Category Archives: conceptual analysis

Tax Day Special: Tea Partiers, et al, and the conceptual poverty of “lower taxes”

Posted on April 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

(Also see this video, which is more to the target demographic.)

* * *

Among Tea Party types, “lower taxes” is a hallmark demand. I would call this a unifying thread, but that would falsely suggest there is much more to many of the participants; often, “lower taxes” is about it. There is of course “reduced spending,” but this marks a difference which makes no difference. And there is a reason Tea Baggers choose Tax Day to protest spending (and immigration, and Muslims, and all the rest).

Bad history from the getup

“Tea Party,” then, is probably a misnomer. At bottom the Boston Tea Party had little to do with “high taxes.” First, it was as much a protest against tax relief against taxation of any kind. The colonists were aggrieved that King George had granted his tea-merchant cohorts a tax exemption—a tax cut, if you will, recalling our own would-be King George of late—among other favors having nothing to do with taxation at all. Second, the revolt couldn’t have been about “high taxes” because the colonists’ taxes weren’t high.

British citizens in the homeland were being taxed up to fifty times what the colonists were, to artificially fund the lifestyles of the latter. Of course, the colonists were upset about the ”without representation” part of being taxed. But the Tea Bag folks are represented—at least, in the sense that the colonists were on about.

The incoherence of “lower taxes”

It is fair to ask: But what’s in a name? We must look at the substance of the protest.

With other conservatives, Tea Baggers are notoriously poor at naming just what they would cut from the federal budget (i.e., just which “taxes” they would “lower.”) But their demand means absolutely nothing without this content. The failure to specify becomes worse when you consider that they intend “lower taxes” as a virtue, a general recommendation: It is not just low taxes for this or that budget, but for budgeting; thus, the details can’t be spelled out in advance. I argue that this abstractness makes the “lower taxes” mantra worse than incomplete; it is incoherent.

* * *

Bear with me. I could see if somebody wanted no taxes whatsoever. This isn’t my position, but it is clear and coherent.

Likewise, I could see if they wanted taxes to fund only certain things and not others. This would not be so far from the first position; instead of “no taxes for anything,” it would be “no taxes for this thing.” Again, this is clear and coherent. And formally speaking, this does describe the Tea Bag position; for instance, they want taxes for defense, but not for (certain) health care.

But then, why their focus on “lower,” plain and simple? I mean, lower for health care, OK; but then what for defense, and all the other things they want to tax for? Once they drop the health care budget, can we, say, jack up every other region of taxable spending by more than the “liberals” ever dreamed of paying for health care alone?—Or jointly depress them to less than health care was before the drop?

I just don’t know what to do with “lower taxes.” It gives us only slightly more direction on budgeting a nation as “no live tigers” gives us on decorating a home.

Economic versus moral arguments for “lower taxes”

There is more than one kind of argument against (high) taxation emerging from this camp. Some ground the position in rights and justice—people have a right not to be taxed, or a right to their taxable income. Here, however, I’m interested in a different argument: The idea that taxation should be kept low so that people can “keep more of their money in their pockets.”

This is the argument you hear first and oftenest from Tea Party types. And one expects that; these “bread and butter” concerns (or “materialist” ones, for the Marxists present) are, I think, a necessary condition for mobilizing large groups of people in protest. Sure, there will always be some who march and shout on bare principle; but I imagine if Obama pounded through a bill that raised everyone’s taxes by 5%, but raised their wages by 200%, the “Tea Parties” would dry up post-haste, “principles” clunking in tow.

Yes: In theory, taxes could contribute to, even create, financial insecurity for taxpayers. But just how does “needing more money” relate to “lower taxes”? I mean, if the issue is simply “having,” why make a fetish of “keeping my money” versus “making more in the first place”? For an increase in either will result in an increase in “having.” In theory, TP’ers could talk about taxes, or wages, or both—right?

What’s more, “earning” or “making” occupies a kind of intuitive, quasi-logical priority over ”keeping”: To use an analogy, if I am a farmer who is vastly underproducing her crops, I am probably not going to focus the bulk of my complaints on the carrots the rabbits steal after the harvest. My point is, unless the issue is pure, distinterested procedural justice, bitching about taxes only makes sense if you are getting “enough” in the very first place.

Why the real problem is (and must always be) wages

Some considerations

It is true that, by some measures, the tax burden for most non-wealthy sorts has increased over the last, say, thirty years. (I don’t intend to argue that here.) But other facts suggest that the economic problems affecting most rank-and-file Tea Baggers (and other lower and middle earners) are due primarily to wage and benefit deficits, rather than taxes taken out after the fact:

(1) During the same 30-year period, consumption levels have been maintained by this group only because of an explosion in consumer debt. In turn, this reflects a decrease in real wages across the same period.

(This, in relative and absolute senses, e.g., the share going to low and middle earners, as well as the per- dollar spending power of this share.)

(2) This decrease in real wages has outpaced any rise in taxes.

And most importantly,

(3) The gap between the value of what this group of wage earners produce at their jobs, and what they are paid for it, is far greater than the gap between what they make and what they would make if they kept what is presently taxed.

(Note: Any alternative to this (3)-scenario—that is, any reversal in the relative sizes of the two “gaps” in question—is utterly unthinkable. The net worth of the entire working class is less than the dollar-value of their collective alienated production; long before they could be taxed enough to rival the latter, they would run out of money, stop buying the products they make, and the economy collapse.)

A “tax relief dividend” versus a “productivity dividend”

To illustrate the enormous import of this last point, consider economist Juliet Schor’s observation that “since the 1970’s, labor productivity has roughly doubled.” This means that today, we can reproduce a 1970s standard of living (measured in ”marketed goods and services”) in half the time it took then.

Schor’s main emphasis is on the extra free time this could mean for workers. But the productivity dividend can be viewed in ‘material’ terms as well. It means, conversely, that across the period in question, we could have doubled the standard of living for each worker without increasing the work day. Needless to say, recalling point (1), nothing even close to this has happened. The dividend has been reinvested back into the productive apparatus itself (and luxury consumption for the capitalists) rather than the pockets of workers.

Clearly, there is simply no way any parallel “tax relief dividend” could compete with this “productivity dividend.” The added standard of living which could have accrued if workers kept everything they earned since the 70s comes nowhere close to what they could have earned in the first place.

All of which suggests that the employer class, rather than the state, is the proper primary target when it comes to materialist grievances.

***

A possible Tea Party response is to say that the state is a fairer target than the owning class. The state is “unjust” in (over)taxing, as it lacks any claim to the contested funds in the first place. Employers, on the other hand, have property rights to the productive yield; while it might be nice if they gave workers more, they are not under the same moral obligation as the state. As employees, we are only in a position to ask; as citizens, we can make demands.

This moves us from the economic-materialist realm of argument to a moral, rights-and-justice based one. Though we’ve focused on the former, most Tea Partiers will in reality appeal to both. But this dual approach suggests an incoherence of its own.

Appealing to rights at this point seems to invalidate the ‘material’ complaint we began with—and the same could be said of most formulations (or formulators) of “laissez-faire.” They are asking us to believe: “Yes, it is morally wrong to violate property rights in order to enhance human welfare; and it would remain so even if heaven fell blazing to earth as a result of maintaining this principle. (For how could a mere want override a right?) But hey, whew, wonder of wonders: Gratefully, it only so happens that respecting these rights is the best way to maximize human welfare anyway! (If it weren’t, though, we’d still have to bite the bullet and respect them.”)

(I for one find this counterintuitive in the highest. I mean, holy shit, what are the chances?)

Final thoughts

A scalpel not a cave-club

What a person “has” is determined by a complex of earnings, benefits, expenditures, taxes, waste, and so forth. Each of these could be sub-typed as you wish; there are different sorts of earnings, expenditures, etc. Opposing “high taxes” amounts to arbitrarily opposing a certain “type” of expenditure rather than the net, balanced outcome of credits-versus-debits. This approach is like that of someone who had gotten lost by making a wrong left turn, and so began opposing all left turns, rather than just working to combine left and right turns in such a pattern as to best get from A to B. It is not so much left turns, but the specific “mixture” of left and right turns which gets one lost (or indeed, which gets one to her destination when the journey is a success).

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Posted in american politics, conceptual analysis, economics

Two riffs on homophobia

Posted on February 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

(1) “Enlightened homophobia” and straight privilege

Everyone has heard some version of, “I don’t mind gays so long as they don’t bother me.” This is somewhat like saying, “I don’t mind grocery clerks so long as they don’t throw canned goods at me when I enter the store.” Even if the statement were acceptable on its own, the fact that one would bother making it at all calls even his qualified acceptance of grocery workers into question. The fact that he isn’t saying it about other groups of workers assumes some special propensity on the part of these groups to misbehave.

What these vaguely enlightened types mean by “gays bothering them” is most often: approaching them romantically, making out in front of their children, etc. Once we plug in this variable, the comparison to grocery store workers is less apt. Of course we blame grocery workers for hurling stock at patrons; but on what grounds do we blame, say, gay men for approaching straight men? (I target straight men here because they are the demographic from which the argument tend to emerge.) Why must gay men bear the burden of making absolutely 100% sure in advance that whomever they are approaching is receptive to the approach? It is quite possible that the target of a cold straight approach could be a lesbian; yet straight men hold themselves to no such standard. (And holding different social groups to different standards is, in a word, discrimination.)

And why limit mandatory advance knowledge to knowledge of sexual orientation? When I equated matching orientation with “receptivity,” this was a pretty cavalier simplifying device. Any number of straight women are unreceptive to any number of straight men, too; and sexual orientation is just one of many factors that would make them so. Men concerned to “not bother” an unreceptive woman would have to deal with this entire catalogue. The whole enterprise of flirtation would be fatally hampered by an attempt to obtain all the requisite information beforehand. A clinical demographic survey is quite the turn-off for an opener.

Nor would it be enough; receptivity to a romantic approach is at least in part determined by how the approach itself goes, and thus logically cannot be determined in advance no matter what “facts” we know about the parties. (My wife and I are damned compatible, but we’d never have gotten off the ground if on our first meeting I’d shat my pants and addressed her only through a ventriloquist’s dummy.) We simply cannot know if we are open until we see a bit more of what we are opening ourselves to.

(2) The “incomprehensibility argument” against homosexuality

Years ago, I thought I had heard a certain “argument” against homosexuality. It was so absurd that in time, I figured this was misremembering. But sure enough, I heard it again a few times lately. This prompted some light internet research which yielded many more references (including this recent invocation by Mike Huckabee). I talked to some of my coworkers about gay marriage and it was the first thing two of them said about it.

One might call this the “incomprehensibility” argument—insofar as it can be called an argument at all. It consists entirely in the homophobe’s sheer inability to understand why, for instance, a man would want to be with another man. (I hear this argument from both sexes, but mostly of gay men.) It is not entirely clear what this even means. This can’t be like not “understanding” a math problem or a foreign language. It is some kind of failure to “project,” to imagine or picture oneself in the position of having this attraction—and of course the conclusion that the attraction must then be wrong.

So much can be said here. Is the homophobe saying, because he can’t imagine these feelings, he doubts that gay men actually have them for one another? Surely not. But then, if it is true that someone can “imagine” this, the argument wouldn’t apply to those persons’ behavior, right? Homosexuality wouldn’t be wrong for them. Surely it is not the case that, if not everyone is gay, then no one can be. The strongest mandate the logic permits is: Don’t be gay if you can’t imagine what it is like. (And I imagine you wouldn’t if you can’t.)

By the same token, the homophobe can’t “understand” so many other things—why his friends enjoy cigarettes, or Indian food, and soforth. There are even straight sexual acts, no less—some underworld kink, if nothing else—which he doesn’t “get.” This is, I think, almost exactly what it means to have different interests; and everyone’s interests differ at least somewhat from everyone else’s. In such cases, we don’t work up our lack of imaginative projection into a norm against these activities. Another’s interests could be wrong, yes, but we demand other kinds of evidence to make the case. Nobody says, “I don’t get 70’s music, so it is immoral.” And nobody would listen if they did.

Conversely, many homosexuals will fail to “get” the homophobe’s attraction to women. They can’t imagine themselves wanting that. Should it not follow that the homophobe’s orientation is also wrong? For him to maintain that his own lack of understanding “counts” here, and the homosexuals’ does not, simply begs the question: His argument is supposed to show that homosexuality is spurious; that same argument cannot simply assume that conclusion when it gets in trouble.

Finally—and I consider this the kicker—even the most rabid gay-basher already accepts sexual ‘orientations’ he doesn’t “understand”: He is no more able to “picture” his wife’s or lover’s attraction for men, or for him in particular. He (we’ll assume) is not turned on to look at himself in the mirror, or at other men. But this inability does not lead him to doubt the reality nor the moral legitimacy of his lover’s attraction to him, or to males. He cannot have it both ways; if the “incomprehensibility argument” is rational, then, his lover’s behavior is not.

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What would it mean to “preserve the white race”?

Posted on August 22, 2010 | Leave a comment

[Parts I and II here. Part III later.]

This past weekend the white power people came to town. This has prompted me to get a handle on what makes these assholes tick.

Part I

“White power” has any number of meanings, not all of them compatible. There is white supremacy, white nationalism/separatism, “mere” white pride, and so forth. The most basic corollary can be termed “white preservation” (WP). The brief 14 Words manifesto (probably the one thing every white power group agrees on) begins, “We must secure the existence of our people….” In a debate with Tim Wise, WP advocate Jared Taylor expresses the fear that “…whites, who are perhaps 7% of the population of the world now, will disappear in a flood of miscegenation; is that what you would like to see happen?”

WP means ensuring the conditions for whites to reproduce into the future. It is the tenet upon which all the others depend; if it fails, so do the rest. (No whites, no “white-anything.”) This makes it a natural starting point for examining white power “theory.”

Who is it being preserved for?

It is obvious that white preservationists (WPs) view WP not as a nice thing to have happen, but a mandate. That is, the numerical decrease in the white population (real or perceived, present or pending, by human or natural causes) is something “happening to them,” a bad circumstance that warrants self-defense.

The difficulty rests in trying to locate a victim in this process. Just who is it happening (or would it happen) to? Suppose that multiculturalism, immigration, and miscegenation actually brought about the “extinction” of the white race. Just who is harmed by this? The fear is not that whites are directly endangered, being “killed off.” (If anyone claims this, they’re crazy.) So whites’ “preserving themselves” cannot mean “saving we particular here-now individuals from death.” It could only mean “ensuring future white generations.” Fine, but in what sense is this a self-defense?—as “the existence of our people” would suggest. How would ensuring future whites serve the self-interests of present-day whites? To say “both groups are white” only begs the question; the whole issue is why the fact that they are both white makes them “ourselves.”

The seduction of grammar

WPs speak in terms of a “loss” that they themselves “suffer.” “Whiteness” is a quantity they have, and must hold onto. The whites of today must preserve their whiteness. Indeed, they could speak no other way; a self-defensive imperative always takes this form. This way of speaking is inspired, or reinforced, by the formal structures of language: Grammatically, “whiteness,” like “being married,” is a transient property, one which can be lost and gained by the self-same underlying subject. But WPs seem to have forgotten that it isn’t transient in real life; unlike marriage, if you ever had “whiteness,” you still do, and vice-versa.

Thus, to say that whites have failed to preserve, have “lost their” whiteness must really mean: Some whites died; and later, some non-whites were born. This describes two distinct events, with two corresponding subjects. The first event in no sense “happens to” the second subject. Indeed, if the relevant event is “the extinction of the white race,” it didn’t “happen to” the first group either! (An individual can’t “go extinct”—any more than running out of jellybeans means this particular jellybean ran out.)

Indeed, a numerical decrease is the very sort of thing that “happens to” no one in particular. For whites to suffer a “loss of whiteness” just means that there are no whites left to suffer any kind of loss at all. What “they” have “lost” is precisely their status as a “they.” (And if there is no “they” to be harmed, then, from a self-defensive point of view, there is no harm.)

* * *

In conclusion: The “extinct” whites can hardly be victims of “extinction”; they simply died out naturally, as they would have without any process of “white loss.” Their position is precisely the same either way. The only possible victims are the future survivors of this “tragedy.” But this is a miscegenated future; the survivors are (at best) biracial. The implicit logic of WP would have us view these persons as “potential” or “supposed-to-be” whites who missed out on “their” whiteness. One imagines them sitting and lamenting to themselves: “We” have been robbed of “our” proper racial inheritance. The absurdity is (hopefully) manifest.

I conclude the “self-defense” argument for WP is simply incoherent.

Part II

Arguments from analogy: ”But we preserve so many other things”

At times, WPs set aside the negative consequences of failing to preserve the race (i.e., those “harms” to be “defended against”) in favor of the positive virtues of preservation. One argument is that those features associated with whites—say, “white culture” or Caucasian physical anthropology—are unique and valuable, and thus should, all things being equal, be kept around. (For now, we set aside questions as to whether a “white culture” exists, and is preservable by moral means.)

For example, an alternate 14 Words with wide currency in white power circles demands, “Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.” This aesthetic sentiment is matched by those which exploit the discourse of multiculturalism. These are typically heard at those “cultural celebrations” held by WP groups, e.g. Irish, Scottish, or Southern (US) “heritage events”: “If they (Mexicans, etc.) can celebrate (promote, “preserve”) their culture, why can’t we?”

Notwithstanding the near coextension of ‘those who make these statements’ with ‘racist whites,’ by themselves the statements are not necessarily noxious. That is, to say they often indicate racist beliefs is not to say they are themselves racist (any more than a weather vane is a southerly wind). And the analogy of whites to other groups holds a surface plausibility; every culture has folkways, coping mechanisms and other specialized knowledge borne of a particular social housing, which in principle can inspire, enrich, entertain, or aid anyone.

A more advanced argument from analogy is heard as well: Parsing the words alone, the concept “white preservation” seems to resemble other kinds of morally benign “preservations.” Consider the ecological impulse to “preserve” endangered species. By this I do not mean the desire to preserve as a means to some end “beyond” the species (or beyond biodiversity) itself, e.g. ecosystem balance. Nor do I intend anything having to do with protecting species members from pain and harm per se. Rather, I mean the “moral” impulse to save a biological group for its own worth.)

The idea is that each animal group contributes a unique layer of novelty and interest to the world, and this is (all things being equal) a value to be preserved. For instance, we wish to “save the Great Apes” because apes are beautiful, interesting, and so forth; that is, a world in which apes exist is a more interesting, beautiful, etc. world than one in which they are absent.) In short, if a species is worth saving, why not a race? (This could even rescue the earlier “self-defense” argument: If neither extinct whites nor the miscegenated generations of the future would be harmed by white extinction, maybe it is the whole group of survivors, of all racial complexions, that are harmed in being denied that cultural or aesthetic inheritance associated with whites.)

When it “doesn’t” it doesn’t matter whether it “can’t”

Even if this argument can be defended, it is not clear it can be defended from a white power perspective. The WP project as we know it is not simply concerned to endow a unique value to the world. If it were, we could expect to hear from WPs—in parallel with other “multicultural” affections—that WP will benefit and enrich other racial groups. Indeed, one could expect other racial groups themselves to make these arguments alongside the WPs.

The WPs attribute their exclusion from the multicultural catalogue to anti-white discrimination; but this hardly explains why they welcome and foster the “exclusivity” themselves: Whatever benefit they believe “white culture” has conferred upon the world, this benefaction forms no part of their motivation. They don’t give a damn about how this legacy benefits non-whites. (In fact, they probably resent it.)

The point (here) is not whether this racial exclusivity is wrong or right. The point is that it cannot be deduced from the bare preservationist impulse—any more than an impulse to “save the whales” for their beautiful songs and mating rituals implies that whalewatch trips and aquariums should be limited to white patronage. Such delimitations must be “grafted on” from outside, and their merits independently argued.

I don’t doubt that the disanalogies between WP and ecological-preservationism (EP) reflect something sinister; to the extent the WPs use the “us too” argument, it is disingenuous, a mere tactic, a wedge issue to make palatable some other agenda. For present purposes, though, the disanalogy just means: We cannot take the benign character of EP as support for the benign character of WP—as the white power folks actually conceive it. (More on the “multicultural” comparisons in the concluding Part III, soon to come.)

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Posted in american politics, conceptual analysis, ethics, gay/LGBT, immigration, race/racism

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Murfreesboro Mosque redux: More proof this is about bigotry and not security

Posted on July 17, 2010 | 2 Comments

Those protesting the mosque plan like to claim they are merely “investigating” the Muslims for security purposes—given the reality of Muslim terror, the war, etc.: “We don’t hate anyone, we just want some answers first; we aren’t saying the mosque can’t be built, we just don’t like that the legal process to determine this was shunted.’

In my last post, I argued that the generally negative tenor of the protest contradicted this claim. Let me add to my earlier examples.

Consider the presence of Israeli flags at the rally. First, Israelis and Muslims probably shouldn’t be viewed as natural “sides,” whereby in supporting one, you automatically go against the other; for there is a third option in the interests of both. But that isn’t the point. The point is that the protester who waves this flag clearly intends it to antagonize neighboring Muslims.

I don’t have a problem with “negative tenor” in principle. I’m not calling for “civility” in political action; that is a tactical, not a moral question. I’m all for antagonizing “the enemy.”

But that’s the problem: Antagonizing local Muslims only makes sense if they are the enemy, when the whole point of “investigating” was to determine that very question. Waving the Israeli flag means the “investigation” is complete in the minds of the wavers.

In fairness, fearing all Muslims isn’t enough to make you a bigot—if all Muslims are in fact dangerous. In that case, your “prejudice” just happens to be an astute observation. (The same logic applies in the saying, “it ain’t really braggin’ if you got it.”)

Obviously, it is empirically false that all Muslims are dangerous. But we don’t even need to prove that because the protesters don’t deny it—at least, not openly. They will each acknowledge that there are, or could be, some peaceful Muslims in the world. They just don’t like the “bad ones.”

But here’s where they slip up. As soon as you admit the possibility that a Muslim, some Muslim, could be un-dangerous, the question emerges: What makes these Muslims dangerous? What specifically are they doing that those “good ones” aren’t?

The protesters can’t answer this question because there isn’t an answer. The Murfreesboro congregants haven’t done anything to warrant being taunted with Israeli flags, etc., besides be Muslim. Logically, any other Muslim in their position “would do”—would warrant the same level of antagonism. The antagonism precedes and is detached from a determination of “danger.”

So the protesters’ claim to “respect all faiths” is bullshit. This is about opposing Islam because it is Islam. This is religious persecution, by definition. Either (a) the protesters are lying about not believing all Muslims are “bad,” or (b) they are prepared to mistreat a Muslim whether they think them to be “bad” or not. There are no other options.

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Posted in conceptual analysis, ethics, Islam, race/racism, religion, war on terror

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Homophobic gospel gets back to “nature” (revised)

Posted on July 12, 2010 | Leave a comment

[I discovered this video on Joshua Stewart's fb. Thanks, man!]

This song is meant to be humorous, but not merely so. People really do make this kind of argument all the time: “You don’t see animals mating with the same sex.” (Ergo, it would be “unnatural” for us to do so.)

One problem is the premise is wrong; the same broad spectrum of sexuality—going from strict heterosexuality, to all permutations of bisexuality, to strict homosexuality—is found in the animal and human kingdoms alike. Using “nature” as our standard, then, does not tell us which segment of nature to mimic—whether “the farm,” as the song says, or maybe the Congolese forests where the pan-sexual bonobo ape dwells. Simply put, “nature” supplies no unambiguous prescription for human behavior. Anything we pick is arbitrary. (If we go for genetic similarity, the bonobo beats the chicken by a long shot.)

[Update: Homosexuality has been documented in chickens! You can "see two roosters walking hand in hand!" See this book, page 83.]

A more pressing problem is what impersonating animals should have to do with ethical behavior anyhow. Act like chicken, they are telling us? Who came up with this shit? The most the Mystery Men (and other homophobes) give us is is the argument that homosexual sex is “unnatural” because it can’t produce offspring:

Two mares can’t make a stallion/And two bulls can’t make a cow/It takes a male and female for the species to go on/[T]here’ll be no reproduction if the plumbing is all wrong

First, it isn’t clear what the farm analogy illuminates here; they may as well have said, “It takes a male and female human for the species to go on.” But no matter.

I can only repeat: Why is non-reproductive sex “unnatural”? The vast uncountable majority of elective human activities (e.g., baseball, fishing, shopping) are non-reproductive; if we can accept these as “natural,” despite this limitation, why do we balk at sexual behavior that lacks a reproductive component? (And do we oppose all the heterosexual sex that is non-reproductive?–Oral sex? Contraception? If the lead singer’s wife became sterile, would they be wrong to keep sleeping together?)

Even if we assume a moral imperative to ensure the “species to go on,” the world’s millions of homosexuals have yet to threaten population growth; and it is unlikely everyone will become homosexual. (Even if they do, this is unlikely to knock off the species; plenty of homosexuals have biological children, who in turn have children, etc.)

This whole business of using “natural” as a normative term—as in, “natural” behavior is good, and “unnatural” behavior is wrong—is screwy. Humans are every bit as “natural” as animals. (What else could we be—supernatural?) Homosexuality could be dead fucking wrong, but it would be as “natural” as any other orientation. Indeed, there is no conceivable human behavior which isn’t “natural.” It makes as much sense to judge animal behavior by our own as the reverse.

Finally, if we can’t be homosexual because chickens aren’t, then we can’t be monogamous, much less get married, because chickens don’t do that either. (Roosters mate with as many as 20 hens at once.) Much less do they wear clothes, build hospitals, or sing gospel music. On the other hand, there is no vile thing which some animals do not routinely do to others, or to each other. (The term “pecking order” is inspired by the propensity of chickens to bite and stab weaker specimens.) If we get our morals from this realm, we are subject to become rapists, baby-killers, and cannibals.[1]

* * *

If you want religious music in a country vein, try this instead (hats off to Eric Fields for turning me on to this):

* * *

Notes

[1] By animals doing “vile things” I mean “things which would be vile if a human did them to another human.” I am not sure it is “vile” when animals do it.

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The worst argument against reparations for slavery (and a qualification on arguments in its favor)

Posted on March 10, 2010 | 2 Comments

It is argued that contemporary whites—the ostensible “reparators” for black slavery—were “not there,” didn’t hold or trade slaves or otherwise commit the associated wrongs, thus it would be unjust to hold them accountable for another’s crimes.

The argument fails in supposing the only way to be responsible for something is to be “at fault.” Human experience is replete with counterexamples: There is, for one, a sense that a parent should pay when his child’s baseball breaks a window. One could, of course, answer that this “responsibility” amounts to merely a useful legal fiction, just a scheme for ensuring windows get paid for in view of the likelihood that the average child is penniless. But a person of this view shouldn’t be opposed to some other arbitrary scheme, whereby, say, the victim of the broken window, or the nearest adult to his left, or sharing his initials or taste is television comedies, is legally responsible for the window. Instead, we have some sense that the legal arrangement reflects, or ratifies, some real, underlying norm that would remain in effect with or without the law’s recognition.

There is the further sense that a person can be responsible when nobody is at fault: The baseball player might not have been able to prevent the ball from hitting the glass. Maybe no one could have. The child remains “at fault” in some sense—a causal and (again) legal one—but not in the moral sense invoked by those opponents of reparations. Strictly speaking, no real “fault” has occurred. But a responsibility remains.

Finally, there is the sense that persons sometimes have a responsibility to act in some way when sheer dumb luck places them between another person, or persons, and some undesirable outcome. An island castaway with survival skills may be morally responsible to step up and lead the group, whether or not he wishes to; and someone at an intersection of railroad crossings may be responsible to throw the switch that diverts the crosswise passenger trains from colliding. In such cases there is no implication that either person, or any person, is “at fault” for the shipwreck or the train mix up.

In these ways, the scope of moral responsibility exceeds the scope of “fault.” The reparations opponent must give us more.

* * *

But the problem runs deeper. For it is arguable that nobody is ever strictly “at fault” for anything at all—that is, that “fault” is a pretty sketchy concept in the end. The point is “philosophical” and like many such points, counterintuitive. (Thankfully, this doesn’t make it false.)

Common sense tells us that when we hold another responsible, the self at “fault” is the same entity as the self which committed the transgression; anything else would be unfair. However, as the Buddhists and process philosophers show, this identification cannot be made. Those things which give the self its character—that make it the self that it is—are in a state of restless change. One’s field of experience or mind-state alters from moment to moment.[1] It follows that a new self replaces its predecessor with each change. “Me” at time t is not the same as “me” at time t+1. I do not get sick; rather, a new, sick self succeeds a healthy one.[2] What common sense thinks of as the self—for example, what we call “John”—is an abstraction from the processive “chain” of one-instantaneous-John-after- another.[3]

Thus, it does no good to plead that modern whites “weren’t there” for slavery. Nobody who is ever responsible for anything “was there” either. Accountability is always “for another’s crimes.” The transgressing self, by metaphysical necessity, never sticks around long enough for sentencing.

It does not follow from this that nobody is ever responsible—any more than it follows from the common sense view that no parents are ever responsible for their children’s actions. (It does follow that our metaethics is due for a reconception.[4])

* * *

All the above being said, I suspect that reparations concedes too much to bourgeois procedural justice: Slavery stole something that belonged to black slaves, and contemporary blacks, as their ostensible heirs, are owed what was due them from the white heirs of slaveowners.[5] In my view, such things as “natural rights” to property (in one’s labor or anything else) simply don’t exist, and thinking of them as existing is one of many ideological girders of capitalism.

I do support a radical redistribution of wealth in favor of American blacks; I would support a distributional outcome which is more generous than what most reparations proponents envision. But I support this because blacks need it, not because their or their ancestors’ property rights were violated.

At the same time, I understand the strategic value of speaking to “power”—in this case, bourgeois power—in its own language, of demanding that it be consistent with its own rules, even if these rules are not our own. In this way, Marxists use the theory of worker exploitation to show that capitalism is unjust according to its own laws of “equal exchange.” However, while Marxists are quite open that the goal is not merely a more consistent system of “equal exchange,” I don’t see a parallel qualification emerging much from the reparations camp. This could be because that camp, unlike the Marxist one, includes bourgeois-minded persons—but still.

Finally, I am compelled to solidarize with those black comrades who are directly affected by the debate and who in my experience are largely wedded to the reparations framework. By no means am I prepared to break common cause with the program. But I have my ‘druthers.

* * *

[Postscript: I just read a transcript where Chris Matthews accuses Al Sharpton of “wanting us to pay reparations because we happen to be white.” This is like saying we wanted O.J. to go to jail because he happened to wear Bruno Magli shoes.]

Notes

[1] This is not to identify the self with a “field of experience” or “mind-state”; only to say that if these things change, so does the self.

[2] Even this simplifies, as both the healthy and the sick selves are composed respectively of many sick and healthy, momentary selves.

[3] Social intercourse is possible because each “John” closely resembles its predecessors; they are not “the same,” but are similar enough for identification in practice.

[4] At the least, holding people responsible becomes (or becomes consistently) a matter of managing behavior rather than punishment. It is about treating present selves in such a way that later selves are influenced in a certain direction. This could include treating them as if they are “at fault” for the behaviors of earlier ones; but this would be merely a corrective device, a useful fiction.

[5] Granted, there are other arguments for reparations. But these are either (a) less coherent; (b) reducible (I argue) to a bourgeois property rights schema in the end; or (c) simply not the ones I’m talking about here.

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Why god cannot be the ground of morals

Posted on April 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

[I admit there is nothing new below. Kai Neilsen made the same basic moves before me. But I think the synopsis is helpful. Also, I refer to god as ‘he’ because I’m a dumbass and a flake and can’t think of an elegant, non-sexist rendering.]

tencommandmentsNope.

A common objection to atheism is that, by removing god, one removes the “grounds” for morality. Without a divine legislator, humans are free to do and think whatever they want. Below, I attempt to show not only that (a) god is not needed to ground morals, but (b) he cannot be a ground for them.

God and morals: The wrong kind of atheist response

Atheists have been quick to respond that they are, in fact, no less moral than anyone else. And while I am loathe to equate “imprisoned” with “immoral,” I expect many theists do, so it may be relevant that the prison population boasts about the same percentage of declared atheists as the broader population.

Chris Hitchens gives an interesting twist on this defense. In The Portable Atheist, he issues a challenge to believers: “Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”

Hitchens’ point is that there is no logical reason why atheists could not behave just as theists. Assuming this is true, however, it probably doesn’t answer the theist’s main concerns: Supposing there is a divine legislator whose will provides the reason (and the only reason) for ethical behavior. Sure, atheists could make any statements and perform any actions they want all day long—just as theists could say and do unethical things, in spite of god’s commands. The point is that they could only do so inconsistently.[1]

The believer argues that, without a belief in god, there is no rational grounds for behaving morally; an atheist can do it, but he cannot justify it.[2]

Fleshing out the theist challenge

The heart of the theist’s worry is over arbitrariness in morals. Unless morals are imported from outside humanity, each human is left free to define the good for himself, or to dispose of moral categories altogether. To be able to say that some choices are wrong requires a collective “touchstone” or measure against which the choices can be evaluated. We can still argue about what is good or bad; but as C.S. Lewis pointed out, that we can argue at all presupposes there is some real standard, independent of the arguers, to be argued over.

But how does god solve this problem? For he is in precisely the same existential position as we, it seems. He has no “touchstone” outside himself. His choices are just as arbitrary. We would do no worse to elect one of our species to legislate—my uncle Ron, perhaps; his communications would be more direct, no doubt, and would avoid messy controversies about the legislator’s existence. If there are problems with “Lord Ron,” invoking god does not so much solve them as push them back one level.

Believers would respond—they would have to—that god is more than a useful place-holder, an expedient “tie-breaker” in moral disputes. He does not so much ‘pick’ the good as he (including his will) just is good. Only if we assume god is perfectly good—good completely and at all times—can we know that whatever actions he wills for us are good.

Two options for theists

Option 1: Morals by divine command

Still, how god’s will relates to the good is unclear. To paraphrase Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue: Is it good because god wills is, or does he will it because it is good?

On the one hand, we could simply define “good” as “whatever god wills.” Then we know for certain that god’s commands are good because “good” simply means “whatever god commands.” But this just thrusts us back upon the King Ron problem. It doesn’t solve the problem of arbitrariness in morals. God might have willed us to eat babies (he could change his mind and will this tomorrow) and it could not but be “good” to do so.

Some theists bite the bullet and accept this unattractive consequence—at least when asked. But it is unlikely they could ever embrace it in practice. Defining “good” as “what god wills” makes nonsense of much of what believers want to say about morality.

They can never, for example, speak of god’s having good (or any other) reasons for what he wills. It cannot be that in his wisdom god chooses this because it is good. This would imply he is referencing some standard of the good outside himself, which determines his choices—when we have already defined him as the sole standard.

Not to mention most theists (traditional Christians, for one) would be put off by the implication that an ‘almighty’ god should be “determined” or “limited” by some force outside himself in this way.

Likewise, every believer is taught that she always ought to do what god wills. (Certainly, the Bible demands this.) But this too becomes impossible. It invokes the same “outside standard” our definitions have forsworn. When “what we ought to do” and “what god wills” have the same meaning, the most one can say is “I ought to do what I ought to do,” or “god wills what god wills.” This bleeds our moral imperatives of substance, rendering them vacuously tautological.

Option 2: God as “substantially” but not logically good

Still, believers need to say that god’s commands are always good if they are to retain the idea that god is the ground of morals. They just need some non-tautological way of doing so. In short: We need to say that what god wills is always, necessarily good, but it is not good by definition. For lack of a better analogy, think of a dog which is not logically brown—dogs can be all kinds of colors, and this dog could have been another—but is still, in fact, always brown.

But this brings up a new epistemological quandary: How could we know god is perfectly good? There was no problem knowing he was good when we were simply defining him that way; we knew this in the same way we know unmarried males are always bachelors, or dogs (of whatever color) are always canines.

One could claim to know god is good because of direct acquaintance with him or his works. His goodness is known in the in the same way we know our a friend’s penchant for jokes or cooking style.[3]

But to know whether god is good requires a prior and independent understanding of the concept of goodness. We have to know what “good” means before we can look and see if god and his works exhibit this quality. His goodness is not just a cognition but a re-cognition.

This explodes the theist’s argument: If we can know what is good before knowing god, this knowledge cannot depend upon him. We cannot “get our morals from god” because we need the morals to know whether he is in any position to give them out.

Conclusion

While the “grounding” of morals is an interesting problem, it is a problem for both theists and atheists alike. Postulating divinity doesn’t get us closer to solving it. Even if there were a god, we would have to get a sense of right and wrong from a source outside him. Thus, the fact that we do possess a sense of right and wrong cannot be an argument for the existence of god.

Notes

[1] Hitchens’ approach exemplifies the problems I have with most of today’s “leading lights” (“brights”?) of atheism. They speak as though the only bad consequences theism could produce are observable: Religion fuels violence, divides people, slows progress on stem cell research, etc. This prejudice leads him to cast the ethical aspect of the debate as one of how we get people to do right stuff.

[2] The theists have a point: Living an authentically moral life requires more than the right behaviors. It requires having the right reasons behind them. Having good reasons is what makes moral actions moral in the first place: If I trip and accidentally cushion a baby’s fall from a balcony, I am hardly to be praised for his rescue. Indeed, I could have been on my way to throw a different baby off a different balcony; maybe I only tripped because I was wearing socks to better sneak into the apartment. Even if I meant to save the baby, but only in a crass bid for media exposure, it ceases to be a moral act. If, however, I place myself in the baby’s way deliberately, I’m a hero, and deserve all the praise I get. The behavior is the same; only the reasons distinguish them.

[3] There are other problems with knowing god’s goodness that exceed the scope of this piece. Note, god is not just good but perfectly good. It is unclear how one could be “acquainted” with any “perfect” quality. Maybe we can know god has been good up to now, but “perfect goodness” projects this quality of goodness into an infinite future—while our data is ever limited to the past and present. But this for another post.

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All wrong: A thematic review of Ben Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” part I

Posted on March 29, 2009 | 4 Comments

Part I: Darwin and the science of “social engineering”

This documentary film bears two central themes: First, as the title suggests, it charges that American professors are being punished for sympathizing openly with Intelligent Design theory (ID), a spruced up version of Creationism. Second, it wants to place some blame upon Darwinism for inspiring ugly historical movements like eugenics and the Holocaust. This critique is likewise placed within the context of an extended pro-ID argument.

This part of my review deals with the second theme.

ben-stein-airy-suggestibilistBen Stein: Airy suggestibilist

Wrong from the start: Stein’s fatal error

Eugenics is the effort to “fitten up” the human species by breeding the strongest members, while sterilizing or otherwise preventing reproduction by those deemed weaker. The Holocaust, of course, aimed at the same effect by killing off the weaker ones directly. (I refer to these efforts collectively as “social engineering.”)

Stein not at all specific as to why these sins should be laid at Darwin’s door—but more on that later. For now, one obvious problem with any attempt by ID advocates to blame Darwinism for “social engineering” is that the part of Darwinism that (allegedly) licenses these acts is the very part which ID theorists themselves accept.

Proponents of ID, including those interviewed by Stein (e.g. William Dembski), are fond of saying that Darwin’s mistake was misapplication. He started with a sound idea—natural selection—but simply tried to explain too much with it. All ID theorists accept that natural selection explains “microevolution,” or changes within the same species over time. But they deny that it explains the differences between species; that is, they disagree with “macroevolution” whereby one species evolves into a completely different one. It is at this line of speciation that ID folks part ways with Darwin.

Fair enough, let’s assume. But it is not any particular application of natural selection that inspires the “social engineers”—but rather, natural selection plain and simple. If Darwin’s theory, as Expelled contends, contains the “seeds of horror,” then so does the very ID theory the film endorses. I see this inconsistency as nothing less than fatal for the entire project.[1]

What precisely is the claim here?

But let us dig deeper.

Again, Stein never bothers to say just how Darwin is supposed to be connected to Nazism and eugenics. The film throws up a lot of insinuations and “feelings” on the matter, none of which are really explored.

For a few of the documentary’s claims:

* The eugenicists and Nazi architects were “inspired” by natural selection. But so what? Sometimes inspiration is “taken” rather than “given.” Thirty years ago, John Hinckley, Jr. was “inspired by” Jody Foster to shoot President Reagan. Foster was the inspiration, but her influence was completely passive, and completely excusable.

* Many leading Nazis, and almost all eugenicists, “were fanatical Darwinists.” Maybe, but they were mammals and Westerners and a lot of other things, too. Most all of them had noses,  I expect. Correlation is not causality.

* “The Nazis relied on…Darwin.” This is more specific but fares no better. For they also “relied on” bacteriology and neurology. A ton of real science was involved in the torture of and experimentation upon the “unfit.” (Hell, they relied on mundane things like trucks, wool and tinned meats, too.)

Of course, what Stein really means to say is that the Nazis claimed to be relying on Darwin. As such,

* Mein Kampf cites a “correspondence between” Darwinist ideas and Nazi ideas. But even if some ugly movements claimed to be Darwinist, it doesn’t follow that Darwinism is to blame for them. It is not enough that someone claim to be inspired by a belief to perform some horrible act; in order to blame the theory, it must be shown that it has not been misinterpreted. It must be shown that the perpetrators were correct to draw the inference.

* Darwinism is “a necessary condition” for the rise of Nazism (though not a sufficient one). This is more specific yet. But just as correlation is not causality, causality is not culpability. Perfectly benign entities such as oxygen, gravity, the nation-state, British and American citizens, and Jews, are “necessary conditions” for Nazism as we knew it. Of course, that doesn’t make those things bad. Hitler’s grandmother could have been a lovely human being, but she was a “necessary condition” for Hitler(ism).

* * *

So nothing like an argument is to be found above. The film leaves it unclear what the “engineers” thought was Darwinist about what they were doing, and what was in fact Darwinist about it. (This is compounded by the fact that when actual “social engineers” speak for themselves, they aren’t much clearer.) But perhaps we can stitch something together.

Helping Stein along

The breeding of human beings was an attempt to make humans more “fit” by purifying the gene pool of disease, deformity, stupidity, and so forth, on the assumption, of course, that these traits have a genetic basis.

If you look for “Darwiny” elements in this, I suppose you can find them. You could say that selective breeding of any kind is a “mimicking” of the natural selective processes Darwin codified. And granted, Darwin drew an analogy between natural selection and animal husbandry, to help readers understand the former on the basis of something with which they were already familiar. I suppose with some leap of the imagination you could read into this an analogy between human natural selection and human “husbandry.” But to suggest—even openly—an analogy between human evolution and human “breeding” is hardly to suggest that humans be bred. It is just to say the two processes are alike in some respect.

Also, why would the “engineers” think they had to artificially produce mechanisms that are already working naturally? If they were true Darwinists, wouldn’t they predict the unfit would simply die out on their own? A strict Darwinism, it would seem, would obviate the need for “engineering” altogether.

Stein hints at an answer: The film rolls a clip from a Nazi propaganda film in which the narrator argues, “We [Germans] have transgressed the law of natural selection in the last decades” by permitting inferior members of the species (ostensibly Jews, the disabled, etc.) to survive and reproduce.

The suggestion is that in “the wild,” these inferior beings would die sooner and reproduce less, and thus not threaten the gene pool significantly. But modern culture has interfered with these “natural” self-correcting processes. Now we coddle and tolerate inferiors. Modern medicine—corrective surgery, wheelchairs—compensates for what nature has denied them. And liberal politics have removed the competitive pressure for resources by universalizing access to health care, education, suffrage, etc. This means we will cease to evolve (and possibly “devolve”) unless we act the role of nature and remove these genes ourselves.

“Social engineering” doesn’t follow from Darwinism

I guess this is the link Stein wants to draw. But there is nothing authentically Darwinist about this story. Here are the main problems I see with trying to hang “social engineering” on the theory of natural selection:

(1) Darwinism offers a description of a natural mechanism. Even if that description is false, and natural selection doesn’t exist, it is unclear how any description alone could license specific human behavior. The claim that natural selection operates upon organisms in no way implies that we should operate in “the same” way, or engineer things to bring about “the same” effects that it would. Likewise, the theory that cancer causes mortality does not license us to mimic this effect by killing cancer patients.

Darwinist “fitness” is not a moral category; it is not “good” or “right”—it just is. Getting from “disabled animals naturally die out, enhancing fitness” to “we should kill disabled people to enhance our fitness” requires a moral link that is not found within Darwinism itself, but which must be imposed from the outside.

(2) There is no such concept as “fitness” per se. An organism is fit only in relation to a specific environment. Someone that is fit in one environment might not be fit in another. So it makes no sense to say that “unfit” humans are being artificially kept alive in a modern environment; this can only mean that the modern environment—with wheelchairs, welfare, etc.—has now made them fit. Similarly, a person with 20/200 vision might be unfit in a hunter-gatherer tribal environment, but is no longer so in an environment with eyeglass technology. The new environment simply does not select these persons as unfit.[2]

Once more, anyone wishing to rectify our “transgression of natural selection” is not only wrong but reaching beyond the clear bounds of what is authentically Darwinist.

(3) Even if Darwinism did license killing “the unfit” among us, who says that the targets of the Holocaust and eugenics are “naturally” less fit than anyone else? The social engineers had crazy ideas about what constituted fitness. For example, eugenics was driven by unscientific, “Dickensian” ideas correlating poverty with genetic-based human weakness and moral degeneracy. Likewise, the Nazis had poor theories about “blood purity” which deemed the Jews as less fit than others.

These theories are just false. It is simply not the case that poverty stems from “weak genes,” nor that without modern, liberal German amenities, the Jews would die “naturally” before reproducing. Nor do these views have any part in Darwinism; they had to be grafted on from outside.

(4) Assuming the effects of natural selection could be mimicked artificially, this would endorse social engineering only on the insane assumption that everything which can be done ought to be.

Still, putting aside the moral question, it is unclear that “mimicking” natural selection is even possible. Who knows whether our idea of fitness is the same one “nature” would select for, were its modern constraints removed? Even if they match, it is unclear that the goal of fitness can be achieved in a non-counterproductive way.

For instance, as virtually every evolutionary biologist believes (and Darwin seems to), empathy and altruism are themselves evolutionary adaptations. They have a useful social function, on which the reproductive success of the group depends. Mimicking natural selection would require abandoning these behaviors, risking our becoming less fit in the longer term. Trying for group fitness is probably a contradiction in terms.

Conclusion

Any attempt to link Darwin to the horrors of social engineering has to overlook that he explicitly and unambiguously argued against the practice himself. In The Descent of Man, Darwin strenuously condemns this on purely moral grounds. (The quote, with emphasis, and the analysis which follows, comes from this article in Scientific American.)

Darwin writes:

“The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”

As SA points out, Expelled shadily quotes the passage immediately preceding this one in Descent, alleging its support for social engineering. They ignore the one which contradicts that interpretation entirely—though Stein and the producers had to know of its existence.

[See part 2 of this review, and redux.]

Notes

[1] The most Expelled could contend is that both Darwin himself and the “social engineers” misapplied Darwin. Still, this lets Darwin off the hook for anything more than, again, the technical “paper error” of over-explanation. The moral error falls squarely on the heads of the social engineers.

[2] Behind the social engineering theory is an untenable (and un-Darwinian) nature-versus-culture dichotomy. The reason is makes no sense to say we blocked the action of “nature” is because “we” are as much a part of nature ourselves. Indeed, our action changes the environment, and thus the direction of selective pressures on ourselves, but this hardly makes it “unnatural.” All organisms do this very thing. We could change our behavior, and thus the direction of selection, but this wouldn’t be a return to behaving “naturally.” It would just be a different “natural” behavior than the old “natural” one.

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On the spurious idea of a nation’s “right to exist”

Posted on January 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

A bit about this whole “right to exist” that preoccupies Israeli political discourse:

Assuming any sense can be given to the concept of a “right” at all—it probably can’t; it certainly hasn’t—the origins of virtually any nation-state are so noxious, and so certain to have violated many hundreds of thousands of “rights” in the process of their establishment—that no state has the “right to exist.”

Of course, Israel and its defenders assume that to deny a “right to exist” is to endorse the dissolution of that the thing being denied. But this doesn’t follow. “Right” or not, the state of Israel does exist—and so do all the other states without the “rights” to do so. The question is not whether these entities have a right to exist, but whether it would be moral to dissolve them. Removing Israel as a national entity would be so reprehensible, cause so much pain and chaos—violate so many “rights,” if you like—that any such program would be immoral. The Israeli state—any state—should be suffered to exist not because it has the “right,” but because bringing about the alternative to its existence would be wrong.

For this reason, demanding that Hamas recognize Israel’s “right to exist” before any negotiations or concessions can proceed is unreasonable—because the concept is unreasonable. But even if it were reasonable—that is, even if Israel actually had a “right to exist”—it wouldn’t mean that a demand that others recognize that fact is reasonable. I mean, if Israel has a right to exist, it has many other things as well—say, lush hillsides. Should we demand that Hamas recognize Israel’s lush hillsides before anything can happen? Again, since a right to live in security, or defend itself, does not depend on any “right to exist,” we should no more care how a political party in a neighboring region feels about Israel’s “right to exist” than we should care how it likes its eggs in the morning.

Noam Chomsky’s analysis seems to me correct: An abstract “right to exist” is unique to the Israel-Palestine conflict; it isn’t talked about anywhere else in political science. It emerged in the 1970’s when the Arab states accepted Israel’s “right to live in peace with secure and recognized boundaries.” This, of course, is something all states are minimally granted—it’s more or less a part of the very definition of statehood.

When certain Israeli political elements sought to obstruct meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians, they elevated the standard from the usual “right to live in peace (etc.)” to this goofy “right to exist.” They knew that Palestinian negotiators would feel a “right to exist” would validate of the origins of Israel—the dispossession of Palestinian lands out of which Israel was carved. They knew this was too much for the Palestinians to swallow, and would buy Israel time to create new “facts on the ground”—namely, the settlements, which make negotiations, and concessions of land by Israel, even harder.

By analogy: Let’s say you have built a house on my land without my consent. I’ve fought you for years about it but now I realize what’s done is done. You have a house and it isn’t going away. I agree to let you “live in peace and security,” which is little more than to recognize you as, indeed, my neighbor. But as soon as I endorse your “right to” live there, I suggest that it was OK for you to have stolen the land in the first place. This is another matter entirely.

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For progressive taxation, or against being against it

Posted on November 11, 2008 | 5 Comments

[Revised 11-13-08 8:30 PM EST; forgot the last section]

Continuing the previous post, the arguments against (real) progressive taxation—taxing at a higher rate, the higher your income—rest on a number of misplaced confidences about the meanings of certain words, and some outright abuses of language.

1. The meaning of “more”: Math versus morals

First, there is the idea that one is “paying more” than other people if one is taxed at a higher rate than them. In absolute terms, this is true and hardly controversial; even if everyone were taxed at the same rate, whoever makes more would “pay more” than whoever makes less. But of course the complaint is about paying proportionately more. Again, it is trivially, mathematically true that progressive taxation taxes the wealthy proportionately more than lower earners; this is what “progressive taxation” means. Merely defining a concept is not the same as arguing against it. What is wrong with disproportionate taxation?—is the question.

Critics of progressive taxation could only be saying that, when you pay proportionately more than others, you are burdened more than they. Indeed, if we share moral values of equity and fairness, disproportionate burdening seems wrong. In general, loads should be shouldered as equally as possible; there is no obvious reason why the tax “load” should be different.

But “overburdening” does not describe our subject. It is arguable that paying a higher rate is less burdensome when you are left with many millions of dollars afterward. When you have more to begin with, giving “more” is simply easier. Bill Gates pays his federal rate and donates another huge chunk to charity. Is it reasonable to view him as “burdened” more than his poorer counterparts who pay a smaller percentage, but have to count every penny? The critic must give us more if he is to transform the purely mathematical “burden” into a real-life moral one.

2. Wealth is a privilege for which the state is largely to thank

There is the related criticism that being “taxed more” is a “punishment for being successful.” Again, this is a natural enough way to look at it, if you aren’t thinking hard. Warren Buffett used to say that he could never have become a billionaire in Bangladesh. And he could only be one in the U.S. due to a whole network of conditions not of his making, and for which the government is largely to thank.

As Mike Parenti writes:

“[G]overnment provides private industry with a publicly funded transportation infrastructure of airports, train depots, port facilities, canals, and harbors. And public capital is used to develop whole sectors of the economy, such as the airline industry, telecommunications, the nuclear industry, the Internet, and various medical and pharmaceutical products—which are then handed over to private corporations to market and reap the profits. Corporate America relies on government for the ample applications of force and violence needed to keep restive [foreign] populations in line. Various government agencies involved in surveillance, repression, incarceration and overall social control are well funded….Units of the national security state, the military, the CIA, FBI, DIA, and others, together devour the largest portion of the federal discretionary budget. Hundreds of state, county, and municipal police forces receive generous sums to hire additional officers and buy the latest state-of-the-art equipment, utilized less to fight crime—of which they usually do an indifferent job—and more to keep a tight lid on social unrest.”

Not that I agree with state repression, but the resultant stability certainly benefits the business class. At the least, maintaining a national guard and police force are uncontroversial ways in which the state makes business possible. Our capitalists don’t have to worry much about domestic riots, foreign occupation or expropriation of foreign holdings.

Parenti also notes the “whole basketful of handouts” given to the business class “from federal, state and local governments…[B]illions of dollars in start-up capital, research and development funding, equity capital, bailout aid, debt financing, low-interest loans, loan guarantees, export subsidies, tax credits, and other special favors.”

Even if Buffet himself never received these “handouts” (he did), and even if his own “sector” was never directly “developed” by the state, these subsidies enrich the whole economy, making his own wealth possible. (It is much easier to become a billionaire when such things as billionaires already exist; all the more when many of them exist.)

So far from a means to punish the wealthy for something they have accomplished, progressive taxation ensures that those who have benefited more from the tax-subsidized capitalist system—like that top 2.3% at the heart of the current debate—pay “more” back into it.

3. “Earning” is probably another bullshit bourgeois trojan-horse term

All criticism of progressive taxation rests upon the concept of “earning”—as in, “She has earned her money.” This is not merely a value-neutral, descriptive statement to the effect of “She makes money” or “She gets a paycheck.” “Earning” suggests a relationship of entitlement. When I earn something, I merit it; I deserve it. If this is the case, it can’t be taken away—without a damn good reason. Certainly, taking it away to give to someone who hasn’t earned it is suspect.

But “earning” implies more than this. “Merit” and “deserve” are states of being, while “to earn” suggests an activity: If I “earn” something, I do something for it. It is mine on the basis of some action—some work—performed. (Indeed, it is the work which does the earning.)

Again, all this seems reasonable at first; but at bottom it is rather silly. I’m not saying nobody ever “earns” anything, or that the concept is invalid. Only that “earning” has nothing to do with why people are legally entitled to what they make. My money may be mine, or not, but it is not mine because of any quantity of labor which I have expended, or anything else which I have done. It is mine simply because I entered into an agreement with another person (or persons) to give it to me.

I may work for my money—but if I’d inherited property or stock and merely lived off rent or interest, I’d be allowed to keep that, too. If someone steals my paycheck, I don’t have to first convince the police that the quality and hours of my work have entitled me to that wage rate before I can get my check back.

And consider this: If my work “earns,” in a legally relevant sense, x number of dollars, why can’t another guy complain that he does the same work for less than x dollars, or has to work harder for his own x? I mean, if your work earns money—creates a legal entitlement which everyone else must respect—there should be some universal scale according to which the same quantities of work yield the same quantities of pay. If I have earned it, so has he; for that is what “earns” means. If we work the same and get paid different, one of us is getting less or more than he has “earned.”

Of course, we know the underpaid guy has no legal recourse. We both had different agreements with our bosses (or fellow stockholders, or renters, or consumers, etc.—whoever we get the money from for whatever we do to get it), and that is that. “Earning” never comes into it.

The point is that, once the bogus idea of “earning” goes out the window, you are free to tax according to some other value—like equity, fulfilling needs, etc. You can still come up with a bad tax plan, but having to respect “earnings” won’t be standing in the way of a good one.

More importantly, there is the following point:

Capitalists don’t work, so they don’t “earn” anyhow

One could argue, OK, “earning” isn’t a legally relevant concept—but still, people who “earn” are still doing some kind of work, and we can still assume some rough correspondence of money earned to work done. (Hence, more money means you have worked more, and this means you are entitled to more. More taxation violates a greater entitlement.)

This is not only false, but it becomes more false the higher up the income ladder you go. The wealthier you are, the less likely you are to have done any real work to “earn” it.

That top 2.3% of earners—the group Obama wants taxed at a higher rate, supposedly—is chock full of people who make their living (or substantial parts of it) by owning rather than working. This is the home of capitalists, whose “work” is to lend others the wealth they already have—in the form of productive land, raw materials, machinery, or investment money—to make more wealth.

On the surface, it should be obvious that lending wealth is not “work” in the normal sense of the word. So if we want to say that it is work which entitles one to his wealth, it is hard to see how it could be unjust to tax any percentage of capital assets.

The whole history of capitalism—especially since the challenge of Marx—has accompanied an ongoing effort to show how what appears like doing nothing should justify the great profits that capitalists enjoy—much greater, even, than those who actually labor. Addressing these arguments is relevant to the subject of progressive taxation, but is important in its own right. Hence, the next a later post will deal with it separately.

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