Month: May 2014

by Tracy R. Walsh

Arguing that our current political system doesn’t do enough to take the interests of future citizens into account, philosopher Thomas Wells calls for 10 percent of all votes to be set aside for “trustees” acting in their interests:

Trusteeship has played a political role before – indeed it is the very model for the role of elected legislators that Burke himself advocated, as did the British political economist John Stuart Mill a century later. All the same, we would certainly need to introduce some new rules and legal instruments to ensure the success of this novel kind of political trusteeship by organizations, and especially to protect them from improper ‘presentist’ influence by partisan or commercial interests. To ensure their independence, these organizations might have to demonstrate popular support (say 50,000 unique citizen members), be non-profit-making, comply with electoral campaign financing legislation and so forth. …

[T]he presence of trustee voters has the potential to benefit democratic deliberation in general. They would make sustainability an unavoidable political topic, one that politicians have to treat in a way that is credible to these cognitively sophisticated agents. The improved quality of politicians’ attention to the future would also help the merely human voters who struggle to turn their moral concern for the future into effective political choices. At least to some degree, the myopia built into the institutions of democracy would be overcome.

Alex Tabarrok favors a different mechanism:

Robin Hanson’s government of prediction markets (“futarchy”) is a better approach. It is now well understood that relative to other institutions, prediction markets draw on expertise to produce predictions that are far-seeing and impartial. What is less well understood is that through a suitable choice of what is to be traded, prediction markets can be designed to be credibly motivated by a variety of goals including the interests of future generations. …

We can also incorporate into our measure of welfare predictions of how future generations will define welfare. We could, for example, choose a rule such that we will pass policies that increase future environmental quality unless a prediction market in future definitions of welfare suggests that future generations will change their welfare standards. It sounds complicated, but then so is the problem.

Meanwhile, Corey Robin Robin Hanson is dismissive of the whole idea:

We could also give votes to people in the past. While one can’t change the experiences of past folks, one can still satisfy their preferences. If past folks expressed particular preferences regarding future outcomes, those preferences could also be given weight in an overall welfare definition.

We could even give votes to animals. One way is to make some assumptions about what outcomes animals seem to care about, pick ways to measure such outcomes, and then include weights on those measures in the welfare definition. Another way is to assume that eventually we’ll “uplift” such animals so that they can talk to us, and put weights on what those uplifted animals will eventually say about the outcomes their ancestors cared about.

We might even put weights on aliens, or on angels. We might just put a weight on what they say about what they want, if they ever show up to tell us. If they never show up, those weights stay set at zero. Of course just because we could give votes to future folks, past folks, animals, aliens, and angels doesn’t mean we will ever want to do so.

by Matthew Sitman

In an interview about her debut novel, Cutting Teeth, which follows a group of thirty-something Brooklyn parents and their young children on a weekend trip to the beach, Julia Fierro explores how being a woman and young mother informed the story she told:

The focus of the book is on relationships, and I’m always surprised when women writers complain about their book being tagged by bookstores, book sites, and blogs with “relationships” and “women.” I understand the larger issue that’s upsetting them, and thank goodness we have the VIDA numbers to act as a neon sign broadcasting the truth about gender inequality in the literary world, but I am a woman, and I will always write about relationships. I am inspired by psychology and emotion, conflict and drama. The world is most significant to me as a web of relationships. If a story isn’t filtered through a psychological lens, you’ll have trouble keeping my attention. Humanity’s individual, and collective, fears and needs and desires are the only religion I’ve got and I am obsessively devoted. So I try to embrace the fact that I am a woman writer writing (mostly) about women, although the male characters in my work are often “liked” most by readers (even if they commit the worst crimes—how about that?). Recently, I even had a brief thought—maybe I am writing with women readers in mind? I am, after all, living a life that only another woman could truly understand. I am going through a phase of life—early motherhood—that is complex in a way that is unique to a woman’s experience. What I feel in my body, in my thoughts, and the ways I interpret the world uniquely, all stem from my experience as a woman. But I have to think more on that before I commit.

In a self-interview, Fierro explains how she wrote a novel and founded the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, all while raising two children:

My lifelong insomnia has been a blessing in disguise. I pretty much sleep four hours a night, and am doing my best to ignore conspiracy theories like this, that simultaneously attempt to cut my productivity in half and promise my inevitable doom.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you abandon all household chores that aren’t absolutely essential. Sure, we’re living in chaos, but mom’s making great progress on her next novel and the number of Sackett Street writers attending classes has doubled in the last three years. It turns out that women can “have it all”—they might be miserably tired, suffer from high blood pressure, and not have enough time to eat well, exercise or have meaningful relationships, but you can do anything when you don’t give yourself a reason not to.

Read a sexy excerpt from Cutting Teeth here.

by Jessie Roberts

Kate Good shares the story of her husband’s physical transition from female to male, writing that she’s “learned that ‘transgender’ is a ridiculously large catch-all”:

There’s no such thing as gender reassignment surgery, despite what various government and news agencies seem to think. There’s a menu of therapies, medications, and surgeries, and people pick what combination works for their body, their health, their mental and emotional needs and, not least, their finances. The government as a whole doesn’t have a good grasp on what it means to be transgender, and definitions and regulations vary wildly from office to office and day to day. What it really takes to get a passport issued is anyone’s guess. Even in the time we’ve been together these things have improved, thanks to hard-working activists, but there’s still a lot of work to do both in writing new regulations and clarifying existing ones.

There’s not a line — before here he was female, after he is male.

I think he’s still deciding on how to think about the person he was before transitioning. Every once in a while I see a picture of him before he cut his hair and changed his name and how he dressed, before he was the man I married. It’s an odd feeling. It’s him but not him. I don’t dwell on it.

I don’t dwell on my own sexuality either. I’m straight. I wasn’t attracted to him when he started transitioning, when there was still a feminine curve to his cheeks and hips. If you had asked me then if we would ever date I would have said no. It took two years of being friends before I realized I liked him (liked liked him). One day he asked me out and I thought well, why not? And then we fell in love, fast. We were almost immediately talking about our future, marriage, kids. His being transgender faded to the background.

It sounds unbelievable but I still sometimes forget. He has to remind me that people he met in the past might not know who he is now. I don’t know, or care, what loving him means for my placement on the Kinsey scale, or whatever spectrum is the going standard. If I lost him I would undoubtedly date cis-men. I love him, and I love being his wife. Figuring out what that labels me as seems like a waste of time.

by Jonah Shepp

Vauhini Vara flags a new campaign by Coca-Cola featuring guest workers in Dubai:

In March, Coke installed five special phone booths in Dubai labor camps that accepted Coca-Cola bottle caps instead of coins. In exchange for the cap from a bottle of Coke—which costs about fifty-four cents—migrant workers could make a three-minute international call. The ad shows laborers in hard hats and reflective vests lining up to use the machine—and grinning, for the first time in the video, as they wait. “I’ve saved one more cap, so I can talk to my wife again tomorrow,” one man tells the camera. More than forty thousand people made calls using the machines. Then, in April, after the booths had been up for about a month, the company dismantled them.

At first glance, the ad may seem innocuous, even sweet, until you consider how Coke is exploiting these workers’ misery to burnish its friendly image:

I sent links to the ads to Nicholas McGeehan, a Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied labor conditions in Dubai. I was interested in his take on the questions of appropriateness and ethics that some viewers had raised. The videos, he said, were “odious.” For one thing, he said, Coke is not only using these low-income workers to advertise its product, it is also requiring them to buy soft drinks themselves—at nearly a tenth of their typical daily wages, he pointed out—to use the special phone booth. On top of that, he feels that the ads normalize and even glorify the hardship faced by migrant workers—at least some of whom may be working against their will. “If this was two hundred years ago, would it be appropriate for Coke to do adverts in the plantations of the Deep South, showing slaves holding cans of Coke?” he asked. “It is a normalization of a system of structural violence, of a state-sanctioned trafficking system.”

The Dish recently looked at the conditions of guest workers in Dubai and other Gulf states here.

by Jonah Shepp

The Office of Naval Research is spending $7.5 million to find out:

“Even though today’s unmanned systems are ‘dumb’ in comparison to a human counterpart, strides are being made quickly to incorporate more automation at a faster pace than we’ve seen before,” Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program at the Office of Naval Research told Defense One. “For example, Google’s self-driving cars are legal and in-use in several states at this point. As researchers, we are playing catch-up trying to figure out the ethical and legal implications. We do not want to be caught similarly flat-footed in any kind of military domain where lives are at stake.”

The United States military prohibits lethal fully autonomous robots. And semi-autonomous robots can’t “select and engage individual targets or specific target groups that have not been previously selected by an authorized human operator,” even in the event that contact with the operator is cut off, according to a 2012 Department of Defense policy directive. “Even if such systems aren’t armed, they may still be forced to make moral decisions,” Bello said.

Since the robotic future of warfare has to some extent already arrived, and the danger of getting it wrong is so great, this seems worth the money to me, but Suderman doesn’t see how an ethical military robot is possible:

Obviously Asimov’s Three Laws wouldn’t work on a machine designed to kill. Would any moral or ethical system? It seems plausible that you could build in rules that work basically like the safety functions of many machines today, in which the specific conditions result in safety behaviors or shut down orders. But it’s hard to imagine, say, an attack drone with an ethical system that allows it to make decisions about right and wrong in a battlefield context.

What would that even look like? Programming problems aside, the moral calculus involved in [waging] war is too murky and too widely disputed to install in a machine. You can’t even get people to come to any sort of agreement on the morality of using drones for targeted killing today, when they are almost entirely human controlled. An artificial intelligence designed to do the same thing would just muddy the moral waters even further. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine even a non-lethal military robot with a meaningful moral mental system, especially if we’re pushing into the realm of artificial intelligence.

Meghan Neal entertains the argument that killer robots might actually be more ethical than human soldiers:

For one, killer bots won’t be hindered by trying not to die, and will have all kinds of superhero-esque capabilities we can program into machines. But the more salient point is that lethal robots could actually be more “humane” than humans in combat because of the distinctly human quality the mechanical warfighters lack: emotions.

Without judgment clouded by fear, rage, revenge, and the horrors of war that toy with the human psyche, an intelligent machine could avoid emotion-driven error, and limit the atrocities humans have committed in wartime over and over through history, [roboethicist Ronald] Arkin argues.  “I believe that simply being human is the weakest point in the kill chain, i.e., our biology works against us,” Arkin wrote in a paper titled “Lethal Autonomous Systems and the Plight of the Non-combatant.”

But, of course, as Zack Beauchamp points out, that same lack of emotion prevents a robot from disobeying orders to commit an atrocity:

Charli Carpenter, a political scientist at the University of Massachussetts-Amherst, makes a compelling argument that robots could commit war crimes — because war crimes, contrary to what we might prefer to believe, are often not committed by rogue soldiers as crimes of passion but as deliberate tools of terror engineered by top commanders. In the Bosnian War, for example, Bosnian Serb soldiers were ordered by their commanders to use rape as a tool of terror, and soldiers who refused were threatened with castration.

Robots, unlike people, always do what they’re told. Carpenter’s point is that human-rights abusing governments could program robot warriors to do whatever they’d want, and they’d do it, without compunction or thought. If the reality of war-time atrocities is that they tend to be intentional, not crimes of passion, then that’s a huge count in favor of banning military robots today.

Filip Spagnoli engages both sides of the moral dilemma:

It’s true that robots can be programmed to kill indiscriminately or to kill all brown people. But history is full of human commanders giving exactly the same kind of orders. If robots are programmed in immoral ways, then that’s an easier problem to solve than the prejudices or emotional failures of scores of individual soldiers and commanders. Of course we’ll have to monitor the people who will program the robots. But is this more difficult than monitoring the immoral orders by human leaders? Obviously it’s not. It’s true that monitoring will be easier in democracies, but if dictators want killer robots there’s not a lot we can do to stop them or to convince them to use robots in a ethical manner.

by Jessie Roberts

A half-century after its release, Eric Schlosser revisits Dr. Strangelove. He notes that “Kubrick’s original intention was to do a straight, serious movie,” but the director “gagged on the idea of a straight version” once he began working on the screenplay:

Pauline Kael wrote that “‘Dr. Strangelove’ was clearly intended as a cautionary movie: it meant to jolt us awake to the dangers of the bomb by showing us the insanity of the course we were pursuing. But artists’ warnings about war and the dangers of total annihilation never tell us how we are supposed to regain control, and ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ chortling over madness, did not indicate any possibilities for sanity.” In the same vein, Susan Sontag asserted that, in future decades, “the display of negative thinking” in the movie would seem “facile.” And Sontag wrote that “Dr. Strangelove is nihilism for the masses, a philistine nihilism.”

I find both of these sets of remarks strange. Why should a popular artist have any obligation to propose “sane” solutions to an intolerable situation?

Surely it’s enough to expose with overwhelming comic energy the contradictions and paradoxes of “mutual assured destruction.” Sane actions are the business of scientists, the military, and Presidents, a few of whom may have been roused to act by this movie. (When Ronald Reagan entered the White House, he wanted to see the war room. This gives one pause. But, later, working with Mikhail Gorbachev, he brought about a partial reduction of nuclear weapons by both sides.) And Sontag’s distaste for “Strangelove” feels off. It’s actually a “cheerful film,” she says. Well, yes, that’s the point of the joke. The movie teases the many Americans acquiescing in a mad logic. At the end, Strangelove leaping out of his chair, and General Turgidson warning of a “mine-shaft gap” with the Soviet Union, are continuing their assertion of high acumen. For them, the game of “strategy” just continues. Sontag wanted a serious film, but I don’t see how anyone could miss, under all the buffoonery and juvenile joking, a furious sense of outrage.

by Jonah Shepp

Sudan has sentenced a Christian woman to death for apostasy:

A pregnant 27-year-old Sudanese woman was sentenced to death by hanging Thursday for apostasy after marrying a Christian man and refusing to convert to Islam. Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag also faces charges of adultery. Ibrahim, who was born to a Muslim father but raised Orthodox Christian by her mother, was first sentenced on Sunday, but she was given until Thursday to change her mind and convert. She refused to do so, Al Jazeera reports.

“I am a Christian and I never committed apostasy,” Ibrahim said.

Ibrahim was found guilty of apostasy — the abandonment of one’s religious faith – because she was born to a Muslim father and married a Christian man. The adultery charge came as Islamic law prohibits Muslim women from marrying outside of their religion, a rule which effectively voided the marriage.

Here’s hoping that international outrage over this ruling will see it overturned. Harris Zafar stresses that executing apostates has no genuine basis in Islam:

In Demystifying Islam: Tackling the Tough Questions, I dedicate an entire chapter to explaining Shariah and another chapter to tackling the question of religious freedom and the supposed punishment of death for apostasy. A close study of Islam and its scripture reveals that Islam neither prescribes religion to be legislated nor prescribes any punishment for apostasy.

But in many Muslim-majority countries, apostasy is considered a crime punishable by the state, endorsing the view that Islam calls for death of any Muslim who renounces his or her faith. A growing number of Muslims, however, reject this belief on the basis of Islam, arguing there is no Islamic punishment prescribed for one who renounces their faith. This is because the concept of killing a person for choosing a different faith is, in fact, a violation of the teachings of Islam. Simply put, Islam does not prohibit freedom of conscience and religion and does not prescribe punishments for matters such as apostasy.

But Dreher thinks Islam has to answer for this sort of barbarism, doctrinal basis or none:

Hey Brandeis, this is the kind of thing that Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks out against. Yet you wanted nothing to do with her, because somebody might call you anti-Muslim. You privileged Americans wouldn’t even have her on your campus. Well, look, not all Muslims in the world support this despicable stuff, but if what Sudan is doing to this Christian woman, and what traditional sharia-loving Muslims do to women and girls in Sudan, in Nigeria, and elsewhere is “Muslim,” then being pro-human means you had better be “anti-Muslim” in the sense I mean here.

If, God forbid, she goes to her death, Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag will be a powerful witness to Christianity. And the cruel men who will have murdered her will be powerful witnesses to Islam, whether anyone likes it or not.

Kimberly Smith argues that the real story here is about Sudan’s “complete disregard for the dignity of life, especially female life”:

I know Muslim women in South Sudan who the Islamic Janjaweed raped with sticks as they mocked, “This is so you cannot make black babies.” I know men who’ve been beaten, had their teeth knocked out and forced to swallow them and had limbs hacked off as they watched their wives and children dragged behind the tail of a horse into slavery because their skin was black instead of the beautiful bronze color of their Arab-descendant fellow countrymen. I know a beautiful young schoolteacher whose father forced her to leave her job to marry a man who already had four wives so that he could garner a few more cows. I’ve sat through bomb blitzes targeted at the indigenous people of the Nuba Mountains, which is largely Islamic, simply because they are black and yet dare to proclaim their right to life, liberty and the use of their homeland’s natural resources.

The depravity of the Sudanese government extends far beyond religion and deep into the heart of humanity. A people will not truly have freedom of religion unless it is built upon a foundation of the sanctity of life.