An Essay called "A Refutation of the most Superficially Sophisticated Argument for Libertarianism"

A Refutation of the most Superficially Sophisticated Argument for Libertarianism

I’m going to excerpt some passages from this article (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437324/neil-degrasse-tysons-rationality-pipe-dream), published almost two months ago in the ‘eminent’ right-wing journal known as The National Review,[1] and then briefly (but decisively) refute them. There are basically two reasons why I am doing this. The first is that it is a superficially convincing article which could easily deceive the ignorant or credulous reader: it has a strong start (with which I completely agree), making some important and correct points about complexity and chaotic systems and, whilst the reasoning becomes highly specious when the author actually starts talking about economics and politics, I have no doubt the argument would be able to persuade those who aren’t vigilant about the author’s fallacies, sophistries and distortions. The second reason for carrying out this exercise is that the article’s argument represents one of the standard, general arguments – probably the least obviously terrible argument – that Neoliberals, Libertarians and other “free-marketeers” actually have. This means that, by refuting it, I will be simultaneously undermining a major support for such ideologies. Basically, the article is an instance of the classic Hayekian, “knowledge argument” for Neoliberalism, which goes as follows:

1.)    We can’t possibly know enough about our massively complex society to carry out any effective “central planning” [a term used to encompass pretty much any kind of regulation, pretty much any kind of fiscal policy or government investment in health and education (in the Chicago School/Neoliberal view, the only government economic policy, and the only government role in directly affecting the economy, should be central bank monetary policy), and very often used to encompass welfare and social security].

2.)    There’s a real risk that major “central planning” might seriously backfire, either because: a) the world is chaotic and too complex for us cognitively limited humans (the justification the article uses) or b) it’s just basic economics that you shouldn’t be distorting the market – that will necessarily make things worse by encouraging inefficiencies and rent-seeking (the view based on Austrian economics and its religious picture of “free-market capitalism” as a self-equilibrating, self-correcting, optimal system, which the author almost certainly subscribes to also).

3.)    The “market”, left alone, is a powerful, dynamic engine of innovation, growth and progress (see just above), and is capable, alone, of solving most or all of the big problems that face us as individuals, and as societies (it can cope with any chaos it doesn’t cause).

Conclusion: we should avoid all “central planning” and just allow the “market” [whatever that is] free rein.

As I shall demonstrate, this is a very, very bad argument.

Before I begin my critique, I would like to clear a few things up about the article. As anyone who has actually clicked the link would now know, Kevin D. Williamson wrote the piece in response to a Neil de Grasse Tyson tweet, not directly as a defence of Neoliberalism or Libertarianism. However, despite strongly disagreeing with the way Williamson attacks this tweet (obviously), I do actually have my own problems with the Tyson tweet, and it is certainly not my aim to defend it. The reason I didn’t like Tyson’s tweet is, naturally, very different from the several reasons Mr. Williamson didn’t like it. I didn’t like it for the simple reason that it seems to imply a denial of the is-ought gap: it’s a blatant philosophical error to think that any society where all policy was based on “the weight of evidence” alone would necessarily be an ethical, equitable, free, effective society (and yet this must be what Tyson imagines). Tyson’s “one-line constitution” would, it seems to me, be compatible with plenty of societies that are ethically abhorrent and hellish (even if it would also be compatible with very good societies). Obviously, Tyson thinks Rationalia is just one society – one possible world – but as I just implied, I believe that, if you take Tyson’s stipulated “constitution” alone, there are many possible Rationalias. One possible Rationalia would be a Feudal (or neo-Feudal) society where a small class of barons and warlords enslaved everyone for their own benefit. I believe such a society would qualify comfortably to be a “Rationalia” just as long as the ruling class of such a society was enslaving everyone in a way that reflected the “weight of evidence” (that is, the weight of evidence as to how to effectively enslave people). The ruling class in this Feudal Rationalia could make sure they profited off the exploitation and subjection of millions of peasants in the most efficient and sustainable way possible, by using their best scientists and intellectuals to calculate how much land they should use without irreversibly damaging the environment, how to crush insurrections and rebellions, and so on. Clearly, this is not what Tyson had in mind, and this demonstrates the problem with his tweet.[2]  

Anyhow, that was an easy way of repudiating Tyson’s tweet, and yet it was a much better argument than the much more high-falutin’ one given in the article, which I’m about to destroy.

Here’s an extract from near the start of Mr Williamson’s article, the bit I agree with:

“Drawing from sources as diverse as the works of Henri Poincaré and mathematical biologist Robert May, scholars of complexity have disassembled Isaac Newton’s machine-like, deterministic model of reality that gave scientists the dream of a perfectly predictable world. As Melanie Mitchell put it in her indispensable Complexity: A Guided Tour: Newtonian mechanics produced a picture of a ‘clockwork universe,’ one that is wound up with the three laws and then runs its mechanical course. The mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace saw the implication of this clockwork view for prediction: in 1814 he asserted that, given Newton’s laws and the current position and velocity of every particle in the universe, it was possible, in principle, to predict everything for all time. With the invention of electronic computers in the 1940s, the ‘in principle’ might have seemed closer to ‘in practice.’ That hope turned out to be a false one. Some complex systems (weather patterns, markets, animal population groups) turn out to be extremely sensitive to tiny variations in initial conditions, which we call, for lack of a better term, chaos. You can have a theoretically perfect model of the behavior of a system, but that behavior remains unpredictable — even in principle — because of variations that are beyond our ability to measure. Phillips again: The presence of chaos in a system implies that perfect prediction à la Laplace is impossible not only in practice but also in principle, since we can never know [initial conditions] to infinitely many decimal places. This is a profound negative result that, along with quantum mechanics, helped wipe out the optimistic nineteenth-century view of a clockwork Newtonian universe that ticked along its predictable path. That is pretty heady stuff, but the unpredictability and fundamental unknowability of many aspects of reality are familiar enough, particularly when it comes to human social interactions (meaning, among other things, the whole of politics and economics), human beings being notoriously unpredictable creatures. Soldiers, entrepreneurs, and fashion designers all know that all of the best planning and research that can be done often goes up in a flash when actual events start to unfold. Never mind the failed businesses; go back and read the initial plans of some of our most successful firms, and you’ll get a good laugh.”

This is a basic primer on stuff that everyone should know. Nothing to disagree about. This completely sensible start is why this article has some rhetorical power, even if what’s about to come is somewhat insane. Here’s a much longer extract, coming just after in the article, in which he begins making his argument:

Politicians like to tell simple stories about social problems, preferably stories in which their friends wear white hats and their rivals wear black hats. The 2008–09 financial crisis is an excellent example of that: The Left says that the problem is that we deregulated finance (never mind that we didn’t actually do that) and that “greed” caused bankers to trick tens of millions of Americans into taking out mortgage loans that they couldn’t really afford, with the result that wicked banksters such as Dick Fuld managed to cleverly . . . lose themselves billions of dollars. It’s a dumb story.

Some conservatives tell a pretty dumb story, too: that the bankers and mortgage brokers were in reality good, public-minded, upstanding types, who were viciously strong-armed into making loans to poor people, especially black and brown ones, who schemed to enrich themselves by . . . getting themselves foreclosed on, ruining their credit, losing their investments, and being put out of their homes.

The reality is that regulations, regulatory reforms, and economic incentives interacted in ways that no one foresaw — or could foresee — producing results that no one wanted. Securitization (bundling and chopping up mortgages into financial instruments that could be easily traded among firms) was intended to distribute risk among investors and institutions, but it ended up concentrating that risk. Everything from public-school failures to advanced mathematics contributed to the housing bubble and meltdown.

Many of the policies relevant to the housing bubble go back to the 1930s. No one in the Roosevelt administration could have foreseen what their policies ultimately would contribute to, nor could the deregulation advocates of the Reagan and Clinton years, or the regulators who helped shape housing and financial markets from the Great Depression until the current day. There’s a case to be made (I made it in National Review on December 15, 2008) that the invention of photocopying played a role, with credit-rating agencies switching from an investor-pays business model to an issuer-pays model once the easy replication of their reports made it more difficult to get paid for their work.

These things happen all the time. Protectionist measures taken by the United States against Japanese automakers ended up contributing to those firms’ technological innovation (especially with smaller four-cylinder engines) and allowing domestic automakers to forgo improvements in quality and performance; this ultimately made Japanese cars more attractive rather than less attractive to U.S. buyers. Agriculture policies that kept sugar prices artificially high led to the popularity of high-fructose corn syrup. The Islamic State emerged from our war on al-Qaeda and its supporters. Etc., etc., etc.

The first paragraph is very odd. In just one sentence, he makes more howlers than there are grains of sand on the planet: “The Left says that the problem is that we deregulated finance (never mind that we didn’t actually do that) and that “greed” caused bankers to trick tens of millions of Americans into taking out mortgage loans that they couldn’t really afford, with the result that wicked banksters such as Dick Fuld managed to cleverly . . . lose themselves billions of dollars.”

Let me now explain, in numbered-point form, just what is wrong with this sentence (apologies in advance for the length):

1.)    The claim about “The Left” is a colossal Straw Man. Talk about “dumb stories”; this one about “The Left” is about as dumb as they get (unlike Williamson, I shall now seek to justify this caustic remark). Here, Williamson quite unashamedly suggests everyone who might conceivably be regarded as ‘Left’ (from Paul Krugman to Slavoj Zizek) belongs to one homogenous entity with a hivemind that thinks the two things he suggests, in exactly that straightforward, black-and-white way. Presumably, he doesn’t quite think of the left in quite such black-and-white terms, but that’s really beside the point: an intellectually honest person who disagreed with the ‘Left’ account would at least cite one or two people from this (massive) group, including at couple of quotes from their published works.

Now, to be fair to Williamson (which is not a favour I can imagine him returning), there may well be another place in his journalistic oeuvre where he has actually tried to justify his contempt for these deregulation- and greed-based ‘leftist’ accounts of the causes of the GFC. Nonetheless, as I shall show under headings 2.) and 3.), what he writes here is enough for me to conclude, safely, that he has absolutely no clue what he is talking about.

A different point is that, even if Williamson has elsewhere written a not-completely-idiotic, (partly) empirically founded criticism of the ‘leftist’ accounts of the causes of the GFC, it would still be intellectually dishonest of him to construct the laughable Straw Man that is on display in this article. Lectures about the nature of chaotic systems and the complexity of human societies do not suddenly give you licence to summarily dismiss (and smear) every single one of your ideological enemies (in this case, literally millions of people). That would seem to be – how shall I put it – rather simplistic.  

Now, I realise that, if I were trying to defend the viewpoint of a right-wing Hayekian (for whatever reason), I would probably do exactly what Williamson does here: ignore all the specific arguments of ‘leftists’ and the facts they marshal in support of them, and instead just try to make every single ‘leftist’ look like an idiot with a few empty, sarcastic jibes. If I didn’t do that, I’d worry that ‘the Left’ might end up looking slightly less childish and naïve than I was seeking to portray them. My biggest fear would be that my readers might even come to see that many on ‘the Left’ back up their arguments with substantial historical evidence, telling economic and financial data, and some even with sophisticated, dynamical models of debt build-ups, like Steve Keen (perish the thought). I’m not saying, of course, that Williamson himself is thinking in this highly calculating, cynical way; I think he probably does believe that ‘the Left’ have “a dumb story” that can be reasonably dismissed in one sneering and sardonic sentence. But, regardless of your sincerity, you can’t just sneer away the serious thought of millions of people, including probably hundreds of thousands of academics and scholars – economists (mostly heterodox), historians, anthropologists, etc… Even if you do think that the general truths of “complexity” decisively rule against the arguments of these ‘leftists’, you still have to explain exactly how. Given that I can use similar considerations of social complexity to make the argument that Hayekians or Libertarians who want to deregulate finance don’t understand the chaos of financial dynamics and financial instability (which is an argument I shall later elaborate), one clearly needs more than a facile appeal to complexity to refute the ‘leftist’ explanations of the GFC.

2.)    Williamson claims that “we didn’t actually [deregulate finance]” and then doesn’t cite any support for this claim. One doesn’t usually expect blatant, unambiguous falsehoods in major journals, but, by my lights, this comes pretty close. It sits in uncontroversial conflict with trivial facts that are completely open in the public record (in fact, the three deregulatory acts I’m about to mention have their own Wikipedia pages) and which have been written about in innumerable books. For the ignorant, there were two major deregulatory reforms that took place between 1980 and the GFC (the period of massive financialisation of the US economy, when financial instability also rose markedly (as determined by the lower period of the boom and bust cycle)): The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, which repealed the sections of the Glass–Steagall Act pertaining to retail banking interest rate regulation; and the infamous, Orwellianly named “Financial Services Modernisation Act” (“Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act”) of 1999 (ratified under Wall St’s favourite Neoliberal president, Bill Clinton), which repealed the part of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banks. In 1982, there was also the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, which deregulated savings and loan associations and allowed banks to provide adjustable-rate mortgage loans. While I won’t, as yet, defend the (necessarily difficult) claim that these deregulatory reforms were definite, clear-cut factors in the causation of the GFC, it is important to make clear just how utterly mendacious Williamson is being.

Of course, he can’t be talking complete nonsense, and if I were to make a guess as to what exactly he is talking about, it is perhaps that he thinks that the major deregulatory reforms aforementioned were counteracted by the not-explicitly-deregulatory Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, enacted in the midst of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Since this seems the most likely hypothesis as to why he doesn’t think Wall St had really been deregulated before the GFC, I will now very briefly review the savings and loans crisis, and the nature of the reforms included under the 1989 act.

The most interesting thing to note about the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s and 1990s is that, though the industry was in trouble before the deregulation that took place in 1980 and 1982 (indeed, the 1980 and 1982 acts were largely motivated by the mass insolvency of the industry),[3] this deregulation, combined with a significant increase in regulatory forbearance, ended up worsening the crisis –  allowing it to deepen and spread by artificially pumping up the beleaguered institutions, and fostering fraud and financial chicanery. I honestly don’t know what Mr Williamson thinks about the deregulation explanation in this case, but my guess is that he thinks it’s false (if he is happy to controvert the mainstream scholarly view of the GFC, I think he would be happy to controvert the mainstream scholarly view of this crisis). If he does think this, however, he’s definitely wrong, as we shall see.

Anyhow, I’ve l jumped the gun here. It is highly likely that most (if not all) of my readers won’t know what a savings and loan association is. So, for those too lazy to go on Wikipedia, a savings and loan association, also known as a “thrift” association, is a financial institution which “accepts savings deposits and makes mortgage, car and other personal loans to individual members (a cooperative venture known in the United Kingdom as a building society)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis). Thankfully, the Wikipedia page I just linked has a fairly solid (albeit poorly structured and very clearly composite), well-cited account of the nature of the crisis and of its causes. I enjoin my readers to skim through this now, so that I don’t have to properly review the crisis myself.

Along with the work of the financial historian Kenneth Robinson, this Wikipedia article draws heavily from the writings of the well-known former regulator, regulation advocate and white-collar-crime-fighter William Black in his 2005 book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.[4] It’s worth talking a bit more about Bill. He was a man with a privileged view on the crisis, holding three important regulatory offices during the 80s in which he oversaw S&L activities: he was litigation director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) from 1984 to 1986 (leaving in the year that Charles Keating started to strangle and then hijack the board), then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) in 1987 (which was administered by the FHLBB and insolvent throughout the crisis), and, finally, Senior VP and the General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco from 1987 to 1989 (which had, the year before, completed a damning investigation into Charles Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, and whose members Keating called “homos”). Black ended up being a central figure in exposing Congressional corruption during the crisis, and his blistering testimony at the United States House Committee on Financial Services (also known as the House Banking Committee) in 1989 helped bring about the Senate Ethics Committee’s investigation into the Keating Five (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five) and the resignation of the post-1987 head of the FHLBB, Danny Wall. His testimony was largely based on notes he took at a meeting with the Keating Five in April 1987. Anyhow, the point is that he knows what he is talking about, and he blames deregulation and regulatory forbearance for the huge amplification of the crisis. He saw first-hand the way deregulation and regulatory forbearance allowed fraud to metastasise and poison the industry.

Let us now talk about the thing we promised to talk about several paragraphs ago: the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989. Once again, there’s a good Wikipedia page on this that I would recommend examining (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Institutions_Reform,_Recovery,_and_Enforcement_Act_of_1989). Since there is this page, all I want to say is that the changes implemented by this act are not, overall, strongly regulatory: there are elements that one would describe as clearly adding regulatory oversight, but the FHLBB ad FSLIC were abolished by the act, and weren’t properly replaced by the institutions put in their place: the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Housing Finance Board. Indeed, the Office of Thrift Supervision ended up being captured by Wall St to the point that, by the 2000s, it had adopted “an aggressively deregulatory stance towards the mortgage lenders it regulated” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/22/AR2008112202213.html).

Thus, to put it simply, Williamson is talking nonsense.

Of course, something that Mr. Williamson says later in the extract does shed some light on how he could have made such a mendacious remark about deregulation and still preserved a modicum of self-respect. It is this – “Many of the policies relevant to the housing bubble go back to the 1930s. No one in the Roosevelt administration could have foreseen what their policies ultimately would contribute to […]”. He seems to think that the regulations enacted, and regulatory agencies created, as part of FDR’s New Deal from 1933 to 1934 were at least as important (perhaps more) than the deregulation (a deregulation which he does actually acknowledge with the noun phrase: “the deregulation advocates of the Clinton years”). Again, Mr. Williamson doesn’t bother providing any evidence for this suggestion about New Deal reform (I guess when the world is as complex as he claims, there’s no point bothering with evidence; you can just say whatever shit you want[5])), and, personally, I have literally no clue what he’s talking about (surely he doesn’t think regulation and deregulation both played a role, but that’s what his sketchy remarks seem to imply…). Does he really think the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or “FDIC”) (the most important Glass-Steagall reform to survive), contributed to the GFC? Does he really think the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which created the (impotent and acquiescent) Securities and Exchange Commission, contributed to the GFC? Or is it some other part or parts of the two New Deals that he thinks might have contributed to the GFC? Honestly, I have no fucking idea.

The more general mistake he makes here (as part of his general Straw Man strategy) is to ignore the fact that, at least from my reading (on the GFC, I’ve read the work of Satyajit Das, Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Hudson and Steve Keen), “Leftists” see the roots of the GFC not in financial deregulation, per se, (certainly not merely in financial deregulation), but in the general rise of financial instability (savings and loan crisis, dot-com Bubble, then the Subprime crisis) through the neoliberal period as Wall St’s entire regulatory apparatus – all its checks on criminality and fraud – essentially collapsed, and various kinds of financial chicanery, corruption and outright fraud were allowed to proliferate like algal bloom. He also misses out regulatory capture (including ratings agency capture (Standard and Poor, Moody’s and Fitch)) and Wall St lobbying, which “Leftists” always bring in when they’re talking about deregulation. These were other crucial factors that allowed complex, packaged junk (CDOs and the like) and toxic mortgages to proliferate throughout the market, jeopardising the whole circus.

3.)    The last part of this sentence – the sarcastic words about “wicked banksters”, finishing with an elliptical adjunct that seems to decisively undermine this left-wing idea that Wall St was dictated by greed – is just as stupid as what precedes it. Obviously, Mr Williamson thinks this entire narrative about greedy bankers is absurd, which explains his very sardonic tone. Honestly, I don’t know what to say about this attitude. Mr Williamson and I clearly have very different value systems; indeed, this probably helps to explain why he’s writing for The National Review in the first place, whereas I’m somewhat of a “leftist” who despises everything The National Review stands for, and regards it as dimwitted, sociopathic propaganda. As shocking as this may sound to Mr. Williamson, I think that the responsibility for the financial crisis should indeed lie with the avaricious fraudsters and crooks who created it, not Ma and Pa Kettle, and the kind of vulnerable and desperate people targeted with NINJA loans (“No Income, No Job, No Assets”) and adjustable-rate mortgages (delayed extortion bargains).  Like many of the ‘leftists’ who care about legal precedent and the importance of respecting law and order, I do actually think Wall St’s most fraudulent bankers should have been brought to trial for their enormous embezzlement and larceny; indeed, this seems to me trivial for anyone who believes in a universal moral principle of fairness. But, as it happened, not one of them was. Not a single one.

Mr. Williamson’s last flourish in the sentence is to introduce Dick Fuld, and his loss of billions of dollars, as some kind of sarcastic take-down of this notion that bankers were acting out of reckless self-interest. Huh? People like Fuld couldn’t foresee the crash, so they weren’t being greedy? What? (Weren’t you the guy sermonising about complexity and the limits of human prediction? Why do you expect Fuld to be omniscient here?) Even leaving aside Mr. Williamson’s total failure to make any sense, it’s important to stress that in bringing up Dick Fuld, he’s picked on basically the one unlucky CEO of any of the major investment banks: the CEO of Lehmann Brothers, the only major investment bank that was actually allowed to go bankrupt by the state, rather than being bailed out by a collusive treasury almost entirely beholden to its favourite constituency in the middle of New York. Yes, it is true that the CEOs of Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were forced to resign, but they gifted themselves very generous retirement packages on the way out, and the banks themselves were very quickly back to business as usual).

So, once again, Williamson is talking complete nonsense.

Finally, we have finished taking apart that single sentence. Let’s quickly take apart some others from the same extract. First, this sentence about securitisation: “Securitization (bundling and chopping up mortgages into financial instruments that could be easily traded among firms) was intended to distribute risk among investors and institutions, but it ended up concentrating that risk.”

This sentence is what we, in the business of rational argument, call a “lie by omission”. It is true that this idea that securitisation distributes risk is an important one on Wall St (though, of course, the fundamental reason this “financial engineering” takes place is to maximise bank profits), but it is certainly not the case that investment bankers and hedge fund managers had no clue what was going on. Quite the contrary. It was known to all the big players on Wall St that CDOs were toxic, and that the ratings given to them were fraudulent. The whole point was to sell the tranches to gullible investors – and they did this with a great amount of success, until the music stopped.[6] Warren Buffett was just one of many who identified the danger in the new financial “innovations” when, in 2002, he described CDOs and the other new derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal" (http://www.fintools.com/docs/Warren%20Buffet%20on%20Derivatives.pdf). One big player who actually decided to get out of the market before the crash hit was Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial, who had the foresight to sell $406 million of his own stock, and protect his $100 million-plus salary and bonuses from the (predicted) claws of future prosecutors. The other big players were more rash, but it’s not like they really thought the amount of toxic waste sloshing around Wall St was going to end well (they were gambling), and they also knew they had friends in high places, which made them feel, justly, pretty much invincible.

Williamson’s subsequent speculation about photocopying is a perfectly sensible one, and it gives me an opportunity to reiterate that I don’t think that explaining the causation of the GFC is at all simple (it’s just that it is clear that the fraud and chicanery enabled by deregulation was key). About the next paragraph, however, I have a few things to say. Obviously, Williamson doesn’t much like protectionism; I wonder if he knows that America, like every other prosperous country in the world, was built on protectionism. Anyhow, that’s somewhat of an irrelevancy; I accept that I can’t say anything about his first two examples, which are fair. About his third example, though, of the disastrous intervention to “defeat Al-Qaeda and its supporters”, I will say this: nobody, except rabid American hawks and demonic neocons, thought that applying a sledgehammer to Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds and thousands of civilians, and trying to establish, by force, “democracy” (somehow forgetting the inherent paradox here) would actually help reduce or eliminate the terrorist organisations in the region. If you really thought that was the aim of the war, and you had any intelligence at all, you would not have endorsed it. It is as simple as that – and millions of silly ‘leftists’ can back me up on this. Williamson’s biggest mistake here is accepting the naïve assumption that the war really was just about destroying terrorism; other motives were at play within the US military-industrial complex, not least, control over oil.  

Let us now move onto another big extract:

The epistemic horizon is not very broad. We do not, in fact, know what the results of various kinds of economic policies or social policies will be, and there isn’t any evidence that can tell us with any degree of certainty. The housing projects that mar our cities weren’t supposed to turn out like that; neither was the federal push to encourage home-ownership or to encourage the substitution of carbohydrates for fats and proteins in our diets. A truly rational policy of the sort that Tyson imagines must take into account not only how little we know about the future but how little we can know about the future, even if we consult the smartest, saintliest, and most disinterested experts among us.

That is part of the case for limited government and free markets. Government can do some things, such as guard borders (though ours chooses not to) and fight off foreign invaders. There are things that it cannot do, even in principle, such as impose a “rational” order on the nation’s energy markets, deciding that x share of our electricity supply shall come from solar, y share from wind, z share from natural gas, all calculated to economic and environmental ideals. That is simply beyond its ken, even if all the best people — including Tyson, from time to time — pretend that it is otherwise. Free markets go about solving social problems in the opposite way: Dozens, or thousands, or millions, or even billions of people, firms, organizations, investors, and business managers trying dozens or thousands of approaches to solving social problems.

Consider the relatively straightforward question: How do we move people around to the places they need to go? Even the most simple-minded among us would realize that there isn’t a single answer to that question: Some trips are best done in a 747, some in a Honda Civic. What is the ideal mix of walking paths, bicycle routes, rickshaws, Hindustan Ambassadors, airliners, private jets, trains, hyperloops, spacecraft, sailboats, Teslas, hot-air balloons, zip lines, etc., for the world’s 7.125 billion people? And what will it be 20 years from now? Would you really trust a group of politicians to figure that out?

This section is what one might call a “red herring” orgy. First, this sentence: We do not, in fact, know what the results of various kinds of economic policies or social policies will be, and there isn’t any evidence that can tell us with any degree of certainty. This is an extreme, preposterous overstatement, and in it lurks our first red herring: “with any degree of certainty”. Is he seriously trying to claim that the government doesn’t know that lowering interest rates will increase investment (assuming the private sector isn’t massively indebted)? Is he seriously trying to claim that the government doesn’t know that implementing a stimulus package will stimulate the economy? Is he seriously trying to claim that those who implemented the New Deal couldn’t really have known that it would have had great success creating millions of jobs (even though you literally can’t help creating millions of jobs when you begin thousands of infrastructure projects at once)? Is he seriously claiming that when the government funds hospitals and schools, it can’t know that funding will go to hospitals and schools, and that they’ll most likely be improved (barring misallocation)? Is he seriously claiming that if the government implements environmental controls, it doesn’t know that they will protect the environment? If he’s not making batshit crazy claims like these, then this “with any degree of certainty” phrase must be doing a lot of work. Maybe he means Cartesian certainty. I accept we don’t have that (lol)…

The three examples that follow this sentence are fair, but if you’re going to make a case that the government should basically do nothing (which is what he’s about to do), then you need to show that the government can’t help but fuck up a lot of the time, even when it has the best of intentions (or you have to have some kind of extreme religious faith in the magical powers of “the market”); three little examples of counterproductive policy ain’t going to do it.

The next passage I’d like to target from that extract is these two sentences: There are things that it cannot do, even in principle, such as impose a “rational” order on the nation’s energy markets, deciding that x share of our electricity supply shall come from solar, y share from wind, z share from natural gas, all calculated to economic and environmental ideals. That is simply beyond its ken, even if all the best people — including Tyson, from time to time — pretend that it is otherwise. I’ve really only got one thing to say about this passage: RED HERRING ALERT. Who the fuck has ever said that the government can impose such an order on the nation’s energy markets? Who? Give me one person. Give me at least one citation from some of these “best people”. No? Oh…

One thing the government can definitely do is subsidise renewable energy technologies, and impose taxes on carbon. That doesn’t mean imposing the kind of rational order Williamson sketches above, and I don’t see any reason to think it would be nefarious. I’m sure Williamson thinks there is something terrible about this, but he hasn’t given a reason in the text, and I, personally, struggle to imagine one.

  Next, this extract: Dozens, or thousands, or millions, or even billions of people, firms, organizations, investors, and business managers trying dozens or thousands of approaches to solving social problems. This sounds nice, doesn’t it? All these little people, and these little organisations, working independently, to solve the world’s problems. Beautiful image.

There’s just one, teeny weeny problem with this vision: IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. Is there any evidence that private, profit-making entities have ever solved any major social problems? No, there isn’t. Corporations and investment banks never have, and never will, solve our massive problems with inequality, or poverty. Corporations and investment banks are not going to help protect our natural environment and defend national parks (some of the biggest are, of course, doing the opposite). Corporations and investment banks are not going to uphold the grand tradition of liberal arts education (in fact, the corporatisation of the university system is the central reason for the decline of the grand tradition of liberal arts education, replaced by the ‘university as vocational training’ model). Corporations are not going to help impose a fairer corporate tax regime, or prevent corporate tax evasion (this one’s fairly straightforward). Corporations are not going to reduce crime (in fact, private prisons foster it).

Corporations are internally tyrannical profit-making machines; they are not accountable to the people (unlike the state, which is at least still a tiny bit accountable) and they have no reason to be community-spirited. Even if government planning is hard – even if many well-intentioned policies end in disaster – the burden of proof is colossal on someone who thinks that a neo-Feudalist plutocracy would be better. What kind of lunatic wants a world without public healthcare, public education, financial regulation or environmental regulation, and democracy? In 2016, while the world is heating up faster than ever, this kind of vision for society would seem to me, well, a little FUCKING CRAZY.

Finally, there’s this passage: What is the ideal mix of walking paths, bicycle routes, rickshaws, Hindustan Ambassadors, airliners, private jets, trains, hyperloops, spacecraft, sailboats, Teslas, hot-air balloons, zip lines, etc., for the world’s 7.125 billion people? And what will it be 20 years from now? Would you really trust a group of politicians to figure that out? This is, of course, another red herring, very similar to the previous one about energy. Who the fuck seriously thinks that anyone knows the “ideal mix” of all these transportation technologies? OF COURSE NO-ONE KNOWS THIS. The problem is that, if you leave transportation options to the private sector, the options are reduced, not increased. There has never been a train company started by an entrepreneur. There has never been a railway built by a corporation. The politicians don’t have to figure out the “ideal mix”, but perhaps they do have to try their best to figure out what might be best for the people of their constituency. Yes, that is somewhat of a challenge, but it doesn’t suddenly make funding public transport a mistake. What kind of fucking nutcase would believe that?

In the rest of the article, Williamson mentions one other example of a failed government policy: Obamacare. Naturally, he fails to note that ‘leftists’ also didn’t like that policy, and expected it to end quite badly, since it involved massive acquiescence to corporate power.

Ultimately, what Williamson fails to realise is that his argument can be used against him. If there are limits to human prediction in the social and economic sphere because of the immense complexity of the social and economic world, and the millions of variables at play, you’d have to be pretty fucking insane to say, “Oh, don’t worry, let’s just deregulate everything, destroy the fucking state, and corporations and investment banks will clean up the mess”. Ultimately, this whole view relies on a religious faith in “market” efficiency.

Now, tell me, Mr. Williamson, do you realise that markets are an invention of the state, and that the government creates the conditions for competition to flourish by regulation, taxation and monopoly control?  Do you realise that, though destroying it may help fatcats in the short run, welfare is ultimately necessary to keep profits high by keeping poor people consuming? Do you realise that Department of Defence investment is the origin of most of the technological innovation shaping the world today? Do you realise that state-funded science is the basis for the cutting-edge products of all those celebrated Silicon Valley companies? No, of course you don’t; if you did properly assimilate these facts, they would be fatal to your treasured ideology.

---

[1] I read it just after it was published, via a link posted on Twitter by Nicholas Nassim Taleb (that nasty and demagogueish (intelligent) rooster), and I started thinking about this essay the day I read the article.

[2] Now, of course, Tyson was only making a tweet, not expounding a serious thesis about politics, so it’s probably unfair to be so captious and pedantic about it. But, anyway, it’s still a point worth making.

[3] The seeds of the crisis lie in the stagflation of the 1970s (which famously brought an end to the Keynesian Golden Age, already doomed by the disintegration of the Bretton-Woods system), since Paul Volcker’s attempts to control it by hiking up the federal funds rate was what catalysed the S&L insolvency (higher interest rates spelled doom for their business of issuing long-term loans at fixed interest rates).

[4] Oh no, I’ve played my hand! Obviously, I could never convince Mr. Williamson or people like him that they’re wrong. If Mr. Williamson were to ever read this essay, I’m sure he’d find some way of dismissing it as leftist lunacy.

[5] Ok, perhaps there’s some loonie right-wing book somewhere where he tries to defend these claims, and he’s assuming his audience has read it.

[6] But then they were bailed out anyway.

Some Brief Thoughts on Caster Semenya and Women's Sport

This is a comment I saw below the Facebook link to this New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/sports/caster-semenya-800-meters.html. I have decided to briefly write something about it because, as can be gleaned from the number of likes on this comment, the opinion above is a very popular one, and an opinion which I think is very flawed.
       The comment begins with some 100% correct statements (an accurate generalisation and an accurate example in support) -- but the reasoning from there is quite poor. I don't know if the commentator is one of those extreme PoMo social constructionists who subscribes to the following bipartite doctrine: that there's no difference between men and women in terms of average strength or speed (height differences are, of course, a bit too hard to ignore), and that (as a result) we should try to "abolish all discrimination" in sport by merging men's and women's competitions. She may very well not subscribe to such a doctrine. However, her failure to realise that there is indeed a very important, non-misogyny-based distinction between Phelps' "quirks" and Semenya's "quirks" is suggestive of tendencies in that direction.
         Before I explain why I think the commentator uses poor reasoning in attributing to "misogyny" the different response to Semenya's "quirks", I want to make a few things clear about my own attitude towards biology and sport (to pre-empt charges of reactionary ignorance). First up, I realise that intersex people exist, and I realise that hormone levels vary between people. I realise that some biological females (with the standard set of XX chromosomes) are very masculine in many ways (possessing, for example, angular faces with strong jaws and large features, or significant body hair, or narrow hips or wide shoulders or low body fat (or all of the above)), and I realise that some biological males (with the standard set of XY chromosomes) are very feminine in many ways (possessing, for example, softer, more gracile faces, or inconsiderable body hair, or wide-ish hips or narrow shoulders or high body fat (or all of the above)). As a consequence of my acceptance of these trivial facts, I also accept that it is extremely difficult to draw a line in the sand and say, "Everyone on this side is an unambiguous biological male and everyone on this side is an unambiguous biological female". And, most importantly, I actually do believe that what Semenya's ordeal with the athletic authorities demonstrates above all else is that there's an irreducible arbitrariness to the way the sporting world deals with sex. (I mean, let's face it, most female athletes in athletics and high-intensity sports have unusually masculine physical traits.)
       On the other hand, I also think that it would be a mistake for the world athletic bodies to abandon any kind of biological definition of male and female, and go completely in the direction of the trans-community conception of male and female in terms of (mental) "gender identity". The July 2015 decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to force the IAAF to suspend its hormone test for two years and allow athletes like Semenya and Duttee Chand to compete without any kind of hormonal treatments may very well signal a move along exactly this trajectory. I think this is a cause for slight concern. I believe that what the IAAF was doing was not completely unjustified: there needs to be some arbitrary distinction drawn, based on hormones or some such other correlate of biological sex, because a total abandonment of a biological distinction could very well open the floodgates for a whole wave of merely transfemale athletes (typical biological males who identify as females). As I made clear, I think the merging of men's and women's sports would be a disaster, and also deeply unfeminist. The conclusion of this change would be theft of millions of women's livelihoods, global exposure, and the destruction of the dreams of millions of female children.
      Yes, it is true that the gap between men and women in athletics (and sports like soccer, rugby, cricket and hockey) has gradually closed over the last few decades, and will continue to gradually close as long as more girls are encouraged to get into sport and develop their athletic potential. Nevertheless, there are very good biological reasons to think that women will never reach quite the same heights as men in the really physically intense sports, and so would risk being outcompeted if transwomen were allowed to compete, and certainly if male and female sports were merged.
       Perhaps we can draw the line between males and females for the purposes of athletic competition in such a way that allows people like Semenya and Duttee Chand to compete as they are (without any hormonal intervention), but my point is simply that we must draw it somewhere. Pretending that Semenya's unusual physical features are exactly analogous to those of Phelps is therefore a mistake.
 

Another thought on ethics of eating animals

I made a mistake: Average Happiness versus Aggregate Happiness w/r/t the Lives of Cows: 

The following was a footnote in the previous essay I published on this blog:

"My own view is that the ecological arguments are far more clear-cut, and far easier to sustain, than the arguments from animal suffering. Do cows living a relatively happy, quite social and interactive life on large paddocks or vast saltbush plains have lives of “negative utility”, just because they get slaughtered at the end? That seems to me absurd. And if you agree that such cattle don’t lead lives of negative utility, then reducing the amount of such cattle in the world means reducing the amount of utility in the world (unless the environments vacated create room and resources for far more new creatures, with more capacity for utility than the cattle – but that’s very uncertain and distant). (One could reasonably argue that chickens in battery farms do have lives of “negative utility”, of course.)

Now, you could try to make the animal welfare case without utilitarianism – you could just say “It’s wrong to kill another innocent, sentient creature no matter what”. The problem is that most people don’t have that intuition, which is why most/all vegetarian/vegan moral philosophers argue from utilitarianism (the moral system that ignores every one of our intuitions except the intuition that morality is about pleasure and pains (or preferences))."

A few days ago, when I wrote this first paragraph about the lives of cows and the consequences of reducing their numbers, I was thinking about "utility" purely in additive terms, ignoring "average utility" completely. This was a mistake: no utilitarian can possibly think only in terms of either average or aggregate utility, since both, famously, lead to morally repugnant conclusions. If you care only about average utility, any scenario in which mass slaughter or species extinction leads to more resources and opportunities for the organisms left alive would seem justified; if you care only about aggregate utility, it would seem justified to massively increase the population of the planet, as long as the extra lives you create are just worth living (and you might want humans to leave absolutely no space for other species, because of the Millian belief that "It's better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied" (an intelligent, self-aware creature, capable of reflection, has more capacity for utility, broadly understood)). As a result of these truths, it is necessary for any thoughtful utilitarian to strike some sort of balance between their valuation of average and aggregate utility.

Anyhow, what I realised is that it was unfair to think about the argument from animal suffering in terms of aggregate utility. Indeed, it has occurred to me that the argument from animal suffering looks in much better shape if you think of the issue of the lives of cows purely in terms of average utility. Consider the issue this way: if we abolished the entire cattle industry, would that increase the average utility of the lives of cows (with the only cows left being wild cows, roaming free)? I think most vegetarians and vegans think that it would. It does seem the more reasonable conclusion to draw, since a free cow has unlimited territory to roam and will not get slaughtered after a few years (though it might, depending on its geographic location, be preyed upon by other creatures).

Of course, another question might be whether abolishing the cattle industry would increase the average utility of all organisms on the planet. However, this question is too hard. Given the ecological and environmental impact of the cattle industry, the right answer may well be "yes", but it's impossible to know.

So that's all there is to say really: you probably can sustain the argument from animal suffering against eating beef if you think that what matters is average utility rather than aggregate utility.

A complicated essay called "How the Necessary Negligibility of Individual Consumption Decisions and the Collective Action Problems of our Complex World Imperil the Attempt to Make One's Eating Habits Fully Rational; and Why, Partly as a Consequence of This, You Should Ideally be a Fully Committed, Activist Vegetarian or Vegan, Not a Mere “Ethical Eater” (or “Flim-flam-tarian”)"

How the Necessary Negligibility of Individual Consumption Decisions and the Collective Action Problems of our Complex World Imperil the Attempt to Make One's Eating Habits Fully Rational; and Why, Partly as a Consequence of This, You Should Ideally be a Fully Committed, Activist Vegetarian or Vegan, Not a Mere “Ethical Eater” (or “Flim-flam-tarian”)

I recently became a "vegetarian". Roughly speaking, I don't eat any meat. Definitely speaking, I haven't eaten any meat for several weeks, and I have only consumed small quantities of meat on a few occasions in the two or three months before that. Definitely speaking, I am planning never to eat any meat again (and I am fairly confident that I will be able to do this, since this self-denial jibes well with my Stoical life philosophy). The reason that I consumed small quantities of meat several times after my decision to call myself a vegetarian (and commit to vegetarianism) is not moral weakness or turpitude; instead, it is that, with some reason, I believed that it was "rational" to do so in the particular contexts in which the meat option was available to me. I have now decided that the idea of rationality on which these decisions were based was, in an important sense, silly. This essay is in large part an attempt to explain why I think this (though, first, I have to explain what I'm actually talking about).

The contexts in which I ‘resiled’ from my vegetarian commitments were all contexts in which the meat products had already been purchased by my parents (or, in the first case, me buying Indian takeaway for the household), and prepared either by one of my parents or a chef in a restaurant/cafe. It was because the meat had already been purchased and prepared that I had decided, on each of these occasions (one of which took place at a cafe, when my dad had a bit of leftover bacon on his plate), that it was completely morally permissible for me to eat the meat product in question.[1] In the case of the Indian takeaway, I had realised that I had bought too much meat (not helped by the fact that one of the vegetarian curries I had ordered turned up with chunks of meat in it), and that if I didn’t eat some of it myself, it would just go to waste. How, I thought, could that be at all immoral?

I have come across the arguments of several utilitarian ‘ethical eaters’ along just these lines: that this kind of attitude towards purchased and prepared meat is completely morally permissible, because it is a simple matter of rationality to see that you literally can’t make any difference to the meat industry by eating meat of this kind. It seems obvious: if eating meat in such a situation could not possibly have an effect on the meat industry in any way, and you enjoy the taste of meat, it makes no sense not to have some.

A bit over a month ago, I realised that this line of argument is somewhat problematic and naïve. The biggest flaw, I think, is that it ignores two related problems: the necessary negligibility of individual consumption decisions and the collective action problems of our complex world (both well-known problems for individual utility calculations in general). On the basis of these problems, as well as some other considerations, I ultimately believe that it actually makes slightly more sense – is more rational, if you like – to be fully committed to vegetarianism/veganism, no matter the context where meat is available. Here follows my (rather complicated and long) argument.

As an individual vegetarian or vegan, your eating habits can, at best, have a trivial or tiny effect on the world.[2] The dent an individual vegetarian or vegan makes in the meat industry, even over the course of many years or decades refusing to buy meat products, will be necessarily trivial. The dent an individual vegetarian or vegan makes in the meat industry in a single act of refusing meat will be necessarily negligible. Moreover, because of the difficulty of solving collective action problems in the incredibly complex societies in which we live, it is often the case that individual consumption decisions that appear more ‘altruistic’ are actually negligibly bad for overall utility, rather than negligibly good.

Indeed, it's more profound than that: when you’re one person in a big, complex society, surrounded by thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of other agents, and you weigh up whether to be selfish or to be altruistic in a given situation, the utilitarian calculus typically (I believe) suggests that the selfish option is either no worse than the supposedly altruistic option, or better. Why? Because, your own seemingly ‘altruistic’ decisions in life – your decision to vote in the election for this good candidate over that bad candidate, your decision to purchase this ethically produced shirt or brand of coffee over the ones made from exploited labour, your decision to attend a climate-change protest rather than stay at home – are simultaneously: 1.) almost totally inconsequential, and 2.) plagued by collective-action dilemmas. In fact, in most of the cases one readily thinks of, it seems likely that the selfish option, taken strictly on its own, will produce fractionally more utility overall (because it’s less demanding for you and/or more immediately gratifying for you and/or is the better decision for other people unless huge numbers of people start co-ordinating in making the ‘altruistic’ decision).

To make this claim (or set of claims) concrete, let’s take an example directly related to ethical eating: the scenario of choosing between meat and vegetarian dishes at a restaurant. Let’s say you’re at a fairly good restaurant, and, between the choice of some kind of salad or a delicious, rich, flavoursome meat dish, you take the latter (we can suppose that salads are the only vegetarian option the restaurant has on the menu). What will be the result? Assuming you are not racked by guilt, eating the tasty meat dish will produce more utility for you, because it will be more satisfying and tasty than the gustatorily austere salad (and you won’t risk being mocked for your “self-righteousness” (as is common for vegetarians and vegans)). Moreover, the decision to take the meat dish will also likely produce slightly more utility for the people around you, because you will probably generate slightly more group cohesion (a pathetically large number of meat-eaters become irritable or uncomfortable around vegetarians and vegans). And even if a decision to take the meat dish doesn’t have these (admittedly, relatively trivial) positive effects, that definitely won’t make the decision to choose the vegetarian dish more morally rational according to a utilitarian calculus. After all, the amount of meat a restaurant chooses to order every week (or day, or fortnight, or whatever) isn’t going to be affected by one choice made by one person on one night (in the best case scenario, your decision will be the tipping point for a nontrivial reduction in the restaurant’s meat orders – but that’s very improbable in any case).[3] So it turns out that, in this perfectly standard scenario – which isn’t one of the scenarios that utilitarians typically regard as an exception (a situation where the meat has already been purchased and prepared) – it is most reasonable to believe that the utilitarian calculus is either indeterminate between the two options, or (more probably) in favour of the latter.

One can actually think of even more disconcerting examples than this. Take the decision (not directly related to ethical eating) between purchasing a garment made from exploited labour in the Third World, and purchasing a more expensive garment made from non-exploited labour in the First World.[4] Now, it’s obviously true that if a massive number of people boycott products made from exploited labour (and do it consistently, across multiple companies), then that will put immense pressure on the culpable corporations to improve labour conditions: the extra money the companies have to spend on paying workers and improving facilities will be outweighed by a return to higher profits once they inform their customers know that the exploitation has reduced.[5] But if you consider the case of one person having to make a decision between two garments in a shop, the morally rational decision seems to be reversed (again, both decisions are negligible, but in this case, the seemingly selfish decision seems almost certainly the fractionally better one for the world).

Imagine a young woman who has the choice between buying an expensive t-shirt produced by a major brand from a Western country, and a much cheaper t-shirt made from exploited, sweatshop labour in Sri Lanka. Since she reasons along standard utilitarian lines, she ends up thinking that buying the second one would be immoral because she would be ‘condoning exploitation’ of poor, powerless Sri Lankan peasants working in infernal conditions. She decides instead that she better just bite the bullet, and she nobly forks out the extra money necessary to buy the shirt produced by non-exploited labour.

This sounds like sound reasoning, but it’s actually quite dodgy. The reason is that, if she buys the cheaper shirt made from exploited Sri Lankan labour, she will both reduce the financial burden on herself, and (in an admittedly very small way) be partly supporting the poor Sri Lankan labourers – even if she’s mainly supporting the multinational corporation who exploits these people. By contrast, if she buys the expensive designer shirt, she will be placing a large financial burden on herself, and (in an admittedly very small way) be partly supporting workers who probably have stable incomes and good job security, and mainly supporting the multinational corporation that employs these people. And which one, of those two decisions, is the (fractionally) more morally rational decision for this individual person to take? I reckon it’s almost certainly the former. Unless things radically change for them, the exploited Sri Lankan sweatshop workers would want people to buy the products they make; below a certain threshold, boycotts will be straightforwardly bad for them, because they will result in reduced profits for the company for which they work, and certainly won’t improve their working conditions (indeed, reduced profits will likely lead to worse working conditions, worse wages, or dismissals). And yes, it is true that the boycotts can’t get sufficiently big and powerful to force changes in the conditions of exploited labourers unless individual people decide to make boycotting decisions – but that still doesn’t make the individual decision morally rational.

Some might regard this line of argument as condoning moral nihilism about decisions where the problem of individual-decision-negligibility and/or the problems of collective action rear their ugly heads (as opposed to decisions about whether or not to rob, beat or murder someone, which will obviously have a direct, nontrivial impact on another human). Of course, there’s a strong tradition in moral philosophy of arguing that myopic self-interest is simply more rational in general than open co-operativeness (even if it is not more moral), because just focussing on your own desires is liable to produce more utility for you (and perhaps your family)[6] directly, and raise you above other people permanently, even if collective community co-operation on a given problem (say, preserving the environmental health of an eco-system) will, in the long-run, leave everyone better off (= Hobbes’ dilemma in “state of nature” = The Tragedy of the Commons = (most generally) a Prisoner’s Dilemma).  Given all this, you might be tempted to simply throw your hands in the air and say, “What’s the point of being a vegetarian at all? If I can’t actually have any relevantly good effect on the world, and I enjoy the taste of meat, I should eat meat!”

One possible reply to this kind of nihilism is put forward by the most original and unusual moral philosopher alive today, Derek Parfit. Fairly early on in his 1984 masterwork of moral reasoning, Reasons and Persons (not actually a book I would highly recommend), Derek Parfit imagines a scenario involving a large number of men dying of thirst in the desert, in an attempt to show that one can be rationally required to carry out actions that have imperceptibly positive effects (and by this, he hopes to refute the “Argument from Inconsequentialism”). The outline of the thought experiment is as follows: you have just encountered this mass of desperately thirsty men in the middle of the searing desert, and you have a choice either to add all of your waterbottle to a trough of water that’s being filled for them to drink, or some other amount (including none of it). After a lot of painstaking deliberation and meticulous tinkering with details (as is Parfit’s signature), Parfit ends up claiming that, even if the result of adding all of the water is indiscernible from any other choice to the men (because it only adds, say, one drop to the amount each man gets to drink), this action is still morally/rationally required (for Parfit, morality and rationality are strongly interwoven).

But, of course, even if, after reviewing his argument, you think that Parfit is “correct” on this (and you will only really believe that strongly if you share his meta-ethical assumptions), this kind of scenario is too simple to apply to most real-world situations. I already argued that there are many common situations where either it’s completely unclear which action would produce the infinitesimally better overall utility, or the apparently selfish action would seem to be the one with the infinitesimally better overall utility, considered strictly on its own.

Fortunately, there is another, less academic reply to this kind of largeness-and-complexity-of-world-based moral nihilism. It goes as follows: But don’t you vote?

A single vote among millions of others is necessarily negligible, and is possibly completely inconsequential, no matter the electoral system in place (Majority rule, Plurality or “Instant run-off”). But if this is the case, why would you vote? Obviously, some people think the answer to that question is, “There is no answer and you shouldn’t vote” – but the vast majority of people do not think that. So is it rational to vote? Well, in a very important sense, yes – and that brings us to the last, most intricate phase of my argument.

As I suggested many paragraphs ago, I believe that, if you are convinced of the moral imperative either to reduce animal suffering or to reduce ecological damage and carbon emissions caused by the meat industry (or both),[7] you should be a fully committed vegetarian or vegan, not a superficially ‘rational’ flim-flam person. Despite how it may seem, I really don’t think it does become perfectly morally rational to eat meat on occasions when it’s already been purchased and prepared. In my view, being a vegetarian or vegan should, ideally, be more than just a lifestyle choice; it should be a form of activism (fortunately, I will soon argue for this). If you’re an ethical eater purely on the basis of utilitarian arguments that ignore the problems of individual-action-negligibility and collective action (i.e. bad utilitarian arguments), then you might think it rational just to be some kind of quiet, humble “ethical eater” (or, as ethical eaters shall be henceforth known, a “flim-flam-tarian”). But I think that this is both a shirking of moral duty, and just a bad idea on logical grounds – one that is quite likely to guarantee that you won’t have any positive effect on the world.  There are three reasons why.

The first, and most quotidian, reason why being a flim-flam-tarian is bad is this:

If you often accept leftover meat products and leftover cooked meat made by your housemates, partner or parents (whoever you live with), you will most likely encourage these people to keep buying slightly excessive quantities of food, in the knowledge that the leftovers will certainly be eaten. Of course, you could sternly tell the food purchasers and preparers that they should only purchase meat for themselves, but it would be far less likely to cause trouble and confusion if you just never ate meat at all.

The second reason why being a flim-flam-tarian is a bad idea is that it is surely psychologically far easier for you, as an ethical eater, to completely avoid a given category of ‘bad’ food, rather than psychologically complicate things by sporadically eating this category of food when the circumstances (morally) permit.  While this kind of consideration may seem to give too little credit to human frontal lobes, it’s certainly true that by sporadically eating meat, one sporadically reminds oneself of the taste of meat (the thing one is missing out on whenever there isn’t leftover purchased and prepared meat). Moreover, the value of “purity” is an important element of our moral faculty, and there’s manifestly something much more rewarding and enriching about feeling like one has a strong, clear, pure ethical commitment, as opposed to a muddy, ambiguous one. And though I don’t have any hard evidence of this (it’s too obscure a phenomenon to have been studied), it seems to me that someone who still permits herself to eat meat when she deems it “rational” is significantly more likely to lapse into non-ethical eating than someone who has completely renounced meat. It’s certainly true that, to be a really successful vegetarian or vegan, it is of big assistance to make meat a taboo.

The last and most important reason why you shouldn’t be a flim-flam-tarian – why you should be a fully committed, activist vegetarian or vegan instead – is that a quiet, humble “ethical eater” is obviously going to have much less of an impact upon the world than someone who is strongly and passionately committed to a noble, self-denying, ascetic life choice, which everyone can understand and many will seek to emulate (as long as you’re not too sanctimonious about displaying and discussing this noble life). As I argued several pages back, a single person’s ethical consumption habits, even if they are a strict vegan, are going to be trivial in the grand scheme of things (this was the fundamental basis for the apparently nihilistic argument I spent so long laying out). But even though I suggested, using the example of voting, that this problem of individual-action-negligibility may not be quite as straightforwardly tragic as it seems (and I’ll get to that), it’s certainly the case that there is one way a vegetarian or vegan can guarantee that they will have a nontrivial effect on the world: convincing other people to join them in their moral commitment. If you’re a quiet, semi-vegetarian or semi-vegan, you are probably not performing your activist role at all. Even leaving aside the “quiet” part (you might be a flim-flam-tarian who does engage in some non-sanctimonious proselytising for flim-flam-tarianism), it is, as I suggested, much more morally noble and admirable to seem pure, self-denying and monastic (/ascetic) than to just be some guy who mostly doesn’t eat meat (and sometimes does). On a more basic level, it’s obviously easier to spread a simple, straightforward moral dogma (“don’t eat meat”/ “don’t eat animal products”) than some subtle version of ethical eating, whose occasional meat-eating permissions most won’t understand.

At this point, I imagine that a reader might be slightly confused by the structure of the overall argument, even if they have been agreeing with many or all of the sub-arguments I’ve been making along the way. There is something rather confusing about what I’ve done: I first used the problem of the necessary negligibility of individual consumption decisions and the problems of collective action in a big, complex society to argue that it is silly to even try to work out the ‘rationality’ of eating meat on each individual occasion it is available, but then I suggested that maybe the necessary negligibility of individual consumption decisions and the problems of collective action aren't huge problems for rationality after all (suggesting that voting is still rational even if the individual vote is negligible), and then I started arguing that being a fully committed, activist vegetarian or vegan is almost certainly decisively better in terms of utility-maximisation (and for other reasons) than being a quiet, humble flim-flam-tarian. Aren’t these three strands kind of in conflict?

In order to respond to this question, I should begin by trying to explain why I said voting could still be rational, even if there was a guarantee of negligibility for your individual ballot paper. The answer in that case is that we overcome moral nihilism simply by recognising that we have a moral duty to vote. It is a Kantian circumvention: we cognise that if a nihilistic psychology were to spread widely, it would be extremely costly, and we follow the categorical imperative to carry out the action whose universal repudiation would result in such a disaster. Does the fact that our motivation is not rationally grounded according to utilitarian considerations make voting irrational? No, not at all; according to the way I understand rationality of behaviour (probably a pretty commonsense conception), it would still fit well within the bounds (a Kantian person is a perfectly rational person).

I think the way we non-irrationally avoid moral nihilism about vegetarianism and veganism is very similar: we think to ourselves, ‘If I stop eating meat, that will have a negligible impact on the world, but I know that other people might have that thought also, and it would be a disaster if everyone took this consideration too seriously, so I won’t take it too seriously’. Unlike the case of voting, however, one can definitely use utilitarian considerations to defend a general vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, even if using utilitarian considerations to justify a particular decision to refuse meat is pretty difficult.  I say this because we can be pretty confident that spending several years refusing to eat any meat products does have a supernegligible (albeit still trivial) and clearly positive impact on the world.

And, of course, having a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle which also involves a degree of activism – an attempt to convert other people to the noble, moral cause – may even allow you to raise your overall positive impact on the world above the trivial.

Anyhow, to finish up, it should now be clear that the necessary negligibility of individual consumption decisions and the collective action problems of our complex world do indeed imperil the attempt to make one's eating habits fully rational; and that, partly as a consequence of this, you should ideally be a fully committed, activist vegetarian or vegan, not a mere “ethical eater” (or “Flim-flam-tarian”).

---

[1] If the meat had only been purchased and not prepared, it would not be fully morally permissible to eat it, I figured, because that would potentially accelerate new meat purchases (and, obviously, the aim of ethical eating is to reduce meat production by reducing demand).

[2] Clearly, if you’re also a vegetarian or vegan activist, you may be able to have a slightly greater effect on the world – but we’ll get to that much later

[3] Even if your rejection of the meat dish is the tipping point for a reduction in the restaurant’s meat orders, one restaurant’s choice to reduce their meat orders from a given butcher won’t necessarily cause that butcher to order less meat from the farmer, and even if it does have that effect, one butcher’s decision to order less meat from the farmer won’t necessarily cause him to buy fewer new calves (or slow down breeding or whatever)… So the effect is negligible.  

[4] I use the old, less PC terms “First World” and “Third World” because I think “developing world” is actually a harmful euphemism for countries that have been wrecked by neoliberal financial imperialism and utterly hypocritical market fundamentalism. Third World conveys fucked up poverty, and should therefore, in my view, be the word favoured by the Left (many ‘liberal’ PC terms are actually insidiously euphemistic).

[5] The scenario is, of course, very complex, because if there was enough consumer pressure being applied to major clothing manufacturers to improve labour conditions, it may encourage these corporations to go so far as to return to (pre-neoliberal-globalisation norm of) domestic, First World manufacturing. That would cause major disruption to the economies of East Asia, and probably result in a big jump in poverty, even if it would ultimately be better for such economies in the long run to be self-sufficient (economic globalisation favours Western, particularly US elites, as Stiglitz argues in his famous work, Globalisation and its Discontents, and as Chomsky has been saying forever).

[6] The reason I say “family” is that the literal, original “Tragedy of the Commons” is a scenario where the interests of individual farmers and their families conflict with those of the community as a whole.

[7] My own view is that the ecological arguments are far more clear-cut, and far easier to sustain, than the arguments from animal suffering. Do cows living a relatively happy, quite social and interactive life on large paddocks or vast saltbush plains have lives of “negative utility”, just because they get slaughtered at the end? That seems to me absurd. And if you agree that such cattle don’t lead lives of negative utility, then reducing the amount of such cattle in the world means reducing the amount of utility in the world (unless the environments vacated create room and resources for far more new creatures, with more capacity for utility than the cattle – but that’s very uncertain and distant). (One could reasonably argue that chickens in battery farms do have lives of “negative utility”, of course.)

Now, you could try to make the animal welfare case without utilitarianism – you could just say “It’s wrong to kill another innocent, sentient creature no matter what”. The problem is that most people don’t have that intuition, which is why most/all vegetarian/vegan moral philosophers argue from utilitarianism (the moral system that ignores every one of our intuitions except the intuition that morality is about pleasure and pains (or preferences)).     

Three of my Facebook Posts on False Right-Wing Conceptions of "Liberty" and "Freedom"

Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 7 mins · 

https://newmatilda.com/…/bill-leaks-racism-is-about-hurtin…/
Question of values and priorities; yes, Aboriginal communities across Australia are broken, there are broken families and irresponsible and neglectful parents... but whose fault is it? On whom do you place the blame? I find this whole thing sick. As the author (powerfully) writes, "Why blame systemic racism, the failures of white governments, the accumulated traumas of colonisation, dispossession, massacres, the devastation ofcommunities and removals from families, when you can just blame Aboriginal parents for their lack of agency and self-responsibility?

Why blame poverty, unemployment and lack of infrastructure if you can put all the blame on Aboriginal communities?"

And correct words about the utter mendacity and hypocrisy of supposed rightwing reverence for important Western value of freedom of speech (which ought to mean relatively equal distribution of media power among a large number of sectors and demographic groups in society). Claims of repressions of free speech by those with major platforms in the corporate media are worse than absurd. They're repugnant.

(And I've always wondered: if Howard, Bolt, Albrechtsen (etc) think that white people shouldn't feel guilty for the horrifying, dismal, profoundly disturbing health, education and social status of Indigenous people as compared to the rest of the population -- if they really think Indigenous people have perfectly good opportunities to 'lift themselves up' and become industrious, obedient citizens like the rest of us -- then what do they think the reason for the failure of the community is? By a process of abduction, it can only be.... abject racism. Theories of racial superiority. Mull over it and explain to me how it can be anything else.)

Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 11 hrs ·  · Politics

Massive current in contemporary right-wing politics (the Chicago School, Libertarian strand of right-wing politics, which often claims to have strong roots in Adam Smith and J.S. Mill, and "classical liberalism") is based on atrocious, highly atavistic moral philosophy. They say freedom is incompatible with equality, and if we have to compromise, we compromise more on the side of equality. But what they mean by freedom is "natural freedom" -- simple noninterference of any outside agent/s or institutions on me or my wants. This is not a universalised value (one person's natural freedom is another person's tyranny; the 1%'s natural freedom is the 99%'s subjugation and debt paeonage). It's an elementary principle of moral philosophy that values are meant to be universalised. Freedom has to be bound up with equality because freedom, to be a meaningful value, has to mean freedom for everyone. It seems to me perfectly obvious that there is more freedom (more autonomy and less domination for the majority of persons) in a Keynesian welfare state than neoliberal plutocracy or oligarchy.

Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 13 April ·  · Politics

http://www.theguardian.com/…/stephen-fry-free-speech-child-…

Quite. Echoes the words of yours truly, several aeons ago. Free speech is an important value, but we must bear in mind how it interacts with POWER. The idea behind the value of free speech is that everyone has the right to express an opinion, even if that opinion might offend some people. That's great, and I value this value immensely. But notice that some opinions are heard much louder than others, getting in many more people's ears. Those opinions are typically the opinions of the establishment, of political centrists, and so on (the opinions heard in the mainstream media). If someone has one of those opinions, and they're shouted down in *left-wing* fora for holding it, it is very strange to cry foul. Your opinion can still be heard, buddy -- just not here!
It's important to be exposed to opposing views, of course, and one should learn to defeat bad views by debate rather than censorship. So I generally don't think censorship of speakers on uni campuses is a good idea.
Massimo Pigliucci crystallises the debate around trigger warnings and safe spaces on campuses very nicely here: https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/…/the-false-dichotomy-…/

Anyway, what the fuck has Fry got to complain about re: free speech? Seriously. What the fuck?
As an aside, the Rubin Report really is satan's diarrhoeal cesspit.

Also, have you noticed that these free-speech warriors are very often highly inconsistent? For example, if you put too many left-wing people on Q and A, you're immediately in big trouble. Free speech is out the window. Free speech was out the window for Zaky Mallah on that same program. If you criticise the Liberal government, free speech is out the window. If you make some unpatriotic, ill-judged comments on Anzac Day (I think Mcintyre mischaracterised the nature of the Anzac Day ceremonies, incidentally, confusing them with the displays of our politicians), free speech is out the window And let us not forget the apoplectic rage that someone like Noam Chomsky induces to these supposed defenders of free-speech. Do they want him to have a voice on our mainstream media? Hell no!
This strongly suggests to me that a lot of these people don't actually value free speech at all; what they value is noisy speech for people with their own views. And, yes, I admit that I would also like it if people with my own views were the noisiest, but when they're not (which is all the time), I don't complain that free speech is being violated!

An Essay called "Anarchism as Popperian Conservatism"

Anarchism as Popperian Conservatism

Consider a political doctrine that combines Popperian (literal) conservative ideas with anarchist theory. Let's call it (Popperian) conservative anarchism. It sounds like a paradoxical position, doesn't it? But if you think about it, it's actually quite a rational ideology. Here follows the logic. 

Take as the starting point the clear fact that pre-neoliberal, Western constitutional parliamentary (capitalist) "liberal democracy" was the most just and liberal governing system for a complex society that us humans have yet been able to develop and sustain (essentially Popper's view). Now imagine that you were around in 1975, when the Trilateral Commission Report was written, and the American corporate, financial and intellectual elites starting to worry about the "crisis of democracy", and beginning to 'plan' (word used in high-level abstract sense to, as it were, 'range over' multiple actors, not implying teleology or conspiracy) to rewrite the rules back in their favour. What would be the best way of stopping the moneyed elites and capitalists from wrecking the system, and helping to get installed as President a few years later one of the most destructive, murderous and evil men to have ever walked this earth – Ronald Reagan? 

The same question can be posed in the context of England at that time: what would have been the best way to stop Margaret Thatcher being elected, and thereafter crushing the unions, privatising England's major state assets, slashing taxes for the wealthy, and deregulating the financial markets? 

It seems to me that one of the best answers is: adopting the position of an anarchist or socialist, trying to organise as part of anarchist organisations, and proselytising an anarchist gospel as widely as possible, so as to foster widespread opposition to the concentrations of state and corporate/financial power, and thereby (through protests and the like) placing major pressure on the elites to perpetuate the more equitable, social democratic society.

The thing that Popper missed, I think, is this: all forms of capitalism are inherently unstable in their own way, and the state capitalist social democratic system that characterised the Golden Age was the result of a very delicate balance of popular pressures for democracy (+ the pressure of domestic capital to keep fairly strong domestic, industrial policy) and elite, capitalist-internationalist, financial pressures to just fuck it all up – deregulate, drop capital controls, slash taxes, privatise everything, corporatise everything etc. It was in the late 70s (though many/most contemporary writers on recent economic history put the beginning of the "second phase" of post-war industrial capitalism at Bretton Woods) that this second group of pressures suddenly, cataclysmically triumphed, and thereby began the long process of increasing inequality and massive financialisation which would drastically reduce the amount of real democracy in the West (as Chomsky says, "Inequality is, by its very nature, corrosive to democracy" (empirical validation of this can be found in the work of Thomas Ferguson)). Once you have one increase in inequality, of course, this then creates vicious cycle, because a bigger disparity between rich and power makes it easier for the elites to maintain and strengthen their power through buying elections, regulatory capture, corporate-media propaganda and even the education system. 

In more general terms, what Popper failed to realise is that a strong social democratic system requires that the populace constantly push back against elite powergrabs and attempts at wrecking democracy. That is to say, it requires a constant tug-of-war.
Ultimately, this huge oversight Popper means Popper's political philosophy cannot deal with the following meta-problem (more precisely, meta-collective action problem):
Say lots of people accept Popper's argument: because of their historically unprecedented checks and balances on tyranny, war and chaos – because of their unprecedented capacity to prevent reckless rulers from doing truly major damage – the majority of the population (or even just a large chunk of the population) takes a more Popperian-conservative (literal conservative) view on Western parliamentary democracies. They all say, "Western parliamentary democracy, though imperfect, is the best system us humans have been able to develop and now that we are in one, all we should do is aim for piecemeal change -- after all, history tells us that rapid change and revolutions are highly risky, and things are better than they've ever been." The great irony is that we're now suddenly in trouble. If the populace stops applying democratic pressure on the capitalists (if people stop protesting, and the population starts voting increasingly for the

Tories/Conservatives/Republicans or favouring Right Labour/Labor/Democrat members) – the wealthy elites, the CEOs, the Wall St kings, etc – suddenly have much more freedom to move, buying elections, causing deregulation, tax slashing, privatisation (neoliberal policies).
That's why (Popperian) conservative anarchism is a serious position. We should organise as far leftists, socialists and anarchists – spread radical ideology, try to convince people to protest and stand up to power – not because we are idealists, but because we are conservatives. Because we love the paltry freedoms we have now, and we don't want to see them lost.