Gun Idolatry

Back in August I blogged about an argument against gun control that I thought was particularly silly. Unfortunately, I used up the title that I really wanted to use for this post, a critique of the old NRA slogan "Guns don't kill people; people kill people."

It's a brilliant piece of rhetoric, because on a moral level, it's absolutely true. People are blameworthy for the good or the evil they do, and guns only do evil as instruments at the direction of people. Of course we shouldn't blame guns, but the people who point them at other people.

(That's a little loaded in itself, appealing to our sense of justice in asking us not to blame the poor innocent guns for what people do with them. But by that very same token, guns don't have any rights to justice, and we don't need to care about treating them unfairly if we do blame them for violence. Even if their availability contributes just a little bit to elevated rates of violence, we could be justified in destroying them all, and we wouldn't have to apologize to the poor innocent guns at all. Their owners might have a moral claim, but guns themselves are just inanimate objects with no right not to be scapegoated for our sins.)

From a moral perspective, placing responsibility on human beings is absolutely appropriate, so it's hard to take issue with the slogan there. Indeed, I think this is a very important point often overlooked in the wake of tragedies like last week's horrific school shooting, as we make a deliberate effort to forget the shooter and remember the victims. Well-meaning as that is, and as repugnant as it seems to "reward" the pathetic loser by paying him the attention we presume he wanted, we should remember that our moral obligation is watch out to make sure we don't do bad things, and so we should always be alert to catch in ourselves the kind of error or psychosis or whatever it is that leads people to do bad things. To that end, alas, we really ought to try to understand how the shooter went astray, so we can better avoid taking the same path. Our moral obligations have to do with our role as potential villains, not as potential victims, and so it is the potential villain inside us we must be ever vigilant to identify.

I cannot fault the slogan for reminding us of this. As people, we need to remember that it's not our guns but ourselves we must blame. Guns don't kill people; WE kill people. And if that were the whole of the slogan's meaning, I'd be fine with it. But it's not.

See, there's another reading of the slogan, one that comes out if we read it not from the perspective of a potential villain, but as a potential victim. If you read it this way, it's much more terrifying, insidious, and destructive: Guns won't kill us; people will kill us. Those people, they're dangerous, be afraid of them. Arm yourself; you may need to shoot them.

That fear-soaked message is, I think, central to the gun psychosis of American society. I don't have a problem with people owning guns because they use them for hunting or they enjoy target shooting or they collect them or study them or just think guns are cool. It doesn't bother me that guns are designed to kill people; so are swords, and I have no problem keeping a sword in my house. No, I have a problem with people owning guns because they are afraid. Fear is the problem; frightened people are dangerous.

Why are people afraid, and what are they afraid of? Well, they think they're afraid of criminals or the government or the New World Order coming and imposing its will by force. And sure, these are things against which we should be on guard, of course. But underneath it all is an excessive, irrational and almost mystical terror of violence. Nothing is quite so terrifying, it seems, as the threat of violence. Dying in car accident? Well, yeah, it could happen, but everyone still drives. Lung cancer? Meh. If you gotta go, you gotta go, but don't take away my cigarettes. But somehow, if someone puts a gun to your head, you have to do what he says?

People talk about violence being glorified, but I'm not sure that's the right word. It's mystified, and thus made somehow supernaturally powerful. And so naturally, people who are afraid want to possess this power for themselves, perhaps thinking it will make them less afraid, though it doesn't really, since they know that other people also have guns. Frightened people are dangerous, but frightened people with guns even more so.

Okay, okay, maybe we can blame the occasional (well, appallingly frequent) gun death of an innocent on the twitchy trigger fingers of paranoids, but surely the losers responsible for mass public shootings aren't acting out of fear, are they? No, of course not. But they do often seem to be people who feel powerless in their daily lives, and in a society where guns represent power, what do you expect?

So I don't think the problem is, exactly, that Americans have too many guns. It's that they think they need them, and the very unwillingness to even discuss the possibility of putting stronger regulations in place is symptomatic of that profoundly unhealthy fear. Paradoxically, if they were able to talk about gun control, they wouldn't need to talk about gun control. 

That's not my house!

One day, when I was in kindergarten, we were all asked to draw pictures of our houses. And so we picked up our crayons and got to work. After a while, as my crude representation was beginning to take shape (I took great pains to get the chimney placement just right, struggling with how a vertical chimney could still be perpendicular to a sloped roof), the kid sitting next to me looked over and said indignantly, "That's not my house!"

Okay, so it was a French immersion kindergarten, and maybe the kid was still trying to sort out how pronouns worked, and thought the assignment for everyone was to draw his house. Kind of a cute mistake in a kindergarten kid, but it's somewhat more frustrating when this kind of subjectivity takes over in adults. Lately I've encountered it in two examples I'd like to discuss.

The first was in the context of a Facebook status thread argument about abortion, in which I reprised a little bit of my argument from this posting. Mainly I wanted to make the point that it may not always be a good thing to view the fetus as a person from the moment of conception, because while that may be a great way to behave as an expectant parent, forming a healthy social bond with the person-to-be, it also can create a great deal of unnecessary suffering in the case of a miscarriage. Miscarriages being rather common, after all, is it really better to think of oneself as the grieving parent of a dead child, or a (temporarily) disappointed would-be parent?

This comment drew considerable ire from one commenter who inferred immediately that I must not know what I'm talking about, or I could never say anything so heartless. Obviously I'd never been through a miscarriage myself. Obviously I wasn't a parent. Well.... as it happens, I have a fifteen year old son whom I love dearly, and my wife and I have been through somewhere between 4 and 6 miscarriages after he was born. (It's hard to know the exact number, because in at least one instance it was never fully established that she was actually pregnant. She sure had all the symptoms, but it's uncertain if anything remotely viable was actually starting to develop in there.)

Now, we were deeply disappointed each time, because we really did want a sibling for our son and another son or daughter for ourselves. We also had started to develop hopes for and bonds with the potentiality that was starting to grow, and it was sad to lose them. But did we feel like parents who had lost an actual child? No, no indeed. Our first pregnancy produced a healthy son, and now that he was born, the disappointment of losing a pregnancy was utterly inconsequential compared to the absolute horror with which we thought of losing him. We are the proud parents of a wonderful son; we are not at all the grieving parents of 4-6 dead children and one survivor.

My point here is not the commenter on that thread was wrong to think of a fetus as a person. I don't think she is wrong to think that way, or at least, not very  wrong; on a personal level I think it's quite desirable for individuals to bond with their unborn children that way because it is a part of good parenting. But I think she was wrong to think everyone must think that way, and to assume that her experience of pregnancy and miscarriage was privileged over any other experience that doesn't mesh with it. We are not wrong to be merely disappointed by miscarriage, either. The error she made, and the error I'm musing about in this post, is in thinking that her experience was the experience. Just as my kindergarten classmate mistook his house for the house we were all supposed to draw.

The other example that's been weighing on my mind lately is that of a frequent anonymous commenter to this very blog. He or she regularly exhorts me to accept a particular religious view, assuring me that if I just ask God to reveal Himself to me, I'll come to know Him and cease with all these silly doubts and philosophizing. Now, I don't doubt that I'll feel that way if I just swallow the blue pill (or is it the red one), that I'll be thoroughly and comfortably convinced of my place in the universe and my relation to the divine. But I can't get past the concern that feeling that way won't make it true.

Now, looking at it from the perspective of the commenter, I can certainly see his or her subjective position. I know that believing one has a personal knowledge of the divine feels exactly like knowing, and more, it feels like a private kind of knowing that no one else can truly understand if they don't feel it too. I understand how privileged that sense of knowledge can feel. I feel it too, but I recognize that it really only applies to things that I, by definition, must know, such as how I feel, how I perceive something, how sincerely I am open to God's revealing Himself to me. I know these things better than anyone else can, but I recognize that my subjective privilege doesn't go beyond the borders of my skull. It's not for me to know, better than you do, how you relate to God, whether or not you love your children, what your house looks like.

What I want to assert to my commenter here is that it's not for you to know, better than I do, how I relate to God, how much I love my son, or whether or not I'm drawing an accurate picture of my own house. It's not supposed to be your house.

Nobody Cares What You Think

     "Nobody cares what you think" is something they drill into you in law school, but sometimes I find myself wishing that it was taught to everyone, aspiring lawyer or not. Of course, much of the time it's used to correct the speech habits of students preparing for their first year moot, when prefacing any statement with "I think..." is just a bad idea anyway. But the true significance of this idea is subtle, and may take several years to sink in.

     It doesn't mean that no one wants to hear what you have to say. It means that whether or not you believe what you are saying, and how strongly you believe it, is of no relevance. What your audience cares about is whether or not there are good reasons for them to believe it. In the practice of law, especially, your actual opinion doesn't matter, because you might well believe your client is probably guilty, but your job is not to decide that, but to advise the court as to the best arguments available for why there's a reasonable doubt.

     I've had the opportunity to judge some junior high school debates, and find students very often falling into a similar trap. A speaker would stand up and deliver an impassioned speech starting out with "We strongly believe that the proposition must stand!" This is silly, because we know very well that in the next round, the very same speaker will be emphatically stating how strongly they believe the very same proposition must fall. And so the point here is the same as the one in law school: nobody cares what the speaker believes; we want to hear the arguments for why we should believe, preferable arguments we haven't considered before.

     I was recently reminded of this lesson on a message forum I frequent. We had been discussing some topic or other, the death penalty, I believe, and had gone on for some five or six pages of posts arguing about whether or not capital punishment is cheaper than life imprisonment (it's not, when you take into account the appeals process necessary to make sure we don't execute someone innocent). And then, of course, after all this lengthy and thorough discussion, someone joins in posting his opinion that we shouldn't waste money on keeping these monsters alive in prison, and should just shoot them.
     Obviously the poster hadn't read any of the thread, and was unaware or just didn't care that his arguments had already been presented and dissected in fine detail. No, he just wanted to tell us what he thought, sparking a new round of debunking the same old arguments. But why would anyone care to know that he, this anonymous person on the internet out there, happens to hold a particular and demonstrably common opinion? We aren't voting on it. We don't know him, we don't have any reason to be affected in any way by the fact that he holds or does not old that view. What we want to know is if there are good reasons why we should share that view. And if he'd taken the time to peruse the thread rather than boldly announcing his not-at-all unusual perspective, he'd know that the arguments he brought to bear were old news to the participants.

     Now, it's not necessarily true that no one cares what you think. Some people probably do, and of course when we're voting on something, what each person thinks is aggregated together to give a result. And when you're planning a dinner party, it's good to know what each guest's culinary preferences are. But most of the time, it's a good guiding principle to bear in mind that the mere fact of your preferring A over B is of no value to anyone but you.

Guns Don't, People Do.

     There are all sorts of arguments for and against legal restrictions on gun ownership, but one of the more disturbing arguments I hear from time to time is the one that certain Americans raise: that an armed populace is the best defence against a tyrannical government.

     Now, I don't mean to reject that entirely, because certainly there have been many tyrannical governments overthrown by force of arms throughout history. And there are instances where armed citizenry have made it difficult or even impossible for foreign powers to invade and occupy a country. A realist must recognize that there is a role for weapons and violence in this world, if only because others give them a role. I certainly understand the sentiment (misattributed to Thomas Jefferson) that it is better for government to fear the people than for people to fear the government, though I disagree very much: it is fearful governments that are the most dangerous to their people. (More on that in a later post, I expect; I've been meditating again on the nature of fear quite a bit since this Officer Wawra story broke.)

     But this whole approach to combatting government tyranny is doomed, because it buys into Mao's famous dictum that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and that view of power is at the core of tyranny. One can imagine (or at least fantasize about) a benevolent tyranny where those with a monopoly on lethal force wield it with benign restraint and only for our own good, but tyranny is tyranny is tyranny.

     No, the answer to tyranny is not force. The truly revolutionary development that has lead to the spread of liberty was not the idea of arming the populace. There was nothing at all new about that; weapons have existed in private hands far longer than we've even had governments. The really important change has been the growth of the rule of law, the idea that people have rights and that disputes should be settled according to generally accepted universal principles rather than the personal preferences of any individual.
     This is much more than simply an idea that people hear about; there's probably no society without at least the idea of rules. What matters for the rule of law to take root is for enough people to genuinely embrace the concept, and to agree to abide by rules even when it is not in their immediate interest to do so. And of particular importance is that the people with the guns firmly adhere to this principle. That's why the militaries of developed countries are ultimately under lawful civilian control, and have such strict disciplinary systems in place.

     It's a subtle idea, and while it's well-established here, its grip is always a bit tenuous. Sometimes it's counterintuitive, as when we extend legal protections and due process to the nastiest of criminals. Sometimes it's just inconvenient, like when we stop for a red light at 3:00 a.m. and there's no one else on the road. But the fact that most of us usually obey the law for no other reason than that it is the law is the core of what protects us against tyranny. A tyrant can only become a tyrant if people obey him, and in a rule-of-law society, unlawful commands tend not to be obeyed.

     So the thing to do is to be ever vigilant against attempts to shape the law to the purposes of the tyrant. That means engaging in the political process, arguing and advocating and talking and listening, and steadfastly rejecting coercion. In other words, guns don't protect us against tyranny; people protect us against tyranny.

Why do Persons Have Rights? A reader asks...

A reader emailed me with the following question: Why does a person have rights?


First of all, it's not clear they do, in the absolute cosmic sense. But if rights exist at all, then persons are the things that will have them, by definition.

Persons I define as moral agents, beings who are capable of having interests, acting upon them, and who may be said to have moral obligations in some sort. Rights are a form of moral obligation; if you have a right to life, I have a moral obligation not to kill you. If I have a moral obligation to treat you with respect, you may be said to have a right to be treated with respect. And so on.

(I'm distinguishing moral obligation from prudential reasons to do something, here. It might be in MY best interests to treat you with respect or not to kill you, but the fact that I'm better off by doing something is not what creates moral obligation.)

Now, this doesn't answer the question as to why persons have rights, or why non-persons don't have rights. I may have a moral obligation not to burn the Mona Lisa; doesn't that translate into the Mona Lisa having a right not to be burned? Well, no; I'd rather say that everyone else has a right to keep the Mona Lisa in existence, and it's that right I'd be violating, not any right the painting itself has.

So why do persons have rights? I think it goes hand in hand with the notion of personhood and moral agency, or the exercise of autonomy. We make choices base on what we feel to be right, whatever that means, and while we may not know what right is in all cases, we still have to choose. And it's autonomous agents, PERSONS who much choose. So in a practical sense, it's persons who determine what matters and what doesn't.

Your choice between chocolate or vanilla is an exercise of your will and your determination that one or the other flavour will better satisfy your interests. I presume that the satisfaction of interests is ultimately what we're interested in as choosing beings, and since persons are the seat of interests, I believe it follows that we have an obligation to defer to others with respect to their own determination of their interests. Hence it's not for me to decide whether you should have chocolate or vanilla, when it's you who are better situated to identify your interests.

It gets complicated with interests clash, and that's where rights come in. I may actually have an interest in your eating chocolate and abstaining from vanilla for some reason. (For something like this, it's probably an irrational reason, but who cares? I don't want to beg any questions about what constitutes a valid or an invalid interest. Maybe I think God hates vanilla or something, or maybe I'm deathly allergic to the presence of vanilla byproducts in the sweat of people I might shake hands with.) Rights are the way we try to balance conflicting interests, by identifying a systematic priority of interests. So there's core interests we all have in common, which we agree to treat as paramount. My right to believe God is pleased that you don't eat vanilla is, presumably, less central to the protection of my autonomy than my right to choose what flavour I eat myself, and so I must recognize that YOUR autonomous right to eat what you want trumps my pleasing-God interest. But if I'm deathly allergic to vanilla byproducts, my right to remain alive might well trump your choice of ice cream in contexts where it might make a difference.

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

     I just received an email from a friend of my parents with a political joke in it. Apologies for abridging it and spoiling the punchline, but the gist of it is this: A little girl calls her newborn kittens, whose eyes haven't opened yet, "Liberals", and later, when their eyes have opened, she calls them "Conservatives".

     Ha ha. Cute.

     Yet I found it troubling, because it is part of perpetuating the myth that conservatives are somehow the hard-headed realists who know how the world really works, and everyone else is a naive idealist. And that's simply false.

     The source of the confusion, of course, is the word "conservative". By itself, it's a fine word, and it's conveys an admirable sense of caution and thrift. To be conservative is to avoid unnecessary risk and expense, and these are both things that we'd want in our leaders. It's natural to hope that this kind of conservatism (cautious and thrifty) is rooted in an understanding of how very wrong things can go if we're not careful, and it's natural to import this idea that conservatives' eyes are open to the harsh realities of the world.

     But there's a danger in that assumption, and all the more so because it's so seductively reasonable. If you buy into the idea that you are wise to the ways of the world, while others are naive and gullible, you become especially naive and gullible yourself. You become smug and complacent, and feel that you don't need to listen to the ideas of those naive and gullible idealists who have no idea what the real world is like. Their eyes are closed, and yours are open, so you can't be fooled. Heck, you know how things really are, so you don't even need to look anymore...

     And that, I fear, is exactly what's happened, as evidenced by the joke I referred to at the beginning of this post. Conservatives have become so confident in their superior expertise (and the utter worthlessness of any opinion that doesn't bear the label "conservative") that they are willing to barge on ahead with policies based entirely on idealistic visions of how the economy is supposed to work, or "common sense" ideas of how the criminal justice system is supposed to work, or how foreign governments ought to respond to our clearly superior morality.

     (Our own federal Conservatives have been systematically closing their eyes by slashing funding to Statistics Canada and a host of other government agencies and research programs intended to give government and Canadians the objective information needed to make sound decisions. Republicans in the United States have been doing much the same with not just budget cuts but also legislation like the Data Quality Act.)

     The scorn I sense from conservatives in expressing their opinions about things is palpable. They talk about how obvious it is that this or that policy is the right one, and how stupid anyone would have to be not to see it. Well, if everything true was obvious, and everything obvious were true, this would be a very different world. There are things which seem obvious but are in fact false, and truths which are very subtle and profoundly counterintuitive. You cannot hope to understand these things if you think you already do.

     I love the quote from The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." There is no surer way to keep your eyes closed than to convince yourself they're wide open.

Was the Apollo Mission a Waste of Money?

You are probably familiar with this photograph.

This very famous image of Earth was taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17. It has been seen by pretty much everybody, and has been used so much as to have become a cliché. And yet, it's still an amazingly beautiful and inspiring shot.

But was it worth all the money spent to go to the Moon? There were many people at the time who thought it was a waste, and people today still make that argument. Advocates of space exploration point out that the technologies developed as part of the Apollo program played an invaluable role in advancing our standard of living here on Earth, and there's truth to that, certainly. We have a lot of neat gadgets that we probably never would have developed had it not been for Apollo.

But I want to talk about something else. Look at that image again, and think of how often you've seen it before. It's appeared in books and magazines, T-shirts and posters, advertising campaigns... you name it. It's such a compelling image, it's used everywhere.

Now, copyright and piracy are very much on people's minds these days, and the RIAA in particular is complaining about losing staggering amounts of money to unauthorized copying. Whether their claims are accurate or not, we can agree that images like this photo have commercial value. So I'd like you to consider for a moment just how rich you'd expect to be from royalty payments if you owned the copyright to that iconic photo of the Earth.

Of course, if NASA charged royalties for the use of that photo, it probably wouldn't have been used by nearly so many people, and they almost certainly would have had the same problem that RIAA complains of when it comes to collecting from everyone who uses it. But that isn't really the point. What I want to argue is that if you were to sit down and put a dollar value on the intellectual property of that one, single photograph, taking into account how many people have used it for how many different purposes, the amount of value generated would be staggering. Now, think about these images:

NASA doesn't charge us royalties on using these images. They are part of our culture, and belong to all of us. We are richer for having them. I don't know what dollar value to put on them, but it's got to be pretty large, especially if we listen to RIAA and the film industry.

So forget about all the fancy technology we enjoy as a result of the Moon landings. I think we may even have turned a profit just on the intellectual property assets alone.

Streaking and Peeking: A Paradox of Privacy

     Here's something that always used to puzzle me. If I get a ladder and climb up to peer in your second-floor bedroom window to watch you changing your clothes, I commit an offense against you. Yet if I'm walking down the sidewalk, and you appear there nude, you commit a offense against me. In each case, the same thing happens: I see you naked. Yet in the first instance, I'm the bad guy, and in the second, you are.

     I don't deny the moral intuitions here. I do feel that intruding on someone's privacy is wrong, and so peering through someone's bedroom window ought to be condemned. I am less comfortable treating public nudity as a criminal offence, but there is some logic to things. In our culture, at least, there is embarrassment all around when one person sees another person nude in all but a few contexts. The difference between these two cases is whose wilful act instigates the embarrassing incident.

     But I think it's worth paying some attention to how privacy seems to work in things like this, and why we are usually embarrassed when it's violated. Rationally speaking, there really ought not to be anything embarrassing about using a toilet. It's not as if it's a secret; as the title of the book says, everybody poops. Similarly, everyone has a nude body under their clothes. Almost everyone has some kind of sexuality, as well. So the privacy interest can't really be about preventing other people from knowing these shocking truths. And yet, it would undeniably be a violation of my privacy for you to walk into my bathroom while I'm taking a perfectly ordinary shower. And likely you would feel embarrassed as well, inadvertently walking in like that.
     It seems to me that the realm of privacy is not exactly one of secrecy as such, but of polite ignorance, so to speak. You know I poop, and I know you poop. But unless we are very intimate with each other, it's very awkward for both of us to have concrete images of each other engaged in that perfectly normal biological exercise. We don't need to know the details, and it's unseemly and undignified to be interested in them. That's why I'd be embarrassed to walk in on you in the bathroom. I don't wish to appear as if I am interested in such things.

     I found myself reflecting on this while reading the Supreme Court's decision in R. v. Butler. In that case, the Court articulated that the test for obscenity is "concerned not with what Canadians would not tolerate being exposed to themselves, but what they would not tolerate other Canadians being exposed to."


     Ah, so close, I thought! There's one little distinction that I feel they missed. Is it that I wouldn't tolerate someone else being exposed to something, or is it that I wouldn't tolerate knowing that someone else is exposed to it? I don't have a problem with you going to the bathroom; I just don't want to know the details. I would prefer to remain politely ignorant of it, because it is none of my business, and ought not to be made such. Likewise, I don't really care what your sexual fetishes are or what kind of pornography you may be interested in, but I'd really rather not know what turns you on (unless we're very intimate). 
     And so here's the paradox. If we treat obscenity as something we won't tolerate other people being exposed to, then it becomes the state's business to inquire into what they're being exposed to. But the thing that makes me object to what other people look at is precisely that I don't think it's my business and I don't want to know. So investigating and prosecuting obscenity simply exacerbates the problem for me. There's no dignified way for me (whether directly myself or collectively through the state) to concern myself with your private matters. I feel that to intrude on your privacy through obscenity legislation is just as degrading to me as it would be were I to be caught hiding a closed-circuit camera in your bedroom.


     So, I feel ashamed for the moralizing prudes who go on crusades against pornography. I felt ashamed for, well, pretty much the whole of the U.S. Congress when they became so profoundly interested in President Clinton's privately sleazy behaviour. I feel ashamed for those who are expressing outrage that a Manitoba Queen's Bench Justice has a sex life. And I feel ashamed when I see gossip magazines in the checkout line, boasting about the intimate details of celebrity's lives revealed within. These are things are none of our business, and not only should we not be interested in them; we should be studiously, politely ignorant of them when they are revealed to us.


     Last week, an image was being circulated on Facebook, ostensibly by some honourable fellow who had rebuffed some woman's indiscreet advances to him while her brave husband was off at war. "Make her famous" said the caption. And some people joined in, in righteous indignation, forwarded it to help the shameless disloyal slut get her richly deserved public embarrassment. Yet I felt immediately ashamed for those forwarding it, not because it turned out to be a hoax, but because they were showing a disgraceful and inappropriate interest in someone else's private life, just as if they'd climbed up a ladder to peer in a window.


     Decorum, people, decorum.

I Find Your Lack Of Faith Disturbing: Musing on the Invisible Hand

     A few months ago, a friend of mine told me of a question on an exam he took in an economics course. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like "Government  intervention can only harm the efficiency of the market: True or false?"  The "correct" answer was "true". Well, I found this troubling for a couple of reasons, most obviously because the underlying ideology (that government is bad for the economy) is so absurdly false.
     It's obviously false if you stop to think about it in any detail because there are forms of government interference without which most of our modern economy would be completely impossible. We have laws, police and courts not only to enforce the property rights that libertarians value so much, but also to enforce the contracts that make up the economy in the first place. Government also flagantly intervenes in the market by creating artificial forms of rights, such as intellectual property, that dramatically transform the economic landscape. And perhaps most pervasively, there is money. Money, a system of currency that enormously facilitates transactions by providing a simple, uniform unit of value, is a service created and provided by government, and it is almost impossible to describe how much that single piece of government intervention enhances the efficiency of the market.

     Okay, so maybe those kinds of government interventions in the economy are necessary, the laissez-faire ideologue might concede. But they're just to ensure the basic requirements of free trade. OTHER kinds of intervention, like taxes and regulations on who can do what with their property, those are always bad. Free markets have to be free, and any time you interfere with that freedom, you lose the benefit of the free market which always axiomatically produces the most efficient possible allocation of resources.

     Hey, I'm totally into that Invisible Hand thing. Free markets are, generally, the best way of finding prices for things, and they tend to produce efficient solutions to allocation problems. Markets adapt to changes in costs of production, availability of substitute goods, and all those unpredictable vicissitudes of  the real world. Price of oil goes up? Well, watch as ripples through the markets spread, and prices of everything else adjust to an optimum distribution given the new cost of energy. Oh look, the rising price of oil has made it economical to invest in that new form of solar energy! Solar electricity becomes cheaper, ripples spread through the market, and a new equilibrium forms.

    So when free market ideologues complain about how the government shouldn't interfere with the free market by imposing taxes on this vice or subsidizing that public good, for fear that it will distort the pure functioning of the Invisible Hand, I am baffled. The Invisible Hand isn't some fickle faerie who will only work its magic if we leave out the right kind of milk and cookies, and will run away and leave us helpless if we offend it. It's a powerful statistical principle, almost on the order of a Law Of Nature. Markets will be free, regardless of how hard we might try to constrain them, because markets are made up of independent individuals, some of whom exercise a great deal of creativity to find a way to exploit them. The Invisible Hand is far, far more powerful than conservatives give it credit for.

     Now, you can argue about whether or not a particular government policy is a good idea. If the government decides to impose a tax on pollution, for example, to try to internalize that externality (to use economist-speak), you can argue about whether or not the tax is the right amount or the best way to address the problem or even whether there's a problem at all. There's lots of valid reasons to favour or oppose any given government policy. But whenever someone starts talking about how it will interfere with the efficiency of the market, I wanna reach out and force-choke them.

Taxpayers' Money: an Idea Whose Time Should End

     Several years ago, I was involved in an argument on usenet (remember usenet?) with some fellow who was outraged that he was being forced to pay an "illegal religious tax". It seems he'd discovered that many food producers take steps to ensure their food is kosher, which involves having it certified by a rabbi, for which a fee changes hands. Never mind that the fee is tiny, and spread out over thousands upon thousands of bottles of ketchup or pickles or whatever the product happens to be, amounting to a fraction of a cent per unit. Never mind that, by making the food saleable to a larger market, it enables greater economies of scale and might even lower the ultimate retail price of the bottle. This fellow was upset that some of his hard-earned money was going to Jews.
     Now, try as I might, I couldn't persuade him of the difference between a tax (one feature of which is that it's usually imposed by the government, for a start) and a cost of production or marketing. To be sure, I don't think he was interested in rational argument; he just want to vent his antisemitism. But the argument stuck with me over the years as a particularly stupid one, and one I see in a disguised and less obviously stupid form quite commonly. That's why I bristle whenever I hear someone talk about spending "taxpayers' money".

     It's such a common expression, and so apparently uncontroversial, you might be wondering why it should bother me at all. After all, tax money comes from taxpayers, so it makes some intuitive sense to call it taxpayers' money. And people use the expression as a way of emphasizing who that money comes from and why the government has a duty to spend it wisely on their behalf. What's wrong with talking this way, then?
     What's wrong is that it's simply inaccurate. Taxpayers' money no longer belongs to the taxpayers, just like the money you spend on a bottle of ketchup no longer belongs to you. My antisemitic adversary seemed to think that he was entitled to a say as to how Heinz or Kraft spent its revenue, but he was wrong. Of course, if he happened to be a shareholder in a ketchup company, he might have some say in how the company allocated resources, but in his capacity as a customer, no. He got his bottle of ketchup, and that's that. What Heinz spends its money on is none of his business.
     In the same way, as a taxpayer, your money stops being your money when you pay it over to the revenue agency. You have no further claim to it, at least not in your capacity as a taxpayer. You are, in a sense, a shareholder in the collective enterprise of the State, and so yes, in your capacity as a citizen you do have some claim as to how it spends its revenue. But that's as a citizen, not as a taxpayer.

     It may seem like I'm making a big thing out of a minor quibble here, but it is important, because it distorts public discourse in a couple of ways. In large part, this is because we're mistaken on the nature of the tax transaction. We tend to think of it as being forced to pay for roads, schools, hospitals, courts, police, the military and so forth; in other words, we fall into the trap of thinking we're buying these things as taxpayers. We're not. We should not think of the act of paying taxes as a kind of purchase, where we get something in exchange. That imports all sorts of thinking about getting value for your money, which is just inappropriate in the context of taxation, especially since we're used to being able to pick and choose the things we want to buy, and it feels wrong to have to pay for services you never use.
     Well, taxes are not a purchase, at least not in that sense. If they're a purchase of anything, they're a purchase of the privilege of living in a democratic society under the rule of law, and sure, we might not all pay the same dollar cost for that privilege, but we're all subject to the obligation to contribute via taxes in some way. And that is the end of it. You pay your taxes, and the money you pay is no longer yours. It belongs to all of us collectively, and you have one vote as to how we collectively ought to spend it.
      It's perfectly valid to opine, as a citizen, that we ought not to spend so much on this, and we ought to spend more on that, but the arguments to use there should be limited to whether a given expenditure represents a cost-effective allocation of society's scarce resources. Citizens are equal shareholders, and that is how our discourse should proceed. Taxpayers' contributions are not equal, and we should not allow our democratic values to be eroded further in the direction of one dollar, one vote. I'd like to see the word "taxpayer" removed entirely from democratic discourse.

     The "taxpayers' money" argument is simply invalid wherever it appears. Should a pacifist be forced to pay taxes to support the military? Should a vegetarian be forced to pay taxes to support beef inspection? Should stupid people be forced to pay taxes to support schools and libraries? Should criminals be forced to pay taxes to support police? Absolutely any expense that government pays will have someone who opposes it. So what? Opposition is valid, but it should be democratic in nature, not rooted in property claims to money that isn't yours anymore. Don't complain to me about how your money is being spent; persuade me instead that I should be upset about how our money is being spent.

Loyalty vs. Obedience

     A recurring theme on this blog might be distinctions between easily confused concepts. I started out with a post about the difference between faith and belief and I've also written on the difference between theory and fact. Yesterday the CBC reported on a letter sent to Parks Canada employees warning them not to criticize the government and "reminding them of their duty of loyalty". The author of the letter is confusing loyalty with obedience.

     This isn't a new confusion. Shakespeare addressed it very well in King Lear, where the aging king rewarded his daughters Goneril and Regan for their fawning and empty praise, and condemned as disloyal his daughter Cordelia who alone was willing to tell him that his actions would lead to his downfall. It is soon revealed, of course, that Cordelia was the only genuinely loyal daughter Lear had.

     King Lear illustrates very well the difference between loyalty and obedience. Loyalty, whether to a person or an institution, involves more than simply doing what the object of loyalty might desire or demand; it is a genuine concern for the welfare of that person or institution, a commitment to act in their best interests, including providing needed (but perhaps unwanted) counsel. Obedience, in contrast, is simply carrying out instructions.
   
     So what the government is demanding from its employees is not loyalty but obedience. It orders them not to criticize its policies, and expects them to obey. It doesn't care about the reasons for criticism; like King Lear, it just wants to hear what it wants to hear. (We see this also with the Conservatives' systematic removal of any sort of non-partisan information-gathering or expert advisors from the federal budget. They know what they want to do, and have no interest in anyone suggesting what they ought to do.)
     Demanding obedience of public servants is entirely appropriate. The elected government must be able to implement policy by directing public employees to carry it out. That's not controversial at all, and in fact is central to all employment relationships; within the scope of one's employment, one is obliged to obey one's employer's directions. But only within the scope of that employment.

     It's not always a clear line, of course. If you're employed as a commercial airline pilot, your job is flying planes and what you do or say on your own time is generally your own business so long as it doesn't impact on your ability to fly planes safely and on time, but if you publicly badmouth your airline and negatively affect ticket sales, even on your own time, you can expect to be fired.
     That's the argument that the Conservative government is trying to use in justifying its attempts to exert greater control over the speech of public servants, and superficially it seems reasonable. But there's a crucial difference. Government is not a business, at least not in the sense of a competitive market enterprise pursuing profit. An airline can lose market share and thus profits if its reputation suffers. Government cannot. Government is government, regardless of who happens to form it. A political party can certainly be harmed by damage to its reputation, but so what? No civil servant is obliged to help a party get or stay elected.

     Civil servants owe a limited duty of obedience to whatever political party happens to form the government, but if they owe a duty of loyalty it is to the nation and its citizens, not to the political party. Loyalty to the nation demands providing honest counsel, engaging in the democratic process, and saying what one thinks needs to be said. Sometimes that will be at odds with what the party in power wants us to hear. Too bad. We the people don't always have access to all the information we need to make informed decisions around election time, and so it's vital that we hear from everyone who might know something relevant. IT IS NOT for government to control that dialogue!

You'd feel differently if...

     Yesterday I wrote about the idea of using convicted criminals for medical experiments, prompted by a Facebook status/share/chainletter thingy. Reading through the comments in support of this barbaric idea, I saw a few people who spoke out against it on basically humanitarian grounds, and the responses to these typically took the form of this argument: "You wouldn't say that if you or someone you loved were a victim of these monsters!"

    This is a very common argument, although I rarely see it in any context outside of crime and punishment. I happen to be opposed to the death penalty (for reasons I'll get to in another post), and nearly every time I get into a debate with someone who's in favour, they bring it up. It's easy to understand why: it's a very emotionally powerful argument, and what's more, it appears to be very effective at bringing out a contradiction in the position of the one arguing against capital punishment. How hypocritical, you might say, that I would oppose the death penalty in general but favour it for someone who had killed one of my loved ones. How hypocritical that I might oppose torture for molesters of other people's children while calling for the torture of anyone who molested my own.

     But there's a reason why we don't see this form of argument in other contexts: it's because it's actually a pretty stupid argument, when you stop to think about it carefully. Yes, it's true that I'd probably strongly desire the death of someone who murdered someone I loved. So what? Since when does powerful emotional trauma make someone a better judge of what is to be done? Is it not widely accepted in most other contexts that a strong emotional investment in an issue usually disqualifies one from making rational, objective decisions? We require judges to recuse themselves from hearing cases where they have close connections to one or both parties, and it's generally better if your surgeon isn't also your lover. Likewise, decisions concerning penal policy probably ought not to be made by those with an overwhelming personal agenda.

     It goes farther than that, though. Let's suppose we accepted the idea that overwhelming emotional desires made people better qualified to make policy decisions. It'd be hard to argue against a policy whereby the government provided free heroin to everyone on demand; after all, you'd feel differently if you were addicted to heroin and going through withdrawals!
     Indeed, this is where the argument finally becomes self-defeating. After all, it relies in large part on our shared sense of moral outrage against pedophiles and violent criminals; we want to say that we are entitled to judge these people's actions as wrong. Yet much of the time, probably most of the time, what they do is driven by overwhelming emotional desires. "Don't tell me not to molest children," one might tell us, "You'd feel differently if you were subject to powerful pedophiliac urges!" Well, yeah, I would feel differently. But I'm entitled to say I'd still be wrong to act on those urges, even if I had them.

     And so, by the same reasoning, I can say that while I might desperately want the state to execute someone who'd murdered someone I loved, it'd still be bad policy and bad for society at large to indulge that desire. It's natural, and perhaps even healthy, to want things that are ultimately bad for us. It's also right and proper to refuse to satisfy those wants.

On Using Prisoners for Medical Experiments

     This morning, one of my friends on Facebook shared an image which was basically just the following text: "Why test on Animals when we have Prisons full of Pedophiles?"

     It's an attractive idea. The the posting from which it was shared has, as of this moment, 44,463 shares and 3,169 likes. Of the hundred or so comments I skimmed through, a significant majority were enthusiastic approval, and only a tiny handful expressed reservations. Of those, all of them were based on a vague notion that cruelty and revenge are barbaric, and those were invariably criticized with almost as much venom as that directed against the pedophiles themselves.
     But as viscerally appealing as it might be to try to extract some positive benefit to society from people who do so much harm, it's a terribly dangerous idea, and so much more so because the danger is so subtle. I mean, on the face of it, what's not to like? Evil people suffer, good people benefit with medical cures.

     What's not to like is the insidious corrupting effect this idea will inevitably have on the administration of justice. The only consideration in finding someone guilty or not guilty of a crime should be whether or not the evidence points beyond a reasonable doubt towards guilt. A person should never be found guilty for reasons other than actually being guilty, and the danger of turning convicted criminals into any kind of valuable resource, whether it be labour, medical test subjects, or organ donors, is that someone will have an interest in seeing people convicted in order to realize the benefits of that resource.

     Imagine, for instance, that you are a judge or juror in a system where those convicted of serious crimes are executed and harvested for organ transplants. Imagine also that you have a child who will die without a liver transplant in the next month or so. The case before you is a man accused of a particularly nasty violent crime, and the evidence suggests that he's the most likely suspect. How much doubt is reasonable, when that doubt potentially costs your child a liver?

     That sounds like an extreme case, and we don't (yet) harvest criminals for organs in North America. (In Canada, we don't even execute them, so it's less likely to be a problem here unless we reinstate the death penalty.) And sure, the potential benefit from a cure found by experimentation on a single accused is so remote that it shouldn't influence the decision making in a single case, right?
     Well, not necessarily. The beneficiaries of a policy that made convicted pedophiles into test subjects wouldn't immediately be the patients whose diseases might one day be cured, but the pharmaceutical (or cosmetics?) companies looking for test subjects. There's value in that, monetary value. Profit. And where there's profit as an incentive, it'll find a way to grow.
     Consider the case of Mark Ciavarella, a judge in Pennsylvania recently convicted of receiving around a million dollars in "finders fees" from a for-profit detention center. This organization receives a fee from the state for every person committed to its care, which is how it earns its revenue and hence profits. Evidently they considered it a worthwhile investment to provide Mr. Ciavarella with a financial incentive to find juveniles guilty and sentence them to terms in its facility; more teens in care meant more profits, so up the conviction rate.

     Oh, but that's outrageous corruption, you might say. Obviously, judges who do that sort of thing should be charged and convicted, and just because someone does something illegal doesn't mean the system is bad when it's run by people who obey the law, right?
     Well, no, but there are lots of ways money can influence the system when it has an incentive to do so. And if it's in the financial interests of anyone, whether they be pharmaceutical companies or private prison operators, to increase the conviction rate then they will do so by whatever means is most cost effective, including lobbying for "tougher" laws to make it easier to find an accused guilty, relaxing the evidentiary standards for guilt, removing funding for things like Legal Aid intended to give the accused adequate legal representation, and so on. All of these things we see happening, in the U.S. and also, perhaps, in Canada. (The Conservatives haven't made public any plans for privately operated prisons so far, but they haven't really been very forthcoming about much of anything, and the way they've sold their crime omnibus bill certainly is consistent with such an agenda.)

     Crime is bad. That's something I think we can all agree on, and it's something we all ought to agree on. It follows from crime being bad that we'd all want to reduce it, so there's as little crime as possible. Who could possibly say it would be good to have more crime?
     I'll tell you who. Anyone who profits from it. And turning criminals into a resource for anyone's benefit creates people who profit from it.

The Myth of Abiogenesis

     In discussions or debates about the development of life on Earth, I often hear a remark from the evolutionist side that "Evolution doesn't tell us how life began; it just explains how it evolves from simpler to more complex forms," or words to that effect. I suspect this is an attempt to be conciliatory, by leaving room for the creationists to attribute the first living thing to God.

     It's a nice sentiment, I suppose, but flawed in two ways. First, it's not going to satisfy the creationist who takes issue with evolution in the first place, since such creationists generally want to insist on a literal Biblical account. But second, it's just not true. It turns out that Darwin's principle of natural selection actually does account for the origins of life itself. Not the precise molecular details, of course, but a broad outline of the principle involved. 

     To explain, I first need to ask you to set aside a distinction that doesn't really exist: that between living and non-living material. Now, it seems obvious that there is a difference, and on the scale that we interact with the world, it's a practical distinction to make, but on the scale of molecules, there's just molecules, and no difference between a living or a dead one. A water molecule in my blood is no different from one my my coffee, or one in the cloud I see through my kitchen door as I type this. Likewise more complex organic molecules like proteins and DNA: they're just molecules, ordinary, non-living matter.

     I should also make explicit what the theory of natural selection is all about, at its most basic, abstract level. It's about replication of information patterns, and which patterns will tend to become more common over time.  Natural selection is often expressed as a principle governing what happens when three basic assumptions are true. Those assumptions are as follows:

     (1) There is variation among a population, and those variations affect the likelihood of the individual successfully reproducing.
     (2) Offspring tend to resemble their parent(s).
     (3) More offspring are produced than can survive to adulthood and reproduce themselves.

     This is expressed in terms that assume we're already dealing with living creatures (which isn't surprising, because the theory is almost exclusively used for understanding biological phenomena), but as a Law of Nature, natural selection applies all the time to everything everywhere, and makes no distinction whatsoever between "living" and "nonliving" matter. So just bear in mind that the words "parent" and "offspring" should be understood more as "original" and "copy". What's really being copied with each generation is an information pattern, and subsequent generations are simply copies of copies of copies.

     Now, there are also two concepts concerning replication of patterns we need to be aware of: fecundity and fidelity. Fecundity relates to the number of copies made; a highly fecund creature will have lots and lots of babies. Fidelity relates to the accuracy of the copy, how closely it resembles the original. A duplicate with very high fidelity will be almost identical to the original, while one with very low fidelity might not even be recognized as a copy at all.

     Patterns of information exist in everything, although most of the time we'll not recognize them as particularly useful information, just random arrangements of things. Patterns also give rise to subsequent patterns all the time, simply by the operation of the laws of nature. A pattern characterized by lots of water molecules in clouds may lead to a pattern of liquid water droplets falling as rain, leading to a pattern where water molecules are arranged as standing or flowing water on the ground, and so on.
     This process, of patterns producing new patterns, is in fact a kind of replication. It's just that the value for fidelity tends to be very, very low; almost none of the original pattern of information is recognizable in the offspring. But not always. In fact, patterns are duplicated with surprisingly high fidelity quite naturally, and in ways that we don't often think of as replication. For example, a shadow of a mountain is actually a rather high-fidelity replication of the profile of the mountain itself from a particular perspective. Layers of ocean sediments record climate patterns over time, and so on. In most of these cases, the fecundity of the next generation is very low, however; there are few ways for a shadow to copy itself.

     But there are ways for simple, non-biological patterns to duplicate with both fidelity and fecundity. Consider a rock cleaving in two. The two newly exposed surfaces will have all sorts of random bumps and pits, but they will correspond to each other almost exactly so you can fit the two pieces back together perfectly. Each piece contains a very high fidelity copy of the inverse of the contours of the other piece, and if you were to press one half into some clay, the imprint left would be a pretty good copy of the other half. What's more, you'd be able to reuse the stone to make more copies. So both fidelity and fecundity are well above zero for this process. One can easily imagine, without any human intervention at all, scenarios where a pattern like this is duplicated many times. A rock, rolling down a hill, leaving multiple impressions of itself in the soft earth along its path.

     This process of cleaving to produce mirror-image duplicates can happen on a molecular level, as well. In fact, DNA is very much like the cleaving rock. Each side of the double helix is a sort of inverse copy of the other side. We know very little about how the first DNA molecule came to be, but we do not need to know the precise pathway to see that natural selection would be at play every step of the way. Any pattern of information that, when encoded into matter in some way happens to increase the fecundity and fidelity of the subsequent generation of patterns, will tend to become more common over time. It need not be particularly high in fidelity or fecundity to begin with; it merely needs to be slightly better than the other patterns around it. Its own copies will tend to vary as well (a lot, if the fidelity is low), but whichever pattern has the highest fidelity/fecundity will eventually win out.

     So there is, was, and always will be a natural selection pressure operating in the universe on all matter in every form everywhere, tending to select for higher fecundity and fidelity. In most places, there's not a lot of potential for other, but in some places, particularly planets with rich chemistry and just the right temperature range, there will be enough random patterns that some crystal, some organic polymer, or some other chemical reaction will have a fecundity/fidelity advantage. And that's all it takes to get started. The molecule that is just slightly better at preserving its information by copying will become more common than the next, and over time, ever more sophisticated systems of molecules will accumulate more and better ways to improve fidelity and fecundity.
     There is no point at which the spark of life suddenly appears and matter becomes living, no point at which maggots spontaneously appear in rotten flesh. Every organism, every pattern of matter arises as the result of some previous pattern of matter that it resembles in some way, which in turn arose from an earlier arrangement of matter, and so on back to the beginning of time.

Why is Life so Hard?

     The short answer: evolution.

     Natural selection is lazy. It doesn't work to make things the best they can be. It just makes them good enough to have a decent chance of survival. It didn't make cheetahs run 70 m.p.h. just for the fun of it; it did so because that's about how fast you need to run to catch a gazelle. And gazelles only run so fast because cheetahs eat the slower ones. It's a classic arms race. The cheetah can catch its meal, but usually only by really working hard at it, and the gazelle also pretty much has to give its all to escape. Life's not easy at all for either of them; they're both working at their very peak effort just to survive.
     So nature runs on the principle of "good enough" rather than "the best possible". Very rarely does nature equip some species with a trait that is far more than the job of survival calls for. The only reason pronghorn antelope run so much ridiculously faster than any North American predator is because up until a few thousand years ago, there were cheetahs here too. I don't know of any measurements that would confirm this, but I'd be willing to bet that today's population of pronghorns, without cheetahs selecting for his speed, are slower on average than their ancestors. There are more ways for mutations and genetic drift to reduce the efficiency of a runner than there are to improve it.
    At first glance, we humans might appear to be an exception to this general rule. We are so much more linguistically, culturally and technologically powerful than even our closest primate relatives, it's tempting to think our relatively massive brains and corresponding intellect is a freakish anomaly. (I don't want to get into a debate about human vanity in assuming ourselves to be the smartest in the animal kingdom. I'm using "smart" in the fairly narrow technical sense of having bigger and more versatile brains, so please don't read into it any kind of value judgment. Plants are not "smarter" than we are because they "know" how to photosynthesize and we don't, and cockroaches are not "smarter" because they're more likely to survive as a species in the long run. For all their superior survival odds, cockroaches' brains are tiny and support very limited cognitive function. Plants don't even have brains. So that's all I mean by "smarter", and to argue otherwise is, well, not very smart.)
     On a survival level, our brains certainly seem to be disproportionately powerful. They've made us into one of the most effective hunters on the planet, having wiped out virtually all the edible megafauna on most continents within a few centuries of our arrival. We've figured out how to produce food surpluses through agriculture, and our population has exploded to the utterly outrageous figure of 7 billion relatively large mammals. Survival for many of us, at least in the developed world, isn't even a challenge any more; most of us die from cancer and heart disease instead of starvation or being eaten by predators. This is a direct result of our species' unprecedented technological prowess.
     So how does this figure into Nature's "good enough" approach? How come we got so absurdly smarter than we needed to be to survive?
     A big part of it is the arms race principle. We're a social species, but not a eusocial one. That is, while we tend to live together in groups and cooperate for mutual benefit, we're not completely selfless about it the way ants, bees, some wasps, termites and naked mole rats are. We cooperate and compete with each other, and when we compete, it's usually by way of our brains. Of course, it's a lot more complicated than simple competition, and often that competition takes place within a cooperative framework. A group of hunters may be genuinely trying to cooperate to bring down a mastodon, but they may also be competing to establish social dominance. Even the fully cooperative human has to be able to detect attempts to cheat, and the would-be cheater needs to be able to figure out and defeat those detection attempts, and so on. In short, humans with bigger brains than their fellow humans were more likely to pass on their genes, and this arms race has produced a species with way more smarts than we need simply to squeeze food from our environment and avoid getting eaten by bears.
     And there, in our competition with our fellow humans, nature has made us just barely good enough to have a decent chance at figuring out each other's (and even our own) motives and schemes, and not one bit better than we need to be. Sure, getting food might be relatively easy, and we don't even have to think about avoiding hungry wolves or tigers now, but the countless other struggles of social life remain as hard as they've ever been, and our brains pretty much have to work at peak capacity for that.
     In fact, in many ways, our brains are facing much harder problems than they ever evolved to solve. Fact is, as big as our brains are, they're really not that good at solving certain kinds of problems. They're good at forming judgments about the kinds of things we encountered as hunter-gatherers, but they're not so good at things like formal logic and statistics. We are equipped with a whole lot of shortcuts and quick and dirty heuristics that give "good enough" results for basic survival, but aren't always the optimum or rigorously correct solution. We can learn to do calculus or apply Bayes' Theorem, but it takes a lot of effort.

     So life is hard, and it pretty much always will be, because of the way we evolved and because of how evolution works in general. Our minds, our bodies, our willpower, all are the result of a process that makes things just barely good enough to survive in their environment, and not one bit better. And I'm not at all convinced that's a bad thing.

Paying for Crime

"Fiat justitia, ruat caelum."  

     In a previous post, I criticized the Conservative government's Bill C-10, the omnibus crime bill sold as "getting tough on crime". I find it astonishing that there is any support at all for this, given how well we know that it won't work, from the examples of Texas and California, which are both regretting adopting similarly "tough" approaches. I'm also amazed at the continued push for "abstinence-only" sex education in  certain U.S. states, despite the well-documented consequences of higher teenage pregnancy and STD rates. I just naturally assumed that we all believed that rates of crime, teenage pregnancy and STDs were things we'd want to keep as low as possible. So how can people continue to support such demonstrably ineffective policies with such enthusiasm?
    For a while I just assumed that they didn't understand the problem, and genuinely held to the simplistic belief that these policies would work. To some extent, of course, that is the case; I have heard people argue with great sincerity that tougher penalties are sure to deter crime more effectively, and it's certainly true that abstinence is terribly effective at preventing pregnancy (even if preaching abstinence to teens isn't actually the best way to get them to practice it).
     But lately I've begun to wonder if maybe there isn't something else at play here. One thing I have noticed is that many of the people who advocate these policies tend to be very concerned about sin. They speak in terms of justice, and seem to find it profoundly disturbing that a wrongdoer might get away without appropriate punishment. Which brings me to the legal maxim quoted above:  "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall." 
     The maxim is perhaps most famous for its use in 1772 by Lord Mansfield in Somersett's Case, in which slavery was found to be illegal in England and Wales. Several thousand slaves were in the country at the time, many (like James Somersett himself) accompanying their masters from the American colonies, and Lord Mansfield was urged to consider the mayhem that would ensue from a judgment suddenly and radically changing the legal status of these thousands of slaves. Quite rightly, the judge considered those consequences to be irrelevant; slavery is an unlawful injustice, and cannot be perpetuated just to avoid inconvenience.
     And so it is a noble sentiment, that we should be willing to endure great cost and inconvenience to see to it that justice is finally done. We tend to admire as a hero Inigo Montoya for devoting his life to avenging his father's murder by the six-fingered man, enduring great hardship and sacrifice to bring a killer to justice.
     So I begin to think that perhaps some of those who favor moralistic policies like Bill C-10, abstinence-only education, and many other clearly ineffective but simple approaches, aren't actually concerned with results. What matters to them more is being morally righteous, and if the cost of harshly punished criminals is more crime, well, so be it; we'll just punish them harshly, too. It's almost as if it crime doesn't matter so long as it's "paid for" (and such people very often do speak of "making criminals pay", another unfortunate memetic pathology). If the cost of righteously teaching teenagers to wait until they're married before having sex is that, unfortunately, more of them won't wait, well, too bad; at least we haven't polluted ourselves by implying that premarital sex is okay.

     The trouble with this attitude is that, in the big picture (which is what policymakers are supposed to be considering), it ends up being paradoxically inconsistent with itself. On an individual case basis, we might well praise the diligent prosecutor who spares no expense to bring a particularly nasty wrongdoer to justice. From the perspective of the system as a whole, however, cost-effectiveness needs to be considered; spending the department's entire budget to imprison a single criminal means there are no resources left to go after all the others. At this level, the decision to focus on one criminal is also a decision to let all the others go unpunished.
     It gets worse. The decision to spend a disproportionate amount of resources on punishing a few criminals means fewer resources available to spend on crime prevention. Indeed, for many offenders, we know that rehabilitative programs through conditional sentences have a much better success rate at reducing recidivism than prison terms do; living in prison with hardened criminals is like going to crime school. So an excessive focus on punishment actually leads to higher repeat offender rates.
     Think about what that means. The policymaker who decides to implement a criminal justice system emphasizing punishment is creating a situation in which more crimes are committed than would be under an alternative system. There are people victimized by crime who would not have been so victimized, but for the decision of the policymaker. In other words, the policymaker has chosen a higher crime rate. An argument could be made that the conscious choice to have a higher crime rate makes the policymaker himself morally culpable for that rise in crime. And as one advocating for harsh punishment and against forgiveness, he'd really have little right to expect leniency himself.

     I don't think I'd want to go quite that far. The decision to implement a policy is not the same as the decision to commit an individual crime, and ought not to be assessed on the same moral scale. At the policy level, there will always be individual crimes or other unwanted consequences that follow from a particular policy that might not have followed from a different policy (which would have its own unique unwanted consequences). It's a question of balancing, deciding which policy produces the fewest and lease severe unwanted consequences.

     But in a democracy, it's also a question for us, the people, when we go to the polls. Do we want to be safer from crime, or are we so eager to see criminals punished that we're willing to bear a higher risk of being victimized by crime ourselves?
     I can't imagine how we could sensibly choose the latter. Criminals simply do not "pay for their crimes" by being punished. No amount of suffering inflicted upon a criminal can ever make whole the victim of his crimes, and so the victims of crimes are always worse off than they would have been had the crime never been committed. (Oddly, that's as it should be; we really wouldn't want a world in which people actively sought to be victimized by criminals.) The best thing policymakers can do for victims is ensure they never become victims in the first place.

Corporate Slavery

  A corporation is legally a person, able to exercise many (though not all) of the legal rights of a natural person. Corporations can sue and be sued, can own property and enter into contracts, and can even be charged with criminal offenses, although for obvious reasons they cannot actually be imprisoned, even when they are found guilty. 

  This is the basis of a common criticism of corporations and corporate law. Despite the legal fiction that corporations are persons, they lack the frailties of natural persons which help to inform our morality. Imprisonment may be an effective deterrent (or at least a meaningful punishment) to a natural person (including the directors of a corporation), but has no meaning for the corporation itself. Corporations have no need for food, air, water or shelter, they cannot fall in love, have children, or stub their toes. They don’t age, and they don’t feel pain, fear or remorse. Given all this, it should come as no surprise that corporations sometimes (often) act as soulless monsters without any regard for the interests of others beyond the minimum duty of care imposed by law. So, it is sometimes argued that corporations should not be treated at law as persons.

  I am sympathetic to the concern motivating this argument, but something about it remains unsatisfying. Legal rights are not contingent on the specific frailties of mortal human beings. Suppose a person were to reveal, for example, that she was in fact 3,000 years old, and just happened to have a rare mutation that exempted her from the normal process of aging. Would we say that such a person should forfeit any of her legal rights on that basis? Well, we might want to modify the Copyright Act, since a term of life + 50 years is a bit extreme when the author is effectively immortal, but apart from that sort of thing I expect most of us would agree that the basic rights associated with personhood should remain intact.

  But it occurs to me that the problem with corporations is not that we treat them too much like persons, but not enough. That is, there is one critical respect in which a corporation is treated in a fundamentally different manner from natural persons, at least since the abolition of chattel slavery: corporations are owned.

  Now, before I continue, let me first emphasize that I am not calling for the emancipation of the corporation. Far from it. They already enjoy more than enough power and practical freedom. What I want to do, rather, is point out how this simple fact, that corporate “persons” are also at law someone else’s property, makes it almost inevitable that corporations (publicly held ones, at least) will tend to exercise their legal personhood as soulless monsters.

  First, we must note that as an artificial person, a corporation itself has no mind, and can only act through agents. Thus a corporation must have directors to make decisions on its behalf. The corporation is utterly at the mercy of these directors, who are necessarily empowered to affect its interests by entering it into binding agreements, spending its money and so forth. Whenever someone is empowered over a person in this way, the law imposes a strict duty on the empowered one, called a fiduciary duty, to exercise those powers faithfully in the best interests of the other (who is called the beneficiary). Parents owe a fiduciary duty to their children, physicians owe a fiduciary duty to their patients, attorneys owe a fiduciary duty to their clients, and so forth.

  But what does it mean to act in someone’s best interests? That usually depends on context and who that someone is, but will almost always include some reference to the question: “What would the beneficiary choose for himself, if only he were competent to act on his own behalf?” 

  That question has no meaning for a corporation, however. Remember that a corporation is property; it belongs to someone. That means that its best interest are not understood in terms of what it would want for itself, but in terms of its own value as an asset. So a corporation’s directors are thus under a fiduciary duty to maximize the corporation’s bottom line, to increase its market value. However valuable things like clean air, job security and peace and happiness might be to natural persons (including those natural persons who happen to be corporate directors), they are not a part of the best interests of a corporation, and for a director to pursue such goals on behalf of a corporation at the expense of share price is actually unlawful, a breach of fiduciary duty to the poor helpless corporation at their mercy. Essentially, then, the directors of corporations are legally obliged to make their corporations act as soulless monsters.

  I am not sure what to suggest as a remedy. Perhaps we need to rethink the whole notion of equity in corporations, and redefine it more as a kind of debt. Or perhaps we can, by statute, add factors that directors must consider as being in the “best interests” of the corporations they control. (To some extent, that is possible already by way of a Unanimous Shareholders Agreement, but the default position for a corporation is to care only about its bottom line.) That may seem an artificial and forced solution, but on the other hand, corporations are themselves an artificial concept.

  I dunno. Maybe I’m hoping for some good ideas to show up in the comments thread...

Evolution is Not Your Friend

In my last post, I mentioned a class of objections to the theory of evolution which do not betray gross misunderstandings of the theory. That is, they acknowledge that while evolutionary theory might have objective scientific merit, it leads to implications about the nature or reality that are intuitively, aesthetically or morally objectionable. These objections take a variety of forms.

For example, some find the Hobbesian view of our nature, red in tooth and claw, particularly depressing. The idea that all living things, including us, are merely the temporary survivors of a brutal struggle of each against every other is not a very positive one for those of us who believe deeply in the values of love, tolerance and cooperation. Indeed, many evolutionary biologists themselves going all the way back to Peter Kropotkin (who was 17 years old when Darwin published On the Origin of Species) have emphasized the role of cooperation and mutual aid, rather than competition and conflict, as an important part of the struggle for survival. Yet while evolution can and has produced altruism and human instincts for morality, it still seems unsatisfying somehow to see these things as ultimately rooted in the self-interest of the genes that produce them. We want to feel that noble self-sacrifice really is noble self-sacrifice, not merely some roundabout way of ensuring one's own survival, or worse, a mistake of misfiring instincts.

As unhappy as that sounds, it doesn't really bother me that much. Regardless of how we happened to end up with our imperfect instincts for morality and justice, we have them and they have provoked the philosophers among us to contemplate the logic of it, using the capacity for generalized intelligence we evolved for other purposes to pursue problems that our ancestral environment never "intended" for us. And personally, I am largely persuaded by the efforts of Kant and Mill that there really is an inherent logic "out there" to morality as distinct from the dictates of natural selection. That we got here by means of "survival of the fittest" in no way means that we must adopt that as our moral compass.

Nor am I particularly upset with the absence of a divinely ordained purpose for our existence offered by evolution. There are people who say that the reason they believe in a Creator is that they feel there must be a purpose, some reason we're here, and that we're not just some accident of no importance in the grand scheme of things. I suppose there are two reasons why this objection doesn't really resonate with me: One, I've never really felt the need for authoritative answers from above. Even as a very young child, I frequently doubted the pronouncements of my parents and teachers, and I've never been able to overcome the epistemological hurdle of some mortal human claiming to speak for God; just because they say God wants me to do this or that doesn't mean that's really what God wants. But two: I've never really understood why it would be such a terrible thing if there were no purpose. We exist, and most of us feel a sense of some kind of purpose, whether it's real or not; why do we need it to be on some absolutely solid foundation before we invest ourselves into it? Isn't our own sense of purpose enough, without having to insist that it be dictated by God to have any real meaning?

No, the implication of evolutionary theory I find more dismal is this: we aren't built to be happy, and to some extent we may actually be built to be unhappy. Think about it: our emotional and intellectual capacities were selected for by evolution because they happened to make it likelier that we'd have offspring who would share these capacities. The things that bring us pleasure and fulfilment are not there for our benefit, but rather simply because they tend to motivate us in certain reproductively advantageous directions. Nature doesn't give a damn that we're happy, and in fact it's not really in our genes' interests for us to be too happy or fulfilled, because they we're likelier to slack off in our gene-propagation activities; it's desire that drives us to do stuff, not satisfaction of those desires.

In our ancestral environment, our desires were rarely if ever entirely fulfilled. One of the reasons we love sweet or rich and fatty foods is to encourage us to stock up on them on those infrequent occasions they became available, such as when fruit comes into season, or we're lucky enough to be able to kill some tasty animal. Most of the time we subsisted on vegetables, and so we tend to view leafy green stuff as something to eat if you're really hungry and there's nothing better available. But today, of course, we have virtually unlimited access to sweets and meats, and we have no built-in instinct to regulate how much of it we eat, because we never needed such an instinct in the nearly constant scarcity of our evolutionary past. Our appetites evolved to make us crave things, and never truly be satisfied. There are very good evolutionary reasons for this, but that doesn't make it any easier to resist overindulging in unhealthy diets.

And the same is true of most of our other biologically determined appetites and instincts. It's not enough that we be well-fed and healthy; we also have evolved as a complex social creature for whom status in the group is a key to reproductive success, so we crave being demonstrably better off than our neighbours, or at the very least not worse off. And this is a game that can never be won for most people, since for anyone to win means for everyone else to lose, to some extent.

So that's what I mean when I say we weren't built to be happy. Not just that it's unlikely to be able to attain happiness, but that it may actually be fundamentally built into our very makeup that we should always be unsatisfied. And so I am sympathetic to those who find the implications of Darwin's theory discouraging, even to the point of wanting to reject it.

Yet in my more cheerful moments, I find reason for optimism. Natural selection may have built us to be chronically dissatisfied, but at the same time, the products of human ingenuity are endlessly surprising. We have figured out ways to satiate ourselves with candy and pork chops. Our technology allows us to communicate with each other instantaneously from almost anywhere on the planet. We have devised ways to organize ourselves and relate to each other that our ancestors never could have imagined. And just as we worked out how to fly despite our lack of wings, we may yet figure out how to maximize human happiness in spite of our Darwinian legacy. And even the mere idea that such a thing could be possible should provide all the purpose anyone could need, divinely ordained or not.