Jason Brennan Defends, I Reply

Jason Brennan has now responded to my criticism. He did so on his blog rather than in comments on mine, so I will rerespond here instead of there.

His first response to my claim that "social justice" has no definite meaning is to concede that I am correct if "definite" is taken in a strong sense. It does not seem to have occurred to him that that concession raises problems for his earlier post, in which his very first "you may be a cartoon libertarian if" criterion was "You think the term “social justice” has no definite meaning in philosophy today."

He argues, however, that even if "social justice" does not have a precise meaning, it describes a cluster of related ideas and so is as precise as other terms used in philosophy. A simple test of that claim is whether he can use his definition to say what is a theory of social justice and what is not, and he attempts to do so. 

To illustrate the failure of that attempt, I offer three quotes from his post:

 1. “Theories of social justice focus on the idea that moral justification of coercive institutions depends on how well these institutions serve the interests of the poor or least advantaged.”

2. “Few advocates of social justice think this is the only criterion of legitimacy or justice.”

3. “The most basic form of utilitarianism is a theory of distributive justice but not social justice, because it has no special concern for the poor or least advantaged.” 

Point 2 implies that serving the interests of the poor or least advantaged only has to be one of the things determining justice, not the only thing. Utilitarianism has no special concern for the poor or least advantaged, but it includes their utility in the total (or average) it is maximizing, hence the serving of their interests is one of the things determining justice for a utilitarian; if the poor do worse in society A than in society B and everyone else does exactly as well, then A is a less justified. It follows that, contrary to point 3, utilitarianism is (among other things) a theory of social justice.

To avoid this conclusion, Jason has to introduce the requirement of "special concern for the poor or least advantaged" (italics mine). We have been here before. My clash with BHL folk over the question of what "social justice" means started in an exchange with Zwolinski and Tomasi on Cato Unbound where I made the point I have just made, and got the following response:

As David notes, utilitarians care about the poor in the same way they care about everyone else: their interests are to be taken into consideration equally along with the interests of everyone else. Advocates of social justice, in contrast, seem to care about the poor in a deeper sort of way: in Rawls’ version, the interests of the least well-off have a very strong moral priority over the interests of everyone else.

This is a fine and important distinction for philosophers to make. But it’s worth noting that for most of the real world problems that the classical liberals were concerned about, it is a distinction without a difference. ...  

And, in the rest of their reply, they never explain what a special concern means.

As long as Jason's point 1 is interpreted to mean some concern with the treatment of the poor, as I think his point 2 has to permit, the only theories that do not count as theories of social justice are ones that hold that outcomes to the poor don't matter at all and I have a hard time thinking of any examples. Jason may think Ayn Rand qualifies. I will leave it to Objectivists to demonstrate that, in her approach to political philosophy, the lives of poor people mattered along with the lives of other people and leaving each person free to control his own life was the best way of serving man's life qua man.

Part of my criticism of Jason's position centered on a definition of social justice offered on his facebook page, using the term "minimally decent lives." In his response he switches to something closer to the definition I offered from Z&T, claiming that the two are close enough to both describe the same cluster concept.

That raises an obvious question: Does he agree that "minimally decent lives" in one of his definitions is, as I argued, dishonest mush, a term implying an objective standard that does not exist? If he does agree, he ought to take his use of such a term as some evidence of a problem with the concept whose definition he is offering, for reasons along the lines of those offered by George Orwell in his classic essay "Politics and the English Language." If your objective is to clearly express ideas that you are thinking clearly about, there is no need to use terms that are emotive but meaningless.

Jason goes on to respond to the challenge in another recent post, where I suggest that he is more respectful to a bad argument offered by an academic philosopher, specifically John Rawls' argument for his minimax principal, than to bad arguments offered by libertarians. He disagrees with my evaluation of Rawls argument, and writes:

"Rawls’s defense of the Difference Principle is not fully compelling because there are some important objections and questionable assumptions."

"Not fully compelling" implies that it is a pretty good argument with problems.  But the central assumption of the argument is that someone who knows he will live a life in a society but does not know which he will live will choose as if he is certain to live the worst life. No justification is provided for that assumption, on which the entire argument rests. Does Jason think there are pretty good, if not entirely compelling, arguments for it? Would he like to offer some?

If not, I do not see why he regards that argument as more defensible than the (bad) arguments Rand offers for her views. He goes into some detail on what is wrong with Rand's critique of Kant, and very likely he is correct. But his rebuttal of Rand depends on an analysis of exactly what Kant meant in parts of his writing. My rebuttal of Rawls is more nearly on the level of "his argument assumes that 2+2=5."

Aside from giving me an opportunity to get back at Jason for implying that I might be a cartoon, why does all of this matter? My criticism of the concept of social justice arose in the Cato Unbound discussion, in the context of my trying to get the Bleeding Heart Libertarians to give a clear answer to the question of how their view of libertarianism differed from the views of other libertarians, most obviously from my view. Part of the answer seemed to be that they thought libertarians should make more of a point of the fact that a libertarian society would be good for (among others) the poor, but that defines at most a difference in rhetoric not  content, since essentially all libertarians agree with the claim.

The other part was that they wanted to incorporate social justice into libertarian philosophy. So I tried to get them to tell me what "social justice" meant. To put some substance into the concept, one needs more than concern for the poor, one needs a special concern for the poor, so I asked them to explain what that meant, and they didn't. 

Part of what is interesting about Rawls is that he does answer that question. Brennan, Zwolinksi and Tomasi all speak respectfully of him, but none of them is willing to adopt his answer. That leaves their position as the combination of a critique of the hard line natural rights version of libertarianism, a critique I agree with and made in print a very long time ago, with language about caring for the poor whose content they are unwilling or unable to explain, at least to me.

One final digression, having to do with my interest in moral philosophy. What originally intrigued me about both Rand and Rawls was their claim to have solved Hume's is/ought problem, to have offered a rational argument for normative conclusions based on positive facts—I think a stronger claim in Rand's version than in Rawls'. I concluded that both claims were bogus. Not only do both of them present chains of argument with at least one gaping hole, both of them try to paper over the hole with rhetoric—Rand more entertainingly than Rawls. Readers interested in my view of that feature of Rand's work will find a sketch here.

Ted Nelson Thinks He Has Identified the Creator of Bitcoin

I don't know if he is right, but it is a plausible and entertaining account.

A Different Sort of Bullying

There has been a good deal of talk in recent years about the evils of bullying and what to do about it. Almost all of what is discussed seems to be bullying of low status people by low status people, largely schoolchildren bullying schoolchildren. There is another sort of bullying that is unfortunately common in our society, arguably a more serious problem, and the subject of less, or at least less uniform, condemnation. Some examples are illustrated by two of my recent posts and one older one.

The first is anti-smoking rules carried beyond the point at which they can plausibly be defended as protecting non-smokers. My example is a proposed rule to ban all smoking from my campus. Smoking is already forbidden in buildings and, I'm pretty sure, near the entrance to buildings, so the proposal would have only a tiny effect on exposure to second hand smoke. I am a non-smoker, find cigarette smoke mildly unpleasant, and cannot remember having ever been significantly bothered by it on campus. The document circulated on the ban asserted a number for total excess mortality due to second hand smoke that I argued in my post on the subject was doubly bogus—it misrepresented the claim it was based on, and that claim was almost certainly based on cherry picked data. And, even if the number were correct, it would say little about the effect of the small additional reduction due to the proposed rule.

One motive for such a rule—whether it has passed or will pass I do not know—is probably paternalism, the theory that if you make smoking sufficiently inconvenient smokers may give it up. But I suspect that another motive is bullying. People, unfortunately, enjoy pushing other people around. Such a rule lets people who disapprove of smoking make life more unpleasant for those who smoke,  demonstrating the power of the former over the latter.

My second example is the behavior of police officers. There are obvious reasons why police officers would wish other people to be deferential towards them, since the more extreme forms of non-deference can, in that context, be lethal. If the only people who talk back to them are criminals, mostly criminals about to attack them, that provides a useful signal of when to be on their guard. Making things unpleasant for people who demand a badge number (I once got arrested for assisting someone else to do so), point a cell phone camera at them, or in other ways fail to acknowledge their status and authority, is one way of getting that deference.

There are also obvious reasons why people in general want other people to be deferential towards them, making a profession which legitimizes the demand for deference and makes it possible to enforce it with the threat of death, injury, or prison, attractive to those with that taste. Which I think helps to explain the increasingly common pattern of unnecessary SWAT style raids, kicking in doors, pointing guns at innocent people and ordering them to lie on the floor, shooting dogs. 

I do not think it would be hard to come up with other examples in both categories. People like pushing other people around. Doing so is generally safer and more effective when you have the power of the law on your side. One way to do so is to make rules or pass laws that make life harder for people you disapprove of, whether smokers, gays, or college students who get drunk and have sex. Another is to get a position one of whose perks is the right to order other people around—and, in some contexts, threaten, assault, beat, even kill anyone who objects, with minimal risk of suffering any criminal penalties for doing so. That includes TSA agents whose opportunities are limited to vandalizing checked luggage and ordering people to stand still while being patted down, and police officers with a wider range.

A Question for Bleeding Heart Libertarians

In a recent post, I took issue with Jason Brennan's claim that "You might be a cartoon libertarian if: 1. You think the term “social justice” has no definite meaning in philosophy today." One point that came up in the discussion thread was the suggestion that the BHL folks, who are (I think) all or mostly academic philosophers, are unfairly prejudiced against other people who are not.

Apropos of which, I have two simple questions for Jason or any of the others associated with the BHL blog:

1. Do you believe that the derivation of the rule that, as one of you put it, "lies at the heart of John Rawls’s theory of social justice," is more intellectually defensible than any of the items on Jason's list of criteria for recognizing a cartoon libertarian? Is his derivation of the minimax rule more defensible than the claim that "Ayn Rand’s critiques of Kant or Plato (or any philosopher, for that matter) are insightful." Than the claim that  “'social justice' has no definite meaning in philosophy today." Than the claim that "there are no involuntary positive duties to others."

If the answer is that you think Rawls' argument is more defensible than any of those, I would be happy to argue the matter with you. When I raised the question with Zwolinski and Tomasi in a recent exchange, I got a response which I interpreted as implying that they were unwilling to defend Rawls.

Supposing you are not willing to defend Rawls, at least to that limited extent, the obvious next question is:

2. Would you be willing to describe Rawls as a "cartoon liberal?"

Preferably online or in print.

If the answer to both questions is "no," I do not see how you can defend yourself against the charge that you have a double standard, treat arguments made by academic philosophers, at least famous ones, with more respect than arguments made by other people—even when both are equally bad.

Which is not, I think, consistent with justice in the ordinary sense of the term.

P.S. Thinking about this in response to comments, I concluded that I had overstated my argument. Jason did not say that Rand was a cartoon libertarian, although for all I know he thinks she is, he said that you might be a cartoon libertarian if you think certain of her writings are insightful. Applying the same standard to him, the question I should have asked is whether he would be willing to say that:

You may be a cartoon liberal if you think Rawls' argument for the minimax principle deserves respect.

P.P.S. Jason has now responded to this (and my previous post criticizing me) on his blog.

Sometimes the Good Guys Win

A moving account by a young lawyer who succeeded in getting his client acquitted of a bunch of charges that could have put him in in jail for the rest of his life. The client's offense was shooting two police officers in the legs--when the police smashed down his door in the middle of the night in a SWAT raid. The police fired 37 rounds, mostly from a rifle, into a house containing a bunch of people, including six children—by good fortune none of them were hit. The client fired four shots, all aimed low through the door they were breaking through, and stopped firing as soon as it became clear the attackers were police.

The grounds for the raid? A police informant had told them that someone else in the house had sold crack cocaine. The police found cocaine concealed in a room used by both the client and the person they had been told sold it—and tried to convict the client of having it.

As far as I can tell, none of the policemen were charged with reckless endangerment or anything else, and they are presumably still out there, armed and dangerous.

This summary is based on the lawyer's account, but given other such stories I have seen I see no reason to doubt it.

Cartoon Libertarians, Social Justice, and Bleeding Hearts

"Social justice = the idea that coercive institutions can be legitimate (i.e., permissible) only if, under favorable circumstances, they can reasonably be expected to help ensure that most conscientious people will lead minimally decent lives."

(From Jason Brennan’s Facebook page)

"social justice is a moral standard by which the institutions of a  society can be evaluated on the basis of how well they serve the  interests of the poor and least advantaged."

(Definition offered by Zwolinski and Tomasi in the course of a Cato Unbound exchange)

In a recent piece on the Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog, Jason Brennan took some of his fellow libertarians to task for “cartoony opinions on complex matters.” His list of examples started:

You might be a cartoon libertarian if:

1. You think the term “social justice” has no definite meaning in philosophy today.

(followed by points 2-17)

While I agreed with many of his examples, that was not one of them. If “social justice” has a definite meaning in philosophy, philosophers should be able to offer clear definitions and the definitions should be consistent with each other. As the quotes above, from philosophers from the same faction of the same political movement, demonstrate, they are not. The first specifies that it is about coercive institutions, the second about institutions in general. The second makes the evaluation of a society depend on how well it serves the interests of the poor and least advantaged, the first makes it depend on maintaining a minimal standard for “conscientious people.” The poor and disadvantaged are not all conscientious, conscientious people are not all poor and disadvantaged. Both definitions look more like political rhetoric than political philosophy.

Not only are the definitions not consistent with each other, neither has a clear meaning. Consider, for instance, “minimally decent lives.” A modern making a list of the requirements would almost certainly include access to decent medical care, by which definition no human being prior to 1900 lived a minimally decent life, since what we consider reasonable medical care did not then exist. One obvious response is that what is a minimally decent life changes over time. But that is to concede that the definition uses dishonest rhetoric, pretends that a relative concept is an absolute one. To say that the same life would be minimally decent if lived in 1700 but not if lived in 2000 makes nonsense of the words “minimally decent.”

An egalitarian might say that what matters is not the absolute level but how equal the society is. A utilitarian could point out that what distribution of income maximizes utility depends, among other things, on how much income there is to be distributed. The BHL folks are unwilling to identify with either of those approaches and unwilling or unable to offer a substitute that actually means what it says.

To continue …  . “Advocates of social justice believe the moral justification of our institutions depends on well these institutions serve the interests of the poor and least advantaged.” Depends entirely? Two societies are equally justified if they equally serve the interests of (say) the bottom 10% of the income distribution, even if, in one of them, the rulers live a life of luxury supported by the taxes of everyone else above the bottom, or if, in one, almost everyone above the bottom 10% is a (well taken care of) slave? Does Brennan think there is any human being who thinks none of that matters, that the moral justification of the institutions depends only on how well they serve the bottom of the distribution? I am pretty confident he does not—he is, of course, welcome to correct me in the comment thread to this post.

One possible response is that advocates of social justice believe that the justification of the society depends in part on the implications for poor people. But so does very nearly everyone else. Utilitarians believe that the justification of the society depends on how well it serves everyone’s interests, the poor and disadvantaged included. Similarly for alternative candidates. The concept that, according to Brennan, has a definite meaning in philosophy either has a meaning that nobody could take seriously or a meaning that distinguishes it from practically none of the alternative concepts—the only exception I can think of is a pure deontological position that pays no attention at all to consequences. I agree with Jason that consequences matter, but that agreement does not define social justice.

To return to the first definition …  . If “coercion” means the literal use of force, then fighting off a murderer or rapist counts as coercion, making a society that permits it a “coercive institution.” Does Brennan believe, does he think anyone believes, that permitting such self-defense is only morally permissible if it helps “ensure that most conscientious people will lead minimally decent lives?" What if self-defense is relevant to only a few, and most will get to live minimally decent lives without it? What if it is important only to people who would manage minimally decent lives even if they are not able to use force to defend themselves, but much better lives if they are?

Brennan might reply—he is again invited to do so here—that using force in self-defense does not count as coercion. But that would bring him straight into one of the problems with libertarian theory that he is, I suspect, already aware of. Libertarians say they are against the initiation of coercion, but their definition of initiation of coercion depends on their definition of what rights people have. If Brennan uses the same definition of rights for his definition of social justice, then practically all libertarians believe in it. If not, then what distinguishes Brennan et. al. from the rest of us is not their commitment to social justice but their view of what rights people have.

One of the things that bothered me in a later online exchange with Matt Zwolinski (on libertarianism.org) was a tendency to slide over from the right to use force to protect property in land, which raises serious moral issues since most land was not produced by humans, to the right to use force to protect property in general. Without a theory of what property claims are legitimate, one cannot distinguish the use of force to protect legitimate property from other and coercive uses, which gets us back to the idea that one is only permitted to fight off a murderer or rapist if doing so helps the poor—or at least helps whoever is at risk of not living a minimally decent life, whatever that means.

I should probably stop now, at least for long enough to give Jason Brennan an opportunity to respond. Before doing so, it is worth pointing out just how heavy a burden of justification he has imposed on himself. In his point 1 he was not merely claiming that his view of the status of the meaning of social justice was defensible. He was claiming that it was so obviously true that to deny it was a cartoonish position.

---

My challenges to Zwolinski and Tomasi on social justice from the Cato Unbound discussion.

Discussion started by Bryan Caplan, with comments by me and others, on the problem of defining social justice.

 -------------

You might be a cartoon bleeding heart libertarian if:

1:  You describe Rawls as offering the “philosophically most sophisticated” theory of social justice—and then decline to defend it when "David Friedman trenchantly critiques the maximin decision rule that lies at the heart of John Rawls’s theory of social justice."

2. When asked to define "social justice" you insist that the idea is well defined and prove it by offering two or more inconsistent definitions.

3. When asked in exactly what sense your philosophy implies a special concern for the poor, you change the subject.

4. Your explanations of why the views of other libertarians are wrong are clearer, better written, more convincing and much shorter than your explanations of what you believe and why it is right.

5. You describe your associate professor's salary as a "minimum basic income." (Suggested, perhaps a little unfairly, by Sean II commenting on Brennan's post)

P.S. I continued the argument in a later post, and Matt Zwolinski offered some responses in comments to that post.

P.P.S. Jason has now responded on his blog.

Benghazi and Intra-Party Politics

The current controversy over the attack on the Benghazi consulate and its aftermath looks, at first glance, like a straightforward case of inter-party politics, with Republicans using their control of the House of Representatives to produce and publicize evidence of the misdeeds of the Democrats controlling the White House. But it occurs to me that something else, perhaps more interesting, may develop.

The evidence so far suggests that the Administration, in particular the State Department, deliberately misrepresented the information available to them, blaming the attack on a spontaneous demonstration due to a UTube video, something which they could not be held responsible for or expected to have anticipated, when the evidence suggested that it was actually a pre-planned terrorist attack. And some of the testimony suggests that the objective was to mislead not only the public but Congress, something that members of Congress, Democrats as well as Republicans, might reasonably object to. Hence it would not be too surprising if at some point some Democrats in Congress announced that, much as it pained them to admit that their Republican colleagues were, in this case, correct in their suspicions, the demands of truth, justice, and their obligations to the American people forced them to rise above politics.

It might even be true. But ...  .

Politics exists within parties as well as between them. The part of the Administration most obviously responsible for both failing to protect the consulate and misrepresenting the nature of the attack was the State Department. The Secretary of State was Hilary Clinton. Barack Obama cannot run for President in the next election, but Hilary not only can run, she is currently the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.

And there are surely other Democrats who would like to be President. It will be interesting to see, when and if Democratic unity on this particular controversy breaks—I have not followed the story carefully enough to know if it has yet started breaking—which Democrats break it, and what their alignment is within the Democratic party.

The Binding Constraint on Book Length

Nonetheless, a  non-exhaustive but still wide spatiotemporal coverage has its own epistemic and methodological problems, especially if attempted within the realistic constraints of page economy (scholarly publication being increasingly subject to the harsh rules of profit and loss).

(Wael B. Hallaq, in the introduction to his Sharia: Theory, Practice, Transformations, a book more than six hundred pages long)

Hallaq's complaint takes it for granted that the constraint on how long a book he can write is how long a book his publisher is willing to publish. I suspect that the more important constraint is how long a book his readers are willing to read. As some evidence, I note that he also published a drastically shortened version of the book, discussed in a recent post here. That version, about a third as long and about half the price, ranks 152,814 on Amazon. The longer version ranks 871,161. Amazon does not provide actual numbers for book sales, but my guess is that the latter figure represents a fraction as many as the former.

It is possible, of course, that the still longer book he would like to have written would do better. There is a straightforward way in which he could find out. CreateSpace, Amazon's print on demand subsidiary, will publish a book at negligible cost to you, put it up on Amazon and send you the resulting royalties; the rate depends on the price you choose to charge. If you are willing to accept royalties of 10%, the price for a 600 page book is about $16. So Hallaq could  publish twice the number of pages he did as a two volume work and sell it on Amazon for a total of $32, which is less than half the price of the existing book.

My guess is that it would not sell many copies, even at that price, but I could be wrong.