June 01, 2009
Arguments and incitements
There's a not-absurd moral definition of "murder" that would include abortion. It would also include suicide. People who think suicide is murder in the eye of God (which is the traditional Christian belief) don't insist on making it a crime. Saying "abortion is murder" and calling a physician who performs abortions a "baby killer" on Fox News is different from a seminar-room argument.
May 29, 2009
Dick Cheney: Portrait of a Sadist
What kind of person seems to insist on torturing other people for political purposes and on blowing the heads of off animals for seemingly no reason at all?
May 07, 2009
Afterthoughts on Carbon Charge vs. Cap-and-Trade
A big difference between what everyone calls a "carbon tax" and I, at least so far, stubbornly call a climate injury charge (CIC) (because it's more accurate and anyway this is my blog post and I can do what I want) and a cap-and-trade (CAT) system is (i) neither an economic nor a political tactics issue and (ii) too little...
March 10, 2009
Baked babies, lobbyists, and the fundamental attribution error
A score of infants die every year because parents forget that they are strapped into their car-seats. You can think about that as a problem with the parents, or with the car-seats. You can ask why the parents were so neglectful, or why the car-seats weren't equipped with alarms.
February 05, 2009
Thou shalt not commit protectionism
Three moral arguments Obama could make against protectionism in the stimulus.
November 24, 2008
Stimulus, Consumption, and Charity
When it comes to economic stimulus, your greed is good. Your charity is better.
October 06, 2008
Moral Hazard
Thinking further about the devastating effects on American moral fiber of a creeping socialist response to economic stimulus, and how important it is to be sure the poor don't get all uppity and troublesome, I recall that George Grosz had it covered eighty-odd years ago, and Schiller more than two hundred: ...and Wilde, of course: "Really, if the lower orders...
September 18, 2008
Waste, fraud, abuse, infantilism, and magical thinking
OK, time for some mentable gymnastics! What do the following policies have in common: American petroleum reserves should be used up as quickly as possible. Then we get to negotiate terms with foreign suppliers with none of our own, instead of some. Drill, baby, drill! Drain America First! Lower gas prices! Roads not tracks! Woo hoo! You should spend all...
August 25, 2008
When does "stick to the knitting" mean "put your head in the sand"?
Governments around the world have enacted a variety of requirements to reduce the global warming (GW) effect of its vehicle fuel mix. This is already complicated because some of the GW effect of the biofuels that looked like good plays a year ago results from land use changes hard to measure but probably very large . But there's more: all...
August 10, 2008
A beacon to an oppressed world
One of the really great things about being American is knowing your country is exporting the best of its political and artistic culture to places that really need it. In the sixties and seventies, for example, Europeans watching US TV shows started asking pointed questions about stuff like habeas corpus and refusing to answer questions on 5th amendment grounds, and...
May 31, 2008
Snitching
Predictably, the oxen gored by McClellan's book, apparently having nothing to wield by way of refutation, have hauled out Big Smircha and fired rounds of character slime, mostly (i) if he thought it was wrong, why didn't he speak up at the time? and the less closely reasoned (ii) ya lousy dirty cheaty rat basset snitch! Tim Rutten reflects on...
March 09, 2008
Placebos, antidepressants, and government mendacity
Antidepressants seem to be only somewhat more effective against depression than placebos, and the finding has triggered a fair amount of discussion of health care costs (how much are we spending for drugs that don't work much better than sugar pills?) and of course lots of technical back and forth about the studies themselves. Am I ever not going to...
February 27, 2008
October 14, 2007
The Turkish Armenian Morassacre
The likelihood that Congress will consider, and maybe pass, a resolution declaring the massacres and expulsions of Armenians by Turkey between 1896 and 1923 to be a genocide and giving some vacuous counsel to the president about "understanding and sensitivity" has turned into a real mess, and with lots of good reasons. It's desperately important to the current Turkish regime...
June 26, 2007
June 04, 2007
Time to exhale
I landed on Andrew Speaker last week with all four feet and a couple of readers have since pointed out that I was probably out of bounds. If he knew what we know now about the communicability of his infection, he was certainly not sociopathic nor grossly irresponsible. Sorry. But he was jerky and irresponsible; the risk of causing another...
May 31, 2007
He what?? !! ...so he could WHAT??!!!
Update: A couple of readers point out that this is over-the-top in view of unfolding news; backoff here. Now this gives "to have and to hold, in sickness and in health" a whole new meaning. TB is spread feebly by casual public content (coughing in public places) but effectively by prolonged, intimate contact in closed spaces. If you have XDR-TB,...
May 10, 2007
Are our moral intuitions irrelevant?
Mark argued this morning (follow-up here) that it is neither irrational nor morally wrong for Americans to place greater weight on the well-being of their fellow citizens than on that of unknown persons abroad when thinking about the desirability of expanded global trade. This observation will draw fire from consequentialist moral philosophers, who insist that the right course of action...
The scope of the moral community: an exchange
Alex Tabarrok and I discuss the tension between overcoming individual selfishness and avoiding the bad consequences of collective selfishness.
May 09, 2007
Trade and the collective-action problem
No, it's not irrational or morally wrong for Americans to care more about the well-being of other Americans than about the well-being of Belgians, any more than it's irrational or morally wrong for parents to care more for their own children than for other children. Local social capital is valuable, and ought to be tended.
April 17, 2007
The Rap on Rap
Predictably, Imus' little contretemps raises questions about the relentless truly repulsive conventions of gangsta rap and its related forms. This AP story has some interesting quotes, from critics hostile to the misogynistic, violent stream of gangsta rap and from its defenders anxious to distinguish it from Imus' japes and jabs. The standard defense of this bilge is here offered by...
April 13, 2007
Acts and traits, rights and duties
Anything that gives us moral enlightenment from both Don Imus and Al Sharpton across a table from each other can't be all bad, right? Seriously, while Imus doesn't matter much, the whole episode gives us perspective on a pair of issues too often taken the wrong way. The first is a confusion of acts and traits, as in "anyone who...
March 13, 2007
For a proper moralism in politics
In common usage, "morality" means observing sexual taboos. But common usage is wrong. I'm not against "morality;" I'm against a false and partial morality. Let's not cede a good word to bad people.
October 21, 2006
October 05, 2006
David Brooks, moral idiot
Does David Brooks really think that letting your colleagues molest other people's children is merely a question of "management," somehow divorced from "morality"?
September 28, 2006
August 09, 2006
Just asking redux
Many comments on my previous post, concerning the comparison between Lebanon, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including one from Matthew Yglesias. There’s nothing like the Middle East to get people’s blood boiling—and that thousands of miles from the region. Commentators who rejected the analogy did so primarily on two grounds: 1) the goals and threats in each situation are different, so they...
August 01, 2006
Mel Gibson, Evil, and Art
Mel Gibson's little contretemps with the police has become a lot more interesting than it started out to be. It raises issues about how we should count traits, prejudice, and considered discourse in making moral judgments about people and, as Gibson is an artist (and not just an actor who speaks the lines of others), how the personality of the...
July 09, 2006
World Cup and Doing the Right Thing
I wash my hands of World Cup soccer. Half the games from the quarterfinals on, including the championship, were decided by penalty kicks that have nothing to do with the game, mostly because with all its wonderful qualities, soccer has a fatal design defect: not enough scoring in regulation play. The result of this is that the game score has...
April 14, 2006
March 29, 2006
Benevolent despotism in Singapore
Honest, competent dictatorship is better than the other kind. And Singapore's party oligarchy has delivered the goods. But is the development of a form of tyranny compatible with economic success really something to be happy about?
March 15, 2006
Hilzoy on the functions of moral judgment
Moral judgment, including adverse moral judgment, is a form of social and political action.
January 26, 2006
Google, Yahoo, and corporate social responsibility
I think Google didn't do the wrong thing by submitting to Chinese censorship, while Yahoo did do the wrong thing by narking out a reporter to the Chinese secret police. I could be wrong about that. What I'm sure of is that those are real moral questions, which can't be dismissed by saying that corporate managers should always do whatever will make the most money for shareholders.
January 15, 2006
Moral reform movements led by ministers: RIP.
The Reverend Martin Luther King led a society-wide moral movement for equality. That wouldn't be possible today.
November 18, 2005
Daily Lesson
Jonathan Zasloff writes: Early yesterday morning, the House Republicans passed a budget resolution severely cutting Medicaid, food stamps, and child care. Meanwhile, their allies in the Senate passed a resolution extending tax cuts for some of the wealthiest investors. Class, the Daily Lesson comes from Amos, 8:1-8: Thus the LORD showed me: Behold, a basket of summer fruit. And He...
October 29, 2005
Should corporations serve only their shareholders?
On shareholders' rights an organizational sociopathy.
Shareholder value
is not the same as shareholder wealth
A reflection on Mark's post on the Friedman proposition: I am not comfortable with corporations getting in the doing-good business on the whole, by which I mean charitable contributions. political activity outside their narrow business interests, and similar activities. This is partly because of the slippery-slope problem of excess, and partly because I fear that most corporate executives have some...
