Newsflash: Being a Subject Different From Subjecting

It is, perhaps, one of the perennial temptations of the apologist to get too clever by half, to allow the phrase to defeat the argument. A particularly dangerous tactic in this regard is the tactic of reversal, in which the apologist takes the accusation leveled at him and replies, "Why yes I do. And that's a good thing!" Marc Barnes of the Patheos blog Bad Catholic finds himself floundering in this rhetorical tar pit in a recent post in which he attempt to fend off the accusation that traditional morality seeks to "enslave" women, subjugate them, make war on them, etc. He writes:

The liturgical chants and battle-cries accompanying and bemoaning the war on women are true in an erotic context.

The man who loves does wish to “control a woman’s body,” with an ardor rivaled only by his desire for the beloved to control his own. For what on earth is the sexual act, if not an attempt to control the body of the beloved? This is obvious in the physical sense, as the lover tries to “control” the other’s body into experiencing ecstasy, but it is also true when considering the nature of sex itself: If sex is the ultimate physical expression of erotic love, and love is desiring the good of the beloved, than sex — in its fullest — is the physical attempt to bring the beloved to his or her ultimate good, and thus an obvious attempt to control.

Similarly, the lover does desire a “slavery for women,” and for one woman in particular, a desire overwhelmed only by his desire to be enslaved by her.

Now, maybe I'm just a stodgy old married guy, but I don't actually think that slavery is a very good analogy for love. But let's leave that aside for a moment and accept the standard poetic conceit. Here's the problem: There's a big difference between offering yourself as a slave to someone and wanting them to do the same to you, and wanting to enslave someone. It's the difference between gift and domination. A relationship could work well in which each person wishes to serve the other's every desire: in which, according to the chosen metaphor, each person is a slave to the other. But that only works if they both want to be the slave. If, in any relationship, one or both members want to be the master while the other is the slave, you have a recipe for strife and unhappiness in abundance, not to mention a fair amount of cruelty.

This, really, is the problem with the metaphor. It's all very well for the poet to say, "I want to be your slave," but if his beloved takes him up on the offer by behaving like a slave owner, the poet is going to be dreadfully unhappy. (Which, come to that, brings us to another whole genre of often tiresome poetry.) Even if we accept the metaphor of wanting to be a slave to the beloved, a loving relationship is one in which each wants to be a slave to the other, but neither wants to enslave the other. Being a slave is not the same as enslaving, it's the opposite.

The same problem comes with the attempt to turn "control a woman's body" into a positive. Sex in which both man and woman strive to control each other's bodies is not going to work out well. In seeking to "control" one seeks to make the other do what one wants. If we assume that the lover wants his beloved to get what she wants (say, sexual release) one might assume this would work out to the same thing. But in actual interactions between people "I want to make you do what you want" is very different from "I want to give you what you want".

The inversion and capture method of apologetics is appealing in its cleverness, but the fact is that there are a lot of expressions that you really won't want to capture and make your own, indeed that you can't make your own without expressing your beliefs as something rather distasteful. In this case, terms like "control a woman's body", "enslave women" and "war on women" are not terms that Christians should seek to adopt and turn to positive meaning. It doesn't come off as some clever turn of phrase that makes one appreciate Christian love and a Christian understanding of sexuality in a new light. It just comes off as too clever by half and makes Christian morality sound vaguely nasty.

The Hard Choices

Leah touches on a simple point which doesn't get made often enough about morality, over at Unequally Yoked, which is that there's an unhealthy tendency to see the "hard" moral choices as being very borderline ones in which seemingly both options have major obvious benefits and evils, which are hard to weigh. This is what's behind many of the trolley or burning building dilemmas (though these usually aren't even real moral dilemmas, since they're based on weighing the worth of outcome rather than the intention and end of actions.)

But even weighing out these situations built around placing value on outcomes, often people picture the struggle to make moral choices being around making a clear moral decision in a situation where it bears a huge personal cost of some sort. Certainly, doing what you believe to be right despite huge personal cost is difficult, but Leah points out that most of the struggle of living a moral life is not struggling with one or two really big situations, but rather struggling with tiny ones:

I wasn’t talking being tempted to steal or kill at random, but about repeating a funny, unflattering story about a friend or lashing out when someone doesn’t seem to be listening to your answer to their question or responding to a friend letting you down by just resolving to rely less on other people in the future. People who know me in person will recognize a rogues gallery of my own weaknesses in the above, and I’m sure you can come up with other examples of petty-seeming sin.

The first examples that came to my mind are all sins of commission: when I do what I shouldn’t. The glaring omission is, well, sins of omission: when I fail to do something I should: not helping a lost-looking tourist, not paying enough attention to a friend to notice s/he’s upset and needs attention, not attending to the physical needs of the poor (through donations and political activism) or their dignity (by recoiling when approached by a panhandler).

Calling my struggles with these weaknesses heroic is as silly as labeling my quest to wake up at my first alarm ‘epic.’ But the small scale of the failing doesn’t mean it’s not hard to fix.

Not only is it hard to persevere in these circumstances because the lapses are apparently small (and yet the bad moral habits formed by those lapses over time can be anything but small) but the really hard-to-persevere times involve those situations in which external observers are absent. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith sketches out an essentially secular moral code based on the idea of the impartial observer. We act well in order to be perceived as someone who acts well. We also internalize this observer and thus act well in order to satisfy our internal observer that we are people who act well.

And yet, this internal impartial observer is someone that, we often think we can catch napping or buy off. A moral practice based primarily on regard is one which we find it almost impossible to maintain when not observed.

Asymmetric Warfare and the Conservation of Morality

There's this concept I've been toying with for a while, which I'm tempted to call, after the Second Law of Thermodynamics "the conservation of morality". The idea is basically that sin tends to beget sin, virtue tends to beget virtue, such that when people do evil to others, there tends to be equal evil done back, unless someone intervenes in the cycle by some act of heroic restraint and love. Reading Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace about the war between the French and the forces of anti-colonial Arab nationalism in Algeria, it's been striking me that one of the purposes of "asymmetric warfare" is to amp up that "conservation of morality" by committing acts of such unspeakable evil that it causes the entire situation to become vastly more polarized and driven by hate.

Horne is talking about the Philippeville Massacre (not bothering to link to Wikipedia because the article is uselessly vague) in August of 1955. Up until this point, the war between the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale -- Arab nationalist liberation forces) and the French had been fierce but comparatively low level. On August 20, 1955, in a mining village in which relations between colonists and Arabs had previously been fairly good, the FLN staged an attack on the entire European population of the village that killed 123 French colonials, most of them civilians. Only six colonials survived -- people who'd barricaded themselves in a house and held off attackers with heavy fire. When the French military arrived, they found a slaughter of such unremitting savagery that it radicalized nearly all of the European population of Algeria. It wasn't just that women and children had been killed. There were cases of 70-year-old women who had their limbs hacked off and were left to bleed to death. A mother has horribly mutilated, her five-day-old child slashed to death, and the child then put back into her slashed-open womb. When French soldiers arrived they found ordinary members of the local Arab population so drunk with the slaughter that in one case a soldier wrote about in his diary, he and another solder found two young boys so intent on kicking in the skull of a dead old woman who lay in the street that the only way they were able to stop the boys was by shooting them dead.

The goal of the attack had been the radicalize the conflict, and according to the nature of asymmetric warfare, the attackers didn't care whether this resulted in excessive "blowback" towards their side so long as it resulted in total war. It was as if they had dropped an atomic bomb on the "conservation of morality". When the French army showed up and found that nearly every single French person in Philippeville had been killed, they went mad with anger, and in response they killed nearly every single Arab person in the town. The town had been 90% Arab, so this mean that in retaliation for 123 Pied noir killed, over 1,000 Arabs were killed -- many shot in the street, then hundreds mored rounded up as "prisoners" and machine gunned before being bulldozed into mass graves.

In the twisted logic of asymmetric warfare, this counted as a victory for the simple reason that it massively escalated the scale of the conflict. In the fact of what they had seen, neither French nor Algerian nationalists were likely to back down. Too many people knew of too many "like them" who had been brutally killed, and the level of hate and violence had been increased exponentially. Such is the logic of asymmetrical warfare, and it is brutally effective in creating violence, if not in any other objective.

Money Can Buy You Love

Paul Krugman has been putting up a number of posts over the last week expressing his annoyance with Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart and its emphasis on the social breakdown which underlies inequality in America. Broadly speaking, Krugman seems to think that Murray is obscuring the "real problem" that that top 1% of Americans make so much money by talking instead about the problems that the bottom 40% are suffering in relation to family breakup, illegitimacy and plummeting marriage rates.

In a post yesterday he says:

Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.

So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.

But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.

To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.

But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?
...
[T]he truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?

The thinking here seems particularly tone-deaf: Confronted with the fact that among the least educated and lowest earning Americans, illegitimacy has skyrocketed, marriage has become far less common, attendance of religious services has dropped, etc. Krugman concludes that since crime and teen pregnancy are down, it must be that people aren't much bothered by those social trends. Rather, the big thing that's worrying them is that their wages in inflation adjusted terms have been flat for the last few decades.

If anything, he's sure that the causality must run the other way: since men with only a high school education are finding it increasingly hard to get good jobs, this must account for the collapse in marriage, rise in illegitimacy, etc. If we could just give those people more money, they'd be happy. That marriage stuff -- maybe it's just not so important to them.

Of course, causal systems among people are inherently complex. Doubtless, the economic difficulties of those at the lower end of the education spectrum lead to family breakdown. However, more importantly, family breakdown leads to economic and educational problems. Krugman's blithe "nothing to see here" waves away the far more human topic into order to get back more quickly to discussing the fiscal policy issues he'd rather discuss when it comes to inequality.

"Material Cooperation" and the HHS Contraception Mandate

There's nothing like a public policy debate on a sex-related issue to get a lot of people doing amateur moral reasoning, and I can't help getting into the action a bit. One of the questions I've heard a lot about Catholic institutions' reluctance to cover contraception as part of their health care plans is: "They're already paying their employees, and a lot of their employees are probably going out and buying birth control with that money. How is it any different to make them pay for health coverage that covers all birth control 'free' than it is to simply give them a money and let them buy birth control if they want to?"

The moral concept at play here is one of degree of moral cooperation. The old Catholic Encyclopedia provides a nice summary under it's entry for "Accomplice":

A term generally employed to designate a partner in some form of evildoing. An accomplice is one who cooperates in some way in the wrongful activity of another who is accounted the principal. From the viewpoint of the moral theologian not every such species of association is straightway to be adjudged unlawful. It is necessary to distinguish first of all between formal and material cooperation. To formally cooperate in the sin of another is to be associated with him in the performance of a bad deed in so far forth as it is bad, that is, to share in the perverse frame of mind of that other. On the contrary, to materially cooperate in another's crime is to participate in the action so far as its physical entity is concerned, but not in so far as it is motived by the malice of the principal in the case. For example, to persuade another to absent himself without reason from Mass on Sunday would be an instance of formal cooperation. To sell a person in an ordinary business transaction a revolver which he presently uses to kill himself is a case of material cooperation. Then it must be borne in mind that the cooperation may be described as proximate or remote in proportion to the closeness of relation between the action of the principal and that of his helper. The teaching with regard to this subject-matter is very plain, and may be stated in this wise: Formal cooperation is never lawful, since it presupposes a manifestly sinful attitude on the part of the will of the accomplice. Material complicity is held to be justified when it is brought about by an action which is in itself either morally good or at any rate indifferent, and when there is a sufficient reason for permitting on the part of another the sin which is a consequence of the action.

With this in mind, I think it should be clear there is a big difference for an organization which considers contraception to be immoral between providing employees with health care coverage specifically for buying contraception and providing them with money which they can choose to use for anything they want. The former clearly restricts their actions only to getting something which, according to a Catholic view, is immoral anyway. The latter is simply the just act of paying a worker for his labor, and leaves the worker in charge of deciding how to spend that money. Even if in both cases the worker ends up getting birth control, the proximity of the employer to the buying of birth control is clearly much greater with the contraception mandate than with simply providing his workers with money.

I'd argue that this distinction is actually really clear to us even on subjects which don't involve any clearly immoral action if we start applying it to things that we think of as strictly option. Suppose, for example, an employer provided bicycle coverage to all his employees. Any employee could get a free bicycle. Of course, if you don't want a bicycle, you don't have to get one. People strongly in favor of bicycles might think this was just awesome, but a lot of employees might see this as interfering and overly benefiting the people who are bicycle fanatics. However, a lot of people might see this as a inconsequential "perk" that the company offers and not worry about it too much, though they would certainly see the company as encouraging cycling.

Now let's apply the same model to something that is legal but a little more controversial. An employer announces that they will provide "2nd Amendment Coverage" to all their employees. Any employee who wants can get a "free" Glock 9mm pistol as part of this coverage. He or she can also get unlimited ammunition. Of course, no one is required to get a gun, and the company is not encouraging anyone to do anything illegal or dangerous with these guns. Guns are perfectly legal, and any employee who wanted to could obviously go out and buy a Glock and ammunition for it with his salary if he wanted. However, I think basically everyone would agree that this "2nd Amendment Coverage" would represent the company far more directly being involved in gun ownership and gun promotion than a company which simply payed its workers and didn't prevent them from buying guns with their salaries. This employer would be engaged in "material cooperation" with gun ownership and gun culture in a way that other employers were not.

Ron Paul's Foreign Policy: Golden Rule or Relativism?

If you move about those regions of the internets in which righteous display their moral superiority by posting sixty second video clips showing just how bad their opponents are, you have probably seen headlines lately along the lines of "Christians Boo Jesus" or "Republicans Mock Golden Rule". Of course, one hardly needs to watch the clip, because in the dualism that is politicization, everyone already knows that they're right and their opponents are wrong. But after the fifth or sixth iteration, I had to go ahead watch Ron Paul (who else) present his Golden-Rule based foreign policy to boos. Here's the clip in question:



Or if, like me, you tend not to watch posted videos, here's the money quote:

"My point is, that if another country does to us what we do to others, we aren't going to like it very much. So I would say maybe we ought to consider a golden rule in foreign policy. We endlessly bomb these other countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?"

Now, this sounds superficially high minded, and some people who really are high minded seem lured by it. Kyle, who has an genuine and expansive desire to understand "the other" has his dander up and says:

Last night, while listening to the latest debate, I heard the audience boo the suggestion that we ought to apply the Golden Rule to our dealings and relations with foreign powers and people. Ares forbid we treat strangers the way we want to be treated. Woe to those who put themselves in another’s place and consider the world from his or her perspective.

He links approvingly to Robert Wright over at The Atlantic, who quotes some of the other examples of Ron Paul's "moral imagination", which has made him the unlikely darling of the far left:

Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans....

After observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about Iranians, "Why wouldn't it be natural that they'd want a weapon? Internationally they'd be given more respect."

Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about Iranian motivation? Wouldn't it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?
...
A favorite Paul pedagogical device is to analogize foreign situations to American ones. A campaign ad promoted by a Paul-supporting super PAC begins by asking us to imagine Russian or Chinese troops in Texas. The point is that this is how our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan look to locals.

If you want to see that particular piece of imagination, here that is too:

The closing line here is actually a pretty good example of where this "imagination" breaks down, so although it's a minor detail I'll begin there: "The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted."

This ties into one of our pervasive historical myths about the Roman era: That Rome was good and stable and virtuous so long as it remained a localized Republic, but that once it turned into an empire and got big, decay and debauchery soon set in and it fell. This misses out on the fact that the Roman Empire, from Augustus Caesar to Romulus Augustus, lasted some 450 years and was, for all its faults, generally more stable than the Republic had been. Moreover, it was primarily the imperial phase of Rome which provided Roman cultural to the entirety of the known world, a culture which has remained one of the foundational elements of Western Culture (and now global culture) ever since. When the Roman Empire gradually came apart, lapsing into "barbarian" successor kingdoms in the West and the Byzantine Empire in the East, this is generally seen as a bad thing, not an improvement. It's commonly called the "Dark Ages", and although there's some serious historical prejudice going on there, the period from 400 to 800 was indeed generally a lot dimmer than the period from 1 to 400. For whatever reason, however, libertarians of the Ron Paul persuasion seem to be on the side of collapse in regards to this type of history.

With that bit of historical perspective, let's think a little more deeply about Ron Paul's "moral imagination". Looked at a little more closely, I think we'll find that "moral equivocation" is a little more like it. Let's try a little moral imagination of our own:

Think on the lot of the gang leader. There he is, running a great business of selling crack on the street corners, extracting protection money, and pimping out hos, when what should happen but a bunch of cops show up pointing guns at his gangbangers, knocking down doors to his crack houses, arresting his homeboys. What can you expect him to think? If the cops have guns, he's going to want to have guns. If the cops knock down his door, he'll want to knock down their doors. If they lock up his people, he'll lock up their people. How can we go treating these gang members in ways that we don't want to be treated?

Now, as the basic level, this arguably does describe the logic of the gang leader. If he wants to keep doing what he's doing despite the pressure of law enforcement, he's going to resort to violence and intimidation in response to what he sees as violence and intimidation aimed at him. Does that mean, however, that the solution is simply to cede ownership of swathes of large cities to gang leaders because doing otherwise would involve an escalation in mutual violence between gangs and government authorities. Well, actually, with Ron Paul, he may mean that. But for those of us who are sane, there's a difference between the two side of this situation which this exercise in imagination fails to grasp: the gang leader is breaking the law of being destructive to the common good while the law enforcement is trying to enforce the law and protect the common good.

Is protecting the common good, occasionally by resort to force, a violation of the Golden Rule? Only if the Golden Rule is applied with complete moral relativism. Understood properly, arresting people who gun down their rival crack sellers or extract protection is money is compatible with the Golden Rule, because through their endorsement of the legal order those who enforce the law by arresting these lawbreakers also want to be arrested if they too break the law. They are enforcing the laws that all of us have chosen to live by, and in so doing we as a society are treating others as we want to be treated.

When we elide the moral context, we can make it look like enforcing any kind of justice or order is a violation of the Golden Rule, but as the above example shows, this is clearly not the case.

Having established this basic principle, it now remains to address Ron Paul's more specific points. After all, it might be that police enforcing the law against gang members is perfectly legitimate, but does that principle apply to the US having military bases in foreign countries, or to trying to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons? Aren't all countries, at least, basically equal and deserving of equal rights?

Let's think about Ron Paul's logic a bit here.

Wouldn't it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?

Well, yes. It is logical for Iranian leaders to think this way. They're maintaining a moderately brutal dictatorship that many of their own people would like to see replaced with another form of government, and they're trying to exert greater power in the region after being moderately successful in fighting a low level proxy war against the US in the Shiite regions of Iraq. The other regional powers are Turkey and Israel, both of which have nuclear weapons, and if they could get their own nuclear weapons they would insulate themselves from outside attack (as North Korea has by acquiring nukes) while perhaps buying themselves some time from their own people if regional domination wins them benefits which can be shared around at home.

But what all that internal logic leaves aside is: Does that mean that we, as an outside power, should simply shrug and not mind if they acquire nukes with these aims?

After all, isn't it a generally good thing that Saddam Hussein's brutal Baathist dictatorship fell (as the citizens of the other Baathist dictatorship in the region, Syria, are dying in large numbers to achieve in their own country) and that Qaddafi's oppressive regime has also fallen? Isn't it generally a bad thing that the neo-Stalinist regime in North Korea has won added staying power (and the ability to continue killing tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of their own citizens every year through oppression and starvation) through acquiring nuclear weapons? Not to mention that it may yet turn out to be a very bad thing for some of North Korea's neighbors if the regime goes unstable and actually does launch nukes at South Korea or Japan?

Moral imagination can help us understand that many in the Soviet Union of the '30s really were convinced that "wreckers" were threatening the socialist paradise and needed to be stopped, that many in Wilhelmine Germany really did think that they needed to start a European war before Russia overtook them in economic and military power, and that many in the '30s really did think that "Judeo-Bolshevism" was the greatest threat to their freedom. It can also help us understand that which side of a war someone fights on (and what someone believes about the purpose of a war) often has a lot more to do with where that person was born than with any kind of cool consideration of the issues at stake.

But it does not mean that none of these issues matter, and that there is not a right and a wrong side to a dispute. (Or in the gray tones of the real world: a better and a worse side.) It's all very well to ask how people would feel if there were a Chinese or Russian military base in Texas. However, it would be most fruitful to ask people in Tibet whether they'd rather have an American military base in the area, that behave roughly the way the US military bases in Japan and South Korea do, or if they'd rather stick with the way the Chinese occupation treats them. Openmindedness is somewhat fetishized in our relativistic society, but the fact of the matter is that being "occupied" by the US is generally a much more healthy experience than being occupied by the Chinese or the Russians. This by no means should be taken to mean that the US never does anything wrong while acting as the world's policeman, but when you look at the other folks lining up to be world or regional policemen, it looks like a pretty attractive alternative.

The Christian approach is not found in pretending that there is no difference between viewpoints in disputes between nations, but in realizing that even when we are locked in combat with "the other", we must recall his humanity. C. S. Lewis, I believe, staked out the true Christian viewpoint on such issues when he said in Mere Christianity:

I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the first world war, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.

I imagine somebody will say, `Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?' All the difference in the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever.

Critiques of Economics and Keeping Economics in its Place

Greg Mankiw links to a brief talk given by fellow Harvard professor Steve Marglin as part of an "Occupy Harvard" teach in. Marglin offers a course via the course called "Economics: A Critical Approach", and most of this talk is devoted to explaining why he thinks it's important to criticize "mainstream economics" and how Marglin was unable to get much of a hearing from his fellow members of the Economics Department at Harvard -- indeed he says he basically doesn't talk to them. He complains that the economics profession has become monolithic in accepting certain things, such as the efficacy of markets and the importance of efficiency, which he believes should not be so uncritically accepted, and as such that basic economics textbooks and courses (whether taught by "conservative" economists such as Mankiw or liberal ones such as Krugman) offer a univocal and uncritical examination of the issues at play.

There are actually two very different types of critique of mainstream economics which Marglin says that he deals with, though it's not clear from his talk whether he sees these types of critique as distinct. Firstly, there are what I would term economic critiques of "mainstream economics". One he mentions in particular is Keynes' critique of the idea that the normal state of an economy is full employment. I'm not clear that full employment is widely assumed to be a natural state for an economy these days -- certainly, economies with truly "full employment" are virtually never seen outside of very unusual circumstances. But this is definitely an economic critique. He also mentions more vaguely some "very good" Marxist critiques of economics. He doesn't go into detail as to what these are, but I would assume that these also deal with actual economics.

Most of the critiques he discusses, however, are what I would term moral critiques of economics. He talks about a critique from inequality -- as to whether a distribution of income in which some people have much and many others have little is right. He talks about an environmental critique -- as to whether means of growth are sustainable and environmentally just. He talks about Catholics Social Teaching (and though he doesn't state what this critique is, I assume he must then talk about the concept of the "universal destination of goods"), etc.

Now, although I imagine that Marglin and I see eye to eye on few political issues, I would very much agree that "what is economically efficient?" is very from from being the sum and total of thought one should give to many economic problems. Economics, to the extent that it is a study of how things work, doesn't answer questions of "what ought I to do". At best, it gives some idea of what happens in a system when you make some change. While it may tell you what the results of an action might be, it won't tell you whether the action (or the results) are good.

Personally, I'm fine with that. I don't see that economists have any especial ability to discern "the good", and so I'd be quite happy to have them stick to "what happens" and let people go off and discuss "what is 'the good'" via more established means of philosophy and theology. I like the idea of economics being a lesser science.

Marglin, however, seems to want to pull those questions of "ought" into economics itself and address them there. In this sense, his approach reminds me a bit of the Creationist or Intelligent Design objection that the physical and biological sciences don't give sufficient consideration to God and morality. For my part, while I can see the value of addressing economic critiques of mainstream economics in an economics course (though clearly, as Marglin concedes, one would actually need to learn the mainstream economics first before the critique) I don't think that addressing moral critiques of economics in an economics course is necessarily a good idea -- other than acknowledging that economics is not itself a full life guide to policy and action.

Stopped Me Just In time

Leah of Unequally Yoked has an interesting question about the decision to commit some sinful action versus actually carrying it out:

If someone has made up their mind to do something evil, is there any benefit to them if someone else prevents them from carrying out their intended action?...

Virtue ethics (my usual framework) suggest that nothing much is achieved for the perpetrator. Once you’ve psyched yourself up to do a bad thing and overridden your qualms, the damage to your character has been done; carrying out the crime isn’t marginally worse for your soul. I think Catholic moral teaching might come to the same conclusion, since the moral actor has already given deliberate and complete consent to the act based on full knowledge of the gravity of the act.

But my philosophical intuitions don’t quite jibe with that conclusion. I suspect that a lot of the time, we end up surprised by the gravity of what we’ve done – that people rarely give manage deliberate and complete consent based on full knowledge....

I think you're right that often someone who has decided to do something wrong hasn't, for whatever reason, really contemplated all of the consequences of the action, and so is saved from something if prevented from committing the act decided on.

I want to look at two additional ways in which behing stopped from committing a sin one had already decided to do would still have some moral benefit:

1) It seems to me that because we are not just a conscious will but also a body, that when we do something physically we commit to it and become attached to it in a way that just the mental decision to sin does not. In the Harry Potter example that's been discussed [spoiler warning]: Aside from any question of whether Draco really was mentally decided to kill Dumbledore, it seems to me that the physical act of killing the headmaster would have affected Draco in a deeper way than just the decision to do so. Although there's a culpability to decided to do an evil act, one isn't yet "someone who did that" with all the physical and mental sensations that come with that, until one actually does it. Similarly, say a married guy on a business trip asks a woman at a bar to come back to his hotel room with him, but then she turns him down or some practical circumstance prevents them from actually landing in bed together. Clearly, just by asking, he's betraying his wife in a very serious way. But it seems to me that actually completing the adultery is going to leave him much more attached to that sin, much more deeply in, than the unfulfilled decision.

2) In human experience, sin typically leads to more sin. People lie to cover up their transgressions. Hate breeds more hate. Violence leads to more violence, etc. Someone who's decided to commit some sin but is then stopped before carrying out the act may well not end up being drawn into the whole chain of related sins (lesser or greater) which would have followed in the wake of that first act.

Now clearly, the decision to sin is itself a sin. So it's not as if one is "saved from sinning" if physically prevented from carrying out the act that he or she has decided on. But I think that because we are both material and mental/spiritual creatures, being prevented from actually physically carrying out some sin decided on often does "save" us from something -- though it clearly doesn't render us innocent.

Now, where this would get very messy would be if the person committing the act actually thinks he has carried out the act. One of the things that makes Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well a morally ambiguous and in some ways unsatisfying play is that Count Bertram really does think that he was successfully committing adultery with the young Isabella when he was in fact sleeping with his wife. Even at the end of the play, when you get the big reveal that it was in fact his wife Helene he slept with and who is now carrying his child, the "happy ending" feels off because you get the sense that Bertram is still at heart disloyal to his wife. The "trick" didn't really work, in that while he was in fact sleeping with Helene, he thought it was Isabella and that is still who he really wants to be with, not his wife.

Trolley Madness

At last, I have come across the Trolley Problem which truly gets at the difficulties of modern life.

On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can determine the course which the trolley will take.

On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones, who will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right. If the railman on the right lives, he will go on to kill five men for the sake of killing them, but in doing so will inadvertently save the lives of thirty orphans (one of the five men he will kill is planning to destroy a bridge that the orphans’ bus will be crossing later that night). One of the orphans that will be killed would have grown up to become a tyrant who would make good utilitarian men do bad things. Another of the orphans would grow up to become G.E.M. Anscombe, while a third would invent the pop-top can.

If the brain in the vat chooses the left side of the track, the trolley will definitely hit and kill a railman on the left side of the track, ‘Leftie,’ and will hit and destroy ten beating hearts on the track that could (and would) have been transplanted into ten patients in the local hospital that will die without donor hearts. These are the only hearts available, and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows hearts. If the railman on the left side of the track lives, he too will kill five men, in fact the same five that the railman on the right would kill. However, ‘Leftie’ will kill the five as an unintended consequence of saving ten men: he will inadvertently kill the five men rushing the ten hearts to the local hospital for transplantation. A further result of ‘Leftie’s’ act would be that the busload of orphans will be spared. Among the five men killed by ‘Leftie’ are both the man responsible for putting the brain at the controls of the trolley, and the author of this example. If the ten hearts and ‘Leftie’ are killed by the trolley, the ten prospective heart-transplant patients will die and their kidneys will be used to save the lives of twenty kidney-transplant patients, one of whom will grow up to cure cancer, and one of whom will grow up to be Hitler. There are other kidneys and dialysis machines available; however, the brain does not know kidneys, and this is not a factor.

Assume that the brain’s choice, whatever it turns out to be, will serve as an example to other brains-in-vats and so the effects of his decision will be amplified. Also assume that if the brain chooses the right side of the fork, an unjust war free of war crimes will ensue, while if the brain chooses the left fork, a just war fraught with war crimes will result. Furthermore, there is an intermittently active Cartesian demon deceiving the brain in such a manner that the brain is never sure if it is being deceived.

What should the brain do?

Excerpted from:
– Michael F. Patton Jr., “Tissues in the Profession: Can Bad Men Make Good Brains Do Bad Things?”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, January 1988

Moral Sense and Unequal Exchange

Every week I make a point of finding the time to listen to the EconTalk podcast -- a one hour interview on some economics related topic conducted by Prof. Russ Roberts of George Mason university. Roberts himself has economic and political views I'm often (though not always) in sympathy with, but he's a very fair and thoughtful interviewer and has a wide range of guests. This week's interview was with a semi-regular on the show, Prof Mike Munger of Duke University, and the topic was the concept of euvoluntary exchange which Munger has been attempting to create.

Munger's project aims to identify why it is that some seemingly voluntary transactions are seen as morally repugnant by most people, and are either socially disapproved of or outright outlawed. So for example, say that Frank is very poor and desperately wants to provide for his family. Tom is very rich and is loosing eyesight in both his eyes. His doctor believes they can pull off a revolutionary new surgery and transplant a healthy eye into him, but they need the eye of a live, healthy person who matches Tom's blood type and DNA well. Frank is a match and is willing to give up an eye in return for a million dollars.

Now, there are a few people who lean heavily in the rationalistic direction who would say this sounds like a great idea because it makes most people better off, but most people would react to this with revulsion, and it is in fact illegal to do this kind of thing in the US.

The interesting thing is that voluntarily donating an organ (so long as giving it up isn't considered too big a detriment to you) is considered morally admirable, and is legal. So, for instance, there was a case a year or two ago in our parish where one young woman in the parish donated a kidney to another parishioner who needed a transplant.

Munger's argument is that in the Frank and Tom example, the transaction may seem voluntary but it's not really voluntary because of the disparity in means between Tom and Frank. Transactions that are really, truly voluntary (euvoluntary) are, he argues, always just, at least, in and of themselves as transactions. This is leaving aside the question of whether the thing one seeks to procure is something which you should have or not -- say weapons grade plutonium.

The reason why we're comfortable with someone donating a kidney but not with someone selling a kidney is that in the case of selling the kidney we assume that someone may be doing the act out of desperate need for money rather than a true desire to help. Thus, we approve of the donation of the kidney because it is clear that it's motivated out of a sincere desire to help the other, but we deprecate the selling of a kidney because we fear that someone is being taken advantage of.

To distinguish between euvoluntary and non-euvoluntary transactions, Munger suggests that we'd look at the BATNA or Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.

The example that he gives is as followed (rewritten because the transcription is a little hard to follow, sounding too much like conversation): Say you walk into the grocery store and you see that they're selling bottles of water for $1000. This is totally outrageous, but there's another store right across the street selling water bottles for $0.99, so rather than getting upset you walk across the street and buy water for a dollar. The $1000 price may be stupid, but it isn't seen a really wrong because your alternative to paying that $1000 price is just a five minute walk and a good laugh.

Now, say you've been lost in the desert for two days and you're on the point of dying of thirst. Someone drives up in a Jeep and you ask him if he has a bottle of water. "Sure," he says, "But it'll cost you $1000." When you hesitate, he starts to drive away, leaving you to die. So you agree to give him $1000 for his water.

I think most people would agree that this was an incredibly unjust thing to do, and the reason, Munger argues, is because there's a huge disparity in BATNAs between the two parties in the exchange. If the guy in the Jeep doesn't make the sale, he just drives on and is none the worse. If I don't buy, I die. Thus, the transaction is seen as unjust because it's not really free -- no more so that if he put a gun to my head and demanded a thousand dollars -- even though both parties are, on the face of it, better off because of the transaction. (You don't die of thirst and the guy in the Jeep has $1000.)

Now, I'm not entirely sure whether this is a moral intuition that we have (we certainly treat it as one) or if it's just a matter of social conditioning: we as Americans don't like things which we see as unequal or unfree. But it becomes an important question because through this moral sense we sometimes avoid transactions which could arguably benefit both parties a lot -- usually the "unfree" one far more than the better off one. Russ Roberts provides some interesting anecdotes later in the interview:

[These are from the show transcript, so forgive the conversational tone.]
[O]ne of the students in the class told me a story I found fascinating and that relates to what we've been talking about. She had been visiting in Nepal, and she had clothes that needed cleaning; and she found out she could hire a washer woman to do your clothes for you. No washing machine or laundromats where she was. So, she went to hire someone and the wage was so appallingly low--let's say it was ten cents an hour--she was so horrified that she decided not to hire this woman. It would be exploitative.

I said: You've exploited her by not exploiting her. Maybe she'll only find something much worse. Maybe she'll take it voluntarily, not euvoluntarily. She was looking for work. Maybe she had a hungry child or needed money for medical care; she was desperate enough to work for ten cents and hour; and the student refused to engage in this transaction allegedly because she cared about the woman. As an economist this is very difficult to understand. The more I thought about it, the more I understood it.

When I tell this story to my students, one of the reactions is always: She should have paid her more. Then you ask the question: How much more? American minimum wage? American living wage? And if you offered her $10 an hour instead of ten cents an hour, what would her reaction be? Would she be thrilled? Offended? Where would the line form when the word got out that you were paying 100 times the going rate. There'd be a giant rent-seeking contest. How would you deal with that. I put myself in my student's shoes and tried to think about why you could come to that conclusion and feel good about it. It's the disparity in betnas. This is a student who was going to come back to American life, earn an extraordinarily large income by Third World standards and perhaps even a decent income by Western standards, and certainly compared to this woman. The gap between their wellbeing was so large over a lifetime that this was simply an unimaginable transaction. It's as if that transaction is inherently exploitative, not because of the features of the transaction, but because of the disparity in betnas. Because both people clearly could be made better off? Why wouldn't you joyfully engage in this transaction? She couldn't do it. The punchline to the story is that she did her own laundry, threw out her shoulder, and ended up hiring the woman anyway eventually.
...
The personal experience that I had like this was I was once house sitting for someone while I was in Santiago, Chile, working at a think tank there the summer between years in graduate school. And it turned out that with the house there was a cook. So, I came home the first day I was house sitting and I put my feet up on the coffee table to read the newspaper, and a woman comes out of the kitchen and asks me in Spanish what I'd like for dinner. And I said: What do you mean? And she informed me she was the cook and was going to make whatever I wanted. And I was extremely uncomfortable with this; I said: Well, make whatever you feel like. And she was extremely uncomfortable.

So we eventually came to some conclusion about what she was going to cook, and she's in the kitchen cooking and I'm in the living room reading and I realize this is making me very uncomfortable. This woman is cooking for me who I'm only implicitly paying. She was being paid, but only a small amount. I went into the kitchen to chat with her, which totally violated the social norms; she was very uncomfortable. We proceeded to have an awkward conversation in very bad Spanish. I asked what music she liked; she liked Frank Sinatra and Julio Iglesias. I came to like Frank Sinatra.

[Munger] It's painful to hear this.

[Roberts] The next part was the more interesting part. I thought, sports is something people have in common; I asked her what her favorite football, soccer team. She rooted for Colo Colo, which is what the poor people in Santiago rooted for.

[Munger] You could see that coming.

[Roberts] And of course, all my friends rooted for Universidad de Chile. And I have to mention--what I loved about soccer in Chile, when my friends told me that was their favorite team I asked how it was tied to the University of Chile. They said: Well, there isn't one. I said: What do you mean? They said: They just use the name of the school. I thought how nice, because in America we pretend that the people with the name of that team are associated with the school--in fact, they are kind of like employees, unpaid employees in college. But here they actually totally sever the connection. The Duke University basketball team could be, like, the Celtics. But anyway, I realized again the disparity in our lifetime situations was just inherently uncomfortable. I did not like this woman cooking for me.

[Munger]You felt you were exploiting her somehow.

[Roberts] Right, and I was trying to soften that by chatting with her. As if that was going to help. Oh good, he came in to chat with me--

[Munger]--is he going to grab me?

[Roberts] Not just that. I don't think that was the worry. First, I violated the social norm that I'm trying to make conversation with her, and two, my conversation is not very good; all it does is enhance the feeling that I'm the Universidad de Chile fan and she's the Colo Colo fan. It was a total failure. I would have much preferred that she would not cook for me. I didn't want her there. I didn't want her to do that.

[Munger] Maybe even to the extent of if they had offered, you wouldn't have fired her, but if you said--maybe they'll give her a sabbatical, we'll give her the month off. And they wouldn't have paid her.

[Roberts] I would have said: Great!

[Munger] My question is: how much would you have paid to avoid having to deal with that, with that sense of exploitation?

[Roberts] The answer is some. Maybe even up to the point of saying: Lay her off for a month.

[Munger] Even though you wish her no ill.

[Roberts] Correct. It was an uncomfortable experience. It gave me an insight into my student, when I thought back on it. I think it's really no more complicated than that--just having such a big disparity in life situation. And in particular, if some of my life situation is contingent on the consummation of this contract. That explains why all of these different transactions are illegal, why all of these different situations we feel bad about if not formally illegal. Maybe it's not a transaction, but a sort of social relationship.

This is pretty much exactly the kind of thought process which often causes people to impose regulations (say relating to third world manufacturing, or to child labor) which end up hurting the people they seek to help. No question, it's appalling that people should be working away for fourteen hours a day sewing undershirts for only $2 a day, or that twelve year old kids are working in factories, but often these "sweatshop" and "child labor" conditions have waiting lists, because the alternatives for those seeking work are picking over garbage heaps or being sucked into prostitution at age 12 rather than factory work.

To the extent that we often leave people in even worse conditions for fear that engaging in business with them would be exploitive, it seems like the effort to understand why we make these moral intuitions (and how valid they are) is important. I'm not sure that Munger has really got much further than describing the phenomenon, but it seems an interesting and important first step.

If I Weren't Catholic, I Would...

As a Catholic, one is sometimes accused of being so mindlessly doctrinaire that one "accepts anything the pope says without thinking". However, at other times, one is faced with the opposite challenge: Does your Catholic faith cause you to take any political or moral positions that you wouldn't take anyway?

Typically, both of these objections are leveled by people who don't like one's political or moral stances, but while in the one case it stems from a belief that one would obvious agree with the speaker if only one's head wasn't befuddled by religious notions, the other seems to stem from the idea that if only one really took one's faith seriously, one would agree with the speaker on the point at issue. (Or perhaps alternately, merely a skepticism as to whether anyone actually modifies his life at all due to religious beliefs.)

I think this is a pretty valid question, but if one attempts to think about it seriously, it is a very difficult question to answer, since it leaves one to try to puzzle out how much of one's beliefs and character are the result of one's faith, versus how much one picks one's faith based on beliefs or tendencies one already has.

This would, perhaps, be easier if I were not a "cradle Catholic" or if I had been away from the Church for some length of time as an adult. I could then at least say, "Well, when I wasn't Catholic I believed X, but now I believe Y." Though even then, I think someone could reasonably ask if it was becoming Catholic that caused one to adopt the belief in Y or if it was one's dawning belief in Y that caused one to become Catholic.

The difficulty, as I see it, is to attempt to separate by belief that Catholicism is a true from my other beliefs and tendencies. But really, when one pulls out such a major portion of my worldview, how is one to determine what is affected?

So, for instance, one of the beliefs which informs my politics and my understanding of history is that human nature is something which exists, is the same in everyone, and does not change over time. Thus, if people tended to do something in the past, they will tend to do it in the future unless some sufficient incentive or constraint prevents them. This is something which informs many of my more libertarian/conservative political beliefs, and as a Catholic I ground it in my understanding that we all have souls made in the image and likeness of God but which are "fallen" in nature. However, I tend to suspect that I would hold a similar belief that people tend to not change much over time even if I were an agnostic, since this is also something which is borne out by a materialistic and scientific approach to understanding humanity. So I think many of my views on economics, personal liberty, justice and culture would be the same even if I were not Catholic.

Two other beliefs I hold strongly are that there is an inherent dignity to every human person, which should be respected even when it would be more expedient for society to ignore that dignity, and also that certain human actions have an inherent moral purpose or value. These, I think, are views I would not hold as unconditionally if I were not Catholic.

Taking it that my tendency towards a strong view of justice and a non-changing view of human nature would persist if I were not Catholic (and thus fell back on an agnostic scientific materialism, which is the worldview I find next most persuasive to Catholicism) but would be less inclined to put aside expedience in favor of human dignity and less inclined to give moral actions universal moral value, I think I would probably list the likely differences resulting from stripping Catholicism out of my worldview as being:

- I would be more libertarian in my approach to issues of economics and personal freedom, and more inclined to give a Darwinian shrug of the shoulders if this hurt less fortunate classes or countries harder, unless this seemed likely to cause actual instability.
- I would be more inclined to accept violence or destruction as an unfortunate but acceptable side effect pursuing foreign policy.
- I would be less supportive of foreign aid.
- I would take a harsher approach to justice domestically -- more use of the death penalty, less worry about having a fair justice system, humane prison system, etc.
- I would not oppose same sex marriage.
- I would likely see abortion, euthanasia, etc. as an acceptable societal trade off in increasing freedom and reducing suffering.
- I would not have a moral issue with birth control, divorce, homosexual behavior, or pre-marital sex. And any issues I would have with adultery, pornography, prostitution, etc. would relate to their social evils, and thus any opposition to them would be non-absolute.

All of which is probably to say that I would overall look somewhat more like an average American of my level of education and general disposition. Not, perhaps, an earth-shattering conclusion. But there it is.

Growing Into Morality

Last night I started reading Heather King's Redeemed, her conversion story, which picks up after Parched, the chronicle of her spiral into and final escape from alcoholism. (I read Parched a couple weeks ago and greatly enjoyed it, if that's the right term for a brilliantly written if at times harrowing memoir.)

One of the things that struck me in reading King's account of her conversion is the way in which she describes coming to understand and agree with Catholic moral teaching. She describes how during her time as an alcoholic she had engaged in increasingly promiscuous sex (until her drinking became so single-minded that even sex would have got in the way), taken birth control, had multiple abortions, etc., and how as she was drawn to the Church she came to see how empty and destructive these had been, and how true the Catholic understanding of these topics now seemed to her.

Drama always centers around change, and reading about Heather King's change on these topics both rings true and makes for dramatic reading. Yet it was also striking me how alien this line of discovery was to my own experience growing into an adult Catholic moral sense (something which still requires a certain kind of conversion, or at least adoption.) Both because of her own years away from any kind of religious belief, and perhaps also because she's describing her experience for an audience which is not specifically religious (Redeemed is out from Viking Press), King's growing understanding of morality during her adult conversion is very different from the experience I look back on as I grew from a youthful understanding to an adult one while living within the Catholic sub-culture.

Like most children brought up with a strong moral code, my earliest sense of morality was strictly one of heroes and villains. Bad things were done by bad people, and good people, nice people that you knew, clearly didn't do bad things.

Such illusions cannot last long, and so the next stage was a tribal one. People like us -- people who were Catholic and went to mass and believed in God and such, followed a moral code, and while all people sin, and so one could expect the petty lies and meannesses and betrayals as much in one's on circle as elsewhere, there we things we just didn't do unless we did so in total rejection of all that was good and right. People who did not belong to the tribe, of course, did not know or accept these rules. Those people might join gangs or do drugs or sleep around, but that was because, not being in the tribe, they didn't know (or rejected) what was right.

With a comparatively sedate set of close friends, this kind of illusion can last a long time, but when someone who is "of the tribe" strays, the sense of shock is extreme. How could someone who was one of us and knew it was wrong be so depraved as to sleep around? How could our people have a marriage fall apart? Or get involved in drugs? Or stop going to church?

When your sense of morality is still heavily tribal, the first few times a long-time friend violates the stronger prohibitions of that code the sense of betrayal is extreme. If "people like us" don't do those things, then clearly that friend is rejecting everything you are (and thought he was too) or he was never who you thought he was in the first place.

For me, the maturing process was coming to understand in a human, rather than an intellectual, sense the varying levels of culpability that exist, not only "outside" but within one's own tribe. And seeing that even those "following the rules" often understand them rather poorly.

While for those coming to the Church from unbelief, the difficulty may, at times, be coming to see certain acts (even those as seemingly understandable as using birth control or having sex with the person you love) can be objectively wrong in and of themselves; for those of us who grow up with "the rules" the difficulty is often going beyond understanding the difference between act and culpability to actually internalizing it. Most certainly, some acts are themselves more grave sins than others, and these should be recognized and avoided. But when the great saints accuse themselves of being horrible sinners, this is not merely a matter of excess scrupulosity. The variance in culpability is so great, that there can be those who have committed nearly "every sin in the book" who retain a certain purity of heart, and yearn for God (or, at least, The Good as they know it) while others who externally avoid all major sins can harbor a pride or hate which is no less for being expressed in petty ways rather than epic ones.

Proxy Morality: Advocacy and 'Solidarity'

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post on how we sometimes impute excessive virtue to ourselves for being on the right side of historical conflicts, though a sort of proxy morality. I'd like to follow-up on the theme with the other area in which I think we often fall into a mentality of proxy morality: issue advocacy and solidarity with oppressed groups.

Let me start by trying to lay out a little bit more clearly what I think proxy morality is and why I think it is a danger to us. Proxy morality consists of drawing a strong sense of virtue or righteousness from identification with some cause or group. It is, I think, a dangerous tendency because it allows us to indulge in a great deal of pride and righteousness, while at the same time running of the risk of both excusing ourselves from taking any direct moral action in regards to the issues which we congratulate ourselves on due to proxy morality. It also presents the temptation of telling ourselves, "I'm a basically good person because of my support for X, Y, Z, and thus my minor failings A, B and C hardly matter." Indeed, more generally, I think there is always a big of backslapping going on between Screwtape and his associates when one of us self-awards the "basically good person" label.

One area in which I think we often develop a sense of proxy morality is in regards to advocacy -- often political advocacy. For those of us on the right, this may be in regards to opposing abortion, same sex marriage, euthenasia, and other clear social evils in the voting booth. This is clearly a good thing, and I think there is often significant moral wrong in not opposing these evils. However, casting a ballot or publicaly agreeing with a political stance is something that typically costs us very little at a personal level, and does little if anything to help specific other human beings. So while it would certainly be wrong if we didn't oppose these evils, it is dangerous if we give ourselves too much credit for doing so. As the Chris Rock line goes, "What? You want a cookie? You're supposed to do that!" For those of a more progressive persuasion, a similar sense of proxy morality is often felt by those supporting environmental regulations or programs intended to reduce poverty, etc. Leaving aside questions about whether such measures are successful in achieving their objectives, it must at the least be admitted that casting a vote or engaging in advocacy has significantly less impact on these matters of concern than actually living a "greener" life or doing something yourself to help those in proverty.

A related area of proxy morality is declaring oneself to be "in solidarity" with some particular group recognized to be suffering. If one is actually out living in Neuvo Laredo or Juarez and helping those suffering there, one can make some legitimate claim to be "in solidarity with the poor" -- if on the other hand one simply means, "I really feel for the poor from the safety of my computer desk, unlike those nasty people who clearly don't," then one is engaging in proxy morality.

Similarly, declaring oneself to be "supporting" women in crisis pregnancies or women oppressed by traditional Islamic cultures is a rather empty boast if it is unaccompanied by any particular action (other than talking about it) and should be no great source of feeling virtuous.

Again, I do not want to imply that people should not take these stands or have these sympathies. Doing the opposite (opposing good policies or not sympathizing with those who are suffing) would clearly be bad. However, we accomplish very little actual virtue by taking these stands and we should never allow ourselves to believe that once we have done so our work is done.

Proxy Morality: Taking Sides in History

Generally speaking, I think we would say that moral behavior consists of choosing to do right in one's actions. However, there are a number of instances in which we tend to think of ourselves as behaving virtuously despite not having actually undertaken any action. These are means by which we tell ourselves that we have demonstrated we are "good people" without the burden of actually doing good things.

There are several different ways we do this which I'd like to address under the description of "proxy morality", by which I mean instances in which someone assigns virtue to himself through no more action than identifying himself with some good which is performed by someone else. The first of these, one which I think people of all ideological persuasions fall into at times, is that of taking sides in history.

It is by now an old saw that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and I think there is a good deal of truth in this. Further, it can be of some moral benefit for us to look to history for people and actions to admire. The moment in which we find ourselves suddenly faced with some difficult moral decision is typically not the moment at which are most un-biased or deliberative, and so having clear examples to follow, if they are well chosen, can be a significant benefit.

However, all too often, we assign too much virtue to being "on the right side" of a historical event. Sometimes this happens very shortly after an event. In post-war France, it was often observed that if everyone who claimed to have been part of the resistance had actually been so, the occupation would not have lasted a month. Similarly, I recall reading a civil rights writer observe, "Every [African American] says he would have been a freedom rider. Most people just stayed home. Everyone says he would have marched with Martin Luther King, but people just used the water fountain they were told and watched it on TV."

The fact of the matter is, identifying the right side of history is easy -- indeed so easy that it's easier if one doesn't actually know much about history. So easy that there is virtually no moral action involved.

To be sure, choosing the wrong side of history can be a significant moral wrong. To support the Nazis or support slavery or support Stalin in this day and age shows a deeply twisted moral sense. But to oppose these three is so easy, and so obvious, from this point in history, that there is little to no virtue involved.

To congratulate oneself for admiring the right side of history is to assign oneself virtue one has not earned. Indeed, it is often more a sign of pride than of virtue. Without question, we should admire those in history who acted virtuously, but we should not consider ourselves to have performed any great virtue by doing so. Nor should we be quick to consider ourselves the superiors of those "ordinary people" in history who failed to rise to the standards of our heroes. We look at their actions with all of the clarity of distance, and none of the danger of immediacy.

Social Contract and Morality

Kyle Cupp has a brief post describing the dehumanizing moral effects of seeing human dignity and rights as springing entirely from a social contract (implied or explicit):

This reduction occurs when we understand and act upon our moral obligations to one another only within the framework of a social contract--when we limit our obligations to those who have entered into such contracts and consider ourselves obligated only to those who share our citizenship, have signed a treaty we have signed, or participate with us in some other contractual arrangement. I make this reduction when I don't care about torturing terrorists because they're not signers of the Geneva Conventions, when I wish to alienate the immigrant who enters my country against my country's laws, when I ignore my obligations to those not yet born because the laws of the land do not recognize their personhood, or when I insist that others shouldn't be given Constitutional rights when the rights I wish to withhold from them are basic human rights.

I think that he's right as far as he goes, but I don't think that his point that basic human rights and duties are inherent to humanity (rather than assumed via some sort of contract/relationship) is actually the point usually at dispute in our society. Rather, what seems often to be disputed is what the extent of basic human rights are -- and which "rights" are merely agreed civic rights which we grant explicitly via the social contract.

For instance, on the torture debate, it seems to me that the two camps hold different views about the extent of basic human rights -- not that one camp only believes in the social contract while the other believes in basic human rights. Essentially, those who are defending the use of "enhanced interrogation" on terror suspects assert that it is in keeping with basic human rights to user certain forms of physical punishment as coercion -- punishing someone for refusing to provide information which the interrogators think they need in order to achieve some common good. What this people are saying (and I disagree) is: "It is morally acceptable and in keeping with basic human rights to waterboard (or beat or keep in the dark, etc.) someone who refuses to answer questions which might save lives. However, we as a society have made an agreement both internally with respect to our citizens and externally with certain treaty signing powers that we will forgo this morally acceptable means of coercion when dealing with criminals or POWs because we consider this to be to the overall common good."

I would propose that the way of testing this claim of mine would be as follows: If those who support "enhanced interrogation" of terror suspects really believe that human rights come only from the social contract and not from basic human rights of some sort, then clearly this would apply to things even more clearly in violation of basic human rights. Would they support:

- Selling them into slavery.
- Cutting out their eyes and tongues and then turning them loose.
- Having them drawn and quartered in the public square.

If not, we must assume that this camp does indeed believe that all people have basic human rights, and indeed their conceptions of basic human rights are more generous than those of many (if not most) societies throughout history.

Now, I do think that Kyle points to a real moral danger. Human societies have a natural tendency towards having one set of rules for "our people" and another for "other people". And so it's important to challenge people to think about what rights are human rights and which ones are civic rights extended only via the social contract.

At the same time, among those prone to hysteria about rights violations, there is a great tendency to assume that all civic rights are basic human rights. So, for example, in the US a trial by a jury of peers is a civic right when accused of a crime -- a right that we as citizens are given via the explicit social contract of our country. However, while being treated justly (and not being punished injustly) are basic human rights -- trial by jury is clearly not. And yet in our society, which so often confuses our legal system with morality, it is quite common for people to consider any other means of dispensing justice than a jury trial to be "denying people their basic rights".

While the social contract is clearly not the only thing that gives us rights, it is by no means unacceptable for certain rights and duties to be explicitly stemming from the social contract and available only to citizens or legal residents -- not to those who are not members of the country.

Talking About Sinful Lifestyles With Children

Eric Brown wrote a post about the question of whether children of same-sex-couples should be allowed in Catholic schools the other day, which generated some interesting conversation. One of the problems that lies at the root of this controversy, I think, is the question of how to deal sinful lifestyles when talking to your children.

Obviously, one of the duties of a conscientious Catholic parents is to successfully pass on to their children belief in Catholic moral teaching. We believe, after all, that living according to the Church's moral teachings is key to both the happiness and salvation of our children, and both of these are things we ought to care about a good bit.

This much, at least, is widely agreed upon. Why, however, should that be a reason not to want your children exposed to the children of a same-sex-couple? Isn't that simply a great chance to talk about the Church's teachings about marriage and sexual morality?

Frankly, I (and I think many other Catholic parents) would rather not have to rush that one. Why?

Both thinking back to my own childhood and also about my children (currently ages 8 through 1.5) one of the things that stands out to me very clearly is that children are naturally dualistic. There's a reason why the fairy tale is a genre so enjoyed by children -- children like clear heroes and villains. The adult my be interested in why it is that the wicked witch became wicked, and whether she really thought she was wicked, but to a child, the fact that she is wicked is all they need. Heroes do good things, villains to bad things, and children under the age of 10-12 have a great deal of difficulty seeing people in between.

This is one of the reasons why my wife and I are very careful about what books and movies we expose our children to: Once someone is "the good guy", everything he does is admired and imitated. The flawed hero is not something that children are good at understanding. You see this when children interact with their real life friends as well. The girl down the street who is a "best friend" one day is "that mean girl I just hate, hate, hate" when she offends.

Thus, when I seek to keep my children from running into certain types of sins (divorce and remarriage, adultery, fornication, homosexual relationships) it's not so much because I don't want to explain these sins to my children, though that's part of it. It's more because I'd rather not have to deal with the delicate balancing act of trying to explain the "hate the sin, love the sinner" concept to a mind which is little capable of making the distinction.

"Daddy, there's a new girl in RE class named Heather. Instead of a mommy and a daddy, she has two mommies. How does she have two mommies?"

"Well, Virginia, only a man and a woman can make a baby together, that's how God made us. Miss Jennifer and Miss Jean may have adopted Heather, or maybe one of them had Heather before they met each other."

"But are Miss Jennifer and Miss Jean married?"

"No, women can't be married to each other. It would be very wrong for two women to live together as if they were married. God tells us that only men and women can marry because only men and women can have babies together. But some women try to live together as if they were married anyway."

"Oh."

* * * *

"Daddy, I told Heather that her mommies are not really married and she cried. Then she said I was a big liar. And one of the boys asked her if she was a dipe. What's a dipe?"

"I think the boy was trying to say a very mean word, and I don't think that you should use that word, Virginia. It was very mean of the boy to say that to her."

"But why did she say I was a liar? Her mommies aren't married. You said so. They can't be."

"Sometimes people don't like to hear things even if they are true, honey. Maybe it's better if you don't talk to Heather about her mommies."

"Oh."

* * * *

"Daddy, I asked one of Heather's mommies, Miss Jennifer, if she was really married, and she said she was! Then I told her you said God didn't like that and she said you must be judge-mental. Are you judge-mental, Daddy?"

"Not everyone understands what God tells us about marriage, Virginia. When Miss Jennifer said I was judgmental, she meant that she disagreed with what God tells us about marriage."

"Miss Jennifer said that God made some women so that they love each other, and so God means them to get married. Is that true, Daddy?"

"No, dear. Miss Jennifer is wrong."

Yes, it could be done, but no sane parent wants to get into these situations.

It's not a teaching opportunity, teaching only works well with people able to understand. It's an aggravation and confusion opportunity. Children have three modes when dealing with these situations: Assuming something is okay because the person in question seems nice; deciding to loudly despise the person because "he's bad"; and pestering all people involved with awkward questions. Since none of these are desirable, parents would prefer not to have to deal with the "two mommies" kind of problems unless family connection forces them to. Just as they'd rather not delve into the fact that the nice woman named Phyllis who comes to family functions with Uncle Edgar is not actually his wife, and will fail to draw a "teaching moment" from the fact that Aunt Belinda's oldest child was born two months after she got married.

Of course, family connections often result in children being forcibly exposed to sex out of wedlock, divorce, adultery, etc. But at least in my own experience, when these realities do in fact make themselves known to children the results are usually less than illuminating. Children are inveterate side takers, and if they do not (as they are surprisingly able to do) remain blithely unaware of a situation going on before their very eyes, they will tend to be the ones who say hurtful things loudly at gatherings which leave all the adults glaring at each other.

And if it's difficult to explain to children about a nasty divorce without the children deciding they need to make their moral indignation known by behaving badly in public toward one of the parties, it is that much harder to explain a situation to a child in which the sinners are apparently happy and united in their sin. If one makes a big deal of it, the child is likely to take things to far and attempt to do a little of their own evangelizing (with disastrous results.) If one is circumspect, the child will assume this is just fine, and is unlikely to believe you years later when you attempt to explain that such things are wrong.

While it may seem like singling out homosexuals for special scorn, the "same sex marriage" is perhaps the most difficult lifestyle sin to explain to children. Divorce, because it fractures a family, is naturally disliked by children. Adultery, if it somehow becomes known, will be so only in its home-breaking sense, and thus rejected similarly to divorce. Same sex marriage, however, is unique in claiming to be a marriage when it is not. And thus is by far the most difficult to explain to children. I don't think it's unjustified for parents, who care strongly about presenting a good example of what marriage really is to their children, to not want to have such an issue brought up to their children before the children are of sufficient mental and moral maturity to be able to understand the situation and the Church's response to it.

All Morality is Personal

One hears, at times, frustration expressed that too many Catholics think only in terms of "personal morality" or "personal piety" and that insufficient attention is paid to social or political sin. Certainly, the results of an average Catholic's examination of conscience might seem paltry on the stage of political activism. How can people worry about paltry wrongs such as, "I lied," "I took the Lord's name in vain," or "I indulged in lustful thoughts," when there are third world workers being cheated out of their just wages, the environment being destroyed, racism being perpetuated, nuclear weapons being built and imperialist wars being fought? Isn't it time that we stopped obsessing over these small issues of lying and swearing and sex in order to concentrate on the massive, societal evils that afflict our country and our planet?

This line of thinking strikes me as, in the end, an approach no less dangerous than that of the Pharisee who was so notoriously contrasted with the publican. Why? Because while there are unquestionably social evils that afflict us at a wider level (though there is certainly room for debate as to the precise nature and cause of social evils, I don't think there's any question that such things do exist) morality must, in the end, be examined at the level of individual actions. And for us, that means our actions. Societies do not perform sins, people do. While it may make sense to talk about some pervasive evil such as racism as being a "social sin", racism does not in fact consists of "society" being racist but rather of a number of individual people within a society behaving in a racist fashion. If workers are being treated badly or paid unjust wages, it is not because society does this, but because a certain number of individual people choose to commit those acts.

I think the instinct to think of the large scale problems as social rather than personal moral problems is that in many cases the social problems that people find themselves most concerned about involve actions that they are fairly remote from. Say, for instance, one reads about a clothing plant in China in which managers routinely lock workers in for 16-20 hour shifts, forcing them to work overtime in order to meet production quotas without their consent and without paying them for the additional hours worked. I don't think it would be controversial to say that those factory owners and shift supervisors are acting wrongly -- they they are far away from us and our ability to change their behavior is minimal.

And yet, people are often uncomfortable with admitting that there is little they can do about some evil that is being committed. And so, moral weight is assigned to another set of activities which surround the issue. Do you advocate against low wages and seek to raise awareness? Are you in solidarity with the oppressed? Do you buy local, or buy fair trade, or live sustainably? Do you denounce "the system"? Do you vote for change?

I do not want to argue that people should not engage in advocacy on issues they believe to be important. Helping other people to understand what is right is a moral action, and as citizens in a polity we also have a civic responsibility to persuade our fellow citizens to support policies which will be to the common good of us all. So I would certainly encourage people to engage in political advocacy on those issues they believe to be most pressing (whether that issue is abortion, unjust wages, immigration, human trafficking, etc.) But at the same time it seems to me important for us to remember that our most basic moral responsibility is for our own personal actions, not for advocacy we engage in or groups we join.

The great temptation with these social and political understandings of morality is that they make it all too tempting for people to put all their moral energy into focusing on other people's sins rather than their own. In the story of the pharisee and the publican, the pharisee may in fact be a person who has committed fewer unjust and immoral actions than the publican, but his great fault is that when approaching God he asks not for forgiveness for his own sins (and the strength to avoid them in the future) but rather provides God with a quick run-down of everyone else's sins.

Given that most of us do not have it within our personal power to mistreat third world workers, declare war, torture terror suspects or destroy wetlands, a heavy focus on issues such as these necessarily means focusing on the sins committed by others rather than the sins we ourselves commit. However un-exciting admissions such as "I gossiped about the guy in the next cube behind his back" or "I lied" or "I was short tempered with my kids" might be, if those are the sins we actually have the chance to do something about it is important that they be our primary focus in our moral life. When we focus on sins which are more distant to us to the exclusion of our own, we risk turning morality into an enemies list -- a danger which is the same whether that list is populated with "torture advocates", "economic imperialists" or "baby killers". If he can convince us to focus, in this way, on the sins of others while allowing our own to fester (after all, they are so insignificant compared to the great injustices in the world!) the great tempter scores a victory, not a defeat.

The Sex Life Fallacy

[This is a re-post of a post from back in 2007, as prelude to developing some further thoughts on the topic.]

A couple weeks ago I wrote a bit about bonobos, the "sexy ape" which is sometimes referred to as the kinder, gentler counterpart to the sometimes violent chimps. A commenter later pointed out an article written by primatologist Fraans de Waal in the eSkeptic (an organ of the Skeptics Society) taking exception to the New Yorker article which inspired my post, in which article he was presented as something of an outlier, reaching exciting but perhaps somewhat exaggerated conclusions based on research only on bonobos in captivity.

It seems that Dinesh D'Souza had written a blog post based on the New Yorker article, and this had pretty much convinced de Waal that the entire thing was a conservative attempt to co opt discussion of his "sexy" apes. The Skeptics brought their own ax to grind to the table, remarking in an editorial note, "it is interesting that so many people wish to deny the undeniable relationship between humans and chimps, and at the same time cannot seem to help finding political meanings in primate behavior that supports either a liberal or conservative agenda."

The de Waal article is marginally worth reading, but it strikes me that in his overall defensiveness (perhaps a combination of his less than flattering treatment in the original article and the fact that D'Souza, whom he clearly despises, picked up the story) leads him to engage in some poor rhetorical moves.

For instance, he says that all the examples of purported violence among bonobos are from captivity, and yet two of the examples in the article are recounted by Hohmann as having occurred in the wild.

On another occasion, he dispenses with what strikes me as a legitimate question as to whether or not all of the activity between bonobos which is usually described as group sexual activity for social bonding purposes is actually sexual (as in, whether the bonobos are relating to each other sexually, or just touching each other in what to humans would be sexual ways) by quoting the Bill Clinton/Paula Jones case. Clearly, that's not answering the question as to whether actions which would be sexual among humans actually carry that connotation among bonobos, and it's unfortunate to see that kind of unseriousness in response to what struck me as a pretty balanced, well researched article.

However, all this talk about whether the "hippie primate" who "makes love not war" is indeed the sort of gentle, oversexed creature that it is reputed to be got me thinking about the whole question of a "sex life".

You see, the thing that makes bonobos seem a bit unusual compared to many other animals is their tendency to engage in mating behaviors when not "in heat". While a tiny bit of this has been observed in chimps, chimp males are usually only interested in females when the females undergo the physical changes that indicate they're fertile.

In this sense, one of the things that has excited people about bonobos is that they seem to be interested in sex all the time -- just like many humans. While those of us who use NFP often note that Topic A becomes a bit more compelling during fertile periods, the signs of fertility are not widely observable among humans, and as a species we're pretty open to mating behavior at all times (headaches aside).

It's pretty common in popular culture these days to talk about the necessity of a "good sex life", a somewhat vague term which I take to mean having the openness and opportunity to have sex fairly often and enjoy it a lot. Well, that sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? And here's the bonobo to show that it's not just a human thing, it's a way that primates can get along and relieve tension so they don't fight all the time.

This fits pretty well with the human-as-mental-creature picture which has dominated our intellectual landscape since the Enlightenment. Here we've got this great thing we can do that forms close personal relationships and is a lot of fun as well. Shouldn't we all make sure to fit regular practice of it into our schedules?

Sounds like fun, but I think it fails to take into account our existence as physical creatures with biological systems that have specific purposes. There's a reason why they call them "reproductive organs", and it doesn't have to do with xeroxing.

Now this works out fine for creatures like the bonobos. Most species have a pretty scattershot approach to keeping the species going: every time you have the chance to conceive, you do; and if there isn't enough food or parental care to go around, the child dies. Most animals, left to their own devices, will get pregnant just about as often as their bodies and nutrition will let them. Pop 'em out, let 'em go.

However modern, first world, human society has managed to work itself in expected pregnancy to be very rare (and never to come unexpectedly) at exactly the same time it's decided that everyone needs a healthy and active sex life. Basically, we want to mate like bonobos, but not have every female going around the jungle either pregnant or with a small baby clinging to her back.

Modern birth control (and abortion) has made this possible to an extent, but holding mother nature in check with technology tends to add other complicating factors. It seems moderately hard-wired in humans for sex to create emotional pair-bonding, of the sort that you need between a pair of mates raising offspring that take 13-17 years to reach biological (much less intellectual) maturity. Taking the reproduction out of sex reduces the need for pairbonding, and so we provide ourselves with all sorts of ways to make ourselves unhappy why pursuing the "sex life" ideal.

I'm not saying that biological realities mean that sex should simply be a matter of closing ones eyes and thinking of England (though a vacation sounds like a good idea now that you mention it), but it seems to me that from a creature point of view we put ourselves into awkward places when we try to focus on having a "sex life" without admitting that we're really talking about a "reproductive life".