chooses the opposition’s weakest (or one of its weakest) arguments or proponents for attack.

Talisse developed an account of this fallacy in an article in Scientific American, “Getting Duped: How the Media Messes with Your Mind“:

Weak man tactics are harder to detect than those of the straw man variety. Because straw man arguments are closely related to an opponent’s true position, a clever listener might be able to spot the truth amid the hyperbole, understatement or other corrupted version of that view. A weak man argument, however, is more opaque because it contains a grain of truth and often bears little similarity to the stronger arguments that should also be presented. Therefore, a listener has to know a lot more about the situation to imagine the information that a speaker or writer has cleverly disregarded.

The problem is that there are always both strong and weak interlocutors in the electorate. There are a lot of crazy, wrong, and stupid people in the United States. Should bloggers and scholars devote their energies to responding to them? Or should they respond to the strongest, smartest, best proponents of a policy with which we disagree?

This is made doubly difficult due to the history of ‘dog whistle‘ political discourses in the US. As Lee Atwater put it:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger”.

Atwater’s point has often been misinterpreted, in part because his practice was so despicable. His claim was not that state funding cuts actually count as racism, it was that forcing racist politicians into dog whistle politics raises the tone of the debate, so that we can hope, eventually, to be having a substantive conversation about policy rather than a coded conversation about race. Of course, it’s clear that there will always be a portion of the population that hears some talking points as coded racism, and it’s clear that some politicians will take advantage of that fact in order to ’switch codes’ and gain their trust. But how much of our time ought to be devoted to combating the use of increasingly anachronistic codes, and how much to ferreting out the best policies?

To my mind, we’re hurt more by our paranoia about codes than by the codes themselves. If everything is a “message,” if everything is rhetoric, than there’s no reason to listen to the opposition or consider alternatives. By accusing reasonable folks of being in league with unreasonable and basically racist arguments, we’re denying that they are honorable or worth considering as equals. Not everything is a power struggle: sometimes, especially in democratic deliberations about complex institutional reforms, people argue because they actually want to get it right.

As I see it, the way we deal with out fellow citizens largely depends on applying the principle of charity both in our interpretation of their argument and in our selection of which arguments to interpret. But this task is complicated by the role that scholars, teachers, and public intellectuals play in policing the boundaries of reasonable public discourse itself.

Sometimes we target arguments for racism or sexism because such arguments are gaining or currently hold enough traction to influence public policy. This is obviously important. However, sometimes it seems that we target those arguments because we’d like to tar our opponents with the stink of racism or sexism. This seems to be what’s happening with the Tea Party movement. By targeting the lunatics and the racists, we ignore the possibility that there’s a core of reasonable people with reasonable cause for disaffection with American politics. That’s a strange refusal of empathy, given how disaffected many of us were just a few years ago, and how little has changed, in practice, except for some of the personnel: there are still innocent prisoners in Gauntanamo Bay, there are still CIA black sites, we’re still at war with two different countries, the Patriot Act is still in place…..

If we really believed that fringe activists and lunatics represent the core of the Tea Party, then we ought to wonder whether all fringe theories are the tools of someone’s propaganda. But then we’d have to ask whether the 9/11 Truthers were just as much a leftist conspiracy as the Birthers are alleged to be a rightist conspiracy. Yet we know that’s not the case: “If there were a conspiracy,” we think, “I’d have been invited, right?” And yet we continue to ascribe such motivations to our opponents.

I think it’s absurd to claim that last decade’s paranoids were “really” motivated by a desire to delegitimate President Bush and undermine the war on terrorism. Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly liked to make such claims… but at the time most liberals understood that the conspiracy theorists were a Weak Man stand-in for our legitimate grievances. We knew that when idiots got up and “proved” that the World Trade Center was deliberately demolished, no one benefited. It didn’t help the antiwar movement, it didn’t prevent massive tax cuts for the rich, and it didn’t keep President Bush from engaging in domestic spying. It was just superstition and paranoia. Like the Birthers, such insanity could be ignored or laughed at, but it never helped anyone to debunk it.

Of course, politics is not public policy scholarship. There are a lot of false assumptions circulating due to voter ignorance, and many of them impact the range of viable policies. Correcting some of those has to be the purpose of political speech. So that means we spend a lot of time distinguishing IMAC rationing from a death panel, or the “public option” from single-payer. If you’re interested in the debate, and you know enough to make those distinctions, you should, of course, correct your ignorant relatives when they send you their crazy email forwards, or chime in at the dinner table.

But assuming you’re interested in the debate and truly want to get the right answer, you can’t be satisfied with having defeated the loony fringe. You’ve got to seek out the smartest opponents you can and try seriously to match your arguments against theirs. This usually involves undermining one’s own certitude, embracing fallibilism and forgoing strict pluralism and relativism. I say that if we’re not willing to do that, our confidence is unearned.

There’s a major public choice barrier to having the kinds of debates that really need to be had publicly: that’s the draw of the smoky back-room deal, where none of the ignorant masses can intrude with their absurd rhetoric and misplaced fervor. But if we want to be a mature democracy, we’ve got to hold each other to high standards of civility and public discussion. The costs are what always stick in our craw: putting up with idiots, responding to smugness with a smile and a reiterated request for calm debate, and worse, the necessity of sometimes giving up on a conversation with an opponent who refuses to see reason. I think the rewards are worth it: more public participation, better policy outcomes, less polarization, and more cross-cutting interaction with those with whom we disagree.

Of course, I’m biased. Moderates are just so much more interesting than partisans. Activists are all about incommensurable principles and painting the opposition as malefactors. You always know what a partisan is going to say before he says it, and the gaps in their knowledge are usually staggering. With moderates, it’s amazing how much you can learn from the moments of surprising disagreement: a principle differently applied, a piece of data which you never considered, or a different sense of how institutions fit together optimally.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s real evil in the world and it’s important to oppose it; but it’s rarely particularly interesting. Evil is, by its nature, superficial and boring, and those who oppose it generally have to be fairly single-minded in order to sustain their efforts. Torture, war, and exclusion are exceptions to this: holdovers of crueler times that liberal democracies just haven’t mastered yet. So by all means, let’s get to work on those issues. Still, most things that we work on in advanced liberal democracies aren’t about pure evil, and treating them as if they are just damages our capacity to work with our fellow citizens to get the right answers.

• Evan pointed me to The Next Right. Not the Tea Party, but a similar attempt to reconstitute the conservative party around less jingoistic and racist ideals.
• Peter Levine prefers the “Coffee Party”:

The Tea Party consists of fellow citizens whose participation is welcome. I reject treating them as dupes of shadowy corporate lobbies or as racists. (Since racism is intermingled with ideology and economics in the United States, no movement is simply innocent–but I would need a lot more evidence before I would uniquely indict the Tea Partiers on that score.) All that said, their brand of politics seems the opposite of what we need. They interpret standard economic policies–like a stimulus during a recession–as signs of immanent tyranny, thus turning our mainstream debate into a struggle for our national survival. That creates a very difficult environment for governance and problem-solving–even if one happens to favor a smaller role for government.

• Michael links to Marc Ambinder’s analysis:

The point is that the Tea Party movement is not nearly as exogenous as it seems. It is a movement of a certain type of Republican-leaning independent. [...]

There is a distinct ideological dimension to the Tea Partiers; they are “fed up” with both parties, but they are, quite plainly, more “fed up” that the Republican establishment does not seem to embrace their emotional valence. If they’re satisfied, they’ll vote Republican.

If they’re disatisfied, they won’t vote Republican. (They won’t vote for Democrats in either case.) I would hazard a guess that Tea Partiers, though they exist in marginal districts, tend to be more numerous in heavily Republican districts. So perhaps we overstate the degree to which Tea Party enthusiasm, per se, translates into Republican political success in the midterms.

• David Brooks hates the Tea Party because of how much it resembles the New Left:

Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.[...]

Because of this assumption, members of the Tea Party right, like the members of the New Left, spend a lot of time worrying about being co-opted. They worry that the corrupt forces of the establishment are perpetually trying to infiltrate the purity of their ranks.

Because of this assumption, members of both movements have a problem with authority. Both have a mostly negative agenda: destroy the corrupt structures; defeat the establishment. Like the New Left, the Tea Party movement has no clear set of plans for what to do beyond the golden moment of personal liberation, when the federal leviathan is brought low.

In my book, that’s a pretty good recommendation.

As I’ve said, the Tea Party is largely up for grabs: there are at least three factions each trying to unify the coalition. The Tea Party Nation put on the Nashville convention, but that was boycotted by other factions. If you spend enough time on Google, you’ll come across I am the Tea Party Leader. Who’s in charge? The Youtube generation, Time’s 2006 Person of the Year: You.

It’s this internal factionalism that distinguishes the Tea Party from other conservative movements: under a generic historical allusion, resentments, ideologies, and ideas are duking it out for recognition and perhaps control. This Time Magazine piece captures some of that localism and resistance to unification: Why the Tea Party Movement Matters.

One of the worst things about the latest incarnation of conservatism was the weird attachment to strong authority figures, whether it be Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, or George W. Bush. That over-trusting attitude towards older white men created a scary resemblance between conservatism and authoritarianism, which isn’t a particularly conservative doctrine. The Tea Party as it currently stands seems to have more in common with traditional conservative and modern progressive efforts in its rejection of centralized authority, representative strongmen, and traditional masculinity.

Of course, much of this analysis depends on parsing the relationship between the Tea Party and Glenn Beck: he seems at once an uncharismatic leader and a drama-queen sideshow. A lot of this got organized through his 9/12 Project, and he certainly represents the most emotionally manipulative side of the movement. We’ll see if he succeeds in dominating the whole thing and redirecting the energies into the post ‘94 Republican neo-con/theo-con/paleo-con convergence. My claim is simply that this is far from fait accompli. Based on what I’ve been reading lately, I’m beginning to think he lost control as the movement grew larger after the heavily publicizes 9/12 rally, but it’s clear he plays an important role still from his bully pulpit on Fox. Some of the same goes for Sarah Palin, but it seems important that CPAC voted for Ron Paul.

Right now, I’m thinking of the Tea Party in line with early-20th Century Progressivism. Of course, that’s ironic, since the movement seems to combine a distaste for a particular brand of Progressive “expertocracy” with strands of nativism and small government rhetoric. But much like the early Progressive-era policies of the Wisconsin Republican Party, the real evil for many Tea Party members is “The Curse of Bigness,” centralization, and the experience of alienation from supposedly-democratic governance. Also like the Progressive movement, the title ‘progressive’ or ‘Tea Party’ itself has become so overused that it no longer identifies a unified or directed ideology or movement. Though the largest Tea Party organizations are run by GOP PACs and Republican-affiliated consulting firms, the majority of ordinary members don’t know about or endorse that affiliation. Instead, they’re fleeing the Republican party in search of authenticity, like the Green Party on the left. In this sense, the efforts to ‘astroturf’ the movement might still be undermined by an actual grassroots movement of disaffected citizens.

The Bush Jr. administration wasn’t very small-c conservative, after all, but he campaigned and won on ‘compassionate conservatism’ and non-intervention in foreign affairs. It might not have seemed a credible claim to Democrats and left-leaning Independents, but many people voted for Bush Jr. on that basis. That’s what they want, and they deserve honest representation. What’s more, that kind of principled conservatism seems to promise a much better loyal opposition partner for the Democrats than the current Republican party. I’m no conservative, but I do believe that it is possible that a new and differently organized iteration of the conservative faction would be better for both public deliberation and for the country as a whole.

David Ibnale had no idea how tough it would be to give away umbrellas on Market Street the other day. He figured that he and his free umbrellas were going to change the world. The world had other ideas.

“People thought there was something fishy about it,” Ibnale said. “There wasn’t. It was just free umbrellas.”

Ibnale was one of a dozen people in San Francisco who had been given $100 by a startup charity that is trying to get strangers to start doing nice things for other strangers. It’s a novel concept. Most folks, it turns out, aren’t prepared for it. “What’s the catch?” a man asked.

No catch, replied Ibnale. Take an umbrella. You’re getting wet.

“No, thanks,” the man answered, and kept walking through the rain. Ibnale began keeping count. He asked 27 wet people if they would like to have an umbrella. Seventeen of them said no.

Altruism is something of a novelty these days, and most people have little time to partake. But altruism is the whole idea behind the new charity, called the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy.

The article mentions other attempts at ordinary altruism, some of which were more successful. I love this sort of thing, less for for the evidence of suspicion built into our daily interactions (“What’s the catch?”) and more for the creativity it demands of folks and the plus-sized benefits it engenders. (400 quarters on a grammar school playground is worth more than $100.)

That said, the hedonic utilitarian in me (an unpleasant man to be sure) worries that we ought not to call random acts of generosity philanthropy, or even altruism, exactly. The reason to do this kind of show-off charity is thoroughly selfish, since we end up keeping so much of the enjoyment for ourselves. On this view, the real reason we love these stories is that they sound like fun: it’s the utility monster in all of us trying to find its way out. (“I can spend $100 better than you can!”) Though this kind of creativity is certainly welcome, there’s a niggling voice who insists that a true altruist wouldn’t even need to see the benefits of her efforts, and would donate the money to Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders where it can do “the most good.”

So let’s put these suspicions to rest: understood as virtue or capacity cultivation, these kinds of exercises are more effective than duties or obligations for accomplishing the goals that duties and obligations seek. We know this with children: we use enjoyable and fun exercises cultivate the virtue of charity so that they learn to cherish altruism later and elsewhere. So why not skip that fancy dinner and buy some umbrellas? Maybe it’ll make you a better person, but even if you fail to flourish, there’ll be a lot of dry and suspiciously grateful people. And if it turns out to be fun, maybe we can skip two dinners, and split the proceeds: half for Haiti, half for random acts of kindness.

Zero-sum games are for suckers. Hedonic utilitarians ought to know that better than anyone: be full of win.

“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs [Medicaid and Medicare] that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.”

Progressives have largely ignored this movement, because of its association with organizations like the John Birch Society and those who deny that Barack Obama is an American citizen. But I’m struck by how much the Tea Party is beginning to coalesce as a a group of bipartisan deficit hawks, fiscal conservatives, and libertarians.

The Tea Party doesn’t have settled leadership or a national platform, and its members have largely rebuffed attempts by some in the old guard of the Republican Party to define it. It also seems significantly younger than the Republican Party. In the same light, it doesn’t seem that all of the people currently flirting with the Tea Party movement would recognize themselves in the image of potentially violent disenfranchisement described by Frank Rich, who identifies an ideological affinity between the Tea Party and Joe Stack, the terrorist who flew a private plane into the IRS building in Austin, TX:

…most Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril.

Now Rich is convinced that Tea Party members is a nascent hate group, but I’m not persuaded. Certainly there are hate groups out there, and some of them have put out feelers, trying to determine whether the Tea Party might grant them some legitimacy, as it has done for the John Birch Society. But the membership doesn’t know what it is, yet.

Because I teach college students at a pretty expensive private university, I asked this morning if anybody would be willing to talk to me about the Tea Party. I’ve just concluded a discussion with one Tea Partier, not necessarily representative, but very interesting.

• Student X is a junior, majoring in anthropology and wants to “research human rights” by going to graduate school in the humanities or law. Her senior thesis is going to be on linguistic determinism, Sapir-Whorf and Chomsky. Her family is Republican. Her boyfriend is libertarian.
• She attends Tea Party rallies because she believes that the stimulus bill was irresponsible and the economy would have righted itself without adding to our considerable debt. She calls the Tea Party a coalition of “fiscal conservatives.”
• She believes that President Barack Obama is a citizen and describes herself as “socially quite liberal,” which means that she “supports gay marriage.”
• Her biggest concern is that: “When I’m 40, the government will be bankrupt.” She claims that disagreements in politics are about fundamental values, not facts, so if she prefers “liberty to equality” that’s not a claim that anyone can “disprove.”
• As a 20 year-old, she wasn’t old enough to have a say or an opinion on the war in Iraq, but it generally troubles her. Her primary concern in class is human rights, not the economy or even domestic politics: perhaps that’s a safer position to take with an obviously liberal professor.

I was mostly in listening mode, because I didn’t want to start an argument but rather gather more data. It was enlightening. She’s smart and a good student generally. From here on out, Student X is the face of the Tea Party for me.

What a lot of progressives are ignoring is the upside to the Frank Rich argument: the nascent Tea Party movement isn’t going away, and it’s not the same as the Republican Party. Everybody who thinks that they have the political world all figured out has to remember that there’s a new generation every decade trying to figure out the same set of problems under all new circumstances. Every year there’s a new set of freshman who think Ayn Rand is hot shit and don’t understand how it can be just for the government to tax us to spend money on the welfare of others. Every year every one of us becomes a little bit more the establishment to be ousted rather than the radicals doing the ousting.

The Tea Party is a new partisan configuration under the sun: undefined and largely un-coopted by an established set of elites. The Republican has long struggled to unite the economic policies of low taxes, free trade, deregulation with the social policies opposing abortion, gay marriage, and drug use. Ever since the Democratic Party began borrowing Republican’s economic policies, the Republicans have become increasingly irrelevant. The Tea Party could change all that by disturbing the traditional alliance between libertarians and conservative religious folks, between neo- and theo-conservatives. It could turn into anything, especially for the generation who doesn’t remember the fall of the Berlin Wall or Iran-Contra or Nixon or Vietnam. Some Tea Partiers could vote for Obama and then swing wildly in a new direction if the mood hits them because all they want is CHANGE but they don’t know what it is they want to change or how.

These are folks who’re getting their history of the Progressive Era from Glenn Beck, whose first vivid memory was planes crashing into the World Trade Center, and who spent their teens having daddy issues with George W. Bush: “I love him, he makes me feel safe!” “I hate him, he violates my privacy!” The thing about daddy is you can never stop yourself from loving him in the end, and Frank Rich is trying to warn us that we’re harboring right-wing terrorists in our midst, some of whom may simultaneously support a strong executive branch and a return to traditional values. Frank Rich is worried about fascism: he’s fearful that this new generation will decide that their lowered expectations for the future can be blamed on the Chinese or free trade or the welfare state. That’s certainly a possibility. Joe Stack proves that this kind of populism can be prone to violence. However, that doesn’t mean that the label ‘Tea Party’ is the best way to talk about a group of militias, dominionists, and white supremacists who have been resisting the New World Order since the first President Bush took office. It may instead be a new avenue for principled conservatism and enlivened political culture.

If it is going to be this new form for conservatism, a healthier conservatism than the form the Republican Party has taken over the last two decades, then it will be because both liberals and conservatives take it seriously and don’t prejudge it. I disagree that the stimulus bill was poorly executed or that it is the principle cause of our public debt woes. I disagree that programs like Medicare and Medicaid ought to be left to private charity. But I’d much rather have that debate than some of the debates that the Bush-era Republican Party thought were needed: torture, pre-emptive warfare, warrantless wiretapping, and the unitary executive.

Remember: the 20th Century didn’t get off the ground until World War I began in 1914. The 19th Century didn’t take on its characteristic traits of industrial revolution and civil foment until the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1814. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

It’s going to be an interesting decade.

The living proof that our societies are obviously in-human is today the foreign undocumented worker: he is the sign, immanent to our situation, that there is only one world. To treat the foreign proletarian as though he came from another world, that is indeed the specific task of the ‘home office’ (ministère de l’identité nationale), which has its own police force (the ‘border police’). To affirm, against this apparatus of the state, that any undocumented worker belongs to the same world as us, and to draw the practical, egalitarian and militant consequences of this – that is an example of a type of provisional morality, a local orientation in keeping with the communist hypothesis, amid the global disorientation which only its reestablishment will be able to counter.

Fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization come under fire because of larger health care access issues regarding which treatments should be covered by insurance or under a single-payer style medical system. Given how expensive they sometimes are, should these treatments be covered in the face of unmet medical needs of existing children? Is infertility a disability that requires reasonable remediation? What counts as reasonable, especially since the success rates of these technologies are quite low?

Moreover, the issues with assisted reproduction technologies are still there for couples who can conceive normally, they’re just not usually subjected to public debate. That doesn’t mean there are no public concerns. For instance, some countries incentivize procreation with a tax credit, including the United States. Environmentalists warn that childbearing is by far the largest “carbon footprint” decision an American can make. And we must also note that in the absence of population-replacing reproduction, first world countries must import labor, which enriches immigrants and their home countries through remittances.

So it’s an issue worth thinking through, and though the Parfit Reading Group has basically dissipated, I think there’s still room to discuss the Parfitian response that starts with something called the No Difference View, which is tied to this question.

Parfit asks us to imagine two scenarios in which a woman suffers from an easily treatable illness. In the first scenario, the woman is pregnant, and the illness will irreparably handicap the child if she does not receive a cheap and simple treatment. Obviously, the woman ought to receive that treatment. In the second scenario, the woman is thinking of becoming pregnant, but discovering the illness, she must decide between becoming pregnant now and postponing her pregnancy a few months for the treatment to take effect. Not postponing her pregnancy would leave the resultant child with an irreparable and serious handicap.

Parfit then points out that in the second scenario, we tend to think that the woman ought to postpone her childbirth so that her child may live without the handicap. But in so doing, the second woman guarantees that the child who lives without a handicap will be a different one than the child who would have suffered from the handicap. They might both have been named “Tom” for instance, but the earlier, handicapped child would have been the product of a different ovum and spermatazoon than the later, disability-free child. So in that scenario, it seems like we’ve effectively proclaimed that it is better for disabled-Tom not to exist at all than for him to exist with an irreparable handicap. And this seems a strange response to the question: “Is existence better than non-existence?” Here, it’s not the mother whose rights are at issue, but the child’s right to simple medical treatments. We commonly assume that an unborn child has a right to adequate medical care, but it’s strange to believe that that right could trump his right to exist at all!

The only way to justify the No-Difference View’s claim without also subscribing to some horrendous eugenics program is to specify that non-existent humans don’t have the same right to exist that existent humans have, and further, that we ought to be guided by some form of impersonal welfare-maximizing principle in making procreative decisions. Parfit calls the the Impersonal Totality Principle, and it’s a version of consequentialism: we ought to act so as to maximize the welfare of those who exist without regard for kinship or individuality.

But this seems a strange conclusion, especially in the context of a family. However, we do not normally think of childbearing as calculation, and many people are even offended at the prospect of deciding on family matters with such calculations in mind. In part, this is because procreation creates new subjects, with interests and rights of their own. Many parents take it as axiomatic that they ought to prefer the benefit of their own children to those of strangers precisely because these rights.

In contrast with other kinship obligations, however, this is a kind of chosen fidelity: we take on an obsessive obligation to our children only when we have children. It doesn’t make sense to say that I owe everything to a child that does not and may never exist. Thus, in the decision to take on parental responsibilities, we may well be choosing to take on an absolute and un-defeasible duty in which we can legitimately act selfishly so long as we understand our own interests to be closely allied with those of our children. In such a circumstance, many acts that would seem unreasonable self-centered can even gain the veneer of altruism. Taking on a massive and incommensurable duty simply renders the decision all the more consequential and deserving of moral theorizing.

Utilitarians have long reminded us that there is always someone who could use our resources more than ourselves: every cup of coffee I buy could treat ten cases of fatal diarrhea in Haiti or Thailand. Though I’m unlikely to do it, I really ought to brew coffee at home, and then send the difference to those who need it, and even that is at a minimum. It’s the very least I could do.

The same thing goes for procreative morality: forgoing parenthood may well be a mere extension of that utilitarian principle. While we might not want to give the state the right to coerce reproduction, we could still acknowledge that some form of consequentialism tells us what we ought to do when considering procreation. So if, say, adoption would be a better use of a couple’s love and financial resources than IVF, they ought to adopt  instead of having their own children. And the same argument is probably extensible to fertile couples, who ought to adopt an orphan rather than reproduce themselves.

A similar argument would undermine the preference for infant adoptions, and recommend instead the many older children who go without homes because adoptive couples prefer to adopt infants before language habits and personality traits are formed. Parents seem to prefer making brand new people who share their genetics: on the Impersonal Totality Principle, their preferences are wrong because they preserve suffering and inequity.

Of course, none of these considerations would apply to those for whom reproduction is not a choice. There can’t be a general duty to forgo reproduction, because not everyone has the ability to do so, and because the human race would disappear. Without family planning technologies like birth control, reproduction is closely allied with sexuality and intimacy, and for poor women in most of the world, the choice not to have children is not one that they can make autonomously. But this simply militates in favor of rich and well-educated couples in the developed world recognizing that they have obligations due to their class and access to birth control technologies.

A few questions…

First, exceptions: how would this analysis jive with the duty to procreate advised by Judaism? (“Be fruitful and multiply!”) What about the duty that members of minority ethnicities might experience to preserve their identity?

Second, authority: does being a man undermine my capacity to comment on these matters? I hear similar arguments from many women, but discussing general population ethics as a male in a misogynistic society seems like a fraught position from which to make a judgment. Yet I’m also married, and obligated to have a view if I’m to make decisions with my partner. I can respect her autonomy while simultaneously enunciating my own preferences and expectations. Perhaps the mistake is precisely this attempt to generate a normative view on what ought to be a personal (non)calculation?

Third, models: I’m aware of some different political/bioethical theories that ground differing philosophical views of the right to procreation. For my part, I tend to prefer the Nussbaum/Sen capability theory for this kind of evaluation, which rejects the rights/duties language in favor interests and flourishing. But that doesn’t really eliminate the question, which becomes: is childrearing an integral part of human flourishing? What are some other ways to think about this question outside the ordinary communitarian/liberal/feminist/Foucaultian matrix?

One might call this sort of governing rational administration or rational control. It is government directed by reason that does not appeal to reason but rather to subrational motives that will lead people to do what is rational without their quite understanding what they are doing.

Here, Mansfield demonstrates his major concern, that we have not allowed this debate over health care to become a debate over the kind of regime we have and ought to have. He accuses Obama of ignoring principles in the name of principle, of resisting appeals to reason while attempting to govern rationally. I suspect that Mansfield is right, and even if I don’t seem to share his politics, I wonder what this form of rational irrationality portends for the future of American politics.

An appeal to reason would be a straightforward argument in favor of the principle of government control of health care, but this is thought to be too divisive and too demanding to succeed. So, rather than espouse the principle, Obama has evaded it, and done his best to keep attention focused on the result. The result is described in terms of present benefits made cheaper and more secure, with no attempt to explain how health care as a whole might look and feel when controlled by the government. It might, after all, be enhanced by a new sense of community—which is the benefit put forward by advocates of straightforward, single-payer government control. But to do this, Obama would have to argue against opponents of government control.

How can you not, in reading this paragraph, feel a twinge of recognition? The administration has been called socialist so many times that I think many would-be American social democrats have bought the rhetoric. So why not debate socialism? As I’ve said many times, the public option was only the spectacle of single-payer socialism. Let’s try the real thing, or at least discuss it! Here’s the last bit of Mansfield’s essay I think is good:

Rational administration is more suited to monarchy than to republics. The classical exposition of the idea of governing by reason through human passions is in the political theory of Thomas Hobbes, who favored monarchy over a republic. The classical demonstration of how rational administration operates is in Tocqueville’s book on the Ancien Régime, which shows how administrators of the French monarchy—particularly Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin—made it dominant by using reason without ever arguing principle.

Certainly, there were problems with the Ancien Régime as well as with Tocqueville’s account of it, but the hint that democracy is the enemy of good governance is certainly tempting to follow through. The French Revolution is usually branded an economic revolution, concerned as it was with class and les malheureux, but civic republicans in Mansfield’s own camp consider it a decentralization revolution that was almost immediately overcome from within by new forces of centralization. The role of politics in a government divided into factions is necessarily different than it would be in a government where only one mind, the monarch’s, needs to be persuaded by the best reasons. This is the essence of the debate over pluralism and populism, as Mansfield has rightly demonstrated in his historical work. Of course, he only seems to like the contemporary centralizing power of the executive branch when there’s a Republican there. I’d love to have these debates now, in the public sphere. But I recognize that they wouldn’t help to get health care passed, so I understand why the President resists drilling down into first principles and utopian end-states.

The worst part of Mansfield’s essay is the premise, of course:

But what is the principle? Obama acts and speaks as if there were no question of principle, but of course there is one, and it is perfectly obvious to the public: Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere?

There’s no principle there.  The question isn’t who should supply health care, right? We’re all in agreement that doctors and nurses should actually supply this thing we call health care. The question is, who should pay for it, and how? This is purely a practical question.

I take the word ‘principle’ to indicate a fundamental question of justice. I’m interested to hear a principled argument, but Mansfield certainly hasn’t supplied one. If there’s a principled debate, it would look like this: “X does not deserve health care, because of Y.” Alternatively, “R does deserve health care, because of S.” For instance, we might have a principled debate about how much money ought to be spent on fertility treatments given the unmet needs of already-existing children, 25,000 of whom die every day from easily-treated poverty related diseases. We might decide that wounded soldiers or emergency responders have greater desert than ordinary citizens. We might also have a principled debate on the level of care that ought to be available to criminals while they are incarcerated. We might even argue about the health care rights of children versus the elderly, or citizens versus non-citizens. These are in-principle debates

But generally, we don’t do this: we seem to agree that there isn’t a principled distinction between the health care rights of different human beings, though I think there’s more room for quality-adjusted life years calculations than we currently allow. The principle is quite clear, and it’s not a refusal of principle like Mansfield seems to suggest. It’s not that no one has a greater right to health care than anyone else, because of course the sick have a greater right to health care than the healthy, and those with urgent and treatable illnesses ought to come ahead of those who are stable or untreatable. The fact that, in practice, our distribution of health care resources does not resemble the one demanded by justice then becomes a practical question. That’s the one Mansfield seems to believe President Obama is refusing to address. I guess he’s not paying attention?

But perhaps this is a cheap shot. There are principles at stake when we talk about those who go without health care because they cannot afford health care. There are principles at stake when we argue about which segment of the population ought to bear the brunt of the costs. Public versus private distinctions are sometimes principled ones, as when we’re discussing public versus private coercion. Yet Mansfield has always rejected this simplistic modern liberalism that reduces everything to individual freedom or state coercion, so it’s weird to see him apparently advancing a libertarian position now. Worse, he seems to fundamentally misunderstand the practices upon which his alleged principles are based.

So long as the majority of health care is paid for by insurance, it’s clear that it’ll be paid for by those who can afford it, whether or not they’re the same people consuming it. Generally, the ill aren’t making a lot of money, and productive workers aren’t particularly ill. When it comes to health care financing, there’s no principled distinction between the state as regulator and the state as insurer-of-last-resort. Describing this as a principled division merely muddies the question. From Mansfield, who should know better, it looks intellectually dishonest.

What I find so galling in Mansfield’s account of this embrace of bureaucratic measures is his insistence that it be labeled progressive:

What every progressive wants is to put the particular issue he espouses beyond political dispute. Obama wanted, and as his first State of the Union address showed still wants, to put health care beyond politics so that he can be the last president to be concerned with it. He did concede in that speech “philosophical differences” between the parties, “that will always cause us to part ways.” But he did not say what these differences are and seemed to assume that they would only infect “short-term politics” by serving the ambitions of party leaders.

This may be Obama’s view, but it’s not a progressive one. The Progressives were a real political party and they didn’t stand for big government or bureaucracy. They were squarely in the corner of civic engagement and citizen activism. In short, they were fans of politics. Basically, we need to distinguish the Progressive Party as it existed for a few decades between 1912 and 1946 as a spinoff of the Wisconsin Republican Party, and a larger obsession with progress and teleological accounts of history that has troubled us since the Enlightenment. The Progressive Party was adamantly anti-expert, pro-small-government, “for business and against the trusts,” pro-participation, etc. Louis Brandeis, diagnostician of “The Curse of Bigness,” was hardly a fan of ‘expertocracy.’ The ideology of progress encompasses all those teleological accounts of historical development from Kant, Hegel, and Marx to to the Communists, Nazis, and technocrats. Some who espouse the ideology of progress are in favor of expert management, but they’re hardly Progressives.

Certainly, the 20th century as a whole has been the story of the growth of the administrative state in which medical, economic, and legal experts have made increasingly centralized decisions about the matters effecting individuals, but the Progressives were the party most hopeful that an epistocracy could be avoided simply by making everyone capable of expertise through education and consultation. What they resisted was the party system that had become so exclusive and corrupt that ordinary citizens couldn’t have an impact. Jane Addams was the archetypical Progressive: her Hull House supplied education, space for debate, and room to organize around issues concerning Chicago residents. Indeed, the Progressives favored reforms to the US party system that would make ‘experts’ more accountable to ordinary folks, and educational reforms that would better enable citizens to participate in their own policy-production. Those interested in contemporary attempts to resurrect the Progressivism of La Follette, check out Peter Levine’s great book: The New Progressive Era.

a 40-year-old man who inexplicably became a sexual impulsive with paedophilia. The patient had no prior history of sexual misconduct, but it was soon noted that he was frequenting prostitutes and that he attempted to molest his 12-year-old step-daughter. He was quickly reported to the local authorities, was found guilty of child molestation, and was sentenced to either attend a 12-step sexual addiction program or face jail. Despite a strong yearning not to go to prison, the patient could not inhibit his sexual impulses. It was soon discovered that the defendant had a large tumour pressing on his right orbitofrontal cortex (Figure 2). Upon the resection of the tumour, the patient’s sexual impulsiveness diminished. When the sexual impulsiveness later reappeared, a brain scan revealed that the tumour had grown back. A second resection of tumour again diminished the patient’s sexual impulsiveness [42].

This is basically an unrepeatable experiment in neuroanatomy, but for some reason folks in law really worry about it. The implication of brain tumors that make you a child molester is that potentially child molesters, who we desperately hate, are not responsible agents. If that’s true, then we worry that it would be wrong us to punish them as we want to do. The short response to this is that a tumor can create pathological desires but probably not pathological actions.  More to the point, if a particular child molester isn’t a moral agent, then it is not so much wrong for us to punish them as it is just pointless.

This is so antique an anxiety that I usually only describe these arguments in the stoner voice I use to make fun of sophomore philosophy majors: “Yeah man, like have you ever, like, looked at your hand?” “Dude, what if, you know, like, freedom? What if that’s an illusion?” Each of the papers focused on the problem of determinism, free will, and compatibilism while couching their arguments in terms of the danger that neuroscience allegedly poses to our understanding of agency. Sinnott-Armstrong and Morse gave clear, entertaining presentations, but the material was little more than what I cover in my introduction to philosophy classes. Professional philosophers have largely rejected the pressure of these arguments since Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” introduced a compatibilism that depended on reactive attitudes like forgiveness and resentment rather than metaphysical claims about causation and freedom. Sinnott-Armstrong and Morse rejected them, too, so no surprises there.

Now, Sinnott-Armstrong not only has a pretty good Philosophy of Law textbook, he wrote one of my favorite essays on collective responsibility,”It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” in which he argues against ineffective individual solutions to collective action problems. Since responsibility and agency is one of his chief concerns, I guess I shouldn’t have expected him to start looking at the neuroscience on bias, moral heuristics, framing effects, and group polarization, even though that’s where the interesting and cutting edge implications of neuroscience currently rest for law.

What really bothers me is the way that the discussion naturally supported a particular kind of account of personal responsibility that is itself highly partisan. I went to AEI expecting that the audience would be somewhat conservative, but not that we’d be re-litigating the culture wars. I guess in a sense, I got what I hoped for, insofar as I hoped for a discussion of this:

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions — essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted — not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward — similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.

“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” says Westen. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”

Instead of a discussion, however, I got a demonstration. The whole conference felt like an exercise in assurance: neuroscience would not be allowed to challenge anyone’s assumptions or undermine any of our prejudices. Tradition and common sense were defended. The appearances will be preserved. Let the kaleidescope twirl: the sun still revolves around us.

• “If corporations are people, do they get to vote?”
• “If corporations are people, can we start incarcerating them when they commit crimes?”
• “Does this mean I can marry my bank?”
• “Does charging a fee for incorporation constitute an unconstitutional violation of their reproductive rights?”
• “Thank God we’ve finally ended the scourge of anti-corporate discrimination!”

The New York Times apparently thinks that democracy is done for:

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

Okay, let’s tone down the rhetoric. Here’s the thing: corporations are people and have been since at least 1830, though chartered personhood seems to have operated as an implicit norm even before that:

The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men. This capacity is always given to such a body. Any privileges which may exempt it from the burdens common to individuals, do not flow necessarily from the charter, but must be expressed in it, or they do not exist.

During the oral arguments, Justice Sotomayor famously addressed this argument that the entire tradition of corporate personhood be abolished:

what you are suggesting is that the courts who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court’s error to start with, not Austin or McConnell, but the fact that the Court imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics.

But we can go back to the very basics that way, but wouldn’t we be doing some more harm than good by a broad ruling in a case that doesn’t involve more business corporations and actually doesn’t even involve the traditional nonprofit organization? It involves an advocacy corporation that has a very particular interest.

…what you are suggesting is that the courts who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court’s error to start with, not Austin or McConnell, but the fact that the Court imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics. But we can go back to the very basics that way, but wouldn’t we be doing some more harm than good by a broad ruling in a case that doesn’t involve more business corporations and actually doesn’t even involve the traditional nonprofit organization? It involves an advocacy corporation that has a very particular interest.

At the earliest stages, the institutions seeking personification were places like Dartmouth College, which simply wanted to conduct its business without state takeover. It’s difficult to see an error in Dartmouth v. Woodward without reinventing the background institutitons of our society in ways that would surely be pernicious. If corporations didn’t have *any* rights, they couldn’t sue for breach of contract or demand due process from the government. Nor could universities, or unions, or hospitals.

The question is and always has been: what rights do corporate persons have and how can the state regulate them? Citizens United had produced a film called Hillary: The Movie and wanted to distribute it during the primary season. Their original name was to be Citizens United Not Timid, so obviously this is not high value speech, but it’s eminently political. And if the state can regulate the speech of a company whose whole purpose was to produce a film tearing down a presidential candidate, then clearly the state has the right to regulate political speech by the press. Why censor Hillary: The Movie but not a 60 Minutes piece on George Bush’s National Guard service? Clearly they’re comparable. Much of what passes for analysis on Fox News and MSNBC could be classed as electioneering communication as well, and those are both corporations. There’s just not a principled way to make the distinction stick.

And that’s the rub: many people fear that this will open the floodgates of private money in politics. But the floodgates are already open, and asking the Supreme Court to pretend otherwise is the real joke. As a society, we’ve decided that having money in politics is good, because it allows challengers to unseat incumbents. I think a good compromise is to force corporations to seek shareholder approval for their campaign contributions and political advertising. I think this is the kind of thing we should do to quell discontent, not the sort of thing that will make a big difference. Business interests and unions have always been a big source of cash in politics.

Nor is this, perhaps, such a bad thing. Prawfsblog offers this paper by Jill Fisch, which uses Fed Ex to give a more nuanced account of the role an ordinary business might play in developing and spending political capital in order to influence pertinent regulations. Tyler Cowen posted a now-famous economics paper titled “Why is there so little money in politics?” It’s a good question: if corporations or private individuals really could buy policies worth billions of dollars, they’d spend a lot more than they do. Instead, they spend about the same amount each year, adjusted for inflation and growth:

From 1912 to 2000, presidential campaigns have accounted for approximately the same, small fraction of GDP. This pattern suggests that the private benefits bought through the campaign finance system are not an increasing problem for our economy.

Given what a truly corrupt politician might be worth, that seems like a strange piece of data, but that’s just because our popular culture likes to pretend that all politicians are unprincipled prostitutes. They’re not, and even if they are often self-serving, they generally recognize that while money is a necessary ingredient in any campaign, it’s still more necessary to satisfy your constituents by supplying public goods and regulating public evils.

There are a lot of problems with democracy in the US. The amount of money spent on elections is certainly a symptom of some of those problems, but it’s only a symptom. The root causes are much deeper than corporate personhood: the problem is that natural persons have become so disillusioned that they act as if their only duties as citizens are discharged at the polls. Compared to human apathy, corporate citizenship starts to look pretty good. That’s the problem with our centralized and bureaucratized state system: the only way to steer the machinery of the state is to join a coalition (like a party, a union, or an interest group lobby) that mimics the state’s size and procedural efficiency.

For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

Related: Lin Van Hek sings River of Life.