The power of magick

Via Amanda Marcotte and DED space comes interesting news:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia has filed a petition on behalf of Cynthia Simpson, a witch of the Wiccan faith, seeking to reverse a ruling that upheld Chesterfield County's decision to bar her from giving the invocation at Board of Supervisors meetings.

In its petition yesterday to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the ACLU said it has asked the full court to reverse a three-judge panel ruling that allowed government officials to discriminate on the basis of religion when choosing people to pray at their meetings.

If religious officials are brought in to perform functions closely tied to government -- whether it be with regard to invocations, faith-based charities, or funding for religious schools -- it'd be neat if some Wiccans, Pagans, Hindus, Muslims, Ba'hai, and other minority faiths would assert themselves and claim the benefits and positions involved. I'd say Jews too, but they're probably mainstream enough that it wouldn't have such a pointed effect. Showing that church-state separation is the only way to maintain coven-state separation would increase many moderate voters' enthusiasm for the former. (And if not, we get to see more fun pagan stuff. Maybe it's a throwback from my Hindu upbringing, but I still like idol-worship.) Of course, this requires that the ACLU defend equal treatment of all religions, but I'm guessing they can get that.

There's a strange dark side to this strategy -- it involves using people's anti-Wiccan prejudices to defend church-state separation. But it's better if those prejudices get employed that way than in asserting the hegemony of the Christian religion over others. Besides, we utilitarians feel mischevous pleasure when we can use people's vicious motivations for virtuous ends.

School mistakes huge burrito for weapon

I have nothing more to say.

Vote location

While I'm linking to other good Democratic bloggers, let me recommend Mark Schmitt's illuminating piece on why Harry Reid is outflanking Bill Frist.

Josh Marshall, Democratic hero

It's more for stuff he did earlier in the game than anything he's doing now, but someday when Social Security privatization is defeated, I'd like to see Howard Dean hang a medal on Josh Marshall's neck. The old "Fainthearted Faction" vs. "Conscience Caucus" lists were really valuable in directing our pressure exactly where it needed to go, and Marshall was tireless in pointing out all the trickery by which Bush was trying to sell his plan. Congressmen were referring to him in letters to constituents, and any media people who read his blog knew what the score was. Most likely this is just blogosphere myopia, but I don't know of anybody outside Congress who's fought this thing as effectively as he has.

Serial liar becomes oil minister

Ahmed Chalabi committed bank fraud in Jordan, misled us about WMD in the hope that we'd make him ruler of Iraq, and gave US intelligence secrets to the Iranians while pretending he was our friend. Now he's been made head of the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Be ready for Third World corruption like you've never witnessed before.

Who wants a Sceert eobok?

I'm often amazed at the inability of spammers to spell. The latest wonder in my inbox was titled "RE: Sceert eobok on how to have a great sex instantly." It took me a moment to realize that this was spammerese for "Secret e-book." The spammers had created a flashy graphic depicting 6 pornstar-looking women who were either having a great sex instantly or yelling for someone to bring back their clothes. But despite the skill and effort put into the graphics, they couldn't be bothered to spell the title of their email properly.

The RE:, of course, is deceptive. I have never requested a Sceert eobok on this or any other topic.

Flight of the butterfly

Some of the most interesting evidence for global warming involves animals doing unusual things because of the change in their environment. Texas biologist Camille Parmesan has done some work on this:

Her study found that the butterfly had abandoned habitats in Mexico and southern California and was moving farther north and to higher altitudes.

That led to other climate change studies, culminating in the 2003 paper published in Nature that showed climate change is altering how and where hundreds of species of plants and animals across the globe are living.

She and co-author Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University, analyzed data from studies of almost 1,700 species around the world.

They found that more than 50 percent of wild species have been affected by climate change. Habitats have moved farther north and to higher elevations. Some species were breeding earlier and plants were blooming earlier.

“That’s a huge number, to think that half the wild species are showing a response to 20th century climate change is just a much bigger number that I think any biologist expected,” Parmesan says.

These distinctions matter

My recent post detailing two anti-realist options better than relativism has attracted much discussion.

The metaethical theory you accept -- whether it be error theory, noncognitivism, relativism, or objective realism -- has enormous implications for what you can say is right and wrong. I'm thinking now that I haven't yet presented the argument against relativism that would appeal most to liberals. This is going to be similar to my argument against speaker-relativism.

Consider the situation of the moral reformer -- the person who thinks her culture is accepting the wrong set of moral norms. Maybe this person is in the society prescribed by Deuteronomy 22:21. She says, "People here think it's okay to stone women to death for having had premarital sex, but it's actually horribly wrong." If you go relativist and consider moral claims to be about what the speaker or agent's culture regards as moral, you get this translation of her utterance: "People around here think it's okay to stone women to death for having had premarital sex, but actually people think it's completely forbidden." This is a straight-out contradiction. If you take the moral facts to be, by definition, facts about what society permits or forbids, the moral reformer is screwed the moment she opens her mouth. In espousing a moral system that isn't that of her culture, she's doomed to be wrong. Please, please don't go relativist. It changes the rules of moral argument into something that can be utterly vicious.

Perhaps most people who identify as "relativists" don't want this outcome. As Angelica and Tony pointed out in comments, the term "relativism" broke its cage in the philosophy lab a long time ago and is running wild in the culture. Etymology probably doesn't have control over the term at this point, but it gets its meaning from the idea that moral demands are only true relative to a particular speaker or agent, or her cultural surroundings. And I'd say that in the broader culture, its connection to cultural norms as the truth-makers for moral claims remains intact. Insofar as this is the case, it's something that must be resisted if moral progress is even to be regarded as conceptually possible.

Error theory and noncognitivism, respectively, are two ways of capturing what often motivates relativism without giving a weird theory of moral terms that puts the reformer into this position. Now, error theory isn't good from the perspective of anyone who's rooting for moral improvement -- since all moral claims are false, it's hard to see how an error theorist can be consistent in morally evaluating others' behavior as right or wrong. Perhaps the error theorist can have something else that it's right to promote (happiness? desire-satisfaction?) which she doesn't identify as what morality is about. And error theory doesn't make the moral reformer necessarily immoral, since it holds that there isn't any real morality or immorality. While I think noncognitivism is implausible because of its inability to successfully translate some more complicated moral utterances, its more recent and sophisticated versions survive many tests that relativism does not. If people are interested and I'm sober sometime, I'll post on varieties of objective realism. There are ways of running realism that don't commit you to anything beyond the scientific world-view, and don't require you to mangle moral concepts nearly as much as relativism does.

The broader point here is that our views on morality, or something like it, are going to inform a whole lot of how we act, vote, talk about politics, and operate in the world. We care about morality a lot, and it matters that we understand what it is. Our views on the nature of moral concepts have big consequences for the theory of what's right and wrong. So we'd do well to clarify them and make sure they're what they ought to be.

Expanding Medicare

After reading the excellent Ezra Klein health care series, I want to second the major rhetorical proposal Ezra offers: pitching universal health care as "giving more people Medicare."

What really leapt out at me during this series was how normal government provided health care is... Americans have somehow fooled themselves -- or been fooled -- into believing that government-run health care is somehow different from what they enjoy now. I genuinely believe they carry some sort of dystopian vision around with them, of gray waiting rooms and faceless bureaucrats and bread lines with stethoscopes, rather than grain, at the front.

Americans need to be assured that government run health care is not, in some weird way, a wholly different state of affairs. They need to know that it's the health care they enjoy now, just better, cheaper, and guaranteed. Medicare, because it's already used and liked, comes with those benefits.

I love Harry and Nancy

Remember when Republicans called Daschle an obstructionist, despite the fact that he let them pass pretty much their entire agenda? I'm sure their memories are more fond these days.

The anti-objectivist menu

Battlepanda thinks there aren't any objective moral facts, and so she's defying Dr. Velleman and calling herself a relativist. This reminds me of one of the big reasons why people think they're relativists -- they're unaware of the broad set of options besides objective realism and relativism. Judging from panda's post, I think she's an error theorist rather than a relativist. Let me go through two anti-objective-realist options other than relativism:

Error theory: Panda likens moral properties to Santa Claus and God, and this makes me think she's an error theorist rather than a relativist. The error theorist usually thinks our concept of a moral property is the concept of something objective. In other words, if there were moral properties, they'd be objective entities. Santa Claus, if he existed, would be an objective entity. If he existed, everyone would be speaking a truth if they said "Santa Claus delivers gifts" in their language. But the error theorist also thinks that the property of being morally right is absent from our world, just as the property of being Santa Claus is absent. This is why it's called error theory -- you hold that everyone who makes positive moral claims is in error. Battlepanda is an error theorist about Santa Claus and God, and maybe she should call herself an error theorist about morality as well.

I think many people who call themselves relativists are actually error theorists. They aren't saying that the truth-conditions of moral judgments depend on the speaker or the agent. They're trying to say that there aren't facts out there which can make moral judgments true. There are several motivations for this view. You might be perplexed about what sort of thing a moral property could be, or you might think the irresolvability of moral disagreement is a sign that we aren't latching onto any real properties in the world.

Non-cognitivism: Most people are cognitivists about morality -- they think that moral judgments express beliefs. Beliefs are truth-evaluable states -- it makes sense to talk about them being true or false. Other mental states of ours, like desires, are non-truth-evaluable. While a desire can be satisfied or unsatisfied, that's a whole different matter from being true or false. The non-cognitivist thinks that moral judgments express non-truth-evaluable mental states. These might be emotions, desires, or norm-acceptances (this last one was invented by Michigan ethics superstar Allan Gibbard). Non-cognitivism often has the benefit of making it easier to explain how our moral judgments motivate us to act. It can also allow you to retain talk of morality without requiring you to say there are any moral properties out there.

So if you're trying to figure out what your metaethical views are, the decision tree goes like this:
-First, decide if you think moral judgments express truth-evaluable mental states. If so, you're a cognitivist. If not, you're a non-cognitivist.
-Second, if you're a cognitivist, decide if you think relativism is part of our moral concepts. If not, you're an objectivist*. If you think moral judgments refer back to the speaker or the agent or their culture in the way Velleman talked about, you're a relativist.
-Third, if you're a cognitivist, figure out if the world includes the stuff that moral judgments are about. If so, you're a realist. If not, you're an error theorist.

Personally, I'm an objective realist. I take error theory more seriously than just about any objective realist that I've met, and I'm sensitive to the arguments in its favor. I just think we have a special way of knowing that pleasure is good and pain is bad, which gets us around problems in moral epistemology that trouble other ethical theories. Were it not for this, I'd be one of the few error theorists in today's philosophy world. As things stand, I'm one of the few Benthamite utilitarians.

*By objectivism I mean the view that our moral concepts are about something objective (non-relative). I don't mean the Ayn Rand junk. Stay away from the Ayn Rand junk.

Update: I've fixed the post so that "objectivist" is consistently used to refer to a view about moral concepts. Error theorists count as objectivists now. This makes the title not so apt, but oh well.

Update2: Attention Battlepanda scholars: I have since recanted the view that Panda is an error theorist. I still don't think she's a relativist in the sense that Velleman and I were talking about. Most likely, her talk of being a relativist shouldn't be read as a commitment to that position.

This hurts to read

"During the days of Saddam (Hussein), I used to make one coffin a day. Now, I make scores of them and the demand increases with every suicide car bomb that explodes," said the 67-year-old Baghdadi.

Why speaker-relativism is all screwed up

David Velleman, whose excellent seminar on practical rationality I took in the fall, explains what moral relativism is. He concludes, rightly, that moral relativism is a wildly implausible position that denies the universality of morality. Since morality has to be universal, speaker-relativism fails to give us the meaning of moral terms. If you're up for more relativism-bashing, take a look at this argument for why speaker-relativism is a totally disastrous theory of what moral terms mean. If you accept speaker-relativism, you end up having to say that people from different cultures can't even disagree with each other.

First, so we're all on the same page, let me quote the good professor:

In its most extreme form, speaker-relativism amounts to the view that right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, since it says that each person is correct in making moral judgments according to what seems right or wrong to him. But speaker-relativism also has less extreme forms, according to which the correct moral standard is determined by the speaker's culture, for example. On this version of the view, each person is correct in making moral judgments according to what his own culture deems right or wrong. Thus, a speaker-relativist might say that whereas we are correct to judge slavery wrong, the ancient Romans were correct to judge it differently, because their cultural standards were different.

Imagine the following short conversation between present-day Bob and an ancient Roman:

Bob: "Slavery is wrong!"
Roman: "Slavery is okay!"

These guys are disagreeing, right? I certainly think so. Slavery can't be wrong and okay at the same time, at least if we're talking about the same instance of slavery. But look what happens when we apply the speaker-relativist's translation of moral terms:

Bob: "Slavery is forbidden by 21st Century Western culture!"
Roman: "Slavery is permitted by ancient Roman culture!"

Here we don't have a disagreement anymore. These guys are talking about two different things, and it's possible for both of them to be right. (In fact, both of them are right.) Let me make clear that the problem here isn't that we can't determine who is right, or that we can't resolve this disagreement. The problem is that speaker-relativism presents people as making compatible claims when they're actually disagreeing. As a result, it's a bad theory of what moral terms mean.

Bribery Airlines

Remember those nice cartoony diagrams that they showed us in elementary school about how a bill becomes a law? I don't seem to recall "lobbyists buy stuff for Congressmen" being there. Maybe it's because I wasn't educated in Tom DeLay's district.

Coal mining

In the course of a long and interesting DailyKos post on coal mining, Devilstower reminds us why we love federal regulations:

That "forbidden zone" around my childhood home? That's the "pre-law" land. As in the "before the surface mine reclamation act made us put down a huge cash bond that that we can't get back until we fix everything" land. Before the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. If mining companies had not been required to essentially put themselves deep in debt every time they mined, and only get their money back when things meet the standards, they would have happily left more open pits and acid pools.

Those nice statistics on reduction in pollution? That's the Clean Air Act at work. If the government hadn't stepped in to tell them to stop, they would have never even heard the word "scrubber." Every move they made - from mining lower sulfur coal to the sophisticated steps put in place to cut down on particulate emissions - was done directly to meet the mandates of the Act. If the numbers on that graph look good to you, note that on average the industry has done exactly as it was required to, and not one bit more.

Weak nuclear force

Matt argues in favor of the nuclear option, pointing out that the Republicans can't pass their legislative agenda after Harry Reid shuts down the Senate in retaliation for the elimination of the filibuster. Longer-term arguments are available too -- eliminating the filibuster might help us get universal health care some day. Meanwhile, the Kossacks are marching to get GOP senators to vote against eliminating the filibuster. I really don't know what the right answer is here, but there seems a high probability that Democratic activists are acting contrary to their own interests, and that has me nervous.

Join us at the poker table

There's an obvious reason for Wall Street to support Social Security privatization: if everybody puts money into mutual funds, investment firms stand to pick up more money in management fees.

There's a smaller reason, which has attracted some notice: if more Americans have money in the stock market, they might be motivated to support pro-Wall-Street policies.

And then there's a subtle and devious reason which hasn't attracted much notice at all: the crafty folk of Wall Street want more patsies at the poker table. They want a huge crowd of bad investors who'll buy aggressive-growth mutual funds at the top and sell them at the bottom. That's because they want some beginners to whom they can sell high and from whom they can buy low. Most Americans, like dear old Bob, fit this description. Scams like the one that caught Bob aren't even the issue here. But if he was tricked so crudely, you can guess that his intuitions about market timing aren't likely to be reliable, and may even be a contrary indicator.

As the research director of a dorm-room hedge fund back in my college days, as someone who made and lost a fortune in the Nasdaq bubble, and as someone who's been doing reasonably well in the market over the last couple years, let me point out that there's an emotional side of investing that takes time and pain to learn. It's natural for beginners to buy stocks without seriously imagining how it'll be if, despite their best-laid plans, the stock drops 50% and stays there for a few months. Sure, you say you believe in the company and you'll hold on, but you don't know the emotions that'll be working on you unless it's happened a few times before. Vividly imagining all possible futures is key here. Having a reliable and tested method of investing that you trust, come hell or high water, is also very important.

People who can fully visualize the future possibilities, and who've developed time-testing methods for investing, are going to be taking money from those who haven't. Put simply, the hedge fund managers are going to take the money of hard-working poor folks and feel good about doing it. As the old line goes, when a guy with money meets a guy with experience, the guy with experience gets the money and the guy with money gets the experience. So there's reason to be suspicious when the privateers point to the high historical returns of stocks. On average, people break even playing poker, but that doesn't mean I'll be safe taking my fellowship check to an online poker website.

So well my paper went

I just delivered Possible Girls at the conference. It went beautifully. There was amused laughter throughout, and with the exception of a minor point on the "immorality of modal realism" coming from Ted Sider, I was able to give (at least) plausible defenses of everything I say in the paper. George Bealer, who I hadn't known very well before, came up to me afterwards with big praise, which made me really happy.

Now I'm off to the post-conference party. Can't dress up as the recently tenured Josh Dever like I'd hoped to, but said imitation is in my future and Josh's.

Update:And now I see that I'm blogrolled by Ezra Klein! This day is going so well!

So wrong my loving goes

I don't clearly remember what it's like for a normal guy to accept that the girl he likes is uninterested or married or otherwise out of reach. I only know how it feels for me, and I'm pretty sure that's not the way it is for other men. For me, a huge part of it is the feeling that I'm staring down the barrel of a fundamental law of nature -- the law that Things Shall Not Work Out For Neil. There's a cold feeling of awe, and I feel myself getting goosebumps at the awesome sublimity of the law I'm witnessing in action. There's sometimes a little amusement at how silly I've been in thinking I had a chance, how silly to forget a fundamental fact that characterizes the world. Thoughts of the girl make me sadly wistful, which I guess is normal, but I'm pretty sure that the other feelings take time and misfortune to develop. I imagine that the experience of disappointment is less painful for me than for others, but the reason for this is probably unhealthy. Deep inside I'm so confident of failure that nothing can hurt me.

I'm presenting my paper, "Possible Girls," at our conference on possible worlds tomorrow. The paper argues that if David Lewis' modal realism is true, lonely boys like me can enter into romantic relationships with girls in other possible worlds. I suppose my current state is the mental state with which to go forward and present this paper. Even if I'm unloved by actual girls, the hope of being loved by a merely possible (but real) person will make me read and defend it with the heart it deserves.

Please don't pity me -- my life is going really well overall. I enjoy my work and I have lots of good friends. There's just one area in which nothing ever works out.

Matt-tinged thoughts on corporate incentives

If you haven't been following the sad story of America's biggest automaker, take a look at GM's stock chart over the past 5 years. In addition to economic decline and high oil prices, one of the main causes of GM's 90-to-26 decline has been rising health care costs for employees covered by the company. A whopping 14% of America's GDP goes to health care costs, and these are a huge drag on the business of a high-benefits employer like GM. Now look at Matt's post on TAPPED, which argues that the GM managers of old had only small incentives to prevent this from happening by supporting health care reform:

GM's managers probably didn't side against their own interests when they decided to sink the Clinton health care plan and, with it, their own company. As we've increasingly seen over the past several years, top executives are remarkably insulated against poor corporate performance. If their company's stock shoots up, they make huge sums of money in stock options and other incentive-based forms of compensation. But if their company does badly, they don't lose money the way shareholders do; they just make somewhat less money than they otherwise would have. GM going bankrupt will likely be no real skin off their backs.

Meanwhile, the executives have been paying much less in taxes than they would have had the Democratic Party been seeing more political success over the past 10 years. They used GM's resources in a way that was almost surely contrary to the interests of General Motors, but probably made the right call from an individual perspective. And as long as corporate America is governed in such a way as to create incentives for this sort of irresponsible political behavior on the part of corporate managers, it will be very hard to cope with serious national problems.

One might think that option compensation would give the managers proper incentives to look out for GM's long-term interests here. But that's not the nature of options. Usually your options vest (meaning you're allowed to cash them in) in 3 to 5 years, and the 1994 managers really don't have any incentive to protect the company from a crisis in 2005 -- especially one that's not sexy enough to grab shareholder attention until it's actually killing the company. And as Matt points out, at-the-money options don't expose you to any downside risk. If you get an option grant when the stock's at 50, it makes no difference to your options whether the stock goes to zero or stays put at 50. So wild gambles that aren't in the shareholders' interests are very much in the interests of management.

I remember when Matt considered the way that corporate attitudes towards public policy have changed over the past decades:

But in the 1950s and '60s business groups also spent a reasonable amount of time worrying about issues of broad national concern that also happen to be issues of concern to corporate America writ large. Progressive concern with creating a healthy, well-educated population is pretty well-aligned with the generic business interest in creating a healthy, well-educated workforce. Business interest in, say, lower taxes used to be tempered by this sort of interest in things that require public expenditures and an interest in not wrecking the general economy through out-of-control budgeting.

Somewhere along the way, this kind of thinking has basically vanished in favor of preoccupation with extremely narrow sorts of concerns.

I wonder if changes in the form of executive compensation -- and more broadly, in the ways executives see their jobs and their relations to their companies -- have had a role in diminishing their involvement in issues of broad national concern, like the health care example above.

(And in case you're wondering "How could government-run health care control costs better than the current system?" Matt can start you down the path to knowledge.)