Video: What's Wrong with Being Pragmatic?

In Sunday's Philosophy in Action Webcast, I discussed being pragmatic. The question was:

What's wrong with being pragmatic? My dictionary defines being pragmatic as "dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations." What's wrong with that, if anything? Is that the same as "pragmatism"?

My answer, in brief:

Pragmatism is a philosophic view that rejects thinking long-range and on-principle in favor of short-term expediency. However, many people just use the term to mean "practical," and others are honestly confused by all the bad theories and principles rampant in the culture.

Here's the video of my full answer:

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The Conspiracies of Ron Paul

A few weeks ago, an unknown Ron Paul's supporter (or supporters) created a stir with a video attacking John Huntsman. Reuters reports:

Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman and members of his family expressed outrage on Friday at an advertisement targeted at his adopted daughters by a group supporting rival Ron Paul.

An online ad authored by "NHLiberty4Paul" shows footage of Huntsman with daughters Gracie, who was adopted from China, and Asha, adopted from India, when they were infants.

"American values. Or Chinese," the ad asks to a soundtrack of Chinese music. It calls Huntsman "the Manchurian Candidate" and ends with an image of Huntsman dressed as China's former communist leader Mao Zedong, and the words "Vote Ron Paul."

Here's the video, and I definitely recommend watching it:



So what is Ron Paul's response?

Paul, a Texas congressman, disavowed the ad during an interview on Friday on CNN, but said he could not control the actions of all his supporters.

"I couldn't even hear it, haven't looked at it, but people do that, and they do it in all campaigns," Paul said.

(Update: Apparently, Ron Paul's campaign did attempt to sue to discover the author of the video, but they were rebuffed by the courts.)

Unfortunately, Ron Paul has a long history of tolerating these and other varieties of racist, homophobic, and otherwise disreputable supporters. He distances himself in tepid terms, and refuses to condemn them in anything remotely like the strong language that they deserve. That's why he's got problem after problem with downright frightening supporters.

Ron Paul's 2008 campaign had such problems in spades, particularly for refusing reject donations from neo-Nazis. In this 2010 campaign, Ron Paul's campaign welcomed the endorsement of a Christian dominionist pastor in Iowa who -- consistent with his overall theology -- advocates the death penalty (!!!) for homosexuality. (Please go read the whole story, because it's quite remarkable.) The announcement on Ron Paul's web site welcoming this fothermucker's endorsement was deleted, but as far as I can tell, Ron Paul never repudiated the endorsement.

Moreover, Ron Paul has never adequately explained or repudiated the viciously racist and homophobic comments in his newsletters.

How should the lunatic fringe be handled in a campaign? Consider the reaction of Bob Barr's campaign to a racist endorsement when he ran for president in 2008 on the Libertarian Party ticket:

The Barr campaign is not going to be a vehicle for every fringe and hate group to promote itself. We do not want and will not accept the support of haters. Anyone with love in their heart for our country and for every resident of our country regardless of race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation is welcome with open arms.

Tell the haters I said don't let the door hit you on the backside on your way out!

I'm not a fan of Bob Barr, but *pow* *pow* *pow* -- that's how it's done!

Instead of doing that -- or anything like it -- Ron Paul tolerates dangerous idiots, only setting them at arm's length when exposed by the media. This pattern of actions reveals something amiss with Ron Paul's character and judgment, I fear. He's not a racist, I don't think: he's said and done too much too clearly against that. So is he just willing to tolerate and pander to dangerous nonsense in the hope of a few more votes? I don't think that explains the pattern, not when he sticks to his guns on economics.

I suspect that a major cause of these problems is that he's got a serious but mostly hidden penchant for conspiracy theories. This fascinating NY Times article explores that in some detail. For example:

In a 1990 C-Span appearance, taped between Congressional stints, Paul was asked by a caller to comment on the "treasonous, Marxist, alcoholic dictators that pull the strings in our country." Rather than roll his eyes, Paul responded, "there's pretty good evidence that those who are involved in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations usually end up in positions of power. And I believe this is true."

Paul then went on to stress the negligible differences between various "Rockefeller Trilateralists." The notion that these three specific groups -- the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family -- run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Wow, just wow. By all means, go watch the video for yourself. He just smooth talks right in and out of the conspiracies.

Judged by the standards of a rational epistemology, conspiracy-theorism is nearly at the bottom of the barrel. The mind of the conspiracy theorist is in complete disarray, utterly unable to evaluate evidence or stick to facts. It's engaging in a constant process of invention, and then confusing those inventions with facts.

For that to be the basic psycho-epistemology of the US President... well, that would be frightening.

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Video: Reasoning by Facts Rather than Emotions

In Sunday's Philosophy in Action Webcast, I discussed reasoning by facts rather than emotions. The question was:

How do I know that I'm reasoning based on facts, rather than just being driven by my emotions? Often, I feel strong emotions on some personal or political issue. How do I know that I'm not rationalizing what I want to be true?

My answer, in brief:

By monitoring his thinking, a person can notice the many signs of rationalizing feelings rather than reasoning based on facts. Introspection is the key to noticing and solving this problem.

Here's the video of my full answer:

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All posted webcast videos can be found in the Webcast Archives and on my YouTube channel.

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My Brain Versus Particulars

This Oatmeal comic segment -- part of the brilliant "if my brain was an imaginary friend" strip -- perfectly captures how my brain works. (Click here or on the image to view it.)

I have the same problem with all particulars, such as dates and places. When taking notes on a history lecture by Eric Daniels, I've had to replay what he said in my head, to get down the notes properly. I can hear it perfectly word-for-word -- almost. Inevitably, it sound something like, "The soldiers were despondent after General BUUZZZZZ moved his troops to BUUZZZZZ in the year BUUZZZZZ."

Apparently, after seven years of graduate school in philosophy, my brain decided that particulars were unimportant. Or maybe the causation runs in the other direction. Either way: DOH!

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Be Grateful for the Hard Questions in Police Investigations

In the course of preparing for my recent webcast question on the morality of police lying to suspects, I realized that something is deeply wrong with the standard portrayals in crime dramas of the victim's loved ones.

In those crime dramas, the friends and family of a murder victim are often deeply offended by any suspicion by the police that they might have committed the crime, often to the point of refusing to cooperate after being questioned in a vigorous way. Perhaps that rarely happens in real life: perhaps that's just a device that television writers like to use to heighten conflict. However, if it does happen, then I think that's a serious mistake on the part of those people. It's a failure to understand the epistemic context of the police (and prosecutors) in a criminal investigation.

As I mentioned in the webcast, police officers face a daunting task in any investigation, particularly a murder investigation. Without any ability to speak to the murder victim, they must insert themselves into his life, then extract relevant information from a slew of strangers, many of whom will be unreliable, if not flatly dishonest.

People truly mourning for the murder victim -- as opposed to any criminals in their midst -- should want justice to be done. They should want the police to catch the killer. As a result, they should want the police to conduct a vigorous and thorough investigation, including of the people close to the victim. Simply based on the natural trajectory of an investigation, plus the statistics on who kills who, the police ought to begin their investigation with the person's intimate family and friends. And for the police, no one should be above suspicion.

Hence, the people closest to the victim should expect -- and even want -- to be questioned. They shouldn't want the police to assume that "no mother would kill her son" and "the wife cried, so she wouldn't have killed her husband." Instead, these people should want the police to suspicious of them until provided with some fact-based reasons not to be suspicious. They should want the police to dig -- and sometimes, that will require asking uncomfortable, difficult, or pointed questions. Sometimes, that will require lying to test the statement of a witness too.

Undoubtedly, that would be terribly difficult to endure, particularly in the wake of a tragic death. Still, true friends and family should be grateful for a vigorous investigation, so long as the police are ultimately concerned with doing justice. To do otherwise is to ignore the police's context of knowledge. The police can only learn about the nature and quality of the victim's relationships by prying into them, and they know that the murderer (if among them) will resist that by feigning grief and lying about crucial facts. Sometimes, the police must press hard to separate the innocent from the guilty -- and that's right and proper! Even people in mourning should recognize that.

Of course, if the police are dishonest or unjust in their investigation -- if they make assumptions of guilt or ignore facts, if they're just seeking an easy conviction rather than justice -- then that's a whole different matter. And I still think that a person shouldn't talk to the police without a lawyer present.

But overall, a person should be glad to be questioned vigorously about the murder of a loved one, because then he can have some measure of confidence that if justice can be done, it will be done.

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The Active Mind

[This post was originally written for Modern Paleo.]

In our modern culture, many people adopt a rigid, rule-bound approach to their lives: whatever they learned from their parents, their preacher, and their peers must be the right way, and that's the end of the story. They're unwilling to question their assumptions; they often can't even see that alternatives to those assumptions exist. On the other hand, many people reject that kind of stagnation in favor of acting on the range-of-the-moment. They act based on their gut feelings, i.e. their raw emotions.

These two approaches to life are wrong, often disastrously so. Yet they're not as different as you might think. Both approaches reject reason: they deny paramount importance to human life of rational identification and evaluation of the facts. The people who adopt them seek to coast through life without the effort of understanding the world in which they live. Those often pay a very steep price for that in the form of abandoned dreams, wrecked relationships, and emotional turmoil.

Two years ago, when I began peeking my nose into the uncharted waters of the paleosphere, I was impressed to find that a better approach was pretty common. By and large, people were willing to check their assumptions. They did not submit their judgment to the government and its lackeys, nor blindly follow the advice of their doctors. They were willing to test their theories against the facts of biochemistry, quality medical studies, and their own n=1 experiments. They wanted to know the truth, even if that meant rejecting seemingly universal beliefs about hearthealthywholegrains and arterycloggingsaturatedfat. They wanted to identify general principles, and then practice them, so as to live better.

Basically -- although not universally, of course -- I've been impressed with the "active minds" that I've found in the paleosphere. An active mind isn't an "open mind," nor a "closed mind," as Ayn Rand explains:

[There is a] dangerous little catch phrase which advises you to keep an "open mind." This is a very ambiguous term--as demonstrated by a man who once accused a famous politician of having "a wide open mind." That term is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions and granting plausibility to anything. A "closed mind" is usually taken to mean the attitude of a man impervious to ideas, arguments, facts and logic, who clings stubbornly to some mixture of unwarranted assumptions, fashionable catch phrases, tribal prejudices--and emotions. But this is not a "closed" mind, it is a passive one. It is a mind that has dispensed with (or never acquired) the practice of thinking or judging, and feels threatened by any request to consider anything.

What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an "open mind," but an active mind--a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants--a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear. (Philosophy: Who Needs It)

Personally, I'm always on the lookout for ways in which I might have a closed mind or an open mind rather than an active mind. I try to ask myself why I think and act as I do, particularly as concerns cultural norms. Is some practice just tradition -- or does it make rational sense? I know that when I've been able to do that, I've reaped huge rewards. For example:

• If I'd not been willing to question my assumptions about diet, I'd still be eating wheat, sugar, and other forms of junk food. I'd be bouncing between blood sugar highs and lows. I'd be obsessively thinking about the cookies in the pantry. I'd be slowly packing on the pounds, year after year. My liver would be getting ever-fattier, and I'd slowly ease my way into type 2 diabetes.
  
• If I'd not been willing to question my assumptions about shampoo, I'd still be frustrated with my limp, dull hair. Instead, my hair is soft, well-bodied, and easy to manage. I'm unhappy with my haircut right now, but I've finally got my no-poo system working well. (I'll post more on that later.)
  
• If I'd not been willing to question the quasi-socialist political views of my youth, I'd be cheering on the government takeover of the economy initiated by Bush and hastened by Obama. (EEEK!)
  
• If I'd not been willing to question my assumption that my friend Paul was just too old for me due to our 13-ear age gap, I'd not had the best eleven years of my life as his wife! (He looks the same age as me now; that's a blessing and a curse!)

Life -- in the fullest sense of that term -- requires an active mind. There's no way around it.

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Leonard Peikoff Interview With Magician Steve Cohen

Leonard Peikoff recently gave a fascinating interview with professional magician Steve Cohen.

Among the many topics they discussed were magic, knowledge, belief, deception, art, and entertainment.

Here's an excerpt:

SC: We often hear the axiom "seeing is believing." However on p. 319 of Atlas Shrugged, there is a quote from Dr. Ferris' book "Why Do You Think You Think" that states: "Only the crassest ignoramus can still hold to the old-fashioned notion that seeing is believing. That which you can see is the first thing to disbelieve."

My question is: what can we trust if not our eyes? What is the nature of belief, and how can someone like me (who is forever trying to convince people of something that is not necessarily true) create conviction in others?

LP: I say that, absolutely, seeing is believing. You can trust your eyes, and all your senses. In fact, they are necessarily valid because the only way to establish any truth is by reference to the sensory data. That's the basis on which we form concepts and conclusions. If your senses aren’t valid, you can’t even have such a word as valid.

Now people get confused on this, because they don't distinguish what the senses tell us from the interpretation that we place on that data. If I see a man in a red suit and a white beard and a big stomach, and I say, "I see Santa Claus," my senses do not deceive me, but my interpretation does.

That's true of all alleged cases where you perceive something, and then blame the senses.

So for any issue, you must distinguish: what do you see? And what do you make of it? Now a lot of people will see something that they can't explain, and then come up with mystical interpretations. Whether that's the occurrence of the seasons, or the tides, the attraction of magnets, or whatever it happens to be. They will resort to inner spirits, God, and so on. Their senses -- what they see -- is valid. However, their interpretation, their mysticism, is not relevant.

A proper attitude would be, if you can't explain something that you do perceive, you just say the truth: "I do perceive it, and I can't explain it." Half of the things that were not explicable in the past, later became so. And many of the things that are not explicable yet, will be in due course. That would be a rational attitude...

...No rational person would ever think that what a magician performs is more than a trick. You have to go by facts and the conclusions of logic and science. Over the centuries, a tremendous number of incredulous, unthinking people who go by matters of desire rather than fact... Hundreds of thousands who quote seeing "miracles," and it's all nonsense. It’s all motivated by emotion. And I wouldn’t even say that these people have a conviction. They just have the mood of the moment.

You have to ask, is that the kind of audience you want?

Being a magician, you are a rare commodity as a mystery-monger. But if you’re claiming supernatural powers, you have to put yourself up against Buddha and Moses and all the rest of them. To me, that would be a desecration for you, with your talent.

...

SC: Then why would people search out a magic show?

LP: To me, it's the same category as watching a great hockey player or baseball player, or a pianist, for that matter. When you see a skill that someone has mastered, and are able to experience complete enjoyment of that skill, it's a pleasure to anyone who values human life and human achievement. I mean, how many people in any field acquire that kind of skill?

I don't have any metaphysical need to come see a magic show. If I thought that you were going to take me into a supernatural world, I would not enjoy it at all. First of all, I would feel fear. If this guy can suspend the laws of nature, then they are not reliable. They’re not absolute. Who knows what's coming next? I could fall through the floor, or disappear, maybe disintegrate. Plus, I would lose any admiration of you, the magician. Because if you are a vehicle of the supernatural, why should we give you any credit? Why would we admire you?

There is an absolute, legitimate state called the "suspension of disbelief." This is not at all the same as wanting to be deceived. If you watch a movie, and you see one person stalk another, you won't call the police. You know it's not really happening. On the other hand, it has a reality to you. It's not just shadows on the screen. You're pulled into it. You feel fear, apprehension. It's a state in which you know what you believe, but you are suspending that within limits. That's exactly what you do when you watch a magician. You know that he is not turning a rabbit into a hippopotamus. But you suspend your disbelief by saying, I watched it happen, isn’t that fantastic. While not considering that somewhere there's an explanation. As soon as you reach the end of the performance, the audience's disbelief is no longer suspended. It's a way of enjoying one aspect of a total. But there is no element of escaping from reality.

(Read the full interview.)

For a nice example of close-up magic with a jaw-dropping finale, take a look at this performance. (Although the dialogue is in Chinese, you don't need to understand the language to follow the action.):

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The Value of a Trained Intuition

It was a busy Friday night in the ER. A 34-year old woman came in with chest pain, and I saw her chest x-ray. I was just about to call it "normal" and move onto the next case, when a nagging little voice in the back of my head told me to look one more time. Can you see the abnormality? (Click on image to see it full sized):



I decided that I didn't like a very subtle shadow in her right upper lung. It was just a little too asymmetrically dense compared to the opposite left side:



Hence, I told the ER doctor that there was a possible but not definite abnormality in that area (such as an early pneumonia). I recommended that he order a CT scan to see if it was real or not. He ordered the CT scan, and we saw this:



Based on the irregular contour (and other features), this is almost certainly a 2-cm lung cancer rather than pneumonia. The patient is now "in the system", and we expect biopsy proof soon.

If I had decided to ignore that nagging doubt and instead called her x-ray normal, then 6 months later when the cancer had grown and become obvious, some sharp lawyer could easily have gone back through the records, reviewed the film, and argued that I should detected it back then.

Hence, I probably avoided a lawsuit by taking a second careful look at her x-ray, even though it was a crazy busy night in the ER with x-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds, and MRI images piling up.

Lesson: If a little nagging voice in your head tells you to look at or think about something one more time, then listen to it!

This is, of course, the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. And I believe Gladwell is fundamentally correct.

If one has trained one's subconscious to make good "lightning" evaluations over the years through a process of reason (in adherence to the facts of reality), then one's resultant "intuitions" can be quite valuable. At the very least, one should take those intuitions seriously -- in the sense of using them as a red flag indicating that one should reconsider the issue at hand and apply some more careful conscious reasoning.

Of course, if one's "intuitions" are just a hodgepodge of emotional reactions shaped by chance and whim, then they will almost certainly lead one astray. And Gladwell also emphasizes this point in his book.

Dr. Leonard Peikoff also covers this topic nicely in his Podcast #103 (timestamp 6:55), answering the question on intuition.

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How Do You Know What You Know?

How do you know what you know? And why should you care?

Objectivism isn't just a bunch of conclusions to collect and apply -- there's a distinctive methodology that emanates from the very core of the epistemology which shapes the entire philosophy and its ultimate effects in every realm. At the center of it all is the Objectivist account of just what concepts are, and how we properly acquire and use them. This is central because it goes to the essence of how we humans navigate reality: we're the rational animal, i.e., the conceptual animal. Leonard Peikoff explains it nicely:

For man, sensory material is only the first step of knowledge, the basic source of information. Until he has conceptualized this information, man cannot do anything with it cognitively, nor can he act on it. Human knowledge and human action are conceptual phenomena.

Although concepts are built on percepts, they represent a profound development, a new scale of consciousness. An animal knows only a handful of concretes: the relatively few trees, ponds, men, and the like it observes in its lifetime. It has no power to go beyond its observations -- to generalize, to identify natural laws, to hypothesize causal factors, or, therefore, to understand what it observes. A man, by contrast, may observe no more (or even less) than an animal, but he can come to know and understand facts that far outstrip his limited observations. He can know facts pertaining to all trees, every pond and drop of water, the universal nature of man. To man, as a result, the object of knowledge is not a narrow corner of a single planet, but the universe in all its immensity, from the remote past to the distant future, and from the most minuscule (unperceivable) particles of physics to the farthest (unperceivable) galaxies of astronomy.

A similar contrast applies in the realm of action. An animal acts automatically on its perceptual data; it has no power to project alternative courses of behavior or long-range consequences. Man chooses his values and actions by a process of thought, based ultimately on a philosophical view of existence; he needs the guidance of abstract principles both to select his goals and to achieve them. Because of its form of knowledge, an animal can do nothing but adapt itself to nature. Man (if he adheres to the metaphysically given) adapts nature to his own requirements.

A conceptual faculty, therefore, is a powerful attribute. It is an attribute that goes to the essence of a species, determining its method of cognition, of action, of survival. To understand man -- and any human concern -- one must understand concepts. One must discover what they are, how they are formed, and how they are used, and often misused, in the quest for knowledge. This requires that we analyze in slow motion the inmost essence of the processes which make us human, the ones which, in daily life, we perform with lightninglike rapidity and take for granted as unproblematic. [OPAR p.74]

Rand offers just such an analysis in her monograph, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. In doing so she better equips us to do business in reality while repelling deadly threats that can sometimes be quite subtle. For, "What is at stake here is the cognitive efficacy of man's mind."

As I [Rand] wrote in For the New Intellectual: "To negate man's mind, it is the conceptual level of his consciousness that has to be invalidated. Under all the tortuous complexities, contradictions, equivocations, rationalizations of the post-Renaissance philosophy -- the one consistent line, the fundamental that explains the rest, is: a concerted attack on man's conceptual faculty. Most philosophers did not intend to invalidate conceptual knowledge, but its defenders did more to destroy it than did its enemies. They were unable to offer a solution to the 'problem of universals,' that is: to define the nature and source of abstractions, to determine the relationship of concepts to perceptual data -- and to prove the validity of scientific induction .... The philosophers were unable to refute the Witch Doctor's claim that their concepts were as arbitrary as his whims and that their scientific knowledge had no greater metaphysical validity than his revelations." [ITOE Forward]

The Objectivism Seminar is about to start its journey through Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (Expanded Second Edition). We hope to thoroughly digest the main work as well as all of the supplementary material. The meetings will feature several fairly seasoned Objectivists trading off on moderation, and we especially encourage those who are newer to the ideas or maybe a little fuzzy on them to bring their most challenging questions and puzzles! (And for those who are more acquainted with the material, this offers the challenge of grappling with helping others find their way through those questions and puzzles -- as well as the surprisingly common bonus of finding unexpected fuzziness of their own. :^)

We'll be meeting weekly, in a one-hour conference call hosted at TalkShoe.com. You can participate online with just your computer, or via a regular phone (or you can listen in later via the podcast recordings). The series begins on Monday, February 1, 8:00 pm Mountain time.

Please visit www.ObjectivismSeminar.com to learn more and join in!

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The Flow of the Kindle

I have a love-hate relationship with my Kindle. I wasn't ready to buy one, but Paul gave me his smaller version when he upgraded to the larger version about two months ago.

I love having so many books at my fingertips, in a slim little device. I'm even going to be able to read some hard-to-find books -- like the complete works of Frances Hodgson Burnett. That's 35 books for a mere five dollars. (You can find free versions, but apparently these sets are nicely formatted.) It's easy to read on the Kindle, particularly with the adjustable font size.

However, its clunky interface leaves much to be desired, as does its lack of any easy software for managing files. For example, changing the meta-data in files requires something on the order of sacrificing a goat. (Yes, I'm fussy about that kind of thing.) Basically, I hate the fact that the Kindle is not a Mac. But once you get used to it, it's okay.

So far, I've mostly used the Kindle to read fiction. That works fine, although I'm a bit frustrated by my inability to determine (in some easy way) how far I have to finish a chapter. However, my first attempt to read something serious on it -- namely Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics -- was an abject failure. We've just started the book in 1FROG, and I thought I'd try to re-read it on the Kindle.

It was a disaster -- not just for the discussion but also just for my own understanding. Without physical pages, I simply couldn't get a handle on the structure of the text. I felt lost in a Heraclitean stream of words. I couldn't remember what was where. The more that I flipped back and forth, the more confused I got. I could make notes in the text, but not useful notes. The keyboard is too tiny for substantive notes, and I can't implement my super-handy system of tiny little margin notes. My margin notes are a huge help to later skimming. (That's critical for group discussion.) And they help me retain the material as I read it, in that I pause to think and process in the course of making those notes.

In short, trying to read Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics on the Kindle felt like I was trying to remember the progression of a run done on the treadmill, where the scenery is always the same. In contrast, reading a physical book was like remembering a similar run done through some neighborhood, where the varying landscape cements memories.

I'll likely be able to use the Kindle for reading serious material -- provided that I'm just doing a survey, rather than a serious, intensive read. I'll have to read on the Kindle like I'd listen to an audiobook. Basically, I'll need to set lower expectations for retention and integration. That means that most of the time, when reading a serious work of non-fiction, I'll prefer a physical copy -- at least for now.

Still... if all that I ever do with the Kindle is read fiction (and lighter non-fiction) on it, I'll be pretty happy.

Given my mixed experience, I'm really amazed by these sales numbers, given in an interview with Amazon.com head honcho Jeff Bezos.

Of all the books that Amazon sells, what percentage are digital books?

For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition. It won't be too long before we're selling more electronic books than we are physical books. It's astonishing.

Of course, most readers don't have my need for intensive reading of serious books. Yet still, WOW.

Oh, and this exchange is pretty funny:

What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub?

I'll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It's much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can't turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.

What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub?

If it's sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don't you try that experiment and let me know.

Jeff Bezos does seem a bit prickly! (Via Jason Crawford.)

Note for the sake of the vicious statists at the FTC: If you buy something from Amazon using the links above, I might earn a few pennies.

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Libertarian vs. Objectivist Thinking

The Cato Institute recently hosted a book forum with the authors of the two new Rand biographies, Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller, and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns. Cato's David Boaz ran the forum, setting the context, introducing the authors, and running the Q&A.

I am interested in the two books, so I wanted to hear the authors as they presented some of their thoughts and showed their mettle in the back-and-forth. The bottom line? Burns seems honest in her scholarship and sincere in her engagement. She said a lot of interesting things, and I want to hear more from her despite some weaknesses due to a lack of grounding in Rand's system of thought. Heller didn't come across nearly as well, which left me much less interested in her work. And then there's Boaz.

Boaz began by speaking of the enduring influence of Rand, especially on libertarians and conservatives, and about the recent surge in interest in her and her work. He agreed with a Liberty magazine review of Heller's book, saying that "There can be no question about the fact that Rand remains America’s most influential libertarian, with the possible exception of Milton Friedman, and America’s most influential novelist of ideas." Extending this, Boaz characterized Atlas Shrugged as a libertarian book, and Rand as a libertarian who has done more than anybody in our time to introduce people to libertarian ideas.

What got my attention was Boaz's treatment of the elephant in the room: he chuckled that many listening may wince at his talking that way, that indeed Rand would have disagreed with being classified as a libertarian (this would be an understatement) and that "many of her fans maintain that point even now." He dismissed all of this, saying in effect that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. You see, "anybody who believes in individual rights, free enterprise, and strictly limited government is a libertarian. And Ayn Rand certainly did." QED. Yet, he informs us, somehow this impeccable logic is lost on the "high priests" of Rand's estate, who refused to let any of her material appear in his book, The Libertarian Reader.

As an Objectivist, I see a different puzzle here: Many people, libertarians in particular, clearly admire and profit from Rand's ability to analyze and integrate, to identify widespread and longstanding false alternatives and package deals time and again, and to then offer something better. So I find it odd that when they see Rand apparently ignoring the incredibly straightforward point that she fits their definition, that they don't pause to consider whether there might be some more basic reason for her balking so.

And of course there is. Here's a hint: it's an epistemology thing.

Concepts are important. They are how we organize our knowledge of the world so we can act in service to our lives. Good concepts are immensely helpful (see the basic ideas that ushered in the fruits of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution), and bad ones can really hurt us. What if, for example, your moral system left you seeing the bully and the victim who fights back as morally indistinguishable? As we've seen with pacifism, the result of such thinking is unjust and destructive to all concerned, both personally and socially: victims are morally if not legally discouraged from defending themselves, predators are only emboldened, and this view naturally translates to unjust and destructive cultural sentiments, laws, and policies like those against simply "violence". So it makes all the difference to distinguish sharply between aggressive and defensive use of force because these are in fact morally opposite things with existentially opposite effects on human lives. Examples abound, but the general point to appreciate is that Objectivists are methodologically careful about this sort of thing because they grasp that accepting any concept which treats essentially identical things as opposites, or opposite things as essentially identical, ultimately means inviting difficulty if not disaster in our efforts to successfully navigate reality.

Now consider the libertarian way of thinking about political classification. Rejecting the generally useless left-right spectrum, they offer a two-dimensional approach based on degrees of personal and economic freedom which is often shared via their educational and recruiting tool, the Nolan Chart. In this view, libertarianism is neither left nor right, and it stands fundamentally opposed to totalitarianism. This sets up the natural axis of size or extent of government as their key normative criterion, which is pretty easy to pick out in their policies and rhetoric and reactions to world events. This is also why libertarians have always had influential anarchists in their ranks: even those who might be wary of the "extreme" of anarchism have no principled objection to it because, in their own basic way of thinking, anarchism is the natural full opposite of the evil of totalitarianism -- indeed, they have framed it as the pinnacle of libertarianism.

We can now appreciate what Rand was signaling with her outrage at being grouped or associated in any way with anarchists in particular and libertarians in general: she was refusing the mental, personal, and social chaos that flows from a fundamentally flawed way of seeing things. Rand understood that the essential concept in politics is individual rights, and so she identified totalitarianism and anarchism as indistinguishable in what's important: their complete lack of an objective recognition and systematic protection of man's rights. In contrast, as noted above, the libertarian way of thinking mis-classifies totalitarianism and anarchism as moral opposites by focusing on the inessential characteristic of size. If the purpose of politics is to sort out and enact the conditions required for people to successfully live among one another, this kind of confusion is about as disastrous as it gets -- even while self-consciously seeking the good, the conceptual lens of libertarianism will drive you to its opposite.

And conversely, the libertarian framework fails to capture crucial differences. Consider a powerful government that performs all and only its proper functions in the defense of man's rights, and one that happens to have all the same laws and institutions but also has, say, conscription on the books just in case war breaks out. These two governments are all but indistinguishable (and neither is smiled on) in the libertarians' basic classification scheme based on size. But Objectivists see these two as moral opposites because one is committed to the essential task of the defense of man's rights and the other is not. Even though not currently violating any rights, the government with conscription laws clearly rejects the key principle of the field. It has no principled defense against the slippery slope to serfdom we've seen play out in history all too many times.

The politics of liberty that Objectivism advocates really does depend on a particular philosophical foundation. The Libertarian movement might be in a better position to understand this if they weren't so eager to set aside the fact that fundamental ideas are critically important.

While scholarly leaders like Boaz should surely know better, there are plenty of people who innocently adopt the libertarian way of thinking about government because it seems to line up reasonably well with fundamental American values like strictly limited government, respect for rights, and capitalism. (Indeed, I was just such a person.) But even innocent use doesn't mitigate the very real problems and dangers discussed above. So Objectivists will continue to pointedly reject the libertarian label and its conceptual basis in the interests of moving our culture toward one that genuinely values liberty.

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How Anne Sullivan Taught Hellen Keller to Speak

Those of you have have seen the movie and/or play versions of "The Miracle Worker" might be interested in this short 1930 newsreel clip in which Anne Sullivan explains how she taught Helen Keller to speak:



Ayn Rand was a great admirer of "The Miracle Worker", a now-classic play about Sullivan and Keller.

In her essay, "Kant Vs. Sullivan" (from Philosophy: Who Needs It), Rand wrote:

...Annie Sullivan, her young teacher (superlatively portrayed by Anne Bancroft), is fiercely determined to transform this creature into a human being, and she knows the only means that can do it: language, i.e., the development of the conceptual faculty. But how does one communicate the nature and function of language to a blind-deaf-mute? The entire action of the play is concerned with this single central issue: Annie's struggle to make Helen's mind grasp a word -- not a signal, but a word.

...To my knowledge, "The Miracle Worker" is the only epistemological play ever written. It holds the viewer in tensely mounting suspense, not over a chase or a bank robbery, but over the question of whether a human mind will come to life. Its climax is magnificent: after Annie's crushing disappointment at Helen's seeming retrogression, water from a pump spills over Helen's hand, while Annie is automatically spelling "W-A-T-E-R" into her palm, and suddenly Helen understands.

The two great moments of that climax are incommunicable except through the art of acting: one is the look on Patty Duke's face when she grasps that the signals mean the liquid -- the other is the sound of Anne Bancroft's voice when she calls Helen's mother and cries: "She knows!"

We had the pleasure of seeing a theater version of "The Miracle Worker" with some friends when it came to Denver last year, and it was a real treat precisely because of the talent of the actresses who played Sullivan and Keller.

If you can't see a theater version live, you can always rent the excellent 1962 film version from Netflix.

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Food Neurosis

The NY Times recently ran an article entitled What's Eating Our Kids? Fears About 'Bad' Foods. Here's the opening:

SODIUM -- that's what worries Greye Dunn. He thinks about calories, too, and whether he's getting enough vitamins. But it's the sodium that really scares him.

"Sodium makes your heart beat faster, so it can create something really serious," said Greye, who is 8 years old and lives in Mays Landing, N.J.

Greye's mother, Beth Dunn, the president of a multimedia company, is proud of her son's nutritional awareness and encourages it by serving organic food and helping Greye read labels on cereal boxes and cans.

"He wants to be healthy," she says.

Ms. Dunn is among the legions of parents who are vigilant about their children's consumption of sugar, processed foods and trans fats. Many try to stick to an organic diet. In general, their concern does not stem from a fear of obesity -- although that may figure into the equation -- but from a desire to protect their families from conditions like hyperactivity, diabetes and heart disease, which they believe can be avoided, or at least managed, by careful eating.

While scarcely any expert would criticize parents for paying attention to children's diets, many doctors, dietitians and eating disorder specialists worry that some parents are becoming overzealous, even obsessive, in efforts to engender good eating habits in children. With the best of intentions, these parents may be creating an unhealthy aura around food.

From my perspective, the problem is not that parents are attempting to steer their kids toward healthy foods. Parents ought to do that: they ought to feed their kids foods that nourish and sustain them, as well as to teach them the principles and habits of good eating. The problem here is that some parents seem to be imposing a strict dietary regimen on their children as a duty disconnected from facts -- and disconnected from the child's own understanding. That duty-based approach will do psychological damage, whether the recommended diet is sound or not.

The proper response to that problem is not to say "eat in moderation" or "don't be so fussy" or "lighten up." Nutrition is a science: the human body is not mere mere subjective phenomena, capable of being stuffed full of anything without ill effect. As a matter of objective fact, some foods are healthy and others are not. As a matter of objective fact, some foods should be eaten in abundance, others in moderation, others rarely, and others not at all. The proportions may often depend on the individual, but even then, facts are facts.

A person can do him self very real damage by eating the wrong kinds of foods. Personally, if I attempted to eat sweets "in moderation," I would suffer for it. I would start feeling run down. I would be constantly hungry. I would have persistent cravings for more sugar. I would regain weight. My fasting blood glucose would rise again, meaning that I'd be on my way to type 2 diabetes. My liver would get fatty again -- or fattier. My HDL levels would decline, and my triglycerides would rise. All of that would be very bad for me, and that's a matter of fact.

So for me to refrain from eating sweets is right and proper. Frankly, I'm even discovering that the ill effects I feel from eating just one brownie once a month are not worth the pleasures of it on my tongue. Do I flog myself for eating that once-a-month brownie? Of course not. I simply observe those ill effects and remind myself to choose more carefully next month. It's too bad that I'm so sensitive, and I'm well aware that others are more tolerant of sugar than me. But I'm not going to beat my head against a wall: my job as a person is to live in reality in accordance with the facts, whether I like them or not.

The only real solution to the problem of this new neurosis about food is to banish the duty-based approach to eating in favor of a fact-based approach. A person's dietary choices should be based on his first-handed understanding of the facts. That means understanding the actual science of nutrition -- opposed to the conventional wisdom. (For that, I think, a person simply must read Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories.) And, in conjunction, a person must track the effects of his diet on his day-to-day well-being to determine what kinds of foods benefit versus harm him. That often requires some substantial work of discovery: it's usually not obvious without some careful and sustained experimentation of one's own. Moreover, to be useful, such experiments should be guided by a person's well-grounded general knowledge of metabolism, nutrition, and the like.

In short, a person should fare better in perceptible ways on on any diet worth sustaining. That knowledge should be the basis for the person's nutritional choices, not mere dogma. If a person has that knowledge, then for him to insist on his food choices -- however fussy, however demanding, however contrary to conventional wisdom -- is right and good. Such a person is acting in his self-interest, based on his own independent judgment. And that's a good thing.

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Asking the Right Question

   


That's great! Unfortunately, it is hilarious because what it refers to is so widespread.

The lesson to be taken from this "sign of insanity" is a key epistemological principle in Objectivism: that arbitrary notions -- ideas with no basis in reality -- must be rejected if you want your mind to actually be useful in pursuing life here on earth.

A familiar application can be seen in our justice system: When someone brings a baseless charge before a court, it is rightly dismissed as beneath consideration (and could even earn penalties for wasting the court's time). Chaos would reign if this were not the standing practice, with spurious claims sapping precious resources and inviting injustice. Well, the same should hold in the fact-finding forum of your own mind: if someone brings a baseless idea before a rational mind, it ought to be dismissed as beneath consideration or argument -- as "not even wrong."

As Leonard Peikoff discussed in his lecture series presenting "The Philosophy of Objectivism":

An arbitrary claim has no cognitive status whatever. According to Objectivism, such a claim is not to be regarded as true or as false. If it is arbitrary, it is entitled to no epistemological assessment at all; it is simply to be dismissed as though it hadn’t come up ... The truth is established by reference to a body of evidence and within a context; the false is pronounced false because it contradicts the evidence. The arbitrary, however, has no relation to evidence, facts, or context. It is the human equivalent of [noises produced by] a parrot ... sounds without any tie to reality, without content or significance.

In a sense, therefore, the arbitrary is even worse than the false. The false at least has a relation (albeit a negative one) to reality; it has reached the field of human cognition, although it represents an error -- but in that sense it is closer to reality than the brazenly arbitrary.
...
It is not your responsibility to refute someone’s arbitrary assertion -- to try to find or imagine arguments that will show that his assertion is false. It is a fundamental error on your part even to try to do this. The rational procedure in regard to an arbitrary assertion is to dismiss it out of hand, merely identifying it as arbitrary, and as such inadmissible and undiscussable.

This can be a subtle and tricky topic, and gaining clarity on it represents an important mental upgrade. For further exploration I recommend Peikoff's excellent book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, where he reorganized, systematized, and strengthened the material of those lectures.

[HT: Pharyngula]

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The Truth About Semi-Automatic Firearms

This video by San Jose police officer Leroy Pyle provides an excellent demonstration of the difference between "semi-automatic" and "automatic" firearms:

"The Truth About Semi-Auto Firearms"



In particular, Officer Pyle does an excellent job of showing that two guns can have nearly identical inessential cosmetic features (such as the material the stock is made of), but differ in this one essential feature (semi-automatic vs. automatic), making them fundamentally different guns. Conversely, two guns can have the same essential features (i.e., both be semi-automatic), but one can be made to look very menacing and the other very innocuous simply by changing a few inessential cosmetic features.

In my experience, there are even some Objectivists who lack this basic understanding of the difference between automatic vs. semi-automatic weapons.

This is a nice real-life example of the importance of good epistemology, and in particular of defining by essentials. And we can see the dangers of failing to define by essentials when policy makers talk about banning "assault weapons", which is a bogus concept created grouping together firearms based on these inessential cosmetic features, rather than the essential ones.

Even now, there are some Republican Congressmen (not Democrats) who wish to reinstate the expired "Assault Weapons Ban" based on precisely this bogus concept. And given the incoming Obama Administration, this bill may become law.

As a corollary, this is also a concrete example of why a proper defense of one's political freedoms depends on upholding a proper rational epistemology -- and more generally a proper objective philosophy. Fortunately, that epistemology and that broader overall philosophy is already available to us -- we just have to be willing to use it.

(Video link via Howard Roerig.)

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Force That Isn't Force

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has written an interesting post about a recent survey which purports to show that, "Approximately 18% of women aged 18-24 report having experienced forced sexual intercourse at least once in their lives".

He notes that the types of "force" reported include "Told Relationship Would End" and "Pressured by Words/Actions Without Threats". Of the women who said they were subject to force, 12% said they experienced the first and 61% said they experienced the second. (Respondents could select more than one category of force in the survey.)

As Professor Volokh notes:

This is just ridiculous. It's true that the word "force" has many possible meanings: Some people, for instance, feel they're "forced" "against [their] will" to work in certain jobs -- or are doing those jobs not "of their own free will" -- because that's the only way they can enjoy the standard of living they want. But these are radically different kinds of force from being forced to do something by physical force, or threat of physical injury. And mixing the two yields results that are useless at best and misleading and dangerous at worst.

The survey did note that some women reported being subjected to genuine force, such as "Physically Hurt Or Injured" or "Threatened With Physical Hurt". And of course, these sort of forced sexual intercourse should be condemned and/or prosecuted as criminal violation of individual rights.

But to lump into the same conceptual category of "Force" both "Pressured by Words/Actions Without Threats" and "Physically Hurt Or Injured" is a prime example of what Ayn Rand called the fallacy of package dealing:

"Package-dealing" is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or "package," elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.

This sort of intellectual package dealing destroys actual concepts (in this case of "force") in people's minds and makes rational analysis of the ideas impossible.

Fortunately, there are still people like Professor Volokh who recognize this as a dangerous fallacy and are willing to point it out.

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Principled Punishment and the Death Penalty

There are two natural criteria to attend to if we are to advocate the death penalty in our justice system: we must establish that we are objective in identifying, say, heinous murderers -- and we must establish that it is morally permissible if not mandatory to kill them when so identified.

I want to focus here on the moral question: should we kill the heinous murderer when he is so identified? (I appreciate that the epistemological troubles of our justice system are substantial and likely rule out as negligent the imposition of any punishment so decisive and final as the death penalty. For the moment, though, let's set aside today's epistemological issues and their general reform; please assume objective convictions for this discussion of punishment.)

In addressing the morality of the death penalty, we may be tempted to simply appeal to retributive justice and say that one should lose a life for taking a life, discussion over. But while Objectivists support a retributivist justice system, this principle is not by itself decisive regarding the specific punishment of the death penalty: notice we can't and don't attempt to balance crime and punishment literally, with an eye for an actual eye, a theft for a theft, and so on. (Consider the simple example of an arsonist burning down your house. It is not possible to likewise burn down his if he is a renter.) No, we are satisfied -- and necessarily so -- with the justice of something more indirect. We use proxies like imprisonment and fines, scaled and otherwise adjusted to achieve the effect we seek in matching punishment to endless variety in crime. So any answer to the moral question around the death penalty has to accommodate this and explain just what would make killing a heinous murderer necessary in lieu of, say, locking him up for life.

I haven't yet seen any fundamental explanation of what would require "the ultimate punishment" in the face of this element of flexibility in our response to crime. Here I'll propose a way of thinking about punishment that answers that challenge, and more. (Because I am not a lawyer and could easily be confused about our legal system, I especially encourage legally-savvy readers to jump in and correct or clarify as needed!)

Nested Classes of Offense

First, note how Objectivism carefully distinguishes immorality in general from criminality, a particular species of immorality. Shunning productiveness is your own problem, until you start stealing from others to feed yourself. The key distinguishing feature here is the initiation of physical force (including indirect forms, like fraud). It is one thing to choose not to pursue life yourself -- i.e., to choose not to be moral -- but it is another to also initiate physical force and prevent someone else from doing so, suppressing their moral agency. This is why the Objectivist politics identifies the proper scope of government action (and any legitimate use of physical force) as a response only to violations of rights, leaving all other matters to force-free resolution via, say, personal disassociation. It is specifically the initiation of physical force which necessitates a response involving physical force.

I am going to argue that just as rights violations are essentially different than other cases of immorality and thus require an essentially different kind of response, that there is an essential distinction between criminal offenses and civil offenses that requires an essentially different kind of response, and that there is an essential distinction between capital offenses and other kinds of crime that requires an essentially different kind of response. In every case, the nature of the offense is different in kind than offenses from the other classes, and in all cases the nature of any response, to be just, must at least match the offense in kind. That is: while injustice is possible if crime and punishment are not well matched, justice is impossible if they are not at least from fundamentally commensurable classes.

Consider then the following classes of offense and how they relate to each other, beginning with mere immorality and progressing through nested subclasses of ever-stronger rights violations (yes, as I try to frame these categories in terms of essentials, I may be shifting some boundaries as currently conceived and implemented in our legal system) :

1. Immorality: when someone operates counter to the fundamental principles of sustaining human life (is dishonest, irrational, lacks integrity, etc.). In this case, others are free to respond with a range of peaceful forms of disassociation (by, say, avoiding someone, or perhaps even advertising that choice and their reasons for it). Lameness calls for loneliness. Note how offense and response must be at least fundamentally commensurate: where there is no physical force being initiated, no physical force may be used in response (otherwise that would itself be an injustice to take legal note of -- an initiation of force, criminality in response to mere immorality).
   
   
2. Civil offenses: when someone isn't just immoral, but more specifically bears responsibility for damaging an innocent's person or property (say, with an irrational contract dispute, or an at-fault driving collision). In this case, our justice system compels the offender to repair the damage they are responsible for. Damage calls for restoration. Note how again offense and response must be at least fundamentally commensurate: responding to a civil misdeed with only disassociation of any stripe would be unjust -- and, as indicated above, responding to mere immorality with compulsory "reparations" of any kind would likewise be unjust.
   
   
3. Criminal offenses: when someone isn't just responsible for harming an innocent's person or property, but more specifically intentionally curtails an innocent's moral agency (say, with armed robbery, fraud, burglary). In this case, our justice system in turn curtails the offender's moral agency (his liberty via imprisonment, his property via fines and confiscation). Curtailment calls for curtailment. Note yet again how offense and response must be at least fundamentally commensurate: responding to a criminal misdeed with only compulsory reparations would be unjust -- and responding to mere civil offenses with imprisonment of any length would likewise be unjust.
   
   
4. Capital offenses: when someone chooses not just to curtail an innocent's pursuit of life, but more specifically to eliminate an innocent's life (say, with premeditated murder). Here then is the key distinction to observe: murder isn't merely subverting someone's means to continued existence, curtailing their pursuit of life -- it is purposefully eliminating their life itself, ending their existence altogether. There is a difference in kind between the implicit and the explicit, the means and their end, and these cannot be treated as merely different in degree. Annihilation calls for annihilation. As with the other classes above, offense and response must be at least fundamentally commensurate: responding to a heinous murder with only imprisonment, no matter the length, would be unjust -- and responding to a mere criminal offense with any form of the death penalty would likewise be unjust.
   

I think the above clarifies the objective basis for capital punishment, cementing the moral necessity of its use when the proper conditions have been met (and please note again that such conditions would include an epistemologically sound conviction).

Because the above organization encompasses and relates the entire range of misdeeds and response along principled lines, we have an opportunity to see if it might help explain, or even suggest adjustments to, other aspects of our justice system.

Decomposition of Crime and Composition of Response

Focus now on how the above classes are nested, with each being a narrowing of the preceding: Not every moral breach is a civil offense (often one is only harming oneself, or only harming others in non-rights-violating ways) -- while every civil offense is necessarily a moral breach (that is the source of the responsibility for a rights-violating harm). And not every civil offense is a criminal offense (being responsible for harm and intending to do harm are not the same thing) -- while every criminal offense is a civil offense (intending to do harm certainly makes you responsible for it). And so on through all of the classes.

This indicates that responses should not be limited to only what is indicated by the narrowest category that applies, but must also include any relevant responses from each of the broader enclosing classes as well -- because they all apply. So murderers should expect time in prison (for the criminal aspects), being forced to make any possible reparations (for the civil aspects), and certainly infamy and social ostracism (for the moral aspects), on their way to annihilation (for the capital aspect). And a burglar should expect fines and jail time (for the criminal aspects), to restore his victim (for the civil aspects), and to suffer social ostracism (for the moral aspects). Any given crime must be treated on all applicable levels, by decomposing its aspects into relevant charges, and addressing each to compose the full response.

Our legal system's support for separate treatment of civil and criminal offenses is a mechanism for satisfying this need. But it is also interesting to see how the cascade of offenses above helps us see how our approach is not the only way to satisfy this need: a different court system could, say, use a single trial, decomposing the offense into its various charges at all levels for appropriate assessment, and then handing down a single, integrated response. The cascade of offenses also clarifies how holding separate civil and criminal trials needn't introduce the injustice of "double jeopardy": the charges and potential punishments for each of these classes are different in kind -- one being about responsibility for damages, the other about criminal curtailment of moral agency or worse. So whether or not both of these aspects of a crime are assessed during the same proceeding is immaterial, a matter of convenience or tradition.

One danger of our current two-trial approach, though, lies in blurring the distinction I've drawn between civil and criminal matters. Their division of judicial labor can become unprincipled and uncoordinated: consider that we have criminal courts handing down orders for reparations, and civil courts handing down orders for "punitive damages." This blurring of responsibilities seems to flirt with the injustice of double jeopardy. Worse still, in the case of civil courts drifting into handing down punishments, the higher standard of judgment demanded in criminal proceedings is being evaded.

Graduated Standards of Judgment

Regarding standards of judgment, consider how this nested structure highlights qualitative leaps in the gravity and irreparability of offense and response. Combined with the fact of limited time and resources, this suggests the need for qualitative leaps in standards of judgment and extent of oversight. Negligence in the justice system itself cannot ever be acceptable (that would render it literally an injustice system) : the more grave and/or irreparable the crime, the more diligence we must bring to bear to ensure correctness in conviction and punishment with a similarly grave and/or irreparable response. Our present system addresses this need as follows:

• In civil judgments we must show responsibility for damages. Our system's standard for demonstrating such liability is that of a "preponderance of the evidence", which seems to roughly correspond to what Objectivists technically classify as "probable" [OPAR 178].
  
• In criminal judgments, we must show intent to commit a rights violation (i.e., the initiation of physical force, even indirectly like with fraud or potentially with assault). Our system's more-rigorous standard for demonstrating such guilt is that of "beyond a reasonable doubt", which seems to roughly correspond to what Objectivists technically classify as "certain" [ibid].
  
• In capital judgments, we must show intent to cause a rights-violating death. This requires the standard of criminal judgments, with the additional requirement of appeals and extended scrutiny and oversight to further insure against any systemic negligence.
  

Carefully observing the proper standard for each aspect of a crime is required, lest we court the kind of systemic negligence mentioned above, with civil courts handing down "punitive damages."

Commodity Units of Punishment

Because of the impossibility of literally matching offense and response, as well as because of limits in time and resources, we need to institute uniform responses to crime that make it possible to "dial in" a just match to any given offense.

The above classes of offense are based in philosophical principle and fixed, while within each class there is endless variation in misdeed. Because the misdeeds in each class are fundamentally commensurate, though, we have the possibility of commoditizing our responses, making them regular and even scalable to match a great variety of fundamentally similar offenses. The use of such units also allows us to objectively express the relative badness of one offense vs. another, making for sentencing open to audit, against guidelines that are open to review, clarification, and correction.

In civil reparations, we achieve commoditization of damages economically: most damages can be cleanly reduced to the monetary impact of the replacement value of items, the time value of lost use, the value of time away from work, the economic impact of reputation damage, the economic impact of a lost limb, etc. The troublesome aspects for restoration lie in physical pain, mutilation or death, psychological suffering, the loss of a unique object, and the like: these cannot be genuinely repaired with money or any object or action. Take pain and suffering, for example: at best, we might attempt to contrive a monetary valuation for psychological suffering by rough, subjective scaling of pay for an extraordinarily unpleasant job. But the trouble is most clear in the case of physical pain: trying to find the market value for the experience of letting someone, say, break one's arm is right out. This is quite unfortunate, because it means a victim of such damage cannot be made whole in principle. In such cases there is simply no justice to be had -- and this would be morally intolerable if it were not due to a metaphysically-given fact.

In criminal punishment, our system commoditizes moral agency curtailment via limitations on liberty (incarceration) and takings of property (fines or confiscations). Each component can be scaled and combined with the other in practically endless ways to punish much of what makes up criminal activity. Even psychological suffering can be captured by such losses. But just as we cannot repair the infliction of physical pain in civil cases with any action or object, we cannot genuinely punish the infliction of physical pain via incarceration or fines. These are simply not commensurable. And while there was a metaphysically-given fact standing in the way of civil reparations for such damage, there is no such fact standing in the way of criminal punishments for inflicting such damage.

To genuinely punish the intentional infliction of physical pain, we would need a uniform, scalable imposition of physical pain by some means (ideally one that could deliver a controlled degree and amount with no physical damage whatever, thus leaving all other elements of the crime to be matched as needed by a mix of incarceration, fines, and so on). While perhaps distasteful, this seems to be the only kind of unit which is actually commensurable with the sometimes substantial physical suffering intentionally inflicted in cases involving torture, beating, rape, and so on. In having such a unit of punishment available to match those (and of course only those) commensurate aspects of a crime, the justice system would no longer be driven by its current inability to actually punish, say, a heinous rape of a child, into seizing upon "some" (i.e., the only available) "greater punishment" than even life behind bars. Such a category leap into capital punishment for even a particularly horrible but 'merely' criminal offense is in fact unjust. Responses like that corrode the absolute, principled lines of the justice system to invite ever more arbitrary actions and corrosion -- precisely what must be avoided in a proper government's response to crime. (Note that, just as in capital punishment, such corporal punishment is impossible to repair, so the epistemological oversight must be likewise heightened to prevent systemic negligence.)

In capital punishment, our system achieves commoditization by ostensibly employing a small, uniform set of (relatively) quick and painless procedures for execution. (Note that there is no need for a scalable unit of capital punishment because existence vs. nonexistence is binary.) And on the account here, it is a good trend to seek to standardize on the most quick and painless method(s) of execution -- including bringing as little gore and psychological damage to the witnesses and executioners as is possible. While methods of execution that are purposely torturous and gory in varying ways and degrees have been used throughout history, this would again be a case of needlessly mixing in aspects of punishment which should be assessed and treated independently, in the criminal supercategory. For example, a heinous torture-murder should be decomposed into the judgment and response to the torture, and the judgment and response to the killing, each by the applicable standards -- and this would result in an overall punishment that is properly distinguished from the punishment for a 'mere' murder.

Toward Principled Punishment

I have argued here that we should seek principled lines in identifying and classifying misdeeds, to systemically encourage justice and discourage injustice in our potential responses. And while perhaps distasteful, this means that we should ensure that our justice system has available all of the needed kinds of units of punishment, as in the cases of corporal and capital punishment. This is not only to allow the possibility of genuine justice in punishment, but also so frustration at the systemic prevention of justice caused by any such gaps will not drive people to seek "justice" by violating the principled lines we must observe to maintain the objectivity of our system. That kind of corrosion in particular has to be avoided, lest we spiral ever further into the arbitrariness which has characterized so much of mankind's approach to punishment.

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Don’t Talk to the Police

Here is a fascinating 30-minute lecture by Regent University law professor James Duane about the 5th amendment. He is speaking to law students, explaining why he uniformly advises his clients (and everyone) that they should they never, ever, under any circumstances, talk with the police -- guilty or innocent, a suspect or not, even if they are smarter than Aristotle and Newton combined, articulate as all get out, an expert in the law, and pure as the wind-driven snow. Never.



He explains how talking to the police can't ever help, and will in all likelihood hurt even innocents. This last is the part that really stood out: even the most innocuous statements by the most innocent of people could put them in jeopardy -- it depends on context they don't control. An officer misremembering an answer could bring a conviction; so could misremembering the question. Taping interviews is no guarantee, either: even some fuzziness in the contextual information that floated by before the interview could be disastrous!

His examples are striking. "I don't know who killed Joe. Of course I didn't shoot him: I don't even own a gun -- heck, I haven't ever touched a gun in my life!" Suppose that's all perfectly true. What could possibly be incriminating about sharing that? Well, just consider an officer on the stand responding with "I never mentioned anything about a gun." Toast.

But wait, there's more! It isn't just you or officers who might make a mistake that hangs you, but anybody with whom the police might come in contact. (See the video. Oh, and here is the second half with the other fellow.)

Quite an argument for improved epistemological hygiene in our legal system -- and for very careful engagement with it. While exercising 5th amendment rights is widely associated with guilt, Duane explains that it wasn't designed for that -- it is for protecting innocent people in epistemologically perilous circumstances.

[HT: Jason]

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Quote of the Day

"The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened by convictions."

-- American journalist Alexander Chase, Perspectives, 1966

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Death by Superstition

As today is the supposedly unlucky Friday the 13th, it's a fitting day for a reminder of just how deadly magical thinking can be. Via the New York Times comes a chilling example of albinos in Tanzania hunted down and slaughtered for their supposedly magical properties:

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania -- Samuel Mluge steps outside his office and scans the sidewalk. His pale blue eyes dart back and forth, back and forth, trying to focus. The sun used to be his main enemy, but now he has others. Mr. Mluge is an albino, and in Tanzania now there is a price for his pinkish skin. "I feel like I am being hunted," he said.

Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.

Many people in Tanzania -- and across Africa, for that matter -- believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here. Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.

...

As if being born with a serious genetic disorder wasn't enough of a burden in life, these people face the prospect of a gruesome death thanks to primitive superstition -- in a scientific age when men have walked on the moon. It's almost unfathomable.

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