I like the weird shot he seems to be taking at Max for his internal consistency. He's passive aggressive versus everyone!
Alos: is it blatantly obvious that I'm avoiding doing work today?
Please, let's not start getting all up in his face at his own place. Wouldn't it be nicer to have him be a running joke that we can kick around without him having to deal with it? Like, shouldn't we fix him up with LB's sister?
I agree with Matt W., but just this once: good work, Michael.
Yeah, I guess my feeling about this is like my feeling about impersonating each other: We should have a rule against it, but breaking that rule can be funny in a case-by-case basis.
Hm. I'm lecturing on that exact topic in accounting ethics today.
That is to say, good work, Michael.
Maybe we just miss having a good troll around every now and then. What makes the best trolls are trolls who can't perceive that they are trolls. Perhaps abc should be unbanned. I haven't been called a watermelon in a while.
Matt,
What exactly are you lecturing on? Whether, from a utilitarian standpoint, it makes sense to turn a flexible norm into a rule -- despite the fact that you don't don't plan on enforcing it absolutely -- if, in converting it into rule, you're making breaking it much funnier? Or is your lecture more blog-specific than that?
Act- and rule-utilitarianism, and whether rule-utilitarianism makes sense in those cases in which the act enjoined by the rule would be utility-decreasing, and why even act-utilitarians should follow rules almost all the time anyway. And a bit of Kant, though that stuff isn't going to happen till Thursday in my undergraduate classes. Blogs will not come up unless I get very drunk in the meantime. Next week is when it gets tied back into accounting (and also it's supposed to reflect back on the codes of conduct, which we've already been talking about).
"exactly" was a serious exaggeration.
I have no background in philosophy, but I once dreamed of reconciling utilitarian morals with deontological moral reasoning.
I wanted to argue that strong individual rights actually increased overall utility, that properly conceived there was no tradeoff between rights holders. It was a crackpot theory, but the aesthetics of solving the problem in a unified way were amazing.
If only my philosophy professors were like you all when I was in college so I might have learned something. Instead, we spent the entire semester questioning the existence of his coffee cup.
I don't really know because I stopped existing in that class most mornings after a while.
Um, thank you Becks, but my specialization is kind of questioning the existence of the coffee cup. I do hope to be able to get some of this stuff about rules across so my students will stay off the front page of the paper (the state of Texas has determined that it's a good idea for accountants to take ethics, for some reason).
BG, I don't think that theory is really all that crackpotty; utilitarians kind of have to account for rights somehow, on pain of Peter Singer--but I really should defer to Labs, who will be more likely to know what he's talking about in depth. If you develop the theory so that bunny slippers decrease utility, that would be crackpot.
I thought your specialization was in whether we could talk about the coffee cup, whilst remaining agnostic on its existence.
I think the coffee cup is an abstract cultural kind.
Matt,
That's what I figured. Are there philosophers who take the importance of humor to a decent life seriously? I can see Bernard Williams arguing that a good joke might be worth breaching a moral duty over. And I think I remember Bentham saying that one of the reasons to insist that our politicians do most of their business out in the open is that it provides great material for satire. Anyone else?
So Matt, what's the latest on coffee cps?
pjs: Arthur Danto has said that having a sense of humor is kind of like having a philosophy, and Ted Cohen (in reading a recent essay by whom I learned has been telling the same jokes for at least 25 years[1]) has written about the intimacy-granting and community-forming nature of jokes. Or something like that.
[1] Tortured syntax especially for SB.
Simon Critchley has a book on humor, which I haven't read, in the "Thinking in Action" series.
You know, I'm afraid that Hilde is taking the high road with us. The high road is very unfunny. And ethically and existentially suspect, I imagine.
And not the fastest way to Scotland.
I'm pretty sure he fell into a pothole on the low road, and can't get out.
I spent some time go beyond the border of his ass, dogshit. I say unto the dogshit, etc. Surely thou after my voice; the mistake of the dogshit. Thou shalt not getting anything interesting from a thread of the LORD, vacuous scum, dogshit, nor his ass, until our brother unto him: I have no other day by the smell of Yglesias through a wife for the relation between spelling and the avenger of the LORD came mightily upon him: I apparently made the same as that writer being critical of heaven! And thou art thou after my brother's keeper? The fanclub called him. And the mistake of Yglesias fanblog the relation between spelling and arise, vacuous scum, but not murder.
Okay, I finally clicked over to his blog. It made my stomach hurt. Long, semi-thoughtful posts, with no comments other than the Yglesias one and no real indication of any readers at all. I completely change my read on this. Not only is there an obligation not to mock him publicly, there might even be an additional positive obligation to invite him over to eat with us at our table and maybe also to our birthday parties.
Re 14, it's always seemed clear to me that there's a perfectly good utilitarian basis for inviolable legal rights since the alternative would be intolerably chaotic. Try raising this point in a seminar discussion of trolley problems and chopping up innocent people to harvest their organs, however, and your teacher will rapidly get frustrated and suggest that you're in the wrong field. To wit, the following dialogue after my thesis defense:
Christine Korsgaard: So, what are you doing after you graduate?
Matt: I've got a job as a political journalist.
CK: That seems to be about your speed.
Moral of the story: Kantians are mean.
That's really, really funny. I now transfer my NCBC to Ms. Korsgaard.
Does raising the point that trolley problems suck balls elicit a different reaction?
SB: don't use tinyurl. It makes the baby jesus puke.
I've seen that admonition elsewhere, but I've never read what the specific complaint against tinyurl is. Can you help a brother out?
I tried it first without tinyurl in 27, but MT went all Procrustes on my 29" link.
Tinyurl recylces its addresses, so the links aren't permanent.
Not to mention it makes it impossible to tell where a link is going.
The tinyurl people say, by way of their web page, "we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires." Are they liars, those people?
Anyway, I have no choice as long as the URL box lops off the end of my datum.
It wouldn't even let you make a regular link in the comment box? I'm skeptical, SB.
I'm telling you, it was too big to fit in your box, and you cut it off.
Compare the links in 27 (snip!) and 28 (ahhh).
You put the link in 27 in the URL field. I'm talking about the comment box, which is far larger.
"Does raising the point that trolley problems suck balls elicit a different reaction?"
I'm increasingly inclined towards the 'though experiments in general suck balls' line of thinking. [I may be paraphrasing Stephen Stich's line of thought here :)]
But I don't like mentioning it in public. It's like admitting a secret admiration for logical positivism and the whole "it's science or it's bollocks" line...
The other points made about tinyurl would hold even if tinyurl didn't recycle their urls, and I've been reliably informed that they do expire. So.
Shite, that was meant to be "thought experiments in general...."
Re: 30 and 31. Yeah, that is pretty funny.
MY's coming at it from a different angle. My goal was closer to rule utilitarianism. My goal was basically to destroy the rationale for utilitarianism. My thought was that if you made the unit of rights and absolute moral rules small enough, then there would be no need for a consequential calculus, because the sum of all of those respected individual rights would produce the greatest total utility.
I can't even remember how the reasoning went, but it was beautiful--and unrealistic--because there was no need for any tradeoffs.
In the legal realm, for example, I thought that you ought to be able to prove conclusively that there shouldn't be a tradeoff between natoional security and civil liberties. Protecting civil liberties. There was no trade off between the rights of criminal defendants and society's interest as a whole in putting criminal defendants behind bars, because if we mistreat criminal defendants and we imagine ourselves treating everyone that way, then society is so much worse off. I can't even remember what I was thinking. It was a crackpot theory, but for a brief instant it seemed inspired. It was much clearer then than the gibberish that I just wrote.
I don't think it's gibberish. Society is worse off if you treat incarcerated persons like crap, because there is no net good to such an action, unless you count the satisfaction of retribution, which I, personally, think the indulgence of is, itself, a net minus. There is no conclusive evidence that treating prisoners badly has any positive effect on their likelihood of committing further crimes, in fact, all evidence points exactly the opposite way.
Uh oh, you got me started on prisoners' rights. Now I may never shut up.
But I was talking about the situation where you let a guilty man go free. My basic personal philosophy is "there, but for the grace of God go I." So my thinking was that even if the guy's a violent criminal and he kills somebody, it's still better to let him off on a technicality--otherwise known as a constitutional ussue--because the consequences of not respecting an individual's rights harm all of us.
In the specific case of the factually guilty person off on a "technicality," there's good reason to believe that there really is no downside. The aggregate number of person-years of incarceration handed out does impact the crime rate, but whether or not any individual criminal goes to jail doesn't impact the aggregate quantity of incarceration. State legislators appropriate funds to create X number of prison beds. Prosecutors, through the various discretionary measures at their disposal, then ensure that the beds are filled. If a certain number of people get acquitted at trial leading prisons to become undersubscribed, prosecutors just start driving harder bargains at plea deals.
That's probably completely true, and it strikes me as totally immoral. I'm a total rube, or at least a terrible idealist.
there, but for the grace of God go I
I have heard this phrase before, but I've just now realized that I don't actually know what it means.
As for your general point, I think, actually, that at least if people don't think they agree with you, the constitution and (most of) Supreme Court jurisprudence does. I just spent the last month or so doing a moot court problem that involved a conviction being overturned on a so-called 'technicality,' and there are a lot of cases out there. Seems like we must generally thing this is a good thing, otherwise we would start throwing out judges, or something.
But wait. Do you mean let him off on a technicality v. imprisoning him despite the presence of constitutional issues, or letting him off on a technicality v. imprisoning him absent any such technicality?
If that makes sense.
The aggregate number of person-years of incarceration handed out does impact the crime rate
I'm not sure this is true, or at least not what I've seen in my research.
I can see Bernard Williams arguing that a good joke might be worth breaching a moral duty over.
"Even in the least virtuous product of the human mind, if there can be found but nine good jokes, some philosophers are clement enough to affirm that these nine good jokes should redeem all the wicked thoughts, though plenty as the population of Sodom."
H. Melville, "The Confidence Man"
The former. Letting people off on technicalities. I'm for it. But most people will tell you that there's a tradeoff. That's why we can't try all of those terrorist suspects. That's why, we're told, that we need more aggressive searches etc.
That doesn't make much sense, though. I think I need to eat.
"There but for the grace of God go I" basically means that the homeless guy on the street could be me, and I ought to treat him with a modicum of respect and dignity, because the idea that I got where I am entirely on the basis of individual effort--without luck and privilege is ludicrous.
If a guilty person gets away with murder on a technicality, that makes me feel that my chances will be better if I end up "doing" something inappropriate of a "homicidal" nature, so there's tons of utility for me -- even if I "commit" no "homicide, but especially if others come to believ that I did "commit" a "homicide".
Others think that regardless of statistics, single instances of unpunished crime, within the circle in which they are known, discourage "law-abiding citizens" and encourage "criminals".
the idea that I got where I am entirely on the basis of individual effort--without luck and privilege is ludicrous.
Actually -- and I hardly need tell a bostonian this -- it's worse than ludicrous, it's heretical. God's grace alone -- which is arbitrary and unknowable -- confers salvation.
If, you know, you're a serious Protestant.
Re 54, one of my earliest assignments at The American Prospect was to write an article about how throwing more people in jail doesn't reduce crime. Best as I could tell, however, the problem with that thesis was that almost everyone thinks it does. What the liberals will tell you (accurately) is that increasing America's incarceration rate is a very cost-ineffective way of reducing crime compared to other options. Lots of people recommended to me the work of William Spelman at the LBJ school of public affairs. What have you been reading?
Far and away the funniest thing anyone told me when I was reporting that story was that the cheapest thing we could do to reduce the crime rate is start a vocational program in prisons to teach people how to disable home alarm systems. Stealing things from unoccupied houses is much less likely to lead to assaults or murders than is robbing people at gunpoint. A slightly-less-demented policy proposal would, counterintuitively, be to implement a ban on home alarm systems so as to encourage more burglaries and fewer muggings. That, however, isn't going to win anyone any votes.
Re 57, but if a "guilty" persons escapes punishment on a technicality (which rarely happens, by they way; though consideration of technicalities is frequent, that technicality's consequences don't usually result in no punishment whatsoever, just perhaps a lesser sentence) that frustrates police officers, judges, et al, and makes it that much more likely that they will try their damndest to be absolutely sure and do everything in a manner comporting with the law (i.e. in respect of established constitutional rights).
Without such 'technicality' cases, there would be no other way of having that particular effect on law enforcement officials, barring lawsuits, which almost never succeed because of their qualified immunity.
On the other hand, tipping point theory does support, in a general sense, both of the claims you mention. And I tend to think tipping point theory's alright.
60: can't seem to find the graph at the moment (will dig it up tomorrow), but statistically speaking, the crime rate (as indicated by Uniform Crime Reporting data) seems to bear little to no relation to the incarceration rate, which has been skyrocketing for the last 30 years. Particularly when viewing the data from a group-oriented viewpoint, it's remarkable to note the lack of correlation commonly conceived of; for example, black males are incarcerated at a higher rate than ever before, and they are also committing crimes at a higher rate than ever before.
The problem with the notion that increased incarceration reduces crime is that people want to have it both ways; from a common-sense perspective, the group that's committing the highest rate of crime should have the highest rate of incarceration, but from a policy standpoint, the group that has the highest rate of incarceration should in fact have the lowest rate of crime commission, should it not? Or is this simply a case of the parts not representing the whole?
If the historical data (which, obviously, is not totally dispositive since we only have 30 years of increasing incarceration to look at) does not support the conclusion that increasing incarceration rates leads to a reduction in the crime rate, then what does? It is inherently true that incarceration prevents crime, and if so, why? It's certainly not because we lock up all the criminals and thus incapacitate them, because as is clear, there is always a fresh supply of people willing to engage in criminal behavior. It's not because we rehabilitate the criminals; rehabilitation is generally not occurring (just look at recidivism rates). Why should this work?
Last year I went to a couple of seminars by a professor (David Garland) who said some interesting and convincing things about crime rates over time (U.S. and world-wide), incarceration effects, and also the presence of the death penalty in America versus its absence elsewhere. But I can't remember what most of those interesting and convincing things are.
I've previously claimed (in the context of things like knowing what time or where a particular party was) that it's almost as good to know who knows a particular item of knowledge it is to know that thing, and I still think that holds (at least in the presence of low transaction costs).
What I read was to the effect that what deters crime is the inevitability of punishment, not it's severity. I.E., if you catch 95% of the thieves and give them each one year in jail, it's better than catching 50% of the thieves and giving them each 10 years in jail.
Probation is a real deterrent if done right. Real probation involves being watched, having to ask for permission to do simple things, and ultimately the threat of imprisonment for the non-compliant. As imprisonment has increased, there's been a tendency to skimp on probationary funding and make probation meaningless.
In the US crime and responses to crime are completely interwoven with ethnic and racial conflicts, and a major function of the criminal system is giving reassurance and satisfaction, however meaningless, to the dominant whote community. A certain proportion of law-n-order militants are actually not terribly law-abiding themselves. They just want people even worse than themselves to be punished.
"its".
"Whote" (sic). Like it or not, whotes run the show.
"Whote" is a certain tribe of Native Americans, no?