Positive Liberty

A New Zealand woman drove over her husband.

Twice.

The conservative bloc of the Texas Board of Education has approved some 160 revisions to the state’s social studies curriculum by a vote of 11 to 4.

As further proof that libertarianism belongs to neither Team Red nor Team Blue, and notwithstanding dubious historical, legal and religious claims the Board has insisted upon, I’m pleased to see there’s some good news in the approved curriculum, too. To wit:

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

Also, the Times reports:

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has been diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

Let’s have a round of applause for the digital age!

Are your investments insufficiently risky?

How about placing a bet in a derivatives market for motion pictures.

Since making a bet on a movie so is about the closest any of us will ever get to being actual show business producers, here’s possibly the funniest four minutes in the history of motion pictures (the next five minutes are pretty good, too):

Okay, so it isn’t Scientific American, let alone a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal, but Popular Science has just put its entire 137-year archive online for free browsing. Pretty damned cool.

Later today I will be taking my younger son to see the Tim Burton / Johnny Depp version of Alice in Wonderland. It may be a good movie or a bad movie or an in-between movie, but I won’t subsequently criticize it for not being true to the source material. Doing so would be criticizing a dog for being an unsatisfactory cat. Besides, one does not hire Johnny Depp for what would then be little more than a cameo role.

Carroll’s masterpieces are surely the most celebrated works of children’s literature among the philosophically inclined, for their author (nee Charles Dodgson) was both a mathematician with an interest in logic and, more importantly, a man with a gift for elegant and eloquent absurdities. It is, I suspect, the combination of the two that made Carroll such a rara avis. Continue Reading »

In a preliminary effort to address this question, philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust lured 277 attendees of the 2007 Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association to answer questionnaires asking respondents (1) to compare the moral behavior of ethicists in general to that of non-ethicist philosophers and “non-academics of similar social background” and (2) similar questions about the moral behavior of an arbitrarily selected ethics specialist in their own department. [1]

The authors acknowledge that their survey results hardly constitute solid evidence of ethicists’ actual moral behavior both because the “survey is only an imperfect measure of opinions; and opinion is only an imperfect index of behavior.” No doubt those better versed in inferential statistics could find any number of faults in their methodology and question whether the sample surveyed is in any reliable sense statistically representative of the population of ethicists or philosophers at large.

Such caveats and disclaimers acknowledged, the “results [to me unsurprisingly] suggest that non-ethicist philosophers do not tend to see ethicists, in general, as particularly well behaved. Indeed, a substantial minority of non-ethicists asserted that ethicists on average behave morally worse than non-ethicists.” Comparable results obtained in the survey rating the behavior of specific ethicists in the responders’ particular departments.

The results also appear to somewhat gainsay a longstanding philosophical tradition of belief that ethical reflection is positively correlated with ethical behavior. Socrates found it all but inconceivable that anyone could knowingly act badly. While neither Kant nor Mill make quite so extravagant a claim, both they and many other moral philosophers, past and present, have claimed or at least wished to believe that the study of ethics was instrumentally ethically valuable. Indeed:

We the authors also find this view attractive. If we suppose that professional ethicists are more inclined to or skilled at such reflection than non-ethicists (especially non-academics), and if there is no reason to suspect that ethicists enter the field with a prior inclination towards delinquency, then it seems to follow that ethicists will tend to behave morally better than non-ethicists. But about two-thirds of the non-ethicists and about half of the ethicists surveyed did not endorse this conclusion. Perhaps this skepticism betrays some disillusionment with the Socratic and Enlightenment ideals that many of us are otherwise so eager to share with our students.

Somewhat flippantly, I suppose it should be noted that there is no reason to believe that epistemologists are more knowledgeable than non-epistemologists (even perhaps about what constitutes knowledge) or that metaphysicians have any surer grasp of reality than the rest of us, so why, mutatis mutandis, should ethicists be any different? More seriously, there is also the logically prior question of free will which, especially among contemporary philosophers inclined to skepticism about compatibilism, may undermine the very question whether anyone is ever really more or less ethical in any meaningful sense than anyone else. At least in the opinion of APA convention attendees.

Moreover, again noting that the survey was conducted among professional philosophers, there is almost certainly a question of diminishing returns in play here. Probably every holder of a PhD in philosophy has studied ethics to a greater extent than the average non-philosopher, and it may well be that, at least in the opinion of those non-ethicist philosophers, their non-specialist study sufficed for purposes of contributing to their own rectitude. Indeed, and as the authors acknowledge, there are persuasive philosophical arguments why beyond a certain point the study of ethics may have a negative effect on one’s behavior at least in some circumstances.

In any case, Enlightenment ideals aside, Socrates was surely wrong as anyone who, e.g., continues to smoke cigarettes despite knowing full well the health risks amply demonstrates. And, yes, Kantians lie and utilitarians act in ways not motivated by non-tautological utilitarian grounds, and so forth.

It is not an argument against reason to note that even reason has its limitations and that, as Pascal observed, the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

That is not, I know, sufficiently discursive to be philosophically persuasive. But it is true.

__________

1. Schwitzgebel, Eric and Rust, Joshua 2009: ‘The Moral Behavior of Ethicists: Peer Opinion’. Mind, 118, pp. 1043-1059. [Unavailable online except by subscription.]

According to a class action complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Lower Merion School District issued laptop computers equipped with webcams on a one to one basis to all high school students. Unbeknown to students or their families, the school district had and used:

… the capability to remotely activate the embedded webcam at any time the school district wished to intercept images from that webcam of anyone or anything appearing in front of the camera at the time of the activation.

On November 11, 2009, Plaintiffs were for the first time informed of the above-mentioned capability and practice by the School District when … an Assistant Principal at Harriton High School informed minor Plaintiff that the school was of the belief that minor Plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor Plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the School District.

[Emphasis added.]

This is, of course, only one side of the story. If, however, the plaintiff’s allegations are true, this outrage constitutes perhaps the most egregious recent example of the incipient police state America is increasingly becoming.

Indeed, the fact that this school official, that any public school official would think it permissible to surveil student’s homes — where, if any reader has any doubt whatsoever, both the student and other family members unquestionably have a reasonable expectation of privacy — and, further, to think the practice is so unobjectionable that he would freely admit to photographing allegedly “improper behavior in [the student's] home” to attempt to discipline that student for conduct inside his home is simply breathtaking.

How many other school systems across the country, I wonder, are engaged this very minute in the very same practice?

And since, presumably, they are surveilling minors whose laptops could well be sitting open in their bedrooms as they dress or undress, etc., how many of these school officials could and should be charged with criminal possession of child pornography?

(H/T to Boing Boing.)

Post-rapture care for left behind pets.

Business Week coverage here.

(Hat Tip to Edward T. Ridgely)

William James Morrison, aged 90, died on Tuesday in his home in Utah.

Only a handful of classic toys have approached the lasting popularity of Morrison’s aerodynamic invention. Morrison sold the rights to his Pluto Platter to Wham-O in 1957, the company renamed and marketed the Frisbee and hundreds of millions have been sold ever since. There’s a “Frisbee golf” course in a public park not far from my home. I’d never heard of such things until I moved here several years ago, but it turns out that they’re quite popular. And, of course, it is almost a legal requirement that some undergraduate play Frisbee catch with his dog (preferably wearing a red bandanna) on every college quad in America come springtime.

Frisbees and Slinkies and Hula-Hoops and so forth are precisely the sort of things that never get invented and produced in a command economy. They’re far too “frivolous” for technocrats to “waste” precious state resources on. And that, in a nutshell, is why planned, command economies are inherently inferior to market economies. In the latter, people can decide as individuals what is or is not worth the few dollars a Frisbee costs or, for that matter, the extra tens of thousands of dollars a luxury automobile costs.

Producers can, of course, become very rich figuring out what consumers want and providing it to them — and I hope Mr. Morrison made a tidy sum even though he did sell away the rights to his invention long ago — but markets exist not to make producers rich but to allow consumers to maximize their own happiness given their own scarce resources. It would never occur to a command economy planner that a Frisbee might contribute to that happiness, let alone that people as individuals should be permitted to decide such matters for themselves.

RIP, Mr. Morrison.

Meanwhile, for a more, um, Reasonable analysis of the impact of Citizens United:

The prohibition against Congress regulating political speech in any manner whatsoever is as close to a fundamental and nearly absolute Constitutional restriction on federal power as there is. That said, I have never been entirely comfortably with the airy “speech = money” gloss the Supreme Court has used in addressing these sorts of cases. That said, however, I think on balance the Citizens United case was correctly decided.

However, my purely gut-level fear is that the practical effect of Citizens United is not going to be a more corrupt Congress. That’s probably not humanly possible. Rather, it is that however much more money pours into political campaigns as a result of Citizens United will lead to (1) even longer campaigns with (2) even more campaign ads resulting in (3) even more government.

None of these prospects pleases me in the slightest.

Well, you know, look, that’s the reason he ran for president, to separate the future from the past. — Vice President Joe Biden

Inside philosophical joke: Does President Obama hold to the A Theory or the B Theory and, if the former, is he a Presentist?

(Hat tip to Slate, which is doing the heavy lifting of compiling all such Bidenisms.)

Those words, said with a twinkle in his eye, were spoken to a very young D.A. Ridgely by his boss way back in the 1970s in the acquisitions policy office of the Navy Secretariat. The context back then is irrelevant, but the words came to mind about the topic at hand, which is the prospect of federal involvement in NCAA football. Sports Illustrated reports:

The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday to a senator who had asked for an antitrust review.

In the letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, obtained by The Associated Press, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote that the Justice Department is reviewing Hatch’s request and other materials to determine whether to open an investigation into whether the BCS violates antitrust laws.

“Importantly, and in addition, the administration also is exploring other options that might be available to address concerns with the college football postseason,” Weich wrote, including asking the Federal Trade Commission to review the legality of the BCS under consumer protection laws.

I won’t go so far as to say I couldn’t eventually come up with matters that were even less the business of the federal government than which college football teams go to what post-season bowl games or how the so-called national championship is determined, but I will go so far as to say that it would take some effort.

Mind you, I understand that big time college football is big business. Huge sums of money are involved, almost none of which by the way trickles down to the semi-pro “student athletes” who compete at that level. I understand, also — hell, I live in Texas where the average high school football stadium is significantly larger than at my undergraduate alma mater — that there is tremendous national interest in college football. But there is tremendous national interest in American Idol, the Academy Awards, most major professional sports (all of which are de facto monopolies) and whether Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien should get the Tonight Show, too, but none of those things merits a federal investigation, let alone threats of litigation because the likes of Orrin Hatch thinks his home state school got screwed by the current BCS system.

Hatch bloviates as follows:

I continue to believe there are antitrust issues the administration should explore, but I’m heartened by its willingness to consider alternative approaches to confront the tremendous inequities in the BCS that favor one set of schools over others. The current system runs counter to basic fairness that every family tries to instill in their children from the day they are born.

What the hell? Could there be anything even remotely less egalitarian than American colleges and universities, let alone their damned sports teams? Does Hatch also think that the feds should investigate U.S. News‘ annual academic beauty pageant because the University of Utah (current rank: #126) has yet to be ranked anywhere within shouting distance of Princeton?

I understand Barack Obama believing the federal government has a justifiable role in the workings of intercollegiate athletics because, after all, he believes the government has a justifiable role in everything. But if Orrin Hatch, routinely described as a conservative Republican, believes that your and my tax dollars should be spent pressuring the NCAA to devise a playoff system that will be “fair” to the hundred and twenty current Division 1 FBS teams, what on Earth does he believe would be a frivolous or inappropriate or overreaching use of federal power?

I’ll let the rest of the blogosphere and talking head pundocracy do the heavy lifting as far as sorting out truths, near truths, half truths, outright falsehoods, inconsistencies, contradictions, hypocrisies, rhetorical maneuvers, cheap applause generators and the rest of President Obama’s State of the Union address last night. Indeed, I offer this thread both for my colleagues and our readers to lift a barge or tote a bale or two in that regard.

Meanwhile, here are a few random thoughts mostly from a bit of quasi-live-blogging I did on another forum last night:

1. Where can I get me one of those Bobblehead Bidens?

2. It seems I’m qualified to be a Supreme Court justice; I didn’t applaud or stand up once, and I found myself saying “not true” over and over.

3. Obama’s funniest single sound bite: “Let’s try common sense.”

4. “Neither party should delay or kill every bill just because they can.” On the contrary, that’s exactly what they should do. Well, maybe not every bill, but most of them.

5. “We all hate TARP” [Enthusiastic applause] God help the Republic when they start passing legislation they all love.

6. Obama humbly admits he can’t do it all by himself. Well, hell, even God needed Adam and Eve to lend a hand naming the animals.

7. Finally, one slightly substantive point. If Barack Obama was serious about ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” he’d issue an executive order to that effect prohibiting its enforcement so that he and not Congress would have to take the political heat. Asking Congress to repeal the statute is cowardly. Then again, as with the African American vote, I suspect the president believes he has the grudging support of homosexual voters more or less regardless of what he does. And I suspect he’s right, too.

Those interested in following the story my colleague Mr. Kuznicki discusses below should read Scott Horton’s lengthy report in Harper’s entitled “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle.”

I take no position on the particulars of Mr. Horton’s story. I have not read the “heavily redacted” 1,700 page U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service report following the deaths officially described as suicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo on June 9,2006. Nor have I examined any of the evidence either Mr. Horton or the NCIS has apparently relied upon.

Thus, I will say only this. If the United States wishes to hold its system of justice up as an example to the rest of the world, then at the very least we must hold both our military and our civilian officials to the same standards we purport to uphold. Nothing less will suffice for the rest of the world to take us seriously and nothing less should suffice for us, either.

Corporations, unions, advocacy groups, nongovernmental organizations and the like are not people. Yes, I know, that sentence merely proves what a keen grasp of the obvious I have. But such organizations are ‘persons,’ at least for certain legal purposes and, more importantly, they are comprised of real people, people who join or participate in or contribute to such organizations for various purposes. Not the least of which are political purposes.

Understood as such, it should come as no surprise that the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that key provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, better known as McCain-Feingold (and more properly understood as the Collusive Incumbent Elected Officials’ Protection Act), violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against restrictions on free speech in general and political speech in particular. Continue Reading »

Start with the difficulty any reasonable person will have feeling sorry for someone who receives a $32 million severance package and a mere eight month non-compete restriction. Add to that the fact that many of us who can remember Johnny Carson in black & white (we who the networks demographically don’t care about anyway) always saw David Letterman as Carson’s proper successor on the Tonight Show and you can pretty much guess my opinion of NBC’s situation. In case you just arrived from a galaxy far, far away or have foolishly thought the earthquake in Haiti or the Senate race in Massachusetts or even the NFL playoff games have been the big news lately, the Tonight Show War II has become a global story, so I’ll let the Chinese media explain the current mess:
Continue Reading »

♫ That once there was a spot ♫
♫ For over fifty years that some believed was Camelot. ♫