Peter Singer wins million-dollar prize

The New York Times reports:

Over the past decade, the philosopher Peter Singer has been promoting the idea of “effective altruism,” which encourages people to have reason, rather than empathy, guide their philanthropy.…

Now Singer has been named the recipient of the 2021 Berggruen Prize, a $1 million award given annually to a thinker whose ideas have “profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.” And, in keeping with his principles, he will be directing half the windfall to The Life You Can Save, an organization he founded in 2009 to promote the idea that philanthropy should be directed at efforts to do the most good per dollar to save or improve the lives of the world’s poorest people.

In its announcement, the Berggruen Prize committee lauded Singer, a professor at Princeton, for reinvigorating the philosophical tradition of utilitarianism — which holds that creating the greatest happiness for the greatest number, rather than absolute principles of the good, should be the guiding principle for action — both within academic philosophy and as a force in the world.…

Singer’s work has long troubled comfortable notions, including about what counts as generous. In his 1972 paper “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” prompted by the famine in Bangladesh, Singer, who is Australian, argued that well-off people had a moral obligation to give far more to humanitarian causes around the world than was typical in most Western societies. Geographical distance, he argued, made no difference in one’s moral obligations.

The paper was widely influential in philosophical circles. But he really shot to broader fame and influence in 1975 with the book “Animal Liberation,” which argued that factory farming and animal research were immoral, and called on people to make their lives “as free from cruelty as we can.” To limit moral concern only to fellow humans, he argued, is unjustified “speciesism.”

When I did a post in 2010 about “the 12 books that have influenced me the most,” I included Animal Liberation and said: “This is the one book about which I can say it has affected my life every single day for the past 20 years.”

More from the article:

Singer — who has long said that he gives away about 40 percent of his income — turned to developing his ideas about effective altruism in the books “The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty” (2009) and “The Most Good You Can Do” (2015).

Singer, 75, has also been a controversial figure, particularly among advocates for disabled people who have contended that his utilitarian analysis discounts the value of their lives. (In his 1979 book “Practical Ethics,” he argued that parents should have the right to end the lives of newborns with severe disabilities.) In 1999, his appointment at Princeton drew protest from the disability advocacy group Not Dead Yet, whose founder has called Singer “the most dangerous man on earth.”

Earlier this year, Singer, along with two other philosophers, started the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which aims to “show the value of embracing controversy as a means of getting closer to the truth, advancing knowledge, and reforming social and cultural paradigms.” …

Singer will receive the award at an event in Los Angeles next spring. As for the allocation of the prize money, he plans to invite the public to help choose what charities will receive donations, from among those recommended by The Life You Can Save.

The FAQ on Singer’s website responds to some ethical questions he’s been asked:

How is keeping these people alive going to help, in the long run, when the basic problem is that the world has too many people?

It’s not so clear that the problem really is too many people, rather than that some people have a lot more than they need, and others not enough. But that’s a large question that I am currently interested in investigating more deeply. I do agree that continued global population growth is likely to make the world’s problems more difficult to solve. One proven way of reducing fertility is enabling poor people, especially women, to get some education. Women with even just a year or two of primary school education have fewer children than women with no education. So development aid does slow fertility. But if you want to do something more directly related to population issues, you could give to organizations like Population Services International, or DKT International.

I’ve read that you think humans and animals are equal. Do you really believe that a human being is no more valuable than an animal?

I argued in the opening chapter of Animal Liberation that humans and animals are equal in the sense that the fact that a being is human does not mean that we should give the interests of that being preference over the similar interests of other beings. That would be speciesism, and wrong for the same reasons that racism and sexism are wrong. Pain is equally bad, if it is felt by a human being or a mouse. We should treat beings as individuals, rather than as members of a species. But that doesn’t mean that all individuals are equally valuable – see my answer to the next question for more details.

If you had to save either a human being or a mouse from a fire, with no time to save them both, wouldn’t you save the human being?

Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being. But not because the human being is human, that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens. Species membership alone isn’t morally significant, but equal consideration for similar interests allows different consideration for different interests. The qualities that are ethically significant are, firstly, a capacity to experience something — that is, a capacity to feel pain, or to have any kind of feelings. That’s really basic, and it’s something that a mouse shares with us. But when it comes to a question of taking life, or allowing life to end, it matters whether a being is the kind of being who can see that he or she actually has a life — that is, can see that he or she is the same being who exists now, who existed in the past, and who will exist in the future. Such a being has more to lose than a being incapable of understanding this. Any normal human being past infancy will have such a sense of existing over time. I’m not sure that mice do, and if they do, their time frame is probably much more limited. So normally, the death of a human being is a far greater loss to the human than the death of a mouse is to the mouse — for the human, it thwarts plans for the distant future, and it does not do that for the mouse. And we can add to that the greater extent of grief and distress that, in most cases, the family of the human being will experience, as compared with the family of the mouse (although we should not forget that animals, especially mammals and birds, can have close ties to their offspring and mates). That’s why, in general, it would be right to save the human, and not the mouse, from the burning building, if one could not save both. But this depends on the qualities and characteristics that the human being has. If, for example, the human being had suffered brain damage so severe as to be in an irreversible state of unconsciousness, then it might not be better to save the human.

(Photo by Todd Huffman.)

“If this policy saves even one life...”

“If this policy saves even one life, then it was all worth it.”

“No, if this policy saves only one life while having massive negative consequences for many people, then we should find a more effective policy.”

* * *

That's an imagined dialogue I just made up, not quoting anyone in particular. And here’s a relevant article. Excerpt:

When politicians say, “If it saves just one life,” they can appear to care deeply while simultaneously absolving themselves of the responsibility of crafting a rational response to a difficult issue. It allows them to trade on emotions instead of facts.

Animals

I wish they could appreciate everything I'm doing for them tonight. First I set up a humane, no-kill mouse trap in my kitchen (baited with a generous dollop of peanut butter drizzled with honey), then I carefully cut the plastic rings from a 6-pack of club soda to remove any holes that animals could get stuck in.

A moral rule of thumb

Be good enough so that if everyone in the world were as good as you, it would be a major improvement. That should be a low bar!

This fish was voted the "world's ugliest animal" . . .

. . . but it only looks so ugly because of the ugly behavior of humans.

John McWhorter and Glenn Loury on the ethics of Ferguson

John McWhorter: [Michael Eric] Dyson thinks that a Michael Brown doesn't have any control. . . . The idea is that it's unfair to even suggest that the black community has control . . . . It's considered to be a special case, I think, in human history. The idea is that slavery plus Jim Crow and all these 400 years, then deindustrialization . . . makes it so that we have a group of people who cannot be expected to control themselves. It's on society.

Glenn Loury: That's a . . . category mistake. It mixes up two different kinds of things. Suicides will go up if the unemployment rate stays above a certain level for a certain period of time. I don't have the data at my fingertips, but I bet it's true. So, a social scientist can learn that, and that's worth knowing. This individual who hung herself — you can't account for that action with that reference. That's absurd. It's just mixing up two different kinds of things. There's no inconsistency between the simultaneous existence of a collective and an individual responsibility. Societies are responsible for the conditions in which people live; people are responsible for what they do in those conditions. I see no contradiction there.

McWhorter: You know, I know what you mean, but I honestly think that a lot of people, including a great many academics and intellectuals, would disagree with that point. You and I would be considered a little bit backward in understanding that there's a point beyond which individuals really cannot be held responsible. I think that in terms of that suicide example, many people would say: "No! You can't talk about what's going on inside of her! It's the larger issue!"  . . . The main flashpoint of Ferguson is that Michael Brown and his friend refused to step aside. And I'm not saying that in blame; I'm saying that because that shows you what their attitude toward law enforcement was. And I think that ultimately, that's law enforcement's fault. . . . Now, do I think of Michael Brown as responsible for the fact that he really could have just moved aside? I do. But on the other hand, I also see a society where I don't think that a representative number of people are going to be convinced by that. . . .

Loury: There's an ethical question here. . . . What does it mean to treat people with dignity and with respect? Withholding from them the presumption of their being responsible and capable, in terms of the management of their own lives, is a profound move of disrespect, in my opinion. I don't know how you can possibly have equality under such conditions. Those people then become infantile. The people about whom you say: "Oh my! Look at their conditions! They can only do this!" They become outside the orbit of any kind of moral discourse. They're not moral agents anymore. . . . You've gotta treat people as moral agents, man, or else you're not taking them seriously as human beings.

McWhorter: Well, isn't it sad that the fact is: we're backward! That is exactly why people hate the kinds of things that you and I write, because the idea is that this kind of Kantian — you might even call it "enlightened" — way of looking at it doesn't work when it comes to the descendants of African slaves in the United States of America. . . . I cannot stand the idea that part of my racial identity is supposed to be that I'm supposed to only pay lip service to the idea that we can do anything about our fate — that I'm supposed to just watch this steamroller rolling over us, and have a sense of heroicness in undergoing it and making sure that people see me undergoing it. That doesn't work.

David Brooks dissects America's norms on "inequality"

They're complicated. A sample:

Academic inequality is socially acceptable. It is perfectly fine to demonstrate that you are in the academic top 1 percent by wearing a Princeton, Harvard or Stanford sweatshirt.

Ancestor inequality is not socially acceptable. It is not permissible to go around bragging that your family came over on the Mayflower and that you are descended from generations of Throgmorton-Winthrops who bequeathed a legacy of good breeding and fine manners.

Fitness inequality is acceptable. It is perfectly fine to wear tight workout sweats to show the world that pilates have given you buns of steel. These sorts of displays are welcomed as evidence of your commendable self-discipline and reproductive merit.

Moral fitness inequality is unacceptable. It is out of bounds to boast of your superior chastity, integrity, honor or honesty. Instead, one must respect the fact that we are all morally equal, though our behavior and ethical tastes may differ.

Do you give to charity to help people or for other reasons?

Tim Harford wrote (in an old Slate article):

If people really were altruistic, there would be much less volunteering.

It would almost always be more effective to volunteer less, work overtime, and give more. A . . . banker can pay for a lot of soup-kitchen chefs and servers with a couple of hours' worth of his salary, but that wouldn't provide the same feel-good buzz as ladling out stew himself, would it?

In fact, the closer you look at charitable giving, the less charitable it appears to be. A recent experiment by John List, an economist at the University of Chicago, and a team of colleagues, showed that donations are less than magnanimous after all. Using controlled trials to compare different methods of door-to-door fund-raising, professor List's team discovered that it was much more effective to raise funds by selling lottery tickets than it was to raise funds by asking for money. This hardly suggests a world populated by altruists seeking to do the maximum good with their charitable cash. . . .

Even the way we choose to dole out cash betrays our true motives. Someone with $100 to give away and a world full of worthy causes should choose the worthiest and write the check. We don't. Instead, we give $5 for a LiveStrong bracelet, pledge $25 to Save the Children, another $25 to AIDS research, and so on. But $25 is not going to find a cure for AIDS. Either it's the best cause and deserves the entire $100, or it's not and some other cause does. The scattershot approach simply proves that we're more interested in feeling good than doing good.

For that last point, Harford credits Steven Lansburg, who elaborates on why the idea of "diversifying" doesn't make sense with charity the way it does in other areas:

When it comes to managing your personal portfolio, economists will tell you to diversify. When it comes to handling the rest of your life, we give you exactly the same advice. It's a bad idea to spend all your leisure time playing golf; you'll probably be happier if you occasionally watch movies or go sailing or talk to your children.

So why is charity different? Here's the reason: An investment in Microsoft can make a serious dent in the problem of adding some high-tech stocks to your portfolio; now it's time to move on to other investment goals. Two hours on the golf course makes a serious dent in the problem of getting some exercise; maybe it's time to see what else in life is worthy of attention. But no matter how much you give to CARE, you will never make a serious dent in the problem of starving children. The problem is just too big; behind every starving child is another equally deserving child.

That is not to say that charity is futile. If you save one starving child, you have done a wonderful thing, regardless of how many starving children remain. It is precisely because charity is so effective that we should think seriously about where to target it, and then stay focused once the target is chosen. . . .

If your charitable contributions are small relative to the size of the charities, and if you care only about the recipients (as opposed to caring, say, about how many accolades you receive), then you will bullet all your contributions on a single charity.

Tyler Cowen gives another reason to donate to relatively few different charities, though he avoids giving the extreme advice to donate to exactly one, in Discover Your Inner Economist (a great little book which I can't recommend highly enough):

Charities make most of their money off what is called a "house file." The house file consists of donors who have been giving loyally for years. A good house file . . . brings in much more than it costs to maintain. . . .

If a mailing brings in thirty cents for every dollar spent, that mailing probably went relatively well by the standards of the sector. A fifty-cent return per dollar spent is a smashing hit.

Why spend a dollar to get thirty or fifty cents? The answer is simple: the charity is investing in developing its house file. . . .

We now have a new way to make the world a better place. Once we have found some good charities, we should tell them not to rent out our name and address to other mailers. Virtually all charities rent out or swap names and addresses to similar groups; what better way is there to find new donors than to look for people who are already giving to related causes?

"Remove the name" requests save charities thousands of dollars on their mailing costs. (193-194)

A post on Less Wrong argued:

Imagine you are setting out on a dangerous expedition through the Arctic on a limited budget. The grizzled old prospector at the general store shakes his head sadly: you can't afford everything you need; you'll just have to purchase the bare essentials and hope you get lucky. But what is essential? Should you buy the warmest parka, if it means you can't afford a sleeping bag? Should you bring an extra week's food, just in case, even if it means going without a rifle? Or can you buy the rifle, leave the food, and hunt for your dinner?

And how about the field guide to Arctic flowers? You like flowers, and you'd hate to feel like you're failing to appreciate the harsh yet delicate environment around you. And a digital camera, of course - if you make it back alive, you'll have to put the Arctic expedition pics up on Facebook. . . .

[But] when your life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison. You have one goal - staying alive - and your only problem is how to distribute your resources to keep your chances as high as possible. These sorts of economics concepts are natural enough when faced with a journey through the freezing tundra.

But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to "help people". If that's true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don't. In the "Buy A Brushstroke" campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 [about $850,000] to keep the famous painting "Blue Rigi" in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. Each individual $50 donation could have given a year of normal life back to a Third Worlder afflicted with a disabling condition like blindness or limb deformity.

Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people by preserving access to the original canvas of a beautiful painting. And most of those 11,000 donors, if you asked, would say that a thousand people's lives are more important than a beautiful painting, original or no. But these people didn't have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

Last year, David Sedaris wrote about how he was able to get people to donate extra money to him, beyond just paying for his books, even when he was already a fabulously successful author (via):

A couple of books ago, I put a tip jar on my signing table and I made over $4,000 on my tour. The problem was then I started hating people who didn’t tip me. I didn’t say anything to them, but I would just sit there thinking, “You cheap son of a bitch. I just signed four books and you can’t even give me a dollar?” And why should they? But I just got so involved in it. I had to stop doing it.

I told people it was all for me to spend on candy. They were delighted because it’s funny to give money to someone who doesn’t need it. If there had been a beggar outside the bookstore, at the end of the evening, he might have had 75 cents where as at the end of my best evening in Dallas–[I had] $530 in tips.

Is throwing a pie in the face of an unsuspecting victim ever a good idea?

No, argues T.A. Frank in the New Republic.

Frank's headline is "Is Pie-Throwing Ever Morally Justifiable?," but I've qualified my heading to make it clear that we have to exclude consensual pie-throwing, which is probably more common than what Frank is talking about: pie-throwing as an attempt at protest.

Pie-throwing is the issue of the day because Rupert Murdoch was almost hit with a pie while appearing before a parliamentary committee in London before his wife, Wendi Deng, successfully intervened.

Frank admits that no one seems to be supporting the pie-thrower in this incident, but he says this isn't a universal reaction to non-consensual pie-throwing. For instance, he cites Matthew Yglesias's approving reaction to someone hitting Thomas Friedman with a pie. Frank writes:

A common defense of pie-throwing is that it’s, well, just a pie. But, of course, the person getting attacked has no idea what the hell is about to hit him or her. In 1976, during a campaign appearance in his first run for the U.S. Senate, Pat Moynihan got pied by a Yippie yelling “Fascist pig.” Moynihan, a child of Hell’s Kitchen, was no softie, “but it scared the hell out of me,” he told The New York Times. It had been “a violent act.”

The defense that the fear lasts only a short while—between the time you first notice you’re being attacked and the time you realize it’s just a pie—doesn’t work, either. If fleeting fear were no problem, then mock executions would be just hilarious. But momentary fear can be very powerful indeed. If someone aimed a machine gun at me and started firing loud volleys of harmless whipped cream, I wouldn’t laugh it off. I’d scream in terror. And, if someone “just” charged me with a foreign object in hand, I’d be pretty damn frightened, too. . . .

Dignity is a tricky concept, hard to define. But it’s central to many religions, and it’s mentioned in numerous international conventions. The Geneva Conventions famously prohibit “outrages on human dignity.” What separates civilized nations from barbarous ones is that they treat all human beings, even the enemies that they kill and the criminals that they punish, with dignity. (If prisoners of war were to have custard pies pressed into their heads upon being taken into enemy custody, decent people would see it as a sickening humiliation.) It’s also what separates civilized people from bullies and brutes. Pie-throwers want to rob their victims of dignity. That degrades the rest of us, too.

By the way, what’s ironic about many of these pie-throwers is how seriously they take themselves. When the supposedly light-hearted [Noel] Godin, who kicked off his career by throwing a pie at Marguerite Duras in 1969, explained why he spattered Bill Gates with a pie in 1998, it was because Gates “chooses to function in service of the capitalist status quo, without really using his intelligence or his imagination.” Yeah, intelligent and imaginative people don’t bring personal computing to half the globe. They spend 30 years throwing pie.

Ultimately, pie-throwing amounts to the most violent way possible to attack someone powerful without being likely to get in trouble for it. (Victims rarely press charges, because they don’t want to look like bad sports.) But it’s the not the hegemony of elites that’s threatened by pie-throwing. It’s ordinary decency and openness. Murdoch goes back to work tomorrow. But, if there are further hearings, the public will have to go through much more security to get access to them. Today, only journalists were allowed to stay after the pie incident. Ordinary onlookers were made to leave. Thanks, pie-thrower.

One exception to Frank's general rule that pie-throwers don't get in trouble is Johnny Marbles, the man who tried to pie-throw Murdoch. He was arrested and jailed. So, does Marbles regret what he did? He writes:

I had intended to unleash a wave of polemic as I made my move. As it turned out, the whole thing was far too weird for me to string two thoughts together, particularly as Murdoch's wife rose from the chair to prevent and avenge her husband's humiliation. As it went, I'm glad I was even able to make the accurate understatement that he was a "naughty billionaire".

As I languished predictably in a prison cell later that evening, I contemplated whether people would understand why I'd done it. I knew it was a tall order: a surreal act aimed at exposing a surreal process was never going to be an easy sell. I worried, too, that my clowning would detract from the scandal, or provide sympathy for Murdoch.

Believe it or not, I even worried about Rupert Murdoch's feelings. You see, I really don't hate 80-year-olds and, at the end of the day, Rupert Murdoch is just an old man. Maybe what I was trying to do was remind everyone of that – that he is not all powerful, he's not Sauron or Beelzebub, just a human being, like the rest of us, but one who has got far too big for his boots.

Even the aspiring pie-thrower himself was unable to articulate a convincing case for what he did, either at the time or in a long-winded editorial after the fact. So I agree with Frank: in addition to being violent and degenerate, pie-throwing simply isn't the incisively satirical act the pie-throwers seem to think it is. In fact, it's the opposite of what it's trying to be. People don't have trouble understanding why Marbles would want to do this because pie-throwing is too surreal or subversive for our comprehension; we have trouble seeing the point because pie-throwing is trite, formulaic, old-fashioned, humanizing toward the target, and ultimately meaningless.

ADDED: A couple people have asked me if I feel the same way about the people who are going around throwing glitter at politicians who are opposed to gay rights. Here's my response.

What would you do if you got hundreds of letters to Santa at your address?

The New York Times might as well be begging bloggers to embed this saccharine mini-documentary today, and I'm happy to oblige:



"I think if you're going to do one, you should do 'em all. Or, none at all. I don't know, is that weird? . . ."

"That to me is like saying, 'Oh, well, I can't fix all the world's problems, so I'm not going to fix any of them.'"

"What will future generations condemn us for?"

That's the excellent question asked and answered by a piece in today's Washington Post by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

In my post on the death of Senator Robert Byrd, I quoted this Metafilter comment that tried to draw a lesson from Byrd's membership in, and subsequent renunciation of, the Ku Klux Klan:

I imagine that you (and the rest of us), should we have the opportunity to examine our actions today in 70 years, would be taken aback at some of the things we did and believed, things that appeared to us at the time to be obviously, manifestly right. And here's the kicker: we don't know what those things will be.

We may not want to admit it, but on some issue we are all Robert Byrd. Let's just hope we have the grace, as did Byrd, to realize what that issue is when the time comes.

That comment is phrased as if it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to be a long, long time before we can even perceive what these issues are.

Well, Appiah's article gives some basis to be a little more optimistic. Specifically, he gives "three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation":

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.

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?")

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.

Appiah gives 4 current practices that he imagines that we'll look at in the future and ask: "What were people thinking?"

Can you guess what Appiah thinks these practices are? Remember, the Metafilter commenter didn't just say it'll be a long time before we succeed in putting an end to the practices, but that it would be a long time before we were even capable of reasoning our way to a conclusion about what the practices are. If you can come up with even one of the same answers as Appiah before clicking the link in the next paragraph, that would suggest that the Metafilter commenter was too pessimistic; we actually can answer these questions today.

After you've thought about it, read Appiah's answers.

ADDED: Feel free to put your own answer in the comments, either before or after reading the article.

Did the journalists who reported on the Koran burning threat understand what they were doing?

Matthew Yglesias offers some common sense about why Terry Jones, the pastor in Florida who threatened to burn the Koran, is (or isn't) such a big deal:

[I]t's kind of nuts, isn’t it, that we have the general in charge of an ongoing war commenting on some guy in Florida being a jerk. Even nuttier is that he might well be right that this episode will endanger the lives of Americans soldiers. But that really raises deeper issues about Afghan society and the wisdom and nature of America’s engagement with it. The essence of a digital, globalized world with billions of inhabitants is that there’s always going to be some jerk somewhere doing something ridiculous. “Guy in Florida deliberately trying to antagonize Muslims” can’t become a global news story every time it happens.

In the Bloggingheads clip below, Sarah Posner -- a reporter who specializes in religion -- asks why the mainstream media became so fixated on a pastor who has only about 50 congregants. She hypothesizes that the problem is that most of the reporters who covered the story aren't enough . . . like her! That is, they don't specialize in religion, so "they don't know how to evaluate the influence of a particular person."



While I share her incredulity that this became an international news story, I find her explanation hard to believe. Her own passing remark that Jones has only 50 congregants is not beyond the ken of any competent reporter. If anything, you'd expect a generalist reporter to have an especially high standard for when one pastor's statements are a real story.

For instance, Matthew Yglesias is not a reporter, let alone one with a religion beat. Like me, he's a 29-year-old opinion blogger. He and I can easily see these points, and I don't think this is because we're so extraordinarily perceptive or have any expertise about religion. I don't believe that the reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post lacked the capacity to do what Yglesias and I and so many others (including Dave Weigel and my mom, Ann Althouse) did when we wondered: Wait a minute -- how is this a major news story?

What seems to have been going on for a long time is that the MSM feels that a story is automatically newsworthy as long as it involves religion at all -- completely aside from any normal metrics of newsworthiness. Their standard seems to be based entirely on subject matter, not whether the events are likely to have any broader consequences.

Of course, the Koran burning would have had international consequences if Jones had followed through with it -- but only because of the media's own coverage.

Like it or not, symbolic burnings are pretty commonplace. People burn effigies, flags, love letters, sacred texts. It happens. And usually, it's not very exciting. Think of any kind of object, and there's probably someone somewhere burning it or fecklessly threatening to burn it -- despite, or because of, whoever might be offended if they found out. Normally, major news outlets wouldn't even think of paying any attention to these shenanigans, even if the burned object symbolizes something important.

Here's my point: a symbolic burning doesn't, by its own unaided momentum, inexorably alter anything else in the outside world. This is as true of a pastor burning a Koran as it would be of anything else. The media coverage to date has surely inflamed the Islamic world far more than if the pastor had burned the Koran and the media had ignored it.

As is so often the case, the news coverage itself becomes the story, but the news media rarely admit it. Normally, this is a fairly benign quirk of journalese: Bill Maher has noted that journalists reflexively avoid the first person (singular or plural).

In this case, however, more self-awareness on the MSM's part might very well have saved lives. Now that the story is out there, even though Jones called off the burning, it can be used as a terrorist recruiting tool. We'll probably never be able to pinpoint a causal link from the Koran burning media circus to a specific victim of terrorism, but that doesn't mean there won't be any such causation.

I hope that MSM reporters are pausing to think about what this whole episode means about their own role and responsibility. Reporters don't just neutrally reflect the world; they're willful actors who affect the world. To assume that their effects are always for the better can be fatal.

“First, kill a medium-sized dog, then burn off the fur over a hot fire.”

Peter Singer draws our attention to this, the first step in a "tongue-in-cheek" recipe in Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals.

Singer explains (summarizing Foer):

Yes, dogs are intelligent, feeling beings, but so are pigs, cows and chickens. Properly cooked, dog meat is as healthy and nutritious as any other meat. It is also said to be delicious. In fact, since many people now advocate eating locally produced food and stray dogs are killed in their thousands in most big cities every year, dogs are the ideal local meat.

You can find the full recipe near the end of this editorial by Foer, which also expands on the case for eating dogs.

The incoherent moral psychology of terrorists

From a New York Times piece on "The Terrorist Mind":

A play by Albert Camus, “The Just,” is sometimes cited in explanations of the moral complexities of terrorism. It tells the true story of the assassination by a revolutionary group in 1905 of a grand duke in Russia. The assassin planned to kill the duke while he was riding alone in a carriage but the duke’s niece and nephew accompanied him. So the assassin went back and killed him when he was alone, having drawn from what John Horgan, director of International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University, calls the “internal limits” of terrorists.

For a book published last year, Dr. Horgan collected the accounts of 29 former terrorists, many of them defectors from groups like the Irish Republican Army and Al Qaeda. He found that terrorists must inherently believe that violence against the enemy is not immoral, but that they also have internal limits, which they often do not learn until they are deeply embedded in a group.

Some terrorists who accepted killing off-duty soldiers abhorred the killing of animals. Some are comfortable with only a limited number of casualties. When a key I.R.A. bombing instructor was ordered to shoot a police officer whose mother was a widow, he said he felt he “would have to pay for it.” He went into hiding when the I.R.A. killed a pregnant officer and he overheard his mentor say, “We might get two for the price of one.”

Some interviewed by Dr. Horgan told of becoming disillusioned when other group members stole or robbed banks. It was the stealing that bothered them, not the killing.

David C. Rapoport, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a longtime expert on terrorism and morality, said that the final common pathway is a moral calculus, driven by the conclusion that the terrorists’ enemies have “done something so bad, so terrible that they can’t get away with it.” Moral quandaries have often splintered groups, or caused them to disband.

If your objective is to create a world in which innocents (the members of your persecuted group) prevail, but you have to kill innocents to get there, you are in essence destroying your own dream, Dr. Rapoport said. Nevertheless, he said, many terrorists believe “the pathway to paradise is straight through hell." And to kill or in any way violate their own personal moral codes, many terrorists must believe they will achieve a higher moral condition for the group or society as a whole.

Scientific happiness studies are missing the point.

"The fundamental error of the science - and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused - is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion. Researchers are continuously drawn back to this idea since it makes happiness measurable."

So says Mark Vernon (who also writes the excellent "Philosophy and Life Blog"), channeling Robert Schoch's book The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life.

The whole article is well worth reading and worth keeping in mind the next time someone tries to tell you that researchers have discovered that people who do such-and-such are "happier" than people who do so-and-so.

The movie scene I think of every time I hear the "brilliant filmmaker" defense of Roman Polanski

A memorable conversation from Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 movie Rope:

Rupert Cadell [Jimmy Stewart]: After all, murder is — or should be — an art. … And, as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals.

Brandon Shaw [John Dall]: And the victims — inferior beings whose lives are unimportant anyway!

Rupert Cadell: Obviously! Now, mind you, I don't hold with the extremists who feel that there should be open season for murder all year round. No, personally, I would prefer to have … "Cut a Throat Week" … or, uh, "Strangulation Day" …

I've seen many defenses of Polanski (see my previous post on two high-profile petitions for his release), and they typically argue that his greatness as a movie director makes it somehow wrong to imprison him upon his conviction for child rape.

Maybe they're right: Roman Polanski is a superior individual. Maybe his victim just didn't matter as much as he does.

Well, I really don't think so. But wait a minute — I could be wrong. After all, you and I might both be among the inferior beings. Maybe we should defer to those with more refined moral faculties.

Actually, I shouldn't even refer to what's "moral." It's a lowly concept, as you might remember from Brandon's speech in Rope:

The few who are privileged to commit murder … are those men of such intellectual and cultural superiority that they're above the traditional "moral" concepts. Good and evil, right and wrong, were invented for the ordinary, average man — the inferior man, because he needs them.

Likewise, the petition signed by over 70 movie-industry figures (including Martin Scorsese and David Lynch) doesn't dwell on the details of what Polanski actually did to the 13-year-old girl; it doesn't even refer to a victim at all. It tells you only what you need to know:

His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

That's it — that's all the petition says about the nature of the allegations. Surely a mere case of morals doesn't provide a sufficient justification to punish a great man, does it?

Is it morally wrong to care too much for your children?

This is a valiant attempt to try to ease the tension between utilitarianism and actual human behavior:



Joshua Greene seems to want to have his cake and eat it too: defend utilitarianism while accepting the fact that parents lavish money on their kids that could, from an objective utilitarian viewpoint, be better spent on less fortunate people in the world.

His clever move is to suggest that utilitarianism is an "ideal." We accept that people will never reach the ideal because their extreme concern for their children is so deeply rooted. But the ideal is nevertheless an important goal to aspire to.

If we accept that it's a matter of degree, not of strict compliance with binding rules, that raises the question how close it's reasonable to want people to get to the ideal. It's easy to accept one of his examples: parents who are considering buying an $800 stroller for their child should instead buy a perfectly adequate $200 stroller and donate the $600 they save to charity.

But that example dodges the more uncomfortable questions you raise once you start pursuing this line of argument. For instance (to loosely use another of Greene and Joshua Knobe's examples), instead of paying for your child to go to their top choice of college, you could send them to a cheaper, inferior college (or even no college at all), saving thousands of dollars, and donating the money to a charity that does lots of good for suffering people -- say, Doctors Without Borders. It's easy to imagine that an objective and purely utilitarian observer would prefer the inferior college and the massive donation to a humanitarian charity. But it's impossible to imagine significant numbers of real people actually making that kind of decision.

One particularly revealing thing about this exchange is that Greene himself admits that he would hardly follow a utilitarian regimen of being stingy with his children to allow for morally magnificent levels of philanthropy. Why isn't he convinced by his own "ideal"?

I admit that I share Greene's cognitive dissonance. I habitually analyze ethical questions as if utilitarianism were true. Yet if I were a parent, I would knowingly spend extraneous resources on my children that could have led to objectively better consequences if donated to strangers. (And aside from having children, I'd say the same thing of spending for myself.) I don't mean this to be a remotely surprising commentary on my own character; I'm sure the same thing is true of everyone I know.

Even if you make some sacrifices that are laudable on utilitarian grounds, you'll never even come close to doing all you could to maximize net utility. Is there any point to an ethical commandment that no one ever follows?

IN THE COMMENTS: "Jason (the commenter)" adds:

What is the utility of utilitarianism?

I think the speakers minimized the problems associated with individuals following utilitarianism by focusing so much on parents and their children. You'd also have to stop giving special treatment to your relatives, spouse, friends, et cetera.

I suspect if enough people behaved this way the fabric of society would collapse. Of course, they'd be so free of passion they'd probably cease to exist after a generation. Why would utilitarians have kids in the first place?

"We were talking about Kant's categorical imperative. And that's basically the Golden Rule, right?"

That's how my philosophy professor began class one morning.

"No," responded a student. (OK, it was me.)

"Good, you didn't fall into my trap."

Unfortunately, Errol Morris, the acclaimed documentarian, falls into the trap in his piece for the New York Times about lying — "Seven Lies About Lying."

Morris's lie-about-lying #4 is, "Lying can never be justified" — "one should always tell the truth." He correctly attributes this view to Kant. Unfortunately, he adds:

It was linked to his "categorical imperative," Kant's version of the Golden Rule. Would you like others to lie to you? Then don’t lie to others.

That part in bold is the classic mistake about Kant's ethics. Morris tries to support it with a footnote quoting Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:

"I cannot wish for a general law to establish lying be-cause no one would any longer believe me, or I should be paid in the same coin."

The key word here that refutes Morris's interpretation is "cannot." This should be taken literally: it's about whether it's possible for you to want everyone to follow this general rule, not about whether you would actually like for everyone to lie. Kant thought it's impossible for everyone to follow a rule of lying for personal gain. After all, if everyone followed that rule, no one would be able to trust anyone's statements. Thus, lies would become ineffective, since lies only work if people generally trust other people's statements. The idea of a world in which everyone follows a rule of lying for personal gain isn't merely unsavory; it's self-contradictory. Since you can't conceive of something self-contradictory, you cannot wish for a world where everyone followed the rule. Consequently, you shouldn't follow this rule; in other words, you shouldn't lie.

(That's my off-the-cuff rendition of Kant. I haven't recently read the primary sources, so it might not be perfect. If you'd like to read a more rigorous explanation — using the more traditional Kantian terminology of "universal maxims" and so on — you could try this blog post.)

In fact, the whole foundation of Kant's theory was that people should be guided by reason, not by their personal preferences. The Golden Rule — "Do to others as you would like them to do to you" — directly refers to your personal preferences. It's not surprising, then, that Kant actually criticized the Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule is more self-centered than Kantian ethics. In the standard formulation, the Rule refers to "you" twice in one short sentence: it's about what you would like to have done to yourself. Since different people have different desires about how they'd like to be treated, this implies a relativistic moral code. Taken literally, the Rule may provide wildly different advice to different people based on their idiosyncratic traits.

But I also have a deeper problem with the Golden Rule's invocation of what-you'd-like-done-to-yourself. Even if we put aside concerns about whether it's too relativistic or unstable, there's still the unanswered question of where these desires come from. Why do you want anyone — even yourself — to be treated a certain way? The Golden Rule seems to take this as a given, but the question of what people want — or should want — is hardly simple to answer. It would seem that an explanation would need to come from something beyond the Golden Rule itself. And perhaps that something is actually more fundamental to ethics.

There's another problem with equating the Golden Rule with the categorical imperative: the Golden Rule is, at least on its face, just about how to treat others. Kant saw ethics as including how you should treat yourself. (For instance, one of his most famous examples of the categorical imperative is his argument that suicide is morally impermissible. While suicide does hurt others, Kant was more concerned with the wronging of oneself.) I don't subscribe to Kant's ethical theory, but I at least give him credit for trying to address profound moral questions that the Golden Rule doesn't even touch.

"Ask me why you deserve Hell"

An intense debate over Christian ethics on an American campus.

Reported and participated in by my girlfriend.

(Continued here.)

Charles Krauthammer botches the torture/"ticking time bomb" hypo.

Charles Krauthammer says there's no reasonable debate over whether you should torture someone if doing so could save the life of one innocent person:

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy....

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.

It's fine for Krauthammer to express his own view on whether you should torture in this situation. But it's not fine for him to say that no one could reasonably disagree with him, or that this is an "easy" question.

For example, I disagree. Maybe I'm wrong and Krauthammer is right — but there's a real debate to be had over who's right. On what basis does Krauthammer announce that you should always torture someone to save one innocent person's life? If you have to draw the line somewhere, why draw it there? Why not be more stringent and draw the line at 2 people -- or 10 or 100 or 1,000? (For that matter, you could be even more lenient and say you should torture to prevent just one person from being seriously injured.)

If Krauthammer had drawn the line at torturing someone to save a whole country from being destroyed by nuclear weapons, then I'd agree that there'd be no reasonable disagreement. Then Krauthammer's analogy to "conscientious objectors," whom we respect but also don't want holding top decision-making positions, would be as eloquently appropriate as he seemed to think it was in his actual column. But drawing the line at exactly one person, without providing any further argument for this position (which Krauthammer doesn't), is arbitrary.

This is all just balancing pros and cons. Plenty of people would reasonably say that the negatives of torturing outweigh the positive of saving one person's life.

Why? For one thing, there's the sheer badness of the torture itself. Torture is so awful that I have a general presumption against making exceptions to our rule against it based on a desire to save lives. If this is just a "presumption," you can argue that it should be overridden in select circumstances, but you'd need to point to something more extraordinary than saving a single life to convince me.

Everybody is going to die. That's a given. It would be pointless to try to eliminate death from the world. But it's not a given that everybody is going to be tortured. You and I are going to die someday, and we have to accept that, but there's no equivalent sense in which we need to accept being tortured someday. And I do believe we should strive for a world free of torture.

In addition to the basic moral objection focusing on the victim of torture, there are lots of pragmatic problems that apply even if you disregard that person's well-being. As this article in The Economist argues:

A pointed objection to George Bush’s policies is not just that they crossed a moral line but that they crossed it to no purpose. Mr Bush’s critics were not confined to bleeding-heart liberals who are even now making a fuss about the rights of a captured Somali pirate. They included a legion, from high-ranking commanders to military lawyers to intelligence operatives, who argued that the techniques were counterproductive.

“Enhanced interrogation” acted as a potent recruitment tool for terrorist organisations. It made it more difficult for America to co-operate with allies, particularly in Europe. It imposed personal burdens on front-line workers who found their values compromised. Dick Cheney points out that the techniques yielded some useful information. But the same information might have been obtained by less controversial means. Torin Nelson, a veteran interrogator, says the administration made a fundamental mistake in focusing on how far it could push detainees, not least because people who are tortured will often confess to anything. It would have been better off recruiting and training more skilled interrogators who knew how to win the trust of their subjects.

Krauthammer has ardently supported U.S. military operations that have predictably killed not just one innocent person, but thousands of innocent people. So he clearly believes that someone can reasonably support a policy that causes regrettable deaths. In fact, it's a lot clearer that the U.S. has caused people to die through wars supported by Krauthammer than that we've saved people's lives through torture (or have allowed people to die by refusing to torture). He can't claim that even he (let alone all reasonable people) is automatically in favor of any policy that prevents someone from dying. Unfortunately, the cost-benefit analysis that we have to engage in is more complicated than Krauthammer would like to think it is.

IN THE COMMENTS: "Jason (the commenter)" makes several important points. For instance, he highlights Krauthammer's statement that "[t]he bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life," and asks:

How does anyone know this with certainty?

My original post may have been too charitable in accepting the hypothetical. You have to factor in the rate of error, and balance that against the value of saving a person's life. Figuring out the rate of error is inherently difficult if not impossible. Yet Krauthammer calls the moral calculus "easy."

Also, he refers to the captured person as "the bad guy." Who counts as a "bad guy"? If someone has only considered committing terrorism but hasn't acted on it, is that person a "bad guy"? Is a cab driver who's driven a terrorist around a "bad guy" for aiding terrorism?

Here's my challenge to Krauthammer or those who agree with them: point to one instance in human history when there's been a "ticking time bomb" scenario along the lines that Krauthammer describes. Has this ever actually happened? If so, how often does it happen?