Society for the Reclamation of Liberalism

I had an epiphany while scurrying back from the bank tonight to talk to my boss about which hemisphere I’ll be living in three weeks from now (Answer? No one knows!).

Epiphany: I’m a liberal!

Update: Not in the sense in which we now use the word liberal. And not a progressive or a leftist.

Who knew, right? But it took reading this kid’s blog for some reason to really bring things full circle: There are other strange creatures like me out there in the world. I always knew there were other people who thought like me; I just thought they were called ‘economists’. I totally feel like the gay kid who has figured out that there is a word for what she feels and she isn’t just an alien changeling adrift in human society.

This has been a moment of personal liberation in several respects.

Sub-epiphany A:
I’m not just picking a word I like and pasting it slapdash onto concepts I like. This word has a history and a meaning that has mutated and been purposefully corrupted into nearly unrecognizable forms. Things that don’t have a word don’t really exist, so learning that there is a word for my ideas is waaaaay validating. I didn’t even have to make it up!

In light of the above, I hereby announce the founding of my Reclamation of Liberalism project. I’d only engaged in this project half-heartedly until now, thinking that I was driven mainly by being self-centered enough to want to rearrange everyone else’s political taxonomy to align a category to my personal beliefs. Ha. Nevermore such modesty.

Sub-epiphany B:
I have long felt vague nascent annoyance at being labeled ‘moderate’ or having right-wingers think I’m conservative and leftists think I’m ‘liberal’. This has now hatched into full-fledged self righteous anger! I mean, not so angry. But you know. I watched countless smart freshman show up at Yale confused and neither labeling themselves as liberal or conservative according to the way those terms are now conventionally used in American politics. Since ‘moderate’ and ‘centrist’ are bad words in my alma mater’s political milieu, these kids were quickly either beaten down and re-forged as more ‘radical’ and ‘principled’ leftists or rightists, or decided that being a moderate means you are a pragmatist with no principles and thereby excused themselves from critical self-examination.

Liberals are often mistaken for moderates in our current political lingo, because they sometimes fall on one side of the great political dichotomies and sometimes on the other. This is not because we are moderates, necessarily. It’s because we think you are asking the wrong questions. For example: big government or small government? This is possibly the most philosophically and rhetorically over-used question in American politics. My answer is: tell me the policy and the context, and I’ll tell you what I think. This is not because I am an unprincipled pragmatist or even because I think that the efficacy of government involvement is not a central question in most policymaking. It’s because I do not have a moral principle regarding the size of government. In contrast to a libertarian who likes markets and small government on principle as a matter of just processes and natural rights, I like them when they work toward the things I care about, and not when they don’t. I don’t think that there is anything inherently just or un-just about big government. I wish that those who often find themselves sitting the American political fence realized that there are good reasons to do this on principle.

The point is, I am going to cry myself to sleep tonight over all of the baby Yalies I could have rescued from the clutches of libertarianism or Marxism had I only been noisier about political philosophy in college. Don’t let The Man call you a moderate! Liberalism is, like, totally radical! Because if there were one phrase to describe my college career it would be “shy and retiring regarding matters of political philosophy”.

What is a Liberal, you may ask? I’ve laid out, roughly, the four principles underlying my political philosophy here. The Cliff Notes version is: individualism, egalitarianism, meliorism, utilitarianism. To assist in the identification of these elusive creatures in the wild – a bizarre place where I am told most people don’t throw around words like ‘meliorism’ in casual conversation – here are a few broad-and-only-slightly-less-abstract generalizations.

• She may be what we now refer to as a ‘social liberal, fiscal conservative’. Or, a Democrat who thinks markets are okay sometimes. Or, a neo-liberal (sometimes).
• She may think it makes more sense for government to muck around with the economy than with cultural norms. (The reasoning, in brief: Personal behaviors are, well, really personal. Public policy is by nature one-size-fits-all. Economic policies can also be constraining, but money is at least fungible. I can use it to buy weird music that no one else wants to listen to, and you can use it for whatever knocks your socks off. More on this chain of reasoning at a later date.)
• She may think that government shouldn’t try to legislate everyone toward a single concept of The Good Life, and that it should probably provide some protections against families or religious communities or employers doing it, too. (Pluralism is pretty unavoidable once you put individualism and utilitarianism together. Different stuff makes different people happy, so a good world will necessarily have diverse communities that cater to different preferences. More on this topic too, aka Dara’s-favorite-Professor-Startz-lecture-involving-incoherent-blackboard-diagrams.)
• She may be a Democrat who was – at least, at some point – okay with invading Iraq.

Uh… probably some other stuff, too. You all are hereby invited to the grand kickoff of the Society for the Reclamation of Liberalism, to be held whenever I next find myself in North America in a place with some effing drinkable beer. Or wine. Or scotch. Mmmmm…

Coming attractions:
A Stylized History of Liberalism, or, How Everything Got So Screwed Up
Why Liberalism is Radical (An exposition in four parts)

Unhelpful thoughts on abortion

Approach to abortion #1: Human life begins at conception, therefore abortion is murder.
Problem: How can you allow any exceptions, even for rape or mother’s health? If there is really mass murder going on, why aren’t you out citizen’s arresting doctors who perform abortions?
Solution: Yes.
(Okay, fine – some argue that even if they feel this way they recognize that compromising politically to prevent as many deaths as possible is better than letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.)

Approach to abortion #2: Human life begins at birth, therefore any decisions about abortion should be left in the mother’s hands.
Problem: Why do we feel sad about abortion, as if it’s something acceptable but better to avoid if possible?
Solution: We feel regret about plenty of things with never-to-be-realized potential that have nothing to do with taking human life. Like, novels we never wrote and vacations we should have taken.

Approach to abortion #3: Human life begins somewhere between conception and birth, therefore we should legalize abortions performed before that point and criminalize those performed after it.
Problem: How can we know when life begins?
Solution: We should take our best guess now based on scientific evidence, and refine our laws as medical science improves.

Really unhelpful alternative I am proposing: Human life begins between conception and birth. But not only can we not know when it happens, there is no ‘point’ when it ‘happens’. There is a spectrum which we can only classify at either end – everything between is just a matter of more and less. Any attempts to draw a line through it are not just uncertain, but arbitrary and invalid by the nature of the thing. And the health and happiness of the mother and other people are relevant as an also-impossible-to-classify-spectrum of more and less bad outcomes that have to get weighed against the more and less of the life. Abortion is therefore neither flat out murder, nor a-okay, but always something morally grey, uncomfortable, and squishy.
Problem: So, uh, what are the policy implications of this?
Non-solution: I have no effing idea.

As a general point, I have noticed that people are very uncomfortable with the idea that pretty much everything is morally grey. (Please overlook my assertion of a few days ago that gay marriage is a black and white issue…) The fact that something is the least-bad option does not make it ‘good’. Conversely, the fact that all of your choices are morally unpalatable – or possibly even unforgivable – does not obviate your responsibility to choose between them as best you can. It’s called tragedy, folks, and it’s awesome.

People want to have a list of things they should do or refrain from doing as they go about their daily lives, and to feel that if they can check off everything on that list, they are good, and if they can't, they are bad. Everyday life is about choosing from among less-than-good options, by virtue of the fact that there is always more good one could have done. You can never relax and say “I have been good today”. You haven’t. You’ve been bad. And good. And tomorrow you should be more good and less bad. I say this as someone who bought a latte today instead of sending my two bucks to Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Nigerian mediocrity

There are many reasons behind aid spending, but two are most often cited, particularly by private philanthropies (which tend to be less interested than public funders in providing ‘aid’ to Israel and Egypt):

• Development – This money is an investment which is going to contribute to the political or economic development of this country in a continuing way, beyond the direct impacts of the spending.
• Human rights – This money will provide direct relief to people who are unable to access some goods or experiences which we consider necessary to the expression of their humanity

One or both of these principles can drive a broad range of aid activities. Health and education provide particularly interesting examples, however, because the same activities are often justified using both principles simultaneously and with relatively equal weight. So, funders will argue that better HIV prevention is necessary to prevent massive human suffering and to rescue the economies of southern Africa. Or, that getting girls into middle school is both a matter of women’s rights and will have all sorts of fabulous indirect effects on politics, health, population growth, and labor force participation.

But this is supposed to be another anti-Nigeria post, you say? When do we get to the part about Nigeria, you say?*

The question next arises: where do we spend all of this lovely money on health and education? Well, the reasoning goes, we should spend it where the need is greatest. (Remember we’re talking about funders who don’t typically include upgrades in airborne bombing technology in their definition of need) If need is the extent to which you currently lack the desired object, Chad and Somalia are doing pretty badly on the health and education front. But then, we’re worried that spending money in those places would be a bad investment, since they also currently lack functioning governments or economies. What we need is a country that is doing really badly, but not sooooo badly that investing in human capital seems pointless. Hmm. Also, it would be good if it were really big and had a lot of poor people in it. If only we could think of a country like that…

Nigeria (okay – AND Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda) often serves as a sort of compromise aid target: it is big, poor, and clearly needy, but not such an obvious basket-case that it is difficult to justify the development value of working there. I think is quite plausible, however, that this type of compromise may often serve neither development investment nor human rights purposes.

Generic health and education efforts are justified by both development and human rights aims. But different types of activities within the generalization of ‘health’ or ‘education’ may serve those purposes differently, and furthermore, even the same activity may achieve different things in different contexts. It seems very possible to me that we ought split our pot of health/education money in two, and spend some in the countries where development returns are maximized, and some of it in the countries where human rights impact is maximized. Nigeria may be a compromise based on the bizarre assumption that we have to find countries that have the least-bad combination for both goals.

Why don’t we support technical colleges in Botswana, and women’s literacy groups in refugee camps in Chad? How about full infant vaccination and HIV prevention in South Africa, and clean birthing kits in the Congo and water purification tools in Myanmar? We tend to discount the best off because they don’t need help, and the worst off because they won’t make good use of it.

You may notice that I have used wussy-waffly words like ‘possible’ and ‘may’ in this post more than usual. This is because there is a long list of possible reasons why Nigeria is actually an optimal compromise (shocking!), and I am open to being convinced of their validity.

1. We can’t work in Chad, not just because it wouldn’t reap the development benefits of human capital investment, but because the country is so dysfunctional that our money would actually disappear and not serve human rights purposes either. (Paul Collier cites a study in Chad showing that less than 1% of public money destined for rural health clinics actually made there.) For Nigeria to be the next best thing, of course, we would have to assume that money spent there doesn’t disappear…
2. Investing in middle income countries might maximize development in some sense, but because they are already doing sort of okay on their own, we would rather get less growth in countries with a lower starting point.
3. Investing in low income countries actually does maximize development, because there are large diminishing marginal returns to health and education improvements. The difference in the economic benefits of taking Nigerian kids from 4th to 5th grade versus taking South African kids from 10th to 11th grade overwhelms any other advantages of working in a more functional country.
4. Investing in low income countries actually does maximize development, because middle income countries are no longer at a point where outside interventions can help – if South Africa’s schools suck, it’s because of something wrong in the system, not because the department of education lacks funding or needs technical assistance.
5. Funder organizations have limited human and financial capacity and can’t split their attentions effectively between a bunch of countries. Since they have to show their donors that they are achieving both development and human rights outcomes, they have to pick a compromise target. Actually, I’m not real sympathetic to this one, but I thought I’d throw it in for the sake of completeness.

More in a future post on why development attention should focus more on lower-middle and upper-low income countries. We’ll call it the lifting-Africa-up-by-its-southern-bootstraps approach…

*For any future employers who may someday for some unknown reason find themselves reading this: I love Nigeria. Really. Nigeria is great. We should spend money there, as long as it’s on the right things. I’m totally straw-manning the country to serve my devious literary purposes.

Potentially illegible thoughts on language via skype chat

Courtesy of Eric, who is a Good Person With Whom to Talk About Things.

mlstartz says: so, if we start to use 'ambition' to mean 'making a lot of money in conventional career paths'
mlstartz says: or whatever
mlstartz says: then we talk about ambition being bad
mlstartz says: and we sweep both what ambition originally meant and the new meaning under that judgment
mlstartz says: and we lose the nuance of what the word maybe should mean
mlstartz says: and we don't have a different word to replace it with, so we actually stop talking about those concepts
mlstartz says: I think this is a huge factor in the nuance we've lost in american politics
mlstartz says: by mis-using the words liberal and conservative

eric.schoettle says: so I agree, language is messy
eric.schoettle says: and thinking about our inability to say things because of twisted words both scares me and rings true
eric.schoettle says: but I think it also fundamentally misconstrues language
eric.schoettle says: Language is the epitome of a social construct. It only means what we think it means.
eric.schoettle says: as ideas about things like "making a lot of money through conventional means" change, then so do the words surrounding that

mlstartz says: but that doesn't mean that we have to be consciously governed by the popular will in defining it

eric.schoettle says: now, yes, if we could cleanly fix some things down into particular concepts, it would be great
eric.schoettle says: define theings like in physics, and it's all so much clearer

mlstartz says: just because most people have lots nuance around the concept of ambition
mlstartz says: doesn't mean we have to

eric.schoettle says: but see, that's exactly where I disagree
eric.schoettle says: if we want to expect a different concept to be understood when we use a word, then we don't communicate

mlstartz says: but I think we underestimate the extent to which popular understandings are shaped by conscious attempts at redefintion

eric.schoettle says: and worse, we isolate our communication to our community, that already knows what we're talking about anyway

mlstartz says: but it's possible to be a shaper of language, is what I'm saying
mlstartz says: not just go with the flow

eric.schoettle says: we do, for particular conversations, for particular groups, get to define things, as we make our point
eric.schoettle says: but if you fight to make a word something else, because somebody else defined it purposefully somehow that doesn't work for you
eric.schoettle says: then aren't you fighting over language?

mlstartz says: yeah
mlstartz says: I'm sort of in favor of fighting over langauge
mlstartz says: because when you fight over language
mlstartz says: at the very least you come out with a better taxonomy of concepts
mlstartz says: if not actual agreement on semantics

eric.schoettle says: it's almost impossible to kill an idea by language

mlstartz says: I disagree

eric.schoettle says: hmm

mlstartz says: I think that the concept of liberalism is dead in America
mlstartz says: not in fact
mlstartz says: but as an idea

eric.schoettle says: so I can see it in an acaemic sense, for sure
eric.schoettle says: but if obama wants to express a progressive agenda, well, he doesn't even need to use the word
eric.schoettle says: and that word, well, it's a revitalized word that's being used to deal with changes in what some words mean, as well as political philosophies

mlstartz says: but I think some of the democratic party's struggles to build a strong electoral coalition come from a lack of clarity around the differences between left, liberal, progressive, etc
mlstartz says: we've started to use these words interchangeably
mlstartz says: so we don't understand when people we would describe with one of these words don't act like a voting bloc
mlstartz says: for instance, I think a huge part of Obama's success in revving up the previously politically alienated young, educated, and wealthy comes from his appeal to liberals

eric.schoettle says: I really don't know what you mean by liberals
eric.schoettle says: and sure, I'm not a social scientist
eric.schoettle says: but I'm not an uninterested dunce, either.

mlstartz says: so, when I say liberal, I mean it in something closer to the sense in which the rest of the world still uses it
mlstartz says: and the sense of the roots of the word -- someone who is liberal with something eg. time money acceptance
mlstartz says: and liberals in most of the world like social pluralism and often markets

eric.schoettle says: ok, so where's the key difference from the use of the word here?
eric.schoettle says: b/c I thought you meant it in a more libertarian way, but being generous with money seems to be fiscally liberal, in the U.S. sense

mlstartz says: liberals = pluralism, markets, acceptance of change

eric.schoettle says: define pluralism

mlstartz says: mmmm. again inexactly = individually defined values coexisting communally
mlstartz says: so, like having coexisting religious practices, political communities, languages, etc
mlstartz says: and having a political and economic system that operates with this sort of diversity intact
mlstartz says: rather than acting as a homogenizing or improving force

eric.schoettle says: can improving be non-homogonizing

mlstartz says: mmm, yes
mlstartz says: I guess i meant 'improving' in the sense of bringing everyone toward a socially-defined idea of betterment
mlstartz says: which progressives, at least historically, are into while liberals often arent
mlstartz says: progressives = social improvement, often community-defined values, charity
mlstartz says: early progressives in the US did women's rights and labor laws
mlstartz says: early US progressives also did prohibition
mlstartz says: and mental institutions and orphanages

eric.schoettle says: are you a liberal or a progressive?

mlstartz says: liberal
mlstartz says: but I often agree with progressive politics in practice, see?
mlstartz says: there are major areas of overlap
mlstartz says: which is why leftists, liberals, and progressives have often made a successful electoral coalition
mlstartz says: but they have different reasons for reaching the same policy conclusions
mlstartz says: and when we forget that, we often forget why they form a coalition, and then forget how to predict when and why that coalition might not hold
mlstartz says: so for instance
mlstartz says: as a very rough statement that wouldn't always hold true
mlstartz says: progressives and liberals would almost certainly agree on women's voting right
mlstartz says: might or might not agree on particular labor laws
mlstartz says: and would almost certainly not agree about prohibition
mlstartz says: (or modern equivalents -- sin taxes, smoking bans, etc)

eric.schoettle says: so, ok, I want to go back to the language thing
eric.schoettle says: it's an irreconciable conflict between intellectual clarity and communication with the world
eric.schoettle says: it doesn't necessarily make sense to buck the flow of the masses of people using the word
eric.schoettle says: when instead, you can just appropriate a new term with the meaning you like
eric.schoettle says: and because it's new, it gets the definition you want it to have
eric.schoettle says: if the idea grows, the word will with it, and there's no problem

mlstartz says: words do have a life and history that are hard to replace

eric.schoettle says: you've got to change it in accordance with the way the world works
eric.schoettle says: hence the revival of "progressive"

I promise it’s not just about the utils

WARNING: This post will be stupefyingly boring to the majority of beta testers! For those who don’t feel a need to get the philosophical meta-context for my choosing-the-unchosen blog theme, read no further.

This is a highly summarized brain dump of everything I figured out in college. For those who are interested, this will hopefully provide a context for my attempt to correct my intellectual over-rationality. I’ll try to make it as brief and painless as possible. Come to think of it, this is a great commitment strategy – having posted stuff like this will ensure that I can never get old and silly and try to run for political office!

To start with meaningless labels, I would call my thinking something along the lines of “liberal utilitarianism”. Oddly enough, the best definition of liberalism I’ve come across is from John Gray, of all people. As summarized by Robert Bork:

“MR. GRAY identifies the four philosophic elements of the "liberal syndrome" as "moral or promative individualism" (the idea that ultimate value lies only in the state of mind, feeling, or lives of individuals), "universalism" (the idea that certain right inhere in all human beings and that every political institution is to be judged by the degree to which it secures the specified rights), "meliorism" (the idea that human institutions may be improved indefinitely through critical reason), and "egalitarianism" (the idea that, because all humans are morally equal, hierarchy and authority require an ethical defense).”

I would alter the order and content of this formulation slightly to describe my personal beliefs:

1. Individualism: The individual is the fundamental unit of moral value. Please note: Community-level arrangements and interactions between individuals are relevant and can certainly be moral or valuable, but only in so far as they contribute to the achievement of The Good^TM for their constituent individuals.
2. Egalitarianism: Individuals are inherently morally equal and equally deserving of The Good. People do not deserve things on the basis of their differential natural endowments or life choices. Please note: This does not mean that we should create political or social systems that prevent people from getting things on the basis of their endowments or choices – just that they don’t deserve what they get any more or less than anyone else. More on this in FAQs below.
3. Meliorism: Human institutions can be improved to be more conducive to the achievement of The Good. Please note: This does not mean that improvement will happen, merely that it can happen, and that it can happen through changes in instruments of human construction. There is no historical inevitability about ‘progress’.
   
4. Universalism --> utilitarianism: Here’s where I think Gray is not so useful. At best, his view of universalism implies a sort of trite definition of The Good as political rights that ought to be safeguarded by governments for all people. At worst, it is completely redundant with the combination of individualism and egalitarianism (individuals are morally valuable and all equally so, therefore efforts toward the achievement of The Good are deserved by all) – and leaves us completely lacking the content of a moral framework. Sure, The Good is deserved by individuals, equally, and we can do better at providing it. But what is “it”?

I hope that we don’t settle for the idea that political rights provided by governments are the be all and end all of morality. Does this mean that there’s no right and wrong outside of the use of government power to prevent of infringements of a ‘right to life’ or ‘right to property’ or even a ‘right to be fed, clothed, and educated’? That doesn’t leave me with much to go on in personal decisions, except maybe a suggestion that being a policeman is the only way to live the good life. Perhaps this is a definition of The ‘Political’ Good, but I think it’s a poor one, even at that. I’ve found that those who try to describe moral philosophy using a terminology of rights tend to get themselves tangled up very quickly, because rights not only can but often do conflict with one another. A ‘right’ implies something absolute: either you have a right to something or you have no right to it. This leads some to narrow down the list of rights to a point where there is lower probability of conflict between them, leaving them with a minimalist state or anarcho-capitalism. This choice does not appeal to me, for reasons that I will be happy to describe if anyone cares.

The other option is to back away from the absolute nature of rights, and start talking about a ‘hierarchy of rights’. Some things (like life) are more important than other things (like freedom of speech), so if they conflict the one higher up the totem pole trumps the other (e.g. you don't have a right to speech when it's a threat to my life – yelling fire, national security secrets, etc). This formulation rapidly leads to minute calculations of trump order between the lesser rights, arguments about how to use the word ‘right’ to talk about positive goods like food and shelter, and questions about how serious the threat to a major right has to be to merit trumping the minor right (e.g. should we live in a police state to minimize threats to life and property?).

At this point, frankly, the word ‘right’ is meaningless, and is causing you more trouble than it’s worth. What we really mean to say is that life, rule of law, freedom of expression, food, clothing, education, self-respect, and a laundry list of minor ‘rights’ are good things. Most of us want them. It’s nice when we have them. Some of them are less good or important, and we’re often willing to trade those to get the big ones. And the government probably has some role to play in helping us get them or preventing other people from taking them away from us. So shall we just say what we mean? There are many good things in this world which can contribute to the wellbeing of an individual: material goods, spiritual goods, intellectual goods, social goods, political goods. Some of them are near-universally agreed upon as goods, like life. Others are controversial. Most are dependent in some degree on the individual in question – there is much commonality between human needs, but we all want slightly different combinations.

A good is not gratification and happiness is not hedonism. Most people recognize the value of short-term pain for long-term gain. Many recognize some of the deeper pleasures: service to others, success in the face of adversity, and the achievement of love and respect. And when people don’t recognize the worth of these things right away, usually they’re still happier in the long run when someone teaches them how to be well in a richer sense. In short, it is possible for an individual to maximize her wellbeing through hedonism or through self-mutilation. But for the rest of us, the things that are conducive to wellbeing are fairly recognizable as consistent historical patterns with some significant variation around a mean. This is what I mean by utilitarianism. With the understanding that wellbeing is meant in the broadest possible sense and will involve something slightly different for each person, The Good is to maximize wellbeing for all individuals through personal actions and collective and political means.

Some FAQs:

Don’t I deserve things differentially from other people by earning them?

No. You don’t deserve happiness more than other people for being nice or smart or hardworking any more than you do for being the strongest warrior or the most beautiful maiden in the land. Did you do something to earn your personality or intelligence or work ethic? No. You didn’t. You were born with them or brought up to have them, just the same as your physical characteristics or your aristocratic title.

It sounds like you’re saying that everything about me is determined by my natural endowments and upbringing. What about free will?

Uh, what about free will? No, you don’t have it. Why does everyone get all freaked out about this? If you think about it, it makes no intuitive sense to imagine a form of causation that is neither random nor determined by preexisting characteristics. Being who you are because of characteristics endowed by genetics or God or nature or whatever doesn’t make you any less you. It doesn’t obviate the need for mental and physical processes that lead to the next outcome. It doesn’t prevent us from making moral judgments and recognizing The Good. And it doesn’t prevent us from punishing people for doing bad things, unless we think that the purpose of punishment is to pass judgment on sin, rather than to deter or constrain bad things.

Does this mean that you’re going to go all pinko-Commie redistribution-ist on us and try to ensure that all those equally deserving people get equal stuff?

No. The goal isn’t equality, the goal is maximizing wellbeing. It’s entirely possible to have an arrangement that leads to greater inequality and still makes everyone better off, and that’s okay. When it comes to decisions about distributions that are not Pareto optimal [wiki], it gets more complicated. This is where the egalitarianism comes in, and I think it probably tells us that we need some sort of minimax social utility function where we arrange things to get the best for the worst-off. But I’m open to the possibility that there are circumstances in which it’s okay to really screw some people to help a lot of people (see the draft). Yes, there is an issue here with interpersonal comparisons of utility. But point being: I’m cool with capitalism, okay guys?

Can you measure utility, though? Where’s your utilometer?

No. Can you measure virtue? Where’s your virtuometer?

So how does this play into my personal decisions? Is my moral responsibility to maximize my own wellbeing, or what?

You have a personal responsibility to increase the wellbeing of everyone. On the planet. Including yourself, of course.

Whoa there. Infinite responsibility? So it’s somehow my fault that babies are dying of natural infections in Malawi? Under your system, there’s no way for me to be good!

Yes, yes, and true. So what? You have infinite responsibility to do good things, and you will inevitably fall short. You will fail to achieve moral perfection. It’s amazing how many people I know who claim to believe in original sin have a serious problem with this concept.

Whew. If anyone is interested, I would be happy to entertain requests for clarification or elaboration or arguments about why I'm full of it. Otherwise, I've gotten this off my chest, and we can all move on with our lives.

Infamous Napkin Diagram aka Why Republicans Keep Winning

Tomorrow I'm going to post what will probably be for most beta testers a stupifyingly boring introductory post to my Learning To Be Irrational blog theme. In the process of writing and trying to avoid going to bed on time, I was remembering the stuff below. I hope that it'll be more entertaining than tomorrow's post.

Keep in mind that I made this up to torture freshmen. Approximately 2/3 of the politically-inclined members of Yale classes '08 through '10 were asked to locate themselves on this chart early in their college careers. On a napkin. At brunch. No, really.

Also keep in mind that the words I'm using in Exhibit A are as defined by the chart, and not necessarily as in common parlance. Because if there's one thing I learned at Yale, it's that it's more fun to make up your own definitions to serve your own purposes!


Exhibit A:
Exhibit US Politics:
If you don't believe me regarding napkins, brunch, and terrified freshmen, just ask Matt or Roger.