Between 'Just is' and 'Is just'

Dogmatism is where people say, 

It just is like that. Homosexuality just is wrong. Islam just is incompatible with liberal democracy. Don't question me. Don't ask for a justification. This is not a debate.

Cynicism is where people say, 

That is just what they want you to think. That is just your opinion. There's no way of knowing who's really right so I might as well believe whatever suits me. 

Academics debating MOOCs have a conflict of interest

Academics are fighting back against Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the new and massively disruptive trend in higher education (e.g. this open letter to Michael Sandel). But their complaints look very much like a rationalisation of their own unenlightened self-interest rather than following from any real consideration of the interests of students.

These days the only good arguments for monarchy are republican ones

The arguments I hear from people who claim to be monarchists all have something in common: they are all republican in form and substance.

Britain's sudden and bizarre resentment of migration

All three of Britain's major political parties are joining the loony xenophobic fringe against migration. I can't really condemn them for that since the British people themselves seem to be leading this march to intolerance. And it is intolerance. The successful diffusion of anti-racist social norms in recent decades has constrained the most natural expressions of anti-immigrant prejudices. But the contorted arguments about fairness and community being trotted out now are still basically the same bigoted drivel about nasty uncivilised foreigners coming over here to steal our stuff and undermine our values.

Gay marriage: the right to be the same is not the right to be different

The success of the campaign to legalise gay-marriage across many western countries is quite momentous. It is astonishing to see how fast political and popular opposition to gay marriage (or, as supporters call it, 'marriage') is crumbling in the face of the reasonable demand for public justification for banning it. The feeble excuses for arguments trotted out by bishops, pundits, activists, politicians and lawyers arguing before the US supreme court are increasingly perceived for what they are: the rationalisations of bigoted prejudices.

And yet, there is something disappointing in how the gay-marriage debate is being won. Proponents have overwhelmingly argued against discrimination, rather than for the freedom to be different. They have argued that it is unfair to treat their relationships differently from heterosexual ones because they are in every significant respect the same. Doing so violates the principle of equality under the law: treating similar cases in the same way. There are hundreds if not thousands of government benefits and ancillary rights linked to marriage status which it is unfair to deny to people on the basis of an irrelevant feature: their sexuality.

Has just watching porn become passé?

I recently came across a fascinating statistical analysis of the US porn industry by Jon Millard, Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and their Careers. It made me wonder, is just watching porn not enough anymore? Will spreadsheets and statistical infographics become an increasingly ubiquitous feature of the consumption of pornography? And what does that imply about how we relate to it?

The philosopher as anarchist

We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's. (From GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday)

Perhaps Chesterton had Rousseau in mind, with his savage denunciations of so called civilisation, and of the bourgeois 'philosophers' who provided convenient rationalisations of the status quo.

I open the books on Right and on ethics; I listen to the professors and jurists; and, my mind full of their seductive doctrines, I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order; I bless the wisdom of our political institutions and, knowing myself a citizen, cease to lament I am a man. Thoroughly instructed as to my duties and my happiness, I close the book, step out of the lecture room, and look around me. I see wretched nations groaning beneath a yoke of iron. I see mankind ground down by a handful of oppressors. I see a famished mob, worn down by sufferings and famine, while the rich drink the blood and tears of their victims at their ease. I see on every side the strong armed with the terrible powers of the Law against the weak. (The State of War)

Further arguments for republicanism: Pity

Hilary Mantel on Royal Bodies in The London Review of Books:

I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn't have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren't they interesting? Aren't they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage. 

I hadn't realised before that the kind of compassion with suffering pressed by animal rights critics of zoos could be relevant to the institution of the monarchy! All that's lacking is to politicise Mantel's observations into a proper critique of gross injustice.

Drone strike equality

The recent leaking of an Obama administration memo on the legal justification for killing Americans abroad has apparently caused some consternation. Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU:

This is a chilling document. Basically, it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen. … It recognizes some limits on the authority it sets out, but the limits are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated.

I however, as a non-American, welcome the move to drone strike equality. Excluding American citizens from the chance of death from the sky delivered by some intern playing on an adapted X-box in Langley was discriminatory. If executing people on suspicion of involvement in al-Qaeda (or one of its subsidiaries or franchise partners) without due process is good enough for foreigners, it should be good enough for Americans too.

Construing the 2nd amendment

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The contemporary 'gun-rights' movement in America claims to derive its legitimacy from the 2nd amendment to the Constitution. Yet their construal of that constitutional right is peculiar since they appear not to take the contingent justification embedded in the constitution seriously (that first clause of the sentence). It seems that the right to bear arms has outgrown its rationale in security, whether communal or personal. Arguments for gun control that relate to these thus miss their target. Rather, the main rationale and attraction of gun rights is a 'heroic' view of citizenship, which is a peculiarly American conception that has to be debated at the level of political philosophy, not facts and statistics.

Mass killings are not a good argument for gun control

It must be rather obvious, if not intuitive, that if one analyses the gun control issue in public health terms, as political Liberals generally do, then freak events like mass killings do not justify gun control. First, mass killings are rare and their effect on death rates negligible. Second, gun control would not prevent them. Third, the whole argument is a distraction from the real public health case for gun control: by making killing so quick and easy guns convert an intention to harm  into deaths at an astounding rate.

Is corporate tax avoidance really a matter for consumers to address?

A strange phenomenon has appeared in Britain: MPs have appealed to the British public to persuade tax dodging corporations such as Starbucks, Amazon and Google through consumer lobbying and boycotts. They have even called for consumer action against the Big Four accountancy firms who design the elaborate tax avoidance schemes in question. It's all quite exhilarating and apparently there has already been some success - Starbucks has voluntarily requested to pay 20 million more.

After Leveson: Freedom of the press is not the same as freedom of speech

The Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press has finally concluded. It recommends a 'voluntary' press association with statutory powers, and new liabilities to legal action for those who stay outside. Of course, some have called this a threat to the free press and free speech (e.g. Kenan Malik). First, freedom of the press should not be conflated with freedom of speech. Second, freedom of the press is merely a means to important ends: holding power accountable and informing people of matters of public interest. Proper regulation can make the press better at those while preventing significant harms.

Justice vs truth at the International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court, and the one-off tribunals it is intended to replace, face a tension if not a conflict between the aims of truth and justice. Bringing the perpetrators of awful crimes against humanity to justice is of course the official reason for these courts, but bringing out the truth of what happened is also usually cited. In fact I have the distinct impression that the courts themselves have little faith in their ability to provide justice and now see their service to truth as their greatest contribution.

Golden Dawn may be the last straw for Greece

Greece has been at the forefront of the Eurozone's sovereign debt crisis for some time. Its efforts to get assistance from central EU institutions like the European Central Bank and major EU economies like Germany have been hindered by a failure of solidarity. From Greece's side there was the abject incompetence and inconsistency of its government, which made it a difficult partner to work with.

Why are the Republicans so bad at politics?

Obviously the Republican party is quite tactically astute. They chose the most nationally appealing candidate they had available (from an admittedly narrow list). They make free use of all the dark arts of electoral competition, from declaring that their first priority was to deny Obama a second term, to racially coded negative advertising to gerrymandering districts to voter ID laws designed to suppress non-Republican demographics. They are at least as good at tactics as the Democrats.

Still, it is astonishing that they seem to lack any strategic sense or vision for their party's future (let alone the country's). They seem to believe that the essential truth of their conservative values makes them the legitimate ruling party. They have apparently forgotten that in a democracy legitimacy comes from popularity, not being right.

Pratfall: The latest Bond film lacks both imagination and style

Skyfall begins with a great chase sequence and fulfils or exceeds expected levels of mayhem. But that's about all that can be said for it.

What does it take to be a good economist?

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject at which few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature of his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.  (J. M. Keynes. 1924. "Alfred Marshall,  1842-1924" in The Economic Journal)

The irrelevance of the Left: Gaddafi

A recent conversation with some British Lefty friends, after a conference on dialectical materialism of all things, seemed to illustrate something about the state of the Left that I hadn't properly appreciated before: its flight from reality.

Why I do not wear a poppy

It is that time of the year when people are selling poppies to "remember the service" of military veterans. I won't be buying one. I don't like the coerciveness of the poppy ritual, the way it tries to bring everyone together around a single shared narrative of remembrance, sadness, and gratitude. I don't like the unquestioning acceptance of the value of that military service, of the necessity and meaningfulness of war in general. And I really don't like the government's intimate involvement.

I see the poppies as a straightforward propaganda campaign by government to manufacture social attitudes and emotions that foreclose the possibility of reasoned public scrutiny of its military campaigns, past, present and future.