cruelty would seem to be easily ruled out. Also, I might add, would things like factory farming: an arrangement which is extremely difficult to see any animal “consenting” to in however attenuated a sense we can come up with.

  • CO2 emissions for me, not for thee

    Ross Clark points out that certain high-profile policies in the developed world ostensibly aimed at reducing global warming actually function as a protectionist racket against the developing world.

    The two most significant that he mentions are the attempt to enforce caps on emissions on countries like China and India without taking per capita emissions into account and the popularization of “food miles” as short hand for carbon emissions – thus favoring local food over imported – when the reality is far more complex (Jim Mason and Peter Singer talk about this in their The Ethics of What We Eat – “buy local” may often serve as a good rule of thumb, but not as a hard-and-fast rule).

    The entire article is well worth a read. Clark worries that “increasingly the politics appear to be shifting the burden of cutting carbon emissions on to the world’s poor: they must be kept in a state of noble peasanthood so that we can carry on living pretty much as before.”

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises:

    In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder.

    Roepke was a free market economist, widely credited with Germany’s post-war economic recovery. He was also a deeply conservative thinker in the best sense who recognized that life is more than the market. His A Humane Economy argues that the market requires strong social, cultural and legal frameworks in order to function as it should without reducing social values to market values.

    Here’s a snippet:

    The questionable things of this world come to grief on their nature, the good ones on their own excesses. Conservative respect for the past and its preservation are indispensable conditions of a sound society, but to cling exclusively to tradition, history, and established customs is an exaggeration leading to intolerable rigidity. The liberal predilection for movement and progress is an equally indispensable counterweight, but if it sets no limits and recognizes nothing as lasting and worth preserving, it ends in disintegration and destruction. The rights of the community are no less imperative than those of the individual, but exaggeration of the rights of the community in the form of collectivism is just as dangerous as exaggerated individualism and its extreme form, anarchism. Ownership ends up in plutocracy, authority in bondage and despotism, democracy in arbitrariness and demagogy. Whatever political tendencies or currents we choose as examples, it will be found that they always sow the seed of their own destruction when they lose their sense of proportion and overstep their limits. In this field, suicide is the normal cause of death.

    The market economy is no exception to the rule. Indeed, its advocates, in so far as they are at all intellectually fastidious, have always recognized that the sphere of the market, of competition, of the system where supply and demand move prices and thereby govern production, may be regarded and defended only as part of a wider general order encompassing ethics, law, the natural conditions of life and happiness, the state, politics, and power. Society as a whole cannot be ruled by the laws of supply and demand, and the state is more than a sort of business company, as has been the conviction of the best conservative opinion since the time of Burke. Individuals who compete on the market and there pursue their own advantage stand all the more in need of the social and moral bonds of community, without which competition degenerates most grievously. As we have said before, the market economy is not everything. It must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature. Man can wholly fulfill his nature only by freely becoming part of a community and having a sense of solidarity with it. Otherwise he leads a miserable existence and he knows it. (A Humane Economy, pp. 90-91)

    Here Roepke sounds a bit like John Paul II, who recognized the value and importance of markets for production and exchange, but the equal or greater importance of maintaining the value of things, especially human life, that cannot be reduced to exchange value. As he wrote in the encyclical Centesimus annus:

    It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. But this is true only for those needs which are “solvent”, insofar as they are endowed with purchasing power, and for those resources which are “marketable”, insofar as they are capable of obtaining a satisfactory price. But there are many human needs which find no place on the market. It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied, and not to allow those burdened by such needs to perish. It is also necessary to help these needy people to acquire expertise, to enter the circle of exchange, and to develop their skills in order to make the best use of their capacities and resources. Even prior to the logic of a fair exchange of goods and the forms of justice appropriate to it, there exists something which is due to man because he is man, by reason of his lofty dignity. Inseparable from that required “something” is the possibility to survive and, at the same time, to make an active contribution to the common good of humanity. (Para. 34)

    It’s probably no coincidence that Roepke, the son of a Lutheran pastor, enunciated a similar kind of Christian Democratic vision. American conservatism has, unfortunately, tended toward a kind of “vulgar libertarianism” in theory, which valorizes “the market” as the solution to all social problems. And in practice it has ironically tended toward corporatism – favors for big business that actually end up shielding them from the vicissitudes of the market.

    The interesting question to me is whether there is a space for Roepke-style “humane conservatism” to join with McKibbon-style grass-roots progressivism in offering an alternative to the kind of neoliberal version of globalization that many would argue threatens the social, moral, political, and ecological health of our society.