Month: December 2009

A poem for Sunday

by Andrew Sprung

Scaffolding

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won't slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job's done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

by Seamus Heaney

The Root Of Morality

by Patrick Appel

Marc D. Hauser argues that it stems from biology:

Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially.

Illiterate By Choice?

by Patrick Appel

Drake Bennett reviews a book about Zomia, a largely lawless section of Asia. I don't buy this:

In his most speculative and contested claim, [Yale political scientist James Scott] argues that even the lack of a written language in many Zomian societies is an adaptive measure and a conscious societal choice. For peasants, writing was, first and foremost, a tool of state control – it was the instrument the elite used to extract money, labor, and military service from them. As a result, Scott argues, when those peasants escaped into the hills they discarded writing in an attempt to ensure that similar coercive hierarchies didn’t arise in the new societies they formed.

Ignoring War Critics On The Right

by Patrick Appel

Erik Kain counters Abe Greenwald's notion that Obama is "going neoncon":

Neocons like Greenwald assume that the only people who could possibly oppose war are liberals. Such is the state of affairs on the right, I suppose. But even worse, to weigh someone’s morals on their support for war (and to call the lack of support immoral) strikes me as fairly awful. The old trick is to question someone’s patriotism, and that’s cynical and arrogant enough, but to define an entire group’s morality based on their belief that interventionist wars are wrong is absurd.

Larison follows up.

If Free Will Isn’t An Illusion, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Free will is the age-old question that keeps sophomores up all night. But Searle is not the best voice on this question, as he is ultimately a dualist, trying to bring in something from outside the physical world, but without evidence.

Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room is an oldie but a goodie on this topic, at least in part making the same argument that you do – we all live our lives as if we have free will, and we can't tell that we don't, so that's good enough.

Further, a big part of this question is what do we actually want when we ask for free will? Not randomness, I think, which takes quantum mechanics out of the picture. We want our decisions to be based on real preferences, which are determined by what? Well, by rules for what we prefer, of course. If we postulate some dualistic outside 'soul' or other driving force, we just push the question back a level – what are the rules by which the soul makes choices? Again, we don't want randomness, we want real preference. So we just can't get away from a rules-based, deterministic system. It might be chaotic, there might be a huge number of rules and inputs to those rules, so many that we can never be fully 'predictable,' but ultimately we WANT there to be rules. Searle usually seems to miss this point.

Another reader seconds:

My favorite book of all time is Elbow Room: Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting.  Especially the chapter 'Could Have Done Otherwise' changed everything for me, articulating a stance toward responsibility and choice that permanently resolved an existential anxiety toward ethics that had always bothered me.  It's Daniel Dennett at his very best, before he started haring off into things of which he has no particular understanding (religion).

Anyway, I found that once the whole conundrum had been flipped upside down, it made vastly more sense. Better yet, our base intuitions about what is important and meaningful emerge reconfigured but strengthened, not invalidated.

Another reader:

William James pointed out that, not only is free will pragmatically true, but more generally any philosophical argument whose truth or falsity would not result in an actual concrete effect on our actions is a mere semantic game.

Feeling Vs. Acting Morally

by Patrick Appel

Ryan Sager points to a few new studies on the subject:

The ultimate lesson, I think, is that our motives are rarely what we think they are. We think we want to do good to do good, but more likely we want to do good because we feel guilty. Likewise, those of us who think we’re good people, we’re probably the ones who act the worst — because we think we’ve got no moral deficit to pay off.

Further thoughts in his column this week.

Gay Mayors

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

You referenced Annise Parker as “the first openly gay mayor of a major American city.” I assume you’re already getting hate mail from residents of Portland and Providence.

A few (including my mother, who lives in Portland). “Major” is a subjective term, of course, and I used the verbatim wording from the source of the quote.  But for the record:

Universal illusory insurance?

by Andrew Sprung

In just the kind of below-the-radar cave-in that health care reform advocates fear from Congress, the Reid health care reform bill permits insurers to place annual caps on a given policyholder's coverage.  That is, it allows for illusory insurance — the kind that switches off when costs become ruinous. As Stephen Finan, a policy expert with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network told the AP:

The primary purpose of insurance is to protect people against catastrophic loss…If you put a limit on benefits, by definition it's going to affect people who are dealing with catastrophic loss.

The apparent motive is not a corporate giveaway per se, but political pressure generated by the misleading sloganeering that passes for political debate in this country.  Ezra Klein explains:

The tradeoff here is slightly higher premiums for everyone versus total financial ruin for the people who absolutely need help the most. Politically, choosing "everyone" rather than "people with cancer" makes sense, because the first group has more votes than the second. But on a policy level, it's nuts. Health-care insurance literally exists to protect us from the worst-case scenarios. This provision says that the Senate bill will protect everyone but the truly worst-case scenarios. If you assume that people support the basic concept of health-care insurance, then they don't, or shouldn't, support this.

But the American people are much more likely to hear that premiums are going up than they are to get a detailed explanation of what they're getting in return for higher premiums, and so the Senate bill is watching its back. In a more sensible political system, however, the two parties would agree to institute a reinsurance program, as Reihan Salam has suggested. Chuck Grassley has broached reinsurance in the past, but he seems more interested in opposing this bill than improving it, so I don't see much chance of him resuscitating the idea.

The pressure to gut coverage rules to meet cost control targets highlights what a long road the U.S. has to travel before we manage genuine universal health insurance. In France, Germany, Japan, Canada, the U.K., and every other wealthy country in the world, a citizen's risk of being bankrupted by health care costs or denied access to a level of treatment available to any fellow citizen is zero. In the United States, the best we can hope for within 5-10 years (and it will be an enormous improvement) is to cover 94% of the population, with premiums that in many cases will cause  significant financial hardship, under coverage rules riddled with  fewer holes than are now allowed but with as-yet-undetermined (and under-reported) gaps remaining. With those limitations, we'll still spend 50–100+% more per capita than the wealthy countries that provide true universal care under a variety of payment systems — that is, every wealthy country but the U.S.

For all the brouhaha over the public option, the coverage rules governing the exchanges are arguably more important. The House bill bans annual coverage caps. Protecting that ban is worth going to the mat for.